Not everyone at the Defense Department seems to have gotten the message. Right now, the U.S. military is looking to pour money into the renovation of 35 golf course sand traps at the Woodlawn Golf Course at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Contracting documents show that Air Force Special Operations Command also wants to purchase sterile mushroom compost for the golf course greens at Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico. It is also looking into hydroseeding at that same course. The Army, for its part, plans to issue a service contract that will cover maintenance in the golf course clubhouse at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York.
“The military shouldn’t be in the golf resort business,” said Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog advocating for an end to wasteful spending.
The courses instead tend to serve a clientele of military retirees and dependents. Some are open to public membership. Service members, he said, are seldom primary beneficiaries. “They don’t have the spare time to go golfing for hours during the week,” Murphy said. [ed. not so, they're actually primary beneficiaries with much reduced greens fees and priority tee times.]
Even at a time of rampant cost-cutting across the federal government — including calls from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency to cut as many as 80,000 jobs from the Department of Veterans Affairs — the U.S military’s golf habit is not on the chopping block.
“This is reflective of a broader disconnect between the Trump administration’s rhetoric and its actions, particularly when it comes to Pentagon spending,” Murphy said. “Just like you don’t pour money into sand traps if your goal is defense, you don’t give Congress the go-ahead to boost Pentagon spending by $100 billion if your goal is to cut wasteful spending at the Pentagon.” (...) [ed. the Pentagon hasn't been able to pass an audit in the last seven years, and has no idea where the nearly $1 trillion it receives each year is going. It ain't because of golf courses.]
Sen. William Proxmire, D-Wis., said in 1975 that the $14 million a year spent on the Defense Department’s 300 courses, including 19 in foreign countries, was a “waste of the taxpayers money.” He complained that the funds came “directly out of the defense budget.” It took until the late 1980s for Congress to finally curb the use of such appropriated funds for military golf courses.
In the decades since, the Pentagon’s golf courses — run by the military’s Morale, Welfare, and Recreation as well as Marine Corps Community Services programs — have shrunk in number. The Intercept counted about 145 golf courses, although this is something of an understatement. The Army owns 54 separate golf courses, and while some are just nine holes, many others have the standard 18 holes and still others boast 27 or even 36 holes. The Intercept also counted 51 courses for the Air Force, 29 for the Navy, and 10 for the Marine Corps.
Military courses are classified as revenue-generating programs that should provide “for a majority” of their operating expenses or be supported by other sources of revenue, such as military bowling alleys and eateries, as well as outside donations. Golf course funding is not supposed to come from congressional appropriations, and Pentagon boosters have long wielded this as a cudgel in defense of the military’s golf obsession. But critics question why such funds are used for putting greens instead of troops. (...)
Whether military golf courses actually generate profit and conduct repairs and improvements exclusively with non-appropriated funds has also been as much aspiration as a hard and fast rule. When the General Accounting Office examined Defense Department golf courses in the 1990s, investigators found courses losing money or using taxpayer funding at 40 percent of the bases analyzed. Of 10 bases inspected, two had courses that lost $43,645 and $225,546, respectively, in a single year. Another two bases used congressionally appropriated funds for their golf courses, including maintenance of a golf clubhouse and repairs to golf course structures. (...) [ed. In the 90s? C'mon...in the present overall Pentagon budget this is just lint, or random change you find under couch cushions. The cost of just one sidewinder missle (and hundreds are used in training and other military uses every day), is $400-500k per missle.]
Profligate spending on golf is de rigueur under President Donald Trump, who reportedly played at least 289 rounds of golf, at a cost to taxpayers of at least $150 million for travel and security, during his first term. In 2019, Trump also faced corruption allegations following reports that U.S. military personnel were frequently staying at a Trump golf resort in Scotland. He countered that he was not enriching himself, but that he was instead losing money as a result.
Trump had, by the middle of last month, already spent around $11 million in taxpayer dollars on golf this year. Each trip to his Florida country club Mar-a-Lago costs, on average, $3.4 million, including travel on Air Force One, limousines for Trump’s motorcade, and the stationing of armed boats nearby, according to a 2019 GAO report. The DoD incurred most of these costs. Ironically, Trump could save taxpayers money by playing at the many military golf courses closer to the White House, such as the two 18-hole championship golf courses at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, the Marine Corps’ Medal of Honor Golf Course in Virginia, the two championship 18-hole golf courses at the Army’s Fort Belvoir Golf Club also in Virginia, or at the Armed Forces Retirement Home course in Washington, D.C. [ed. so these are ok, but all others are not?]
In the decades since, the Pentagon’s golf courses — run by the military’s Morale, Welfare, and Recreation as well as Marine Corps Community Services programs — have shrunk in number. The Intercept counted about 145 golf courses, although this is something of an understatement. The Army owns 54 separate golf courses, and while some are just nine holes, many others have the standard 18 holes and still others boast 27 or even 36 holes. The Intercept also counted 51 courses for the Air Force, 29 for the Navy, and 10 for the Marine Corps.
Military courses are classified as revenue-generating programs that should provide “for a majority” of their operating expenses or be supported by other sources of revenue, such as military bowling alleys and eateries, as well as outside donations. Golf course funding is not supposed to come from congressional appropriations, and Pentagon boosters have long wielded this as a cudgel in defense of the military’s golf obsession. But critics question why such funds are used for putting greens instead of troops. (...)
Whether military golf courses actually generate profit and conduct repairs and improvements exclusively with non-appropriated funds has also been as much aspiration as a hard and fast rule. When the General Accounting Office examined Defense Department golf courses in the 1990s, investigators found courses losing money or using taxpayer funding at 40 percent of the bases analyzed. Of 10 bases inspected, two had courses that lost $43,645 and $225,546, respectively, in a single year. Another two bases used congressionally appropriated funds for their golf courses, including maintenance of a golf clubhouse and repairs to golf course structures. (...) [ed. In the 90s? C'mon...in the present overall Pentagon budget this is just lint, or random change you find under couch cushions. The cost of just one sidewinder missle (and hundreds are used in training and other military uses every day), is $400-500k per missle.]
Profligate spending on golf is de rigueur under President Donald Trump, who reportedly played at least 289 rounds of golf, at a cost to taxpayers of at least $150 million for travel and security, during his first term. In 2019, Trump also faced corruption allegations following reports that U.S. military personnel were frequently staying at a Trump golf resort in Scotland. He countered that he was not enriching himself, but that he was instead losing money as a result.
Trump had, by the middle of last month, already spent around $11 million in taxpayer dollars on golf this year. Each trip to his Florida country club Mar-a-Lago costs, on average, $3.4 million, including travel on Air Force One, limousines for Trump’s motorcade, and the stationing of armed boats nearby, according to a 2019 GAO report. The DoD incurred most of these costs. Ironically, Trump could save taxpayers money by playing at the many military golf courses closer to the White House, such as the two 18-hole championship golf courses at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, the Marine Corps’ Medal of Honor Golf Course in Virginia, the two championship 18-hole golf courses at the Army’s Fort Belvoir Golf Club also in Virginia, or at the Armed Forces Retirement Home course in Washington, D.C. [ed. so these are ok, but all others are not?]
While critics have called out the Pentagon’s frivolous focus on golf for at least 60 years, the DoD has consistently played through. During that time, the U.S. military has been mired in losses and stalemates from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, to Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. In each conflict, the U.S. military killed far more people than it has lost on the battlefield, but in none was it able to achieve victory. Despite this, Hegseth remains obsessed with the idea of lethality at all costs. His department, however, continues to divide its attention between the battlefield and the fairway.
by Nick Turse, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Fei Liu/The Intercept; Getty Images
[ed. Remember when Obama went golfing once or twice a week and the Wingers went crazy? Now, crickets. Anyway, this is one Pentagon program I can actually get behind. Military personnel need R&R, that's obvious, even if they aren't always fighting, fighting, fighting against... whatever. In Alaska they closed one of the oldest and best courses in the state (Elmendorf AFB) for supposedly budgetary reasons (everybody thinks the base commander just hated golf). Now there are only three courses left in the entire Anchorage area, two of them military (with wall to wall civilian participation). Think they're losing money? Hardly.]
