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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says he has a singular mission. “Your job [as secretary] is to make sure that it’s lethality, lethality, lethality. Everything else is gone. Everything else that distracts from that shouldn’t be happening,” during his confirmation process. Since taking the helm at the Pentagon, Hegseth has doubled down. “We do warfighting here at the Department of Defense,” he said at a Pentagon town hall, demanding a “laser focus on readiness, lethality, and warfighting.”
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.
What golf has to do with lethality is a question that the Defense Department failed to answer. Nor would the Pentagon weigh in on the hundreds of millions of dollars wrapped up in, or swallowed up by, military golf courses over decades. The Pentagon did not provide a full tally of its current inventory of golf courses, which The Intercept put at around 145. What is clear is that critics have been raising alarms about the military’s golf obsession for at least 60 years, and, despite claims of a new dawn at the Pentagon, putting-green is still par for the course.
“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.
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 from the Department of Veterans Affairs — the U.S military’s golf habit is not on 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.”
Critics have called out the Pentagon on its golf courses for at least six decades. In 1965, the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) cited the Pentagon for spending almost $2 million on land to build an 18-hole golf course at Fort Gordon (now Fort Eisenhower), Georgia, when there was already a nine-hole course at the base. The agency said the property should be sold off.
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 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 , 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 “ ” 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.
“If the Pentagon and the armed services want to raise private money to supplement support activities for members of the military,” said William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, “it would be better spent bolstering services for personnel suffering from PTSD, traumatic brain injuries, and other negative consequences of serving in war zones — services that are underfunded currently.”
As with many Pentagon policies, regulations governing military golf courses aren’t as simple as they seem. For one, there are that allow golf courses “in foreign countries or isolated installations within the United States” to receive appropriated funds. This is no small matter since Defense Department golf courses dot the world.
The Air Force, alone, boasts overseas golf courses from the Alpine Golf Course at Aviano Air Base in , and Hodja Lakes Golf Course at Incirlik Air Base in , to Tama Hills Golf Resort at Yokota Air Base in , and West Winds Golf Course at Kunsan Air Base in . All told, there are at least two dozen DoD courses in foreign countries, not to mention two in the U.S. island territory of Guam. And even when host nations defray the cost of upkeep, golf-related spending still raises questions about Pentagon priorities. Senate investigators found, for instance, that while for golf course netting at the Army’s Camp Zama in the 2010s, the money could have been better spent on constructing a much-needed fire station on a U.S. base.
