Defense on a Diet

Cutting the Pentagon is a question of strategy—as well as fiscal sanity.

In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama made an attempt to placate critics of his fiscal profligacy by proposing a three-year freeze in federal spending. Republicans immediately cried foul, noting that outlays would remain stuck at the administration’s bloated levels. The more serious among them also point out that Obama excluded the biggest entitlement programs—Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security—making his moratorium no exercise in spending restraint at all.

Yet there were fewer objections to the fourth category of spending Obama exempted: expenditures “related to our national security.” No one wants the federal government to pinch pennies when it comes to its paramount constitutional responsibility, protecting the physical security of the United States. But the Cato Institute’s Christopher Preble and the National Security Network’s Heather Hurlbut argued shortly afterward in Politico that much of what is spent in the name of security serves no such purpose.

Even freezing defense spending at current levels would be an expensive bargain: the Pentagon’s base budget was $548.9 billion in fiscal 2011. That’s not counting the additional $182 billion requested that year for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, conflicts that have already cost the country $1 trillion. Costs can be expected to rise even more: inflation-adjusted military spending has increased by 60 percent over the past decade, prompting Preble and Hurlbut to write, “because our national security rests on our economic health as well as on the strength of our military, a liberal and a libertarian can agree that the Pentagon should no longer get a pass.”