The bulk of the spending, $84.5 billion, funds military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The remainder goes to diplomacy, foreign aid, and the flu. That's on top of $65.9 billion supplemental Congress already passed to fund the wars in this fiscal year. So it's yet another year that the American taxpayer is spending upwards of $150 billion for nation-building efforts that are unlikely to succeed and only tangential to our security. President Obama's plans to end the war in Iraq are long overdue, but with the war in Afghanistan expanding, Americans should ask how long counterterrorism will require counterinsurgency wars of indefinite duration. It is time for a new approach to counterterrorism—one easier on our much-taxed wallets.

The bill includes a variety of measures the president did not request. Such additions are Congress' constitutional right—but some of these additions will not serve the national interest. Particularly egregious are the eight C-17 cargo aircraft. The C-17 buy is a sop to the workers, many of them in politically powerful southern California, who make the aircraft. The Air Force says it has all the airlift capability it needs; in fact, it probably has too much already.

The goods news is that the Obama administration plans to make this the last war supplemental. It will attach future war spending to normal defense appropriations requests (now running around $550 billion, by the way). By keeping the requests separate, the Bush administration avoided comparing the utility of spending on current wars (in supplementals) on spending with future wars (the regular defense budget). Now the comparison should be more straightforward, and the choices more transparent.

There is little reason to think that this explosion of new spending has made us safer. The defense budget underwrites a militaristic foreign policy, one committed to quixotic efforts to promote social transformation and dampen all instability abroad. A military posture of restraint -- one focused on U.S. defense rather than someone else's -- would allow us to spend half what we do on defense. We'd be safer for it, because lower spending would discourage us from meddling in others' conflicts.

Cutting defense spending is not without risk. The greatest danger is leaving the military with inadequate funding and manpower for its missions. That is why reductions in military spending need to be accompanied by reductions in military commitments -- starting with the war in Iraq.