What Is a ‘Strong’ Defense?

The good people at the Stimson Center’s Budget Insight blog invited me to contribute a guest post discussing the Sustainable Defense Task Force report Debt, Deficits, & Defense: A Way Forward. Here’s an excerpt:

The most common response [to the report] has been some sympathy for our argument that military spending should be subjected to the same scrutiny that should be applied to other government spending. There are still a fair number of people, however, who share our concern about the deficit, but who counter “But I want a strong defense.”


Who doesn’t?


The task force report was written with a single consideration in mind: in what ways, and where, could we make cuts in military spending that would not undermine U.S. security?


[…]


A leading conservative in the Senate, Tom Coburn (R-OK) wrote that the deficit reduction commission “affords us an opportunity to start some very late due diligence on national defense spending… [as well as] reduce wasteful, unnecessary, and duplicative defense spending that does nothing to make our nation safe.”

Read the rest here.