July 14, 2010 8:33AM # What Is a ‘Strong’ Defense? By [Christopher A. Preble](https://www.cato.org/people/christopher-preble) --- SHARE The good people at the Stimson Center’s [Budget Insight](http://budgetinsight.wordpress.com/) blog invited me to contribute a guest post discussing the Sustainable Defense Task Force report [Debt, Deficits, & Defense: A Way Forward](http://www.comw.org/pda/fulltext/1006SDTFreport.pdf). 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](http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/Sen-Tom-Coburn-Americas-Fiscal-Defense-Crisis-06412/) 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](http://budgetinsight.wordpress.com/2010/07/13/what-is-a-strong-defense/). ##### Related Tags [Defense and Foreign Policy](https://www.cato.org/defense-foreign-policy) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).