"Is it really possible to claim that the U.S. armed forces have been our most effective instrument of power projection? Have we purchased more than $1 trillion worth of increased security since 9/11?"

Hard to say, since it's a counterfactual. Sure, military tools are no longer that effective, but U.S. military spending has certainly helped dampen security competition around the world, particularly in Europe and the Asia-Pacific. Those of us in Asia are watching the budget debates carefully, and while many in the region already believe that U.S. power is in terminal decline, a defense spending cut will only hasten regional rearmament.

Perhaps a better question - looking at the Heritage graph - concerns not the level of spending, but how the money's being spent. With 50% of the world's defense spending, the United States should in fact be having a larger international security presence, particularly in East Asia, than it currently does.

Who would argue high defense spending has actually done America any good over the past decade? Apart from getting it into a few extra trillions of dollars into debt and fighting two disastrous/eternal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?

High defense spending isn't always appropriate and is the single most important reason for the Soviet Union's collapse, to cite only one case.

It depends -- first, we need presidents who will not get us into wars, or put another way, an administration with a grand strategy that matches lower defense spending. This would require an utter and total refutation of the the neoconservative or liberal interventionist model, so obviously they may feel threatened. Since we don't have that, it's hard to say what level of defense spending we need, because we'll just get into conflicts and then have to spend more money but use budget tricks to hide it like Bush did.

Question to readers -- what is the best logical, empirically grounded argument you can make for not cutting the defense budget?

We should not make serious cuts to the defense budget at this time, because we have not yet redefined our strategic objectives to cohere with significantly less military spending. Cutting the budget now would simply result in less money being spread over the same purposes, and that has costs in terms of military readiness, logistics, and fighting capabilities.

If you get into a fight with some other country, its a really good thing to have overwhelming military superiority. You do not want to fight anything close to even battle or get so sucked into a war where you project power to other places to influence outcomes there. For instance don't get too caught up in 3 wars in the middle east and not be able to influence China's claims to the South China Sea or a belligerent North Korea.

That said, I do believe cutting the defense budget is a necessary thing considering we're broke.

ROFLOL…the neocons are full of it! We are wasting money and making Afghan and select contractors rich in Afghanistan with hyper inflated cost and expenses to “fight” this war. We need to heavily trim this effort, and have the Afghans fight for themselves and save the US taxpayer some money and more importantly, American lives.

$900 billion over 10 years. What do we get in exchange for not spending this on defense? One year of additional stimulus spending? Yes I agree there is room to cut in the defense budget, but there is not enough there to make a serious dent in the debt crisis our country is mired in. Kinda sucks having 10 years of fairly rigorous defense cuts be blown by profligate domestic spending in 12 months. It seems to me that all this is more heat than light that obscures the entitlement crisis that will not go away even if you abolish DoD

Defense industries in the US are market leaders. If the "subsidies" to those industries are removed they might lose their economy of scale advantage.

They also have the advantage that other countries wants to have inter-operable forces and wants the political goodwill benefit of buying American. If the US was no longer THE superpower this advantage would decrease/vanish.

The guy might be a good historian, but he never saw a war he didn't like. These people are like military fetishists. I wonder if they even realize defense is one government role among many, and society is more than an armed camp.

Where are the neo-conservatives who brought on this economic and political mess?

They are evidently hiding in their think tanks or taking asylum in academia. Anyway, they are in safe havens, satisfied that they achieved their stated goals of regime change by toppling their nemesis - Saddam Hussein. Though none of those neo-cons wore the country's uniform, they pushed others to get into the fight.

It was the neo-cons who decided America should have an empire in the 21st century. Their design for the world has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths - not to mention the wounded and displaced.

Many of the neo-cons may have been kicked out of top government positions, but their influence in former President George W. Bush's administration was enormous. They convinced Bush of the need for torture. Unfortunately, President Barack Obama has not ended the unlawful practice.

It's not surprising that the neo-con aspiration to get Saddam coincided with Israel's purpose, or that Saddam was accused of holding weapons of mass destruction. Iraq had none. Hans Blix, the former head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, begged Bush to let him go into Iraq to prove Iraq had no such lethal weapons. Bush refused. He wanted to invade Iraq.

Bush once told an interviewer that only war presidents are remembered in history. He will go down in history all right. Ironically, Bush and his cohorts - and the world in fact - know that only Israel had a nuclear arsenal in the Middle East. Top American officials, from Obama on down, have lost their credibility by refusing to say that Israel is a nuclear power.

The next target for the neo-con empire builders is Iran, another major enemy of Israel. If Iran succeeds in developing a nuclear bomb, the United States is supposed to attack Iran. So far, Obama has resisted the neo-con orders, but who knows for how long.

Their agenda was laid out in Project for the New American Century. Their "Statement of Principles" promotes increasing military spending; modernizing our armed forces; strengthening ties to democratic allies to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values; promoting the causes of political and economic freedom abroad; and accepting responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, prosperity and principles. These are goals not easily won without war.

By the end of 2006, PNAC was "reduced to a voice-mail box and a ghostly website," with "a single employee" "left to wrap things up," according to the BBC News. In 2006, Gary Schmitt, former executive director of the PNAC, stated that PNAC had come to a natural end.

The PNAC was a platform for a new American colonialism - and the neo-cons continue to lobby in Congress. They also are welcomed on the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post for their ultra-right points of view.

Others on the neo-con team include Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Kagan, both former Reaganites and Bush propagandists.

The neo-cons stated that the failure to depose Saddam would have resulted in a "decisive surrender in the international war on terrorism." They did not estimate the cost in American lives and money - and they probably didn't care.

Critics of the neo-cons have called them "chicken-hawks - men who have never seen the horror of war but are in love with the idea of war." They accuse the neo-cons of taking it a step further than the conservatives, who believe in maintaining a strong national defense. The neo-cons can only succeed in promoting their goals by blurring the lines between policing the world and maintain a strong national defense.

While many Republicans have begun to question the old neo-con foreign policy consensus that dominated Bush's GOP, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) is the new neo-con hopeful.

While the neo-cons have achieved some of their goals, they have betrayed the good will of Americans and the decency of the country. They should be ashamed!

Helen thomas http://www.fcnp.com/

Neoconservatives are paranoid control freaks looking for demons to be afraid of. Every empire has fallen due to the cost of maintain its empire and that is whats happening to the US. The rise of China should be seen as an opportunity to give some of the security responsibility to someone else. Why shouldn't they have influence in SE Asia? Japan's economy is big enough to defend itself. If we cut our budget in half we would still be spending more than any other country in the world. Has it ever occurred to neocons that America doesn't have all the answers?

Also, in a globalized world economy war is just too expensive both monetarily and economically. Power is now defined by economic power instead of military power and the cost of war can be used in much more productive ways. What is needed is a budget increase in the State Department and a smarter use of international institutions. These institutions aren't perfect, but its cheaper than using the military to solve all the world's problems.

Comparing current defense spending to spending in previous decades isn't really effective, unless of course you're more concerned about the propaganda value of the comparisons.

I would recommend comparing the amount spent on defense as a percentage of GDP.

In 1985 U.S. GDP was $4.2 trillion, Defense Spending was $402 billion, so about 9.5% of GDP. Current GDP is around $14 trillion, defense spending around $700 billion, or around 5% of GDP.

Looking at this way we're spending less of our wealth on defense than we were under Reagan.

I doubt that makes you feel better though.

No expense is too great in support of the Israeli Foreign Legion and its thousand year war with Islam.

Ah, I think I will just take all of the money of the entire Earth and just make it worthless. The Devil can use it in hell to stoke the fires down there.

"what is the best logical, empirically grounded argument you can make for not cutting the defense budget?"

There are about 3 million people working directly for the ministery of defense

And don't forget defense industry- so actually defense spending is the biggest federal employment scheme in harsh economic times.

That is real neocon thinking...no?

Does this author not realize Obama is the ultimate Neo-Con?

After all, Neo-con has almost become a buzzword so it is easy to forget its definition. Neo-conservatism is predicated on the idea of EXPORTING democracy where it doesn't exist, either through diplomacy or war.

Obama is busy bombing Libya in a blatant act of neo-conservatism. Obama has exponentially increased our presence in Afghanistan, increasing Bush's targeting-killing program by a factor of three. And while Gitmo is no longer accepting detainees, Obama has off-set the need by simply killing potential residents with predator airstrikes.

This guy is a partisan hack.

Neocons, don't you love them. It is always the average smuck that sacrifices his blood and treasure. Neocons, instead of being an armchair general that sacrifices nothing ( probably profits) why don't you lead the charge and show us all how it is done.

Well it is probably needless to point out that Israel is the reason behind the endless warmongering of the Neocons. They fear that if the US is no longer willing to go to war (vs. Muslims of course) we might not want to defend Israel in a pinch. So they constantly talk up the US military and seldom see a war they don't like. Taiwan for them is the Asian Israel. If the US ever decided not to defend Taiwan, it might also decide not to defend Israel. So any turn in the US toward pacifism, to the settling of long delayed issues, any move to get out of China's face, or to seek rapprochement with Islam are to be fought vigorously. What is amusing is that by glueing itself to the US and then encouraging it to run up an impossible amount of debt in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel has risked the financial collapse of its protector. If the US decides, as it should, to reduce its deficits by ending its futile wars, Israel will be the first to suffer and left in the lurch.

This graph gives you a good idea of the anti-Muslim war costs and their effects on the US fiscal position. You can see that the war costs incurred under Bush are about equal to all the policy change costs of the Obama administration.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/obamas-and-bushs-effect-on-the-deficit-in-one-graph/2011/07/25/gIQAELOrYI_blog.html?wprss=ezra-klein

The only excuse, rational that is, that I could imagine for military spending is that, given the Tea Party's demand to cut government spending, it may be the only stimulus spending these reactionaries will accept. So far I am not aware of Tea Party types saying we should cut military spending, although there may be a few mavericks who do so. The GOP has long been the "war party" and I doubt it will change spots now.

"...just as bad as, oh, I don't know.... writing a whole book pretending to discover that there's an interest group lobby that supports Israel without defining it properly."

Might that be a slap at Mearsheimer and Walt? I hope not. If it is, I find it regrettable, since their book was an immense service to the national understanding of US politics and foreign policy.

For the neoconservatives in Washington, the emergence of the Arab Spring early in 2011 represented an imminent challenge to their regional design and to Israeli supremacy. Accordingly, they initiated and orchestrated an aggressive campaign to derail if not ... The hawks and neoconservatives continue to sound the alarm over projected cuts in the budget of the Defense Department. Needless to say, the exact size and scope of those cuts is far from decided, and according to various analysts, both liberal and ... When I returned to Washington after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak, whose trial is starting Wednesday, the neoconservatives on the right and justice hawks on the left dared the U.S. to believe that the Middle East – and our relationship to the ... Can it credibly be said that George W. Bush and U.S. neoconservatives are partly responsible for the emergence of Norwegian terrorist and mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik? According to columnist K. Selim of Algeria’s Le Quotidien d’Oran.
. "The GOP foreign policy debate has changed profoundly since the last campaign," Lake writes, with the neoconservatives losing ground. If, like me, you'd like to see less empire and more republic in contemporary Republicanism, you'll consider that good news. The committee is close to neoconservatives and maintains good relations with the Jewish and Christian pressure chambers, while coordinating its political activities in accordance with the policy of the Zionist Likud party via the Jewish institute for shyla stylez... Indeed the dismissive tone of such breezy generalizations appears to have emboldened key neoconservatives in the Bush years. So it seems somewhat disingenuous for these writers to dissociate themselves completely from the thought-world of someone like Anders Breivik.

you know ther is a saying: If mideast falls the whole world collapses and may be one community dissappears for good from this planet-so the interest to save all that can be saved. RIO nd if you go to history you will note Americans are foremost as humanitarian helpers-never mind what the weak minded say..