The Obama Defense Budget

Michael Goldfarb complains that "cutting" the Pentagon budget after it grew 80 percent from 2001 is tantamount to "gutting" our defense. It takes a very expansive view of what is necessary for America's defense to argue that our needs cannot be met with a multi-billion dollar budget that vastly exceeds the spending of all our potential adversaries combined (to say nothing of the already huge lead we enjoy).

But let's put that aside for a minute. I do think there is a very valid complaint about the trajectory of the Obama administration's defense investments. To wit: we're not unwinding the manpower and resource intensive nation building/counter-insurgency missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead, we're reallocating resources to fight these kinds of missions and paring back investments in our technological and strategic strengths.

Liberals, bizarrely, are cheering this as they apparently envision the future of warfare as entailing widespread occupations of distant, hostile lands. Conservatives are complaining because they want to fund both wasteful nation building projects and a robust, technologically superior conventional military force. And both have larger constituencies than those calling for a superior conventional force that avoids costly nation building.

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The F-22 Raptor. Photo by: Rob Shenk used under a Creative Commons license.