Discriminating, Targeted Cuts to Defense

Ross Douthet defends some of the Tea Partiers proposals for cuts in the defense budget against criticism from the neo-cons, which I think is right on target:

I’m of two minds about this. Overall, I’m inclined toward the William Wohlforth view that a unipolar world tends to be more stable than the alternatives, and that America’s sometimes absurd-seeming military edge (our defense budget is larger than that of the next 15-20 countries combined, etc.) actually serves a valuable purpose in deterring great power jockeying, regional arms races, and cross-border wars. Both the United States and the world have benefited immensely from the absence of major power conflicts, and it’s naive to simply assume that the recent decline in wars and battlefield casualties — one of the great, underrated blessings of our fraught-seeming era — would endure in the absence of a military hegemon whose position is essentially unchallenged.

However, America’s military edge won’t be sustainable at all if we go bankrupt, lurch from debt crisis to debt crisis, or get stuck in a debt-driven economic stagnation for years or decades on end.

Brooks, Feulner and Kristol counsel against “indiscriminate budget-slashing in a still-dangerous world,” and “across-the-board cuts aimed at our men and women in uniform.” I, too, am against “indiscriminate” and “across-the-board” cuts. But discriminating, targeted cuts to defense may prove a necessary part of any solution to our fiscal woes, and I don’t think it’s a bad thing that some Tea Party candidates are willing to at least entertain that possibility.