Whether sequestration happens or not, there is no doubt, given the Pentagon’s own future year projections, that expectations for future defense funding are declining, and there is a considerable contingent of Americans who believe discussions about how much to cut from the base defense budget are missing the point. The Defending Defense Project, a joint effort of three conservative think tanks – the Foreign Policy Initiative, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute – has embraced a more robust national defense as its cause, and warns against the dangers posed by budget cuts.

In “Defense Spending, the Super Committee, and the Price of Greatness,” (www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/11/defending-defense-setting-the-record-straight-on-us-military-spending-requirements), the project lays out its argument against more defense cuts, focusing on two main points:

1. Entitlements, rather than defense spending, have been the main drivers of America’s growing debt and deficits. Entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security – “non-discretionary” expenditures – now account for about 60 percent of the federal budget. Only about 35 percent of the budget is consumed by discretionary spending, of which defense spending is now slightly more than half.
2. Defense spending is actually lower, in terms of GDP percentage, than at any time since World War II, and has already suffered three rounds of cuts under the Obama administration, including former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates’ Efficiencies Initiative, which targeted $100 billion in savings from the military budget over five years.

Given the potential threats posed by autocratic regimes in Asia and the Middle East, said the project’s leaders, a smaller military is simply a bad idea for the foreseeable future.

Nobody would – or at this point can, really – argue that entitlement spending, without any countervailing revenue generation, isn’t adding a crushing load to the national debt. The White House Office of Management and Budget’s revised projections estimate that the annual interest payment on the U.S. debt could exceed the entire annual defense budget – but that seems more an indicator of the massiveness of the national debt than of the insignificance of the defense budget. While a fraction of the total (discretionary and non-discretionary) national budget, defense spending is still a large fraction – about one-fifth.

“It is a fact that we spend less of the percentage of GDP on defense today,” said Rumbaugh, “but … we are spending more money on defense than ever before. The reason it’s a smaller share of the GDP is because we’re a very rich country, and have gotten richer over the last 60 years. There has been no decline in the defense budget in real terms … We’re still spending absolutely more than we used to spend, and defense is still a high priority for the United States.”

In his analysis of the Pentagon’s $553 billion request for 2012, Harrison observed that the amount, while historically high, was still affordable given the size of the U.S. economy.

“We could pay for a bigger defense budget,” said Harrison, “if we wanted to.”