This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, September 28, 2010.

I'm Kayla Brown. Military spending consumes a huge chunk of the federal budget,

and that spending is driven by how much our military does.

So how do we cut what our military does and then cut the spending that goes along with it?

Benjamin Friedman is a research fellow in defense and Homeland Security Studies at the Cato Institute, he's

co-author of the new report, Budgetary Savings from Military Restraint.

The Department of Defense recently announced an efficiency initiative where they're going to try to become more efficient in the sense of shifting

money from administrative costs or overhead to forced structure.

And that's brought on by pressure to save money that occurs from the

deficit and also from the fact that personnel costs and operational costs are

growing faster than the total defense budget. So force structure costs are getting

squeeds by the growing costs of manpower essentially. Gates has responded to that by

canceling a couple weapons programs but now by saying we got to we got to find

some give in the budget and we're going to cut

overhead and they've come up with a bunch of fairly sensible ideas about how to do that

closing joint forces command in Norfolk Virginia which I think was largely a waste of time and space that produced a lot of

PowerPoint slides that were complicated that no one read, and getting rid of the number of contractors

and the number of generals in the Pentagon.

So I think all those things are good ideas.

What bothers me about is that it's been portrayed in the media as a cut to the bottom line of

the Pentagon.

The Washington Post has repeatedly written that were cutting the defense budget.

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