This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, June 29th, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Military spending is often sacrosanct among people who want to cut lots of other spending. but it's one of the few areas of the federal

budget that can be cut at least technically with ease.

So how to do it?

Chris Preble, Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute is among scholars working on the Sustainable Defense Task Force,

a group aimed at cutting military spending without sacrificing U.S. security.

A report from the task force was released June 1st.

A lot of people who are generally supportive of cuts to federal spending are reluctant to contemplate cuts to military spending and the logic

is that the defense function is a core function of government.

So among libertarians and conservatives who believe in a fairly narrow

definition of what a core function of government is, the military is one of

those few things that we want our military, want our government to do is to provide for our security.

The problem of course is that much of what we spend on our military is not really about defending the United States, it's about

defending a lot of other countries that could defend themselves, a point you and I have talked

about many times. But the urgency for us getting a handle on our military spending is growing because of the

fiscal imbalance because of the deficit and again deficits that are primarily

driven by long-term spending entitlements and whatnot.

But in terms of the discretionary budget, the defense budget, the DOD budget is the largest component of the discretionary budget and it has grown

dramatically over the last 12 or 15 years. The important number is that real military spending, national security spending in inflation

adjusted dollars has grown 86% over the last 13 years since 1998.

Some of that is for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,

...