This is the Cater Daily Podcast for Wednesday, April 8th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

In the multi trillion dollar coronavirus relief bill passed by Congress, the military got only a tiny sliver,

a far cry from its typical portion of the federal budget.

It brings into sharp relief the fact that viruses don't care about the size of your army.

Cato Institute Vice President Chris Preble details what that might mean for

defense spending priorities going forward.

No I think if we look at this sort of back up a little bit and we think about traditional threats

to human security over time, right, for as long as we can, you know, we know, you know, human beings have fought with one another.

They've threatened one another and so traditional defenses against invasion and attack, go back when we performed into, you know, organized societies.

And so for so long our national security was organized in that way and even to this day our military

is sort of postured in a way to deter threats and to retaliate in the event that

those deterrence fail.

I do think that 9-11 and terrorism in general was a different sort of problem

in the sense that it was primarily, it was perpetrated by non-state actors people who did not have a

fixed location and all those other criteria that sort of differentiate them from traditional

state threats like the Soviet Union or China, for example.

And yet in that case, the military proved reasonably adaptable to being able to sort of pivot to dealing with both state and non-state actors and you know

Continue and again we've we could have a separate conversation on whether or not the decision to militarize the approach of counterterrorism was actually

effective or if a different approach might have been more effective I suspect we

might have tried something different and why it worked even better, but the point is in the current environment that the military instrument seems particularly ill-suited to deal with a faceless, nameless pathogen.

In fact, as we've seen tragically

...