This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, January 5, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The strategy for the American military from the President and the Pentagon

represents a shift in some small ways, such as a reduced emphasis on

nuclear weapons, but like so many strategy outlines, the latest one regularly

justifies the military's status quo.

Benjamin Friedman, research fellow in Defense, and Homeland Security

Studies at the Cato Institute, comments.

The President and the Secretary of Defense are trying to explain something about their strategy

for defense spending for the next several years,

and it doesn't seem like there's a whole lot of meat to it, if I understand you correctly.

So what is important in what the president and the

Secretary of Defense have told us? The president and the Pentagon have agreed

basically to cut the defense budget a bit over the next 10 years.

Now of course this president won't be president for 10 years and maybe not even for three

years but they have this new trajectory for Pentagon spending,

which would cut it by about 8% in real terms over that period if the plan stayed in place, which by the way is unlikely.

So that's a real cut, and although it's not very big, it's actually growth in nominal terms,

just growth slower than inflation.

Even that small cut has a lot of people in the Pentagon, as backers on Capitol Hill and think tanks

and so forth quite upset.

And one of the charges being leveled against the president

...