This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, May 23rd, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates says the U.S. shouldn't make big cuts to military spending,

but his arguments defending our bloated military

are deeply flawed.

So says Benjamin Friedman, Research Fellow in Defense and Homeland Security Studies at the Cato

Institute.

Friedman is co-author of the Cato Report budgetary

savings from military restraint. Secretary Gates has said that we can't do it all

in efficiency in terms of getting military spending cuts but then he says

we shouldn't do anything beyond the gains inefficiency that we can achieve.

Our argument at Cato, Chris Preble, and my argument about defense spending is that it requires

cutting defense commitments, that you really save money by doing less and then you could have

less personnel, less operational costs, and so forth. and sometimes the Secretary of Defense says things that cause us to

think he agrees with us. He'll say, well we have to make some choices about our roles in the world, but then he gives a speech like he did yesterday where he comes out and says, well, everything we're doing in the world is really essential to our security.

So it seems sometimes he's sending... world is really essential to our security.

So it seems sometimes he's sending sort of conflicting messages.

But I think really what he's doing is on the way out the door trying to set current policies

in stone. And he's a hawkish guy so he's sort of I think tying

the next Secretary of Defense Leon Penn at his hands or trying to by making it harder for us to draw

down some of the commitments we have around the world.

What else jumped out at you in what Secretary Gates said?

...