This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, November 29th, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The United States should repurpose its military to the explicit protection of the United States and its citizens.

It takes time to remove the U.S. from its many expensive and entangling alliances.

Christopher Preble, Director of Foreign Policy Studies, the Cato Institute, says we don't have to wait for that shift in

policy to cut the military budget.

We can make big changes now with no change in U.S. security.

As you like to point out, cutting the military budget really begs

rethinking what we do with our military, but there are things that we can do without

doing this admittedly necessary thing of rethinking what we should be doing

with our military.

Right.

That's correct.

I mean, so I've been arguing for some time that the military should be sized in accordance with the strategy and the strategy

is extremely ambitious.

But even if people don't buy into my argument, my and Ben and other Cato Scholars, the argument

for what we should do in terms of restraint, what we call restraint.

There's still a number of places where there is genuine bloat, just waste excess in military and related spending, which is pretty obvious.

So for example, we believe that nuclear weapons provide us with an important deterrent.

But research shows that you don't need to have thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons to have a credible

strategic deterrent. In fact we could we've cut the and we know partly why we

know we know this is because we've cut the arsenal dramatically since the end of the Cold War and we are more secure, not less than we were in 88 or 1989 or whatever.

...