This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, July 26, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Don't fret for the military budget.

Turns out, despite claims to the contrary, it hasn't been cut in more than a decade even after you strip

out the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Chris Preble, Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Cato Institute says there are lots of

immediate savings to be had in cuts to the Pentagon. The military budget still has

quite a number of defenders. You have a coalition of groups both industry groups and some think tanks who continue to make the case for

very high levels of military spending.

Of course the United States spends nearly half of the global military spending

is spent by the United States almost 50 percent.

And there is still quite a strong constituency here inside the Beltway to continue this.

The military's budget has essentially doubled in the last 15 years and not all of these

increases are attributed to the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If you look just at the base budget the kind of core Pentagon budget

excluding the costs of the wars over the last 10 years the Pentagon has received an

additional nearly trillion dollars above where their baseline was in 2000.

So I think the most important statistic or fact that people have to understand in

debating military spending going forward is understanding just how much it's grown over the last decade.

There's a lot of sort of woe is me on behalf of the military budget, but as you note, the military budget has celebrated an unbroken string of increases since the late 90s.

1998 was the inflection point.

The military's budget has continued to rise and for all the talk of cuts in military spending,

...