This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, July 8th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Leaving aside that the U.S. military could use both some spending reductions and a more focused

mission rooted in US security interests.

The United States has a lot of military bases

that simply don't advance US security.

A new letter of a coalition of groups

makes the case.

Chris Preble, Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute,

discusses the effort to restart base, realignment, and closure, or BRAC.

For several years now, there have been a number of efforts to sort of pull together disparate

views on defense reform that include a very broad spectrum of opinion among the

within the think tank community and a few academics. I participated in one of

those joint letters back in 2013.

There was another one in 2015.

And those reforms included things like reforming the military's pay and benefit system, which is very much suited to the

20th century and really needs to be updated, addressing the overhead, the civilian overhead, the workforce relative to the size of the force, and lastly the base overhead, the additional excess bases.

This time around I, having worked on this issue for many years now, going back to 2011 or so,

assembled a similar letter but focused exclusively on a base realignment

enclosure, Brack, that is the need to reduce the Pentagon's excess infrastructure.

It included, the signatories included most of the people who had signed on

to one of the two prior defense reform letters, as well as a number of other people who are not defense

...