This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, May 13th, 2010. I'm Caleb Brown.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates wants to trim the fat of military spending.

He has trouble naming one of the many U.S US military commitments that he would cut wholesale.

Justin Logan, Associate Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute believes that getting serious about cutting the defense budget means cutting our obligations abroad.

The more serious plan to cut military spending, says Logan, is on the table.

Secretary Gates gives a speech on purpose at the Eisenhower Library. What was his explicit aim in giving

that particular speech at that particular place? Clearly Secretary Gates was

trying to draw an analogy between himself and the policies of President Eisenhower.

I don't think that's really a fair comparison.

First of all, President Eisenhower, most historians and political scientists agree, was largely out of step with the militarized containment strategy that many of his successors followed in particular in the United States

with respect to the Cold War.

Eisenhower stated, for example, in 1952 that if in 10 years all American troops stationed in Europe have not been returned to the United

States, then this whole project that means sort of the whole NATO effort will have failed."

Almost 60 years later Bob Gates still wants American troops in Europe.

Just to give you another example, Eisenhower used what was called remainder method accounting for the defense budget.

They calculated tax revenues, subtracted domestic expenditures, and the rest went to defense.

And they managed to figure out how to get the job done, I think, when the United States

was facing a much more significant threat.

If anybody proposed remainder accounting,

the remainder method in defense budgeting today,

they would be written out of town on a rail

and derided as radicals with some support.

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