This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, February 24, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel plans to reduce Army manpower to its lowest level since

before World War II.

That may look like a dramatic shift, but much of that is to be expected.

Technological innovation and winding down wars should save Americans money. Chris Preble, Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute,

comments.

How much of what Secretary Hagel is proposing is something that should be expected? I think most of it should be expected.

I think most of it should be expected given that, given the budget realities,

that we are still in a serious deficit situation,

that the budget, there are budget caps in place of course they were relaxed modestly by the Ryan Murray

Compromised that was negotiated back in December, but there are still spending caps in place and so the Pentagon had to do certain things to meet to get under those caps.

More generally, the war in Iraq is over the war in Afghanistan is

drawing down and there is very little enthusiasm on the part of the American

people for additional wars appropriately because those kinds of wars that we were planning

to fight in the 2000s turned out to be very costly and unnecessary to U.S. security and I would argue actually harmful to US security by drawing us into other people's political disputes.

Now this is from the New York Times story on the subject.

These are from Pentagon officials speaking anonymously. One result

the officials argue will be a military capable of defeating any adversary but too small

for protracted foreign occupations.

To which I and most Americans would say, good.

That's slightly tongue in cheek, of course.

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