This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, November 21st, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown. Meager spending cuts for the military under so-called sequestration seem less likely now, but that hasn't stopped the hyperbole

of those who believe only the U.S. can maintain global order.

Justin Logan, Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, comments.

How are cuts that would be occurring under sequestration to the Pentagon?

How are those being couched? how are people who are defending the Pentagon,

how do they think about these cuts?

Well any range of hyperbolic terms would work, catastrophic. They will leave us vulnerable to attack, said

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, a range of neo-conservatives, defense canesians, and others have described them as catastrophic,

have also used, as I mentioned, the sort of economic argument because Americans are sort of down on big foreign military intervention, so the big threat has been that they'll destroy a million jobs, plunges back into

recession, so pretty much any extreme catastrophic metaphor that you can think of has been has been used.

And especially if you live in the Washington DC area you've paid attention to any

television that's occurred in this media market. That is a particularly effective threat given the jobs that exist in Maryland, Northern

Virginia, Washington, D.C. within the defense industry. But how real are those kinds of cuts?

Well, there, so it's a little bit wonky and it takes a little bit to unpack, right?

So when, if and when the sequester happens, which it looks increasingly unlikely that it will come to happen,

there would be an initial cut of about $55 billion off the top.

And there's some dispute still, interestingly,

about the extent to which those could be done strategically.

Or there's sort of a Damically and Sword argument that says, look, we couldn't even do this

strategically.

It just takes a chunk off the top of everything within the defense budget that's subject

...