This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, August 18th, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown. The cuts to military spending offered by Defense Secretary Robert Gates

may amount to some improvements in efficiency

that they don't cut much spending.

True spending cuts says Chris Preble, director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute,

will mean re-establishing the very purpose of the military as a force for

the protection of the United States.

Secretary Gates would like to consolidate some of the overhead that has grown up within the Department of Defense over the last, you know, 15, 20 or more years

includes the most prominent is closing down Joint Forces Command, Jifcom, which helps to, or supposedly

helps to coordinate different parts of the military working together.

It was a fairly new command and therefore the logic is

that rolling it back will not lose a lot in the grand scheme of things in terms

of capabilities. There's obviously grown up a lot of civilian infrastructure, civilian overhead that can be cut back and I think that's likely to move forward.

There's long been some concern about the use of contractors which it's argued are more expensive that may be true in the short term.

I'm not entirely convinced that it's true in the long term.

But these are reforms that are actually quite well established.

It was based on a number of recommendations

that he received from a commission and defense business board

which had laid down a lot of these recommendations and they're fully

consistent with that. I think it's also interesting that the new Central

Command commander that is James Mattis who was previously Jifcom even he supports shuttering

the command that he just recently led so I think there is actually quite a bit of support within the Pentagon and

...