Putting "Defense" Back into U.S. Defense Policy: Rethinking U.S. Security in the Post-Cold War World.

• Author: Korb, Lawrence J.
• Position: Book Review

By Ivan Eland Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001. Pp. x, 242. $39.95 cloth.

In January 2002, the Bush administration presented a defense budget to the Congress that called for spending approximately $400 billion on defense in the fiscal year beginning October 1, 2002. This means that, since coming into office, the Bush administration has increased the baseline budget by nearly $100 billion, or 30 percent (the war against al Qaeda and the Taliban was funded separately through a supplemental appropriation); that the United States now spends more on defense than the eighteen next-ranking nations in the world combined; that the United States is now spending 15 percent more in real terms than it spent on average during the Cold War; and that President Bush increased the defense budget more in his first year in office than he promised in his campaign to increase it over a decade.

If anything, the defense budget will continue to climb even more rapidly over the next five years. The Democrats, afraid of being branded as soft on defense in light of the events of September 11, 2001, passed the president's budget essentially in toto. The Joint Chiefs of Staff pointed out that even with this 30 percent increase, the Bush budget is still $30 billion less than what is needed to fund fully all of the programs the president proposes. Thus, there will probably not be the debate that should accompany such a dramatic shift in the strategic landscape.

Those looking for an alternative view should pick up Ivan Eland's new book Putting "Defense" Back into U.S. Defense Policy: Rethinking U.S. Security in the Post--Cold War World.

Eland, the director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute, argues that even before the Bush binge, the United States was spending too much on defense and that the money is being spent on the wrong priorities. He proposes that rather than increasing the...