The Return of Reagan.

• Position: Bill Clinton's spending on defense

Here we are, more than seven years after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the United States is spending more money on the Pentagon than it was two decades ago. The Pentagon has a budget that exceeds that of the next ten biggest militaries combined. And still the Joint Chiefs demand more, and still Bill Clinton gives it to them. This money is a waste--just more candy for the kids at the Pentagon, more cake and ice cream for the contractors.

This bloated Pentagon budget doesn't make us any safer. In fact, some of it--like the renewed Star Wars program--places us in more jeopardy.

When Clinton announced at the beginning of the year that he was boosting Pentagon spending by $110 billion over the next six years, he obliterated one more distinction between Democrats and Republicans. His proposal, the largest increase since the days of Reagan, sounded an all-out retreat.

"He finally caved," says William Hartung of the World Policy Institute. "It's an abdication of his responsibility as commander in chief. He's afraid to put them on a budget. It's the worst time to have someone like that in charge." Hartung believes Clinton surrendered to the Joint Chiefs "partly because he was never confident running the place, and partly because he's looking to give Gore some political cover."

The camouflage for this increase in Pentagon spending is to raise the pay of the men and women in the armed services. But that's misleading. "Overall, it's being sold as a way to give more money to the troops and for readiness, but one of the main goals is to spend more on unneeded, gold-plated Cold War relics," says Christopher Hellman of the Center for Defense Information. "It calls for spending more than $6 billion for replacing fighter aircraft that already are the best in the world." Other procurement items are equally unnecessary, he says. There is money for a new and improved nuclear aircraft carrier and for maintaining the fleet of eighteen Trident nuclear submarines, even though the Navy said it could get by with ten back in the Bush Administration.

The strategic rationale for this gargantuan Pentagon is still the two-war theory: that the United States should be prepared to fight two wars overseas at the same time. Pentagon strategists under Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the Bush Administration, "more or less worked backward," says Hartung. "They said, `If we want a force of this size, what threat would we need?'"

Lawrence Korb, Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration, takes issue with the two-war strategy. "It's very unrealistic," he says. "The assumption behind it is that while the United States is fighting one enemy the other enemy would take advantage of us. But no one took advantage of us during Korea, or Vietnam, or the Persian Gulf. And the reason is, you don't start a conflict against the major superpower just because you might have some short-term advantage since, in the long term, we'll come back and clean your clock."

Other conservatives have come out against this level of spending. "It's totally unnecessary," says Ivan Eland, director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute. He has harsh words for the Pentagon officials who insist they are so strapped for funds that they can't pay their personnel. "It's like you're buying a mansion and then complaining you don't have...