Victor Davis Hanson: Defense Spending Is a ‘Shovel Ready’ Investment

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom.

President Obama has just ordered massive cutbacks in defense spending, eventually to total some $500 billion. There is plenty of fat in a Pentagon budget that grew after 9/11, but such slashing goes way too far.

Fairly or not, the cuts will only cement the now-familiar stereotype of Obama’s desire to retrench on the world scene. They follow symbolic apologies for purported past American sins, bows to foreign royals, and outreach to the likes of Iran and Syria. Abroad, such perceptions can matter as much as reality, as our rivals begin hoping that Obama is as dubious about America’s historically exceptional world role as are they....

The reason why our deficit is more than $1 trillion is not just that we have multimillion-dollar jet fighters or tens of thousands of Marines. Defense outlays currently represent only about 20 percent of federal budget expenditures and are below 5 percent of our gross national product. Those percentages are roughly average costs for recent years — despite an ongoing deployment in Afghanistan. In contrast, over the last three years we have borrowed a record near– $5 trillion for vast unfunded entitlements — from a spiraling Social Security and Medicare to an expansion of the food-stamp program to include one-seventh of America. Yet many Americans would probably prefer a new frigate manned by highly trained youth to discourage our enemies, rather than another Solyndra-like investment or a near– $1 trillion stimulus aimed at creating jobs in “shovel-ready” projects....