Matt Yglesias argues that if congressional Republicans wind up accepting somewhat higher revenue levels in the near-term, it will be due to the influence of “militarists,” i.e., conservatives who are concerned about the depth of planned reductions in the rate of increase in defense expenditures, rather than reformists:

The view that the American military is dangerous underfunded is not popular among America’s smartest right-of-center pundits (presumably because it’s laughably wrong) but it has much more purchase in congress than other criticisms of where John Boehner and Mitch McConnell have taken the GOP. If the logjam breaks, it’ll be militarism not reformism that breaks it.

By Matt’s standard, I fall in both camps. Most reformist conservatives, like most conservatives in the post-Iraq era, see sharp reductions in defense expenditures as a reasonable concession to the demands of fiscal consolidation. But though I’m certainly more cautious about the armed intervention than I had been a decade ago, for a variety of reasons, I actually think that there is a logical thread connecting domestic reformism and what Matt calls militarism — a thread that those of a more rigorously libertarian bent will see as an intellectual weakness or flaw. One of the main drivers of increased defense expenditures are the rising costs associated with providing military personnel and retired military personnel with medical care. A closely related challenge is retaining a high-quality workforce when disciplined, capable workers, whether non-college-educated or otherwise, have other educational and professional opportunities available to them. The cost of meeting America’s existing set of national security commitments is rising, for the same reason that educational and medical are more expensive in relative terms than they were three decades ago: the “productivity” of war-fighting isn’t increasing as quickly as the productivity of, say, the manufacturing sector, yet the military has to compete with other sectors for workers. That is, the defense sector is a victim of Baumol’s cost disease. If you’re the kind of conservative who accepts that an aging society that guarantees older Americans access to high-quality medical care will probably have to spend more money to do so due to Baumol’s disease, etc., you might also recognize that if we’re going to retain our relative military edge over potential great power rivals, we’ll have to spend more money to do that too. I should stress that one could just as easily believe that we ought to pare back our commitment to providing older Americans with high-quality medical care and, similarly, that we ought to let wealthy Gulf petrostates and European and East Asian market democracies fend for themselves, which is fair enough. Or one might believe that innovation will allow us to actually shrink spending on both missions while meeting existing commitments, and perhaps even expanding them. I’m sympathetic to this latter camp, and we ought to do what we can to encourage labor-saving, productivity-enhancing innovation in the stagnant sectors. When it comes to planning ahead, however, I find that it is best to avoid relying too heavily on best-case scenarios. 

The U.S. military has grown more capital-intensive and firepower-intensive over time, and the rise of drone warfare can be seen as an effort to increase defense productivity. But counter-insurgency operations, for example, are intrinsically labor-intensive, which is one reason why I think it is wise for the U.S. to assiduously avoid engaging in counter-insurgency operations. When necessary, we should try to outsource or offshore counter-insurgency work to indigenous forces in a given country, or to military personnel drawn from lower-wage countries. Unfortunately, we can’t guarantee that this will always be possible, and so I tend to think that it is prudent to err on the side of caution when it comes to military expenditures, as a kind of insurance policy against geopolitical risk. There is no obvious way to adjudicate exactly how much we ought to spend, and I am sympathetic to the idea that there is defense spending that can be safely trimmed. I just don’t think we should be glib about the downside risks, particularly because a secure global commons is centrally important to the U.S. and the global economy and unipolarity, as William Wohlforth argued in 1999, has proven conducive to peace:

The raw power advantage of the United States means that an important source of conºict in previous systems is absent: hegemonic rivalry over leadership of the international system. No other major power is in a position to follow any policy that depends for its success on prevailing against the United States in a war or an extended rivalry. None is likely to take any step that might invite the focused enmity of the United States. At the same time, unipolarity minimizes security competition among the other great powers. As the system leader, the United States has the means and motive to maintain key security institutions in order to ease local security conºicts and limit expensive competition among the other major powers. For their part, the second-tier states face incentives to bandwagon with the unipolar power as long as the expected costs of balancing remain prohibitive.

There are other reasons why some reformists might also be militarists. Conservatives motivated primarily by a suspicion of concentrated power are often skeptical of the virtues of a sprawling national security state are going to want to cut it down to size. Those who share in the “militaristic nationalism” Matt invokes might feel otherwise, and this “militaristic nationalism” might also lead them to see military service as a vehicle of upward mobility.