Two things that make me uncomfortable: Agreeing with the disagreeable, and having people badly argue a position with which I agree. I get a little bit of that today in my piece on Barney Frank and the military-spending committee.

The short version: I think we can spend a lot less on the military without jeopardizing our national security, and, in some cases, we might improve it by limiting or canceling some operations. But here’s the thing: You have to have the discussion about your national-security vision before you figure out how to save a couple of billion dollars here, a couple of billion dollars there, implementing it. The military-spending commission — which had no military members on it, so far as I can tell — uses the budgetary issue as a Trojan horse to smuggle in its vision of a smaller, less active, less engaged national-security apparatus. I happen to sympathize, at least partially, with that vision — I do not see a net benefit from our permanent presence in Korea, Saudi Arabia, Bulgaria, Germany, or Okinawa, for instance — but I do not think this is the way to have the argument. My view:

The Pentagon’s budget is as bloated as any typical federal agency’s, and its operations as poorly administered. There is ample room for cuts in its budget. But there is not at present occasion for these cuts, which presuppose a major change in the military posture of the United States. As crucial as spending reform is — even the chairman of the Joint Chiefs calls the federal debt our top long-term national-security threat — we should not conduct a major rethinking of our national-defense policy under the cover of budget-balancing. That is a debate that deserves to be had on its own terms.

I’m also skeptical of the hostility toward nuclear weapons in the report. As a purely fiscal matter, I have to imagine that our nuclear arsenal is a relatively good investment: The expense of maintaining conventional forces that would provide an equivalent deterrent would be enormous. (If you don’t believe that, ask yourselves why otherwise hapless North Korea doesn’t get smacked around like Noriega’s Panama.)

You can read the rest here.