Robert Kagan counsels against cuts in the defense budget in the Washington Post today. His first argument:

It doesn’t make fiscal sense to cut the defense budget when everyone is scrambling for measures to stimulate the economy. Already, under the current Pentagon budget, defense contractors will begin shutting down production lines in the next couple of years — putting people out of work. Rather than cutting, the Obama administration ought to be increasing defense spending. As Harvard economist Martin Feldstein recently noted on this page, defense spending is exactly the kind of expenditure that can have an immediate impact on the economy.

I don’t really buy the Keynesian assumptions of this argument, but I also think it creates the same sort of problem that the Keynesian argument for, say, infrastructure spending has. Which is, to the extent you let the alleged need to get as much money out the door as fast as you can drive your infrastructure or defense budget, you’re not letting infrastructure or defense priorities drive that budget. There’s just always going to be a tension between those purposes for the spending.