The Defense budget in the U.S is 20% of the U.S budget. That is of course double than what it was in 2001. If the U.S wants to get back to the surplus years of the 1990's then they will have too cut into defense heavily. Except a lot of the defense spending is in the two wars one is almost finished except there is 50,000 troops still left in Iraq, and Afghanistan is slowly going to be stopped. Not much savings so far. This means that the U.S should maybe look at the pentagon which is spending over 500 billion dollars a year. Maybe look into massive cuts into the pentagon. Even though most people would agree the pentagon needs a lot of money, and I agree with that, but if the U.S wants to reduce the deficit than they are going to need to cut important aspects of the budget. And to be truthful the pentagon is spending a much more than before. I am not saying kill the pentagon, but cut it by 80 billion minimum this year alone. The U.S should also cut homeland security, and many other security programs that have billion of dollars in the budget that the U.S can't sustain. Here in Canada we have a defense budget of about 7% , and it doesn't need to grow any more in fact with the mission in Afghanistan ending the defense budget should lower in value of the total budget. We don't need a big army. We don't have any country to fear except maybe North Korea and Iran and they have bigger fish to fry, and nevertheless we do have allies with similar defense spending then us who can join in if needed.Our defense funding is fine where it is now we have the 13th highest defense budget in the world. The U.S is of course way on top of the packed and can afford (or really needs to) cut it's military capacity.
By taking a holistic approach, $80 billion could be slashed from the
$553 billion the Pentagon has requested for 2012, the authors say.
Expensive projects ill-suited for today's wars -- like missile defense
and the V-22 Osprey -- would be cut.
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