Bush's imperial adventures have stretched our military to the breaking point, even as Congress has massively increased military funding. In the face of this reality, many Presidential candidates (such as Obama and Clinton) are calling to increase the size of the military. Yet there is no army in the world that presents the slightest threat to US military supremacy--even if we had no allies. Only a few candidates (such as Richardson) have the sense to recognize how our approach military spending is totally detached from the reality of the threats that face us. Robert Dreyfuss sums up this situation, examining how we've given G.W. Bush a blank check for military spending.
The basic question here is whether massive military spending is really able to protect us from the threats that we face. The first purpose of our military is to smash another army that is engaged in aggressive behavior (such as with Iraq in 1991). However, there is no potential enemy who we couldn't smash in such a situation.
Fighting terrorism is primarily a task for intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, not the military. In the rare cases where we are attacked by terrorists who can act freely in a foreign country, those countries are almost guaranteed to be failed states and all we need to do is play king-maker in their civil wars (such as Afghanistan 2001).
But others want to turn our army into a massive social engineering bureaucracy, in the vain hope that people won't want to hurt us if we go into their homes and disrupt their lives on a regular basis. This path will destroy our military and our country.
We need to get of Iraq and every other territory that we are occupying (such as Guantanamo Bay), and then bring our military expenditures down to a reasonable level. We have plenty of productive uses for those resources, and we shouldn't dedicate them to arms until we need to.
Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes ... known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.... No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
— James Madison, Political Observations, 1795