The problem of agreeing on military spending is a question of what you believe in. There is the realist and the liberal points of view.
Realist says we can do as much as we can to promote free trade, but people are still going to use militaristic force and unfair market pressures to gain an advantage in the global market, thus we always require a large safety force in order to combat that.
Liberal states that if we can obtain true free trade such that every nation depends on another for some good, there should be no need for war as we will become an inter-dependent world.
I'm not going to pass judgement on those that whole heatedly believe in the liberal view because I believe in free market principles and that they have powerful effects in the global economy. However, we sort of cheat at this because we subsidize a lot of products, but we only do it because everyone else does. The thing that pushes me towards realist is the presence of crazy rulers/leaders/dictators.
People like Kim Jong Un, Ahmadinejad, Putin, Hugo Chavez, and Bashar al-Assad scare me, because they are unpredictable and the goal of economic peace does not interest them. Even when we agree to reduce our nuclear stockpiles with Russia, they will never go down to zero. Why? Because you can't trust the other guy telling you what cards he has.
Thus, I am all for making our military one of the most technologically frightening so that attempting a true militaristic assault on the USA would be hopefully unimaginable, but certainly unfeasible. I genuinely did not like the decision made by our current president to cut funding to Future Combat Systems, because most of what they had in the pipeline sounded absolutely awesome.
