Defense Spending

Defense spending is the allocation of public funds to raise, equip, and sustain a nation’s armed forces. Conservatives regard national defense as the first duty of government and the one expenditure most clearly justified by the state’s core purpose, which is to protect its citizens from external threat. The governing principle is “peace through strength”: adversaries are deterred not by goodwill or treaties alone but by visible, credible military power.

This conviction coexists with a real internal tension. The same conservatives who demand a strong military are typically fiscal hawks suspicious of large government budgets, and defense is the largest discretionary line in the federal accounts. The conservative tradition resolves the tension by treating defense as a constitutional obligation rather than ordinary discretionary spending, while still insisting that the money be spent with discipline and against a clear strategic purpose.

Key Takeaways

• Conservatives treat national defense as government’s first and most legitimate function, rooted in the duty to protect citizens from foreign threat.
• “Peace through strength” holds that credible military power deters aggression and prevents war more reliably than disarmament.
• The Reagan buildup of the 1980s drove U.S. defense spending to roughly 6 percent of GDP and is the tradition’s defining modern example.
• Conservatives press NATO allies on burden-sharing, citing the alliance’s 2 percent of GDP target adopted in 2014.
• A standing tension runs between defense hawks and fiscal hawks over how much the protection of the nation should cost.

History And Context

The view that defense is the paramount duty of the state is old. Adam Smith, no friend of wasteful public expense, wrote in The Wealth of Nations (1776) that the first duty of the sovereign is protecting the society from violence and invasion, and that defense is of much more importance than opulence.¹ The American founders built the point into the constitutional order: the Preamble names providing for the common defense among the Constitution’s purposes, and Alexander Hamilton devoted several numbers of The Federalist (1788) to arguing that the national government must hold an unlimited power to raise forces, because the threats a nation faces cannot be foreseen or capped in advance.²

The modern American expression of the doctrine is the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Entering office in 1981 amid concern that détente had let Soviet power outpace American, Reagan launched the largest peacetime military buildup in U.S. history, lifting the defense budget sharply and pressing the policy of negotiating with Moscow only from a position of strength.³ Spending reached roughly 6 percent of GDP by the mid-1980s. Reagan also pressed European allies to carry more of NATO’s cost, a theme that resurfaced when the alliance adopted its 2 percent of GDP spending target in 2014 after Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

The Conservative Position

Conservatives ground defense spending in the logic of government itself. If the state exists to secure its citizens, then the forces that provide that security are not one program among many but the precondition of all the others; a nation that cannot defend its borders cannot guarantee any of the liberties or properties within them. This is why conservatives, following Smith and Hamilton, place defense in a different category from discretionary welfare or subsidy spending.¹²

The strategic doctrine attached to this conviction is deterrence. The peace-through-strength tradition holds that weakness invites aggression and that the surest way to avoid war is to make it manifestly unprofitable for any rival to start one. Conservatives point to the Reagan record as vindication: a sustained buildup, paired with firm diplomacy, helped bring the Soviet Union to arms-control negotiations and contributed to the peaceful end of the Cold War.³ From the same premise flows the conservative insistence on allied burden-sharing. If collective defense is a genuine obligation, allies who shelter under American power while underfunding their own forces are free-riding, and pressing them toward the NATO 2 percent target is a matter of fairness as much as strategy.

The fiscal-hawk strand does not disappear in this account; it is redirected. Conservatives such as those at the Heritage Foundation argue that a strong defense and a disciplined budget are compatible, demanding procurement reform, weapons programs priced against real threats, and an end to waste, rather than spending for its own sake. Defense, in this telling, must be funded generously and audited ruthlessly.

Differing Positions

Critics on the left and among libertarians answer that the United States already spends more on its military than the next several nations combined, and that further increases buy diminishing security at rising cost. They argue that vast standing budgets create their own momentum: a permanent arms industry, an interventionist foreign policy, and what President Eisenhower in his 1961 Farewell Address called the “military-industrial complex,” whose institutional appetite for funding can outrun any genuine threat. On this view, money poured into weapons is money denied to domestic needs, and the deterrence argument too easily licenses open-ended commitments and wars of choice that make the nation less safe rather than more. Some restraint-minded conservatives share part of this worry, contending that prudence counsels a defense sized to defend the homeland rather than to police the globe.

Defenders of strong spending reply that the cost of underinvestment is paid in deterrence failures, and that the relevant comparison is not with domestic programs but with the price of the wars that weakness invites. The historical record they cite, from the 1930s to the present, is that aggressors test the unprepared. Whether 3, 4, or 6 percent of GDP is the right figure remains contested, but the underlying conviction holds firm: a nation that will not pay for its defense should not expect to keep its peace.

References

1. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Liberty Fund, 1981), p. 689.
2. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (Penguin Classics, 1987), p. 184.
3. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (Penguin Press, 2005), p. 217.
4. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960-61 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961), p. 1038.