The United States should and will be the strongest country in the world. But it can achieve that status for significantly less than it is now spending. An early withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan over the next six months would save hundreds of billions of dollars. In addition, we could reach savings of more than $100 billion annually by adopting strategic concepts appropriate to the current world situation, rather than continuing to rack up bills fighting threats that no longer exist. We could also save tens of billions of dollars a year by curtailing our commitment to the defense of Western Europe — which was perfectly sensible when President Harry Truman made it but is wholly inexplicable now that Europeans are wealthy, strong, and threatened by no one — as well as by reducing our military presence in Japan and forgoing the new proposal for stationing U.S. Marines in Australia. We do not need to maintain the fighting capacity we had during the height of the Cold War to engage the Soviet Union in an all-out conflict. Terrorists are terrible people who should be confronted, but they are not a thermonuclear-armed Soviet empire. Fighting them, though in many ways more complicated, should be less expensive.

How to Save the Global Economy: Cut Defense Spending - by Barney Frank | Foreign Policy