“Our [US] military capabilities have declined. Today defense spending is only 16 percent of all federal spending, a historic low rivaled only by the post-Cold War period,” Cotton stated.
Cotton said that if the United States did not “end this experiment of retreat,” defense spending would decline even further to 12 percent in the coming years, impacting the US government’s "ability to defend the country from all threats."
The Senator, who sits on the US Senate Armed Services Committee, argued for a base defense budget with a “$600 [billion] floor, not a ceiling.” The budget currently debated by the US Congress is $77 billion less than the amount Cotton specified.
When the United States began its defense build-up under US President Ronald Reagan, spending 5 percent of GDP on defense was considered “a dangerously low amount,” Cotton explained. “If we spent 5 percent of our national income on defense today, we would spend $885 on defense.”
US defense spending has declined by billions of dollars over the past six years, in part because of the United States withdrawal from the decade-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the US Department of Defense.
