AEI’s Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies will host Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter for a timely discussion of U.S. defense budgets, of the changing strategic landscape in the U.S. and the force that this landscape demands.

The U.S. defense budget serves as a sign of how America has prioritized its global commitments and the bridge between strategy and implementation, where military capabilities define the roles and missions of America’s men and women in uniform. The defense budget has broad global impact, but understanding it is not always easy. As military spending finds its way into the nation’s headlines, learn more about how America allocates resources to support its strength abroad.

Make no mistake: as defense budgets go down, so does America’s capacity to give its men and women in uniform the tools they need to defend our interests abroad—as well as our ability to sustain the world-class scientists, engineers, designers, and machinists that comprise our defense manufacturing industrial base. The military deserves better than this budget, and so does America.

The Romney 4 percent Pentagon budget is no “spike”; it’s more like a return to normal, even very constrained military spending given the global mission of America’s armed forces.

On Tuesday, May 15, join the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for a New American Security and the New America Foundation to discuss an issue sure to face the next president: U.S. defense spending in light of American grand strategy.

Barack Obama’s presidency has had profoundly negative consequences for our national security. From debilitating cuts in defense budgets, to gutting national missile defense efforts, to his unwillingness to acknowledge a continuing war against terrorism, to his inability to stem the nuclear proliferation threats posed by North Korea and Iran....the picture is bleak.

The primary drivers of our growing debt burden are the “Big 3” entitlements of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Yet as part of the debt ceiling deal that created sequestration when the Super Committee failed, politicians effectively fenced off nearly two-thirds of the federal budget and the main source of our over-spending. 

Under current law, the U.S. Department of Defense automatically faces significant spending cuts over the next 10 years—cuts that america's civilian and military leaders have cadidly described as "devastating" and "very high risk."