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."

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. 

Serious questions remain about the national security implications of the proposed deal to raise the federal debt ceiling. With Members of Congress essentially being asked to vote immediately to avoid defaulting on the national debt, they are also entitled to immediate and compelling answers to the defense-related questions.

Most financial analysts breathed a sigh of relief when the president signed the Budget Control Act into law just a few hours before we hit the limit on the national credit card. But that was premature. The new budget law does little more than establish a process by which our fiscal crisis may be addressed, and there are ample opportunities for that process to be overturned.

While there has been growing pressure within Congress to cut defense spending in order to control an exploding deficit, the United States needs a military at least as large as the one it currently employs if it hopes to retain its long-standing posture of global leadership.

The GOP wants to cut $61 billion of discretionary nondefense spending from the total budget of $3.7 trillion, and Democrats are responding as if this will spell the end of Western civilization.

The bedrock issue in the debt limit struggle is whether we should have a larger and more expensive federal government.

With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to pay for, the 1990s "peace dividend" has given way to a substantial increase in military spending. This spending, combined with increases in non-defense related government spending and the long-term cost projections for entitlement programs, prompt a vital question: can America afford the...