Gilbert Gutknecht: “We won the cold war. The military buildup of the 1980's was perhaps, in my opinion, one of the greatest investments in…”

“We won the cold war. The military buildup of the 1980's was perhaps, in my opinion, one of the greatest investments in the history of human beings because we literally won the Third World War, the cold war, if you will, without firing a shot. It was because of the buildup. Now, we are seeing some of that peace dividend. Real defense spending has dropped by over 30 percent in the last 5 years. A lot of people talked about the peace dividend. But I think most of us would agree that that peace dividend ought to go to our children rather than go into even higher domestic discretionary spending. Unfortunately the gentleman from Wisconsin is absolutely right. What we have seen is dramatic increases in domestic discretionary spending along with entitlements as defense spending has come down. But let me just say this, too, and I think this is an important point, and we should have a healthy debate about how many B-2 bombers we really need. But let us have that debate. We live in a relatively safe world.”