MR. KOJO NNAMDIFrom WAMU 88.5 at American University in Washington welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," connecting your neighborhood with the world. Later in the broadcast, a simple primer on how binary code works to drive just about everything you're using these days and why it's so important today.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIBut first, Dwight D. Eisenhower wasn't known for being much of an orator, but he knew that his farewell address on January 17, 1961, would carry weight for years to come. Eisenhower had led the U.S. to victory to World War II and had overseen massive growth in its nuclear stockpile. But he was worried about the legacy he left and the conflicts of interest that militarization and the money behind it would lead to. So he made a prophetic warning, quoting here, "We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence by the military-industrial complex".

MR. KOJO NNAMDIFifty years later, that military-industrial complex continues to grow in size and influence with the Pentagon's budget exceeding $700 billion a year and for many Americans it's become a way to make a living. But would Ike be rolling over in his grave now and have we fallen short in guarding against these conflicts he foresaw?

MR. KOJO NNAMDIJoining us in studio to discuss this is Christopher Preble, director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute and author of "The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous and Less Free," Christopher Preble, thank you for joining us.

MR. CHRISTOPHER PREBLEThank you for having me.

NNAMDIJoining us from NPR's Bryant Park studios is James Ledbetter, editor of Reuters.com and author of "Unwarranted Influence, Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military Industrial Complex," James Ledbetter, thank you for joining us.

MR. JAMES LEDBETTERGood afternoon, happy to be here.

NNAMDIAnd I'll start with you. Fifty years ago on January 17th, Dwight Eisenhower delivered that now famous farewell speech in which he made the warning about the power of the military industrial complex. Can you give us some context to the time and to the speech?

LEDBETTERCertainly, I think one of the most important things to remember is that January 17, 1961 was just three days before the inauguration of John Kennedy. And I think the nation in many ways had -- at least, a good portion of the nation had kind of fallen in love with Kennedy, with the Kennedy persona. Eisenhower was sort of a doddering old man who had done his eight years in office. He'd had some health problems which made him not the most effective public speaker. And so the country was on the transition point and I think maybe not as receptive to the speech as its later fame would indicate.

LEDBETTEROne of the things that had brought Kennedy to power, and Christopher has written a book about this, was the idea that the United States needed to be spending more on the military than it currently was because it was perceived that the United States had fallen behind the Soviet Union in critical areas, particularly nuclear stockpile and the launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957.

LEDBETTERAnd Eisenhower did not share this point of view. He was rather vehemently against the idea that we had fallen behind. He had some intelligence based on U2 spy plane information that we were not, in fact, behind the Soviet Union. But of course, he couldn't disclose that publicly because it was top secret.

LEDBETTERBut in addition, and maybe more fundamentally, he did not believe that we should spend blindly and relentlessly in order to match the Soviet Union or to increase our security real or perceived. He thought there had to be some kind of upper limit to military spending and really had been consistent about this for most, if not all, of his adult life. And so the speech, although he did not write it -- he didn't really draft many or most of his major speeches and this is a common practice among modern presidents.

LEDBETTERThe ideas in it were very, very close to his heart. And by the time it went through the dozens of drafts that we now know it went through, the material was very much his own. And so I agree with you it was a prophetic moment. It was planned well in advance to have an impact on the future more than on the present.

NNAMDILet's listen to a little bit of that speech by President Eisenhower in January 1961.

PRESIDENT DWIGHT D. EISENHOWERNow this conjuncture of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence, economic, political, even spiritual is felt in every city, every State House, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved so is the very structure of our society.

PRESIDENT DWIGHT D. EISENHOWERIn the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence whether sought or unsought by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

NNAMDIPresident Dwight Eisenhower in January of 1961. Christopher Preble, Eisenhower's warning seems a little ironic coming from a man who was a leading figure in this very system. His whole career during his two presidential terms there was a dramatic buildup in nuclear weapons for starters. Did this speech in a way represent a change of heart?

PREBLEIt was not a change of heart. The president did indicate in the speech his sense of disappointment that he had not succeeded in achieving disarmament which was one of his goals. Far to the contrary, the nuclear arsenal, as you point out, had grown dramatically under his watch. He was proud of the fact that there had not been a major war and pointed to that, but most importantly was his sense of disappointment that his vision for national security, which was predicated on a balance, a balance between what was needed to achieve security and sustain security and the needs of the private economy and other public investment.

PREBLEJames is right. This was, in many respects, the victory of John Kennedy. But even the victory of Eisenhower's Vice-President Richard Nixon represented a repudiation of his vision, the Republican platform in 1960 really rejected Eisenhower's notion of fiscal conservatism. But of course, the Democrats went even much farther and John Kennedy when he was president and even after he learned that the missile gap which was a myth, was a fiction. He did not know that coming into office, but he still presided over a very dramatic increase in military spending and I think that reflects a very different economic philosophy than Eisenhower's.

NNAMDIPeople listening to this today, Chris would say Eisenhower sounds like a pacifist. Could he be considered a pacifist at the end of his career or is that a stretch?

PREBLEThere's a great irony that here was Eisenhower, son of Mennonites. And you know, James, I think, points out in his book that there were many things that were a sin and war was a sin, too. He had a very, very sophisticated and nuanced view of warfare. Again, I don't think he was. He was certainly not sanguine about the Soviet threat, but he was very concerned about too much energy, too much attention being invested into the military and tried to emphasize the many, many other areas of national strength that went far beyond what we put into ships and planes and missiles.

NNAMDIJames Ledbetter...

LEDBETTERCan I comment on this?

NNAMDIPlease do.

LEDBETTERYeah, I think I agree with Christopher that change of heart is probably not the right term. But I do think that the farewell address perhaps reflects a change of emphasis. In the early days of the Eisenhower administration, Eisenhower gave a remarkable speech we now call the "Chance for Peace" speech...

NNAMDIThat's what I was getting to next. Talk a little bit about that. How did that speech contrast and compare with his farewell address?

LEDBETTERThis was early 1953, shortly after the death of Stalin. And the future direction of the Soviet Union at that time was very much up for grabs. The State Department was quite unclear about who was going to succeed Stalin and what form the Soviet Union was going to take and therefore what direction the United States, Soviet relations were going to take. It was not as kind of frozen in ice as it now perhaps seems to us today.

LEDBETTERAnd as a result, Eisenhower gave a visionary, unique speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors called "Chance for Peace" in which he laid out in terms that, I think, are basically without precedent in U.S. history all the amounts of money that we were spending on the military and comparing them to all the things that we could do both to make this a better country and to make the world a better place. It has been argued that at least some of the speech was sort of propaganda meant for international consumption and the speech was very widely publicized across the globe.

LEDBETTERBut I think he would never have given a speech if he did not, on some level, at least believe in its values. Now, that speech, there wasn't really a lot of follow-up to it. It kind of went up into the air and then died. And then once Khrushchev took over the Soviet Union, looked a lot like it had under Stalin and so the opportunity that had been once perceived was arguably past.

LEDBETTERHowever, I do think in the second term, the late 1950s, that Eisenhower really tried to grapple with the idea that the setup of the cold war was simply a dead end. You were never going to you know beat the Soviets militarily. There was always a risk of a nuclear war breaking out. We would break the country's back economically if we tried to match the Soviet's dollar for ruble and therefore he began to, and I use this term loosely, he began to sort of fantasize about other ways that we might resolve our conflicts independent of an arms race.

LEDBETTERFor example, he toyed with the idea of a massive exchange of college students between the United States and the Soviet Union. I'm talking about tens of thousands of college students switching countries for a year or two semesters or what have you every year. This was never going to make it past the State Department, but it was something that he really thought about. Maybe a little more fantastically he thought about a world-wide plebiscite in which every person in the world would vote. Would you rather be ruled by communism or you know capitalist democracy?

LEDBETTERAgain, this was probably never going to happen, but you sort of going through some of the diaries and the letters that Eisenhower wrote you do get this sense of him trying to find some other way. And I would say that the military industrial complex speech that closes his presidency is a reflection of that change of emphasis, that sense that the path that we're on is a dead end and if we don't change it, it will be to our peril.

NNAMDILet's bring our listeners in on this conversation. The number is 800-433-8850. And that "Chance for Peace" speech President Eisenhower said the cost of one modern, heavy bomber is this, a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. Do you agree with Eisenhower that every penny we spend on our arms is a theft from those who are in need? Call us, 800-433-8850 or go to our website, kojoshow.org, join the conversation there. Here is Nicholas in Silver Spring, Maryland, who brings us into the contemporary here. And Nicholas, go ahead, please.

NICHOLASThank you, good morning. Good afternoon Kojo, how are you doing?

NNAMDII'm well.

NICHOLASAll right. So I just want to drop the website before I make a comment and that is globalsecurity.org and then you can Google it at very low frequency guns. And what you're looking at, essentially, is a weapons system that was developed by Russia in the early 90s, but now has got to the point where you can fire acoustic bullets through walls and, you know, break doors open. And it's a very real weapons system that has a lot to do with the military industrial complex in the state that it's in right now.

NICHOLASThank you, good morning -- good afternoon, Kojo, how you doing?

NNAMDII'm well.

NICHOLASAll right. So I just want to drop the website before I make the comment and that is globalsecurity.org. And then you can Google it at very low frequency guns. And what you're looking at essentially is a weapon system that was developed by Russia in the early '90's but now has gotten to the point where you can fire acoustic bullets through walls and, you know, break doors open. It's a very real weapon system but has a lot to do with the military industrial complex in the state that it's in right now.

NNAMDIOkay. Well, that's what we'll be talking about when we come back. We will bring us into the modern era. Thank you very much for your call, Nicholas. You too can join the conversation by either going to our website kojoshow.org, calling us at 800-433-8850. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDI50 years after Dwight Eisenhower made his famous speech about his concerns about what he characterized as the military industrial complex, we talk about it today with James Ledbetter, editor of Reuters.com and author of, "Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military Industrial Complex." And Christopher Preble, director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. And author of, "The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free."

NNAMDIChris Preble, we talked about President Eisenhower, talking about the modern heavy bomber is the equivalent of a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. Or a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. Update us on this.

PREBLEIn my book, "The Power Problem," I went through the numbers and updated and so where as a brick school and 30 cities in 1953 is the equivalent of a 171 elementary schools today, of the cost of just one B-2. Our fighter plane, the newest one, the F-22 was about $356 million, that's 66 million bushels of wheat. And we could buy about a single family home, about 52,000 single family homes for the cost of one destroyer and back in 1953, that could house the same number of housing, could house about 8,000 people.

PREBLEThe point that I emphasize in the book, of course, and I think this is a key feature of Eisenhower's critique, is that, look, security is a core function of government. No one disputes that and least of all Dwight Eisenhower. But there are opportunity costs. There are tradeoffs. And even if we restrict ourselves to tradeoffs between the private economy and the public economy, he was most concerned about maintaining a balance. A balance between what the federal government spent on defense and what all of us as individuals can continue to spend on our own lives and on our families.

PREBLEAnd this was a theme that came up over and over again in his Presidency.

NNAMDIAnd James Ledbetter, you say, as we come into the current era, that the term, Military-Industrial, is outdated. Why?

LEDBETTERWell, it's outdated in the since that we are arguably very much in a post industrial economy that as a percentage of the workforce, people who are engaged in manufacturing, which is what we think of as industry or sort of at a all time low since they began keeping statistics. Having said that, that doesn't mean that the concept of a military-industrial complex has passed us by. Early in the broadcast, the figure was given of a Pentagon budget of $700 billion annually.

LEDBETTERThe actual overall military expenders is much larger than that because the DOD budget line is only one component of where we spend in the military. So for example, the expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan are largely off budget. Largely paid for by debt. There's therefore an interest on that debt that should be calculated in. There are Veterans benefits. So the size of what we're spending on a military depends, of course, on how you define it.

LEDBETTERBut the figure that I’m using is approximately a trillion dollars a year which is really quite a lot of money. And sort of puts into perspective since we're spending it every year, a lot of the debates about so called stimulus. But, I think, you know, Christopher makes a very good point. Which is that, security, while a very important function of government is not the only function. It also depends on how we define it. Eisenhower's lifelong concern was that the United States not turn itself into what he called a Garrison state.

LEDBETTERNow, you could be the most secure country in the world if you converted your entire economy to defending yourselves and erecting boarders. You know, arming to the teeth. But that, he believe, and I think most Americans when they think about it, also believe would be a rejection of our democratic way of life. Of our concept of freedom, our concept of individual liberty and very importantly, our concept of free enterprise.

LEDBETTERThere's a great concern of Eisenhower's. And so one of the challenges that we face today is, not only the opportunity costs as Christopher says but, also the market distortions that are introduced by having such a huge chunk of our GDP devoted to a system that is largely unaccountable for how much it spends and, frankly, goes to produce things that either blow up, blow other things up or don't do anything at all.

NNAMDIWell, I suspect the defense secretary, Bill Gates, would beg to differ. And, Christopher, he would say that, "Look, we've been ordered to cut spending by $78 billion over the next five years, we're trying here, Chris."

PREBLERobert Gates, only in Washington.

NNAMDIRobert Gates.

PREBLEOnly in Washington, would cutting from the ever rising defense budget be considered a cut. If you look at the numbers, in fact, and the secretary admitted as much, that his budget grows, continues to grow, it's doubled since 2001. And, yet, his goal is that the defense department continue to receive real but modest increases which kind of begs the question, Why? Why does the defense budget -- Why is the defense budget entitled to ever increasing share but everyone else is expected to tighten their belts?

NNAMDIDo you think that this budgetary tightening will stick once the country in out of the financial hole that it's currently in?

PREBLEWell, I really think it goes back to threat. That how we interpret our threats and how we deal with our threats. And again Eisenhower, I think, of all the things that would've really vexed him, was that the Soviet threat was real, he believed that it was worth and necessary to confront it. And, I think, for him to look at what we spend today, which in real terms is more -- actually more than twice as much in real terms, than what he spent in his last year as President.

PREBLEAnd, I think, it would've really just flabbergasted him, frankly, that we would be spending so much to fight essentially a bunch of guys hunkered down in safe houses in Pakistan and wherever else relative to what we were dealing with in 1961.

NNAMDIHere is Gerald in Northwest Washington. Gerald, you're on the air, go ahead, please.

GERALDKojo, thank you so much for having this show. I really appreciate it. I carry this speech with me. I've been carrying it since 2008 in my briefcase and I've been talking about it to anybody who would listen. One of the other things that -- and the quote that you played a little while ago was one of the quotes that I have highlighted in the speech. The other thing that Eisenhower said, who in my opinion is one of the greatest military men ever.

GERALDI've studied his work, I've studied his tactics and the things -- and one of the other things, that down the lane of history yet to be written. America knows that, this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate. And instead be proud confederational , neutral trust and respect. Such a confederation must be one of equal. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as we do -- as do we. Protect, as we are, by our moral, economic and military strength.

GERALDThat table, those scars, maybe -- by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield. This, you know, we've got to talk about this a lot more.

NNAMDIWell, allow me to have James Ledbetter talk about it. Where is that table, James Ledbetter?

LEDBETTERExcellent question. Gerald, I'm so glad that you bring this up. Because, I think, it is very easy when we talk about the military-industrial complex to reduce it to simply a question of spending less or spending more, building weapons, modernizing weapons, etcetera. It's very clear, if you read the entire text of the farewell address, that Eisenhower was talking about something much larger. In the snippet that we played earlier, he referred to it having economic, political and even spiritual aspects.

LEDBETTERThat is a concept to be reckoned with. That the conjunction of the military and industry affects us on a spiritual level. And, I think, that what Gerald is getting at is that the conception of peace that Eisenhower was trying to offer is a much larger conception than simply the absence of war. It is also about the absence of fear. It is the resolution of the underlying conflicts that exist between the United States and the rest of the world.

LEDBETTERYou know, almost none of us have grown up in an environment where we can even imagine that anymore. We have been in a more or less permanent state of war for most of the post World War II period. You could point to a few years of peace or relative cessation of conflicts. But there always seems to be another conflict where the United States feels it necessary to introduce large amounts of troops. They keep coming back even though, as Christopher points out, the threat that Eisenhower worried about is gone.

NNAMDIThank you very much for your call, Gerald. We move onto Paul -- to Ken in Alexandria, Va. Ken, you're on the air, go ahead, please.

KENGood afternoon, Kojo and to your guests. This is a great program. I was just wondering, given the large and permanent build up of the military and the defense industry, after World War II and continuing to this day, how that affects and perhaps complicates our participation in the international arena? Specifically how having such a large military seems to maybe put us into a situation where that is something we'll more easily look to as a solution for international problems as opposed to other countries? And it really does makes us an outlier in the international community in that regard. Thank you.

NNAMDIHere's Christopher Preble.

PREBLEWell, as the saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And I think that's clearly the case. I think that in a less kind of conspiratorial tone, the reality is, the military is particularly adaptive and skilled and the individuals who serve are capable of kind of turning their attention in ways that I think would've surprised even Eisenhower. Again, they're engaged in a kind of nation building operation today in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Not the kind of force on force war that he participated in, in World War II.

PREBLEAnd that planned as President. So I think the reason why the militarization of U.S. foreign policy has proceeded, is a combination of the size of the defense budget but also the professionalism of the military as a group.

NNAMDIJames Ledbetter...

LEDBETTERYou know, can I add to that...

NNAMDIWell, I'd like -- I'm going to offer you the opportunity to add by asking you the following question because...

LEDBETTERSure.

NNAMDI...according to Bob Woodward in the Washington Post, writing about President Obama and Afghanistan, the Pentagon offered Obama a single path, the so called Crystal Surge of additional troops. As recounted in Woodward's book, "Obama's Wars," the President complained, "So what's my option? You've only given me one option?" The militaries own preferred option was all he was going to get. What would Eisenhower say, James Ledbetter, about that situation that President Obama finds himself in?

LEDBETTERGreat question. The -- my book, "Unwarranted Influences," documents in some detail the struggles particularly in Eisenhower's second term. That he faced with his own -- the joint chief of staff, particularly the Air Force had a contentious relationship with the White House. Not over troop commitments by and large but mostly to do with budget issues, how the Pentagon is organized. This sort of thing.

LEDBETTERAnd one of the things about Dwight Eisenhower was, it was pretty hard to have an argument with the man who lead one of the largest, you know, military forces in the history of mankind and won World War II. Pretty hard to have that argument and win. Eisenhower felt himself, you know, an absolute expert on nearly every aspect of the military. And so he gave his joint chief of staff a lot of headaches. He was frequently calling for generals to be fired because they were testifying before congress, etcetera.

LEDBETTERSo I would like to think that Eisenhower, if he were approached with a single path for a military engagement, would say, you guys go back to the drawing board and get me some more options. For Barack Obama, frankly, for most American Presidents, that is a much harder thing to do. And, of course, there are political ramifications for that as well. Eisenhower was, I forget the expression, more or less bullet proof when it came to being attacked for being soft on the military.

LEDBETTERYou couldn't do it. But other Presidents, republican or democrat, are very much open to that potent criticism. I still want to address something...

NNAMDISure.

LEDBETTER... (word?) said, though. Sure, I really appreciate Ken bring up the international angle because this speaks to a crucial difference between our world and the world in which Eisenhower gave his farewell address 50 years ago. And that is, the United States has become, by far, the largest global arms merchant in the world. When Eisenhower was President, and really through the early 1970's, there were essentially no sales of military weaponry abroad. It was against the law.

LEDBETTERYou would create a national security problem if you allowed America's enemies or even many of its allies to get access to our best weaponry. Now, that changed in the 1970s. And so now the largest defense contractors, the Lockheed Martin's, etcetera, the Boeing's, they are also huge arms sales abroad. Something along the order of $40 billion a year in sales abroad. And about two-thirds of the share of the market, I think, Eisenhower would really question whether that was changing our ability to conduct diplomacy and it's certainly an area that a lot of people are paying attention today.

NNAMDIChristopher Preble, I'd like you to help explain exactly where we are today. Because we members of the public, if we happen to be riding the Metro that goes out to the Pentagon, if we happen to be readers of the Washington Post, we can see almost weekly full page ads in the newspaper and huge ads on Metro by manufacturers, Pratt and Whitney and General Electric arguing for and against the F-35 joint strike fighter about which we don't know a great deal, we members of the public.

NNAMDIBut the Pentagon doesn't even want this engine but apparently congress wants it, so what are -- what's -- who are these ads directed to that we're seeing?

PREBLEWell, the ads are directed to the public to communicate to their members of congress or vice versa, to the members of congress to promote this. Look, the military is one of the few places, we don't have an industrial policy here in the United States. I think, that's actually a good thing. But military spending is one of the few areas where it's deemed acceptable for the federal government to spend massive amounts of money building things that, in most cases, will never be used.

PREBLEThey are -- it is a jobs program. It was a jobs program back in the late 1950s when Eisenhower gave his speech again. So Keith, even in my book, my first book, part of the reason why John Kennedy succeeded is he combined his strategic critique of Eisenhower with an economic critique, that if we spend more on the military, we could improve the job prospects in places, like, upstate New York or Detroit, as well as Texas and Southern California, here so much of the military industry in the 1950s had shifted.

NNAMDIYou know, James Ledbetter...

LEDBETTERPlease (unintelligible) ...

NNAMDI...James Ledbetter, a comment posted on our website said, he heard that an early draft of the speech warned against the military-industrial congressional complex, is that true?

LEDBETTERThis is a terrific point. No, it's not true. Or let me put it this way, there are no extent drafts and there are now something like 27 drafts of this speech. It began life in late October 1960, it was delivered on January 17, 1961. And in that period, it went through a number of changes, although not huge changes. There are no drafts that contain that phrase. This is a bit of a historical canard that as best I can tell, was introduced by one of Eisenhower's biographers, Geoffrey Perret. There really -- there's no indication that congressional was part of the phrase.

LEDBETTERCongress is not even mentioned in the final draft of the speech. So it's sort of hard to imagine that it was there. Having said that, there's no question that congress, in the Presidents mind and in the mind of many of his advisors was a critical part of the -- of what they thought of as a military industrial complex, right.

LEDBETTERBecause -- both because members of Congress perceived military spending in their districts to be vital to their re-election and their delivery of services to their constituents, but also because of the tremendous lobbying that goes on, and was going on in Eisenhower's time, by the large military contractors. And some of that lobbying takes the form of campaign contributions. So Congress is a critical part of it, but there's no documentary evidence that that was ever in the speech.

NNAMDIWe're running out of time, but there are two aspects of this that we must get to, because we have not yet talked about the current state of the nation's security. Christopher, last summer the Washington Post Top Secret America series laid bare the web of nearly 4,000 federal, state, and local organizations devoted to counter-terrorism. Nearly 1,000 of those organizations were created since September 11, 2001. With numbers like these, has our military industrial complex either A) taken on a life of its own, or B) is terrorism now the new threat that the Soviet Union once was.

PREBLEWell, clearly, terrorism is the new threat. We had to create an entirely new department, of course, to deal with terrorism supposedly. I have some questions whether it actually does that. But the impulse was driven by Congress wanting to do something and wanting, at the same time, to be able to be able sprinkle benefits and pork to their various districts around the country. And so on the one hand, we have a lack of oversight by Congress, but we also have a lack of desire for that kind of oversight.

PREBLEThis degree -- the amount of money we're talking about allows just horrible excesses, and I think we've seen that from time to time when the Post story, for example, focuses on certain aspects of it. But to try to get a handle over this -- around the size, it's a little daunting.

NNAMDIJames Ledbetter, just this past weekend, defense secretary, Robert Gates, said the Pentagon is rearranging its budget priorities in response to China's military development. Eisenhower built up the nation's defenses because he had the specter of the Soviet Union looming over his presidency. Does China represent that same kind of threat for our modern military?

LEDBETTERI don't think even the most ardent China hawks could make a case that China today represents anything approaching the threat that the Soviet Union represented let's say in the '50s, '60s and '70s. Of course, the potential for a Chinese threat exists. But I, you know, and I've no doubt that there are people who want to exploit a potential or real Chinese threat in order to beef up certain aspects of military spending or so-called preparedness.

PREBLEBut I think that the record is clear that Eisenhower would prefer, at this stage in the not yet existing conflict, to use diplomacy and free enterprise to resolve those conflicts, rather than arming to the teeth.

NNAMDIJames Ledbetter is an editor of reuters.com, and author of "Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the Military Industrial Complex." Thank you for joining us.

LEDBETTERMy pleasure.

NNAMDIChristopher Preble is director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. He is author of "The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free." Chris Preble, thank you for joining us.

PREBLEThank you very much.

NNAMDIWe're going to take a short break, and when we come back, it is 011111. We'll talk about binary code, zeroes and ones. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.