The Department of Defense is the federal agency responsible for the military of the United States. Across six episodes of The Bob Zadek Show, libertarian guests and host Bob Zadek returned repeatedly to a single observation: the agency was renamed from the Department of War in 1947 but never changed its actual mission. As Zadek put it, the department “has become by its activities again a Department of War” Straight Talk with Gary Johnson (2011). The recurring libertarian critique holds that the department spends most of its budget on offense, power projection, and the defense of other countries rather than on the defense of the United States itself.
Origins and the 1947 Renaming
Zadek stated on multiple episodes that the federal department was originally called the Department of War and that in 1947, during the Truman administration, it became the Department of Defense Straight Talk with Gary Johnson (2011). He repeated this account in a later episode, noting that the change came “with consolidation” and that “unfortunately, its mission remained a Department of War; only its name changed to Department of Defense” Nick Gillespie – The Voice of Reason (2011). No guest disputed this account. The 1947 date and the Truman administration attribution appear in Zadek’s framing, not in any guest’s statement.
Spending and the Doubling Since 2000
Gary Johnson, in a 2011 episode, said the United States was spending more on defense than all other countries in the world combined while comprising 5% of the world’s population. He stated that cutting defense spending by 43% would still leave the U.S. outspending China by triple the amount China was then spending Straight Talk with Gary Johnson (2011). Nick Gillespie, in a separate episode, said defense spending since 2000 had “essentially doubled,” from about $400 billion a year in current dollars to closer to $800 billion, and that budgets submitted by President Obama and Paul Ryan each increased defense spending over the next decade, with Obama’s increase larger than the conservative Republican’s Nick Gillespie – The Voice of Reason (2011). Gillespie called this evidence of “how much fat is in these defense budgets.”
Judge Jim Gray, in a 2013 episode, framed the spending itself as a security threat: “the biggest security threat to the United States of America is a failing economy,” and noted that for every dollar the federal government spends, it borrows 30 cents We Are All Libertarians (2013). He argued that no company or household could sustain that and neither can any country.
Offense Versus Defense
The distinction between offense and defense runs through every episode. Johnson said the word “Defense” was a misnomer: “it’s really not Defense, it’s War” Straight Talk with Gary Johnson (2011). Zadek extended the point, arguing that the department should be a “Department of U.S. Defense, not of World Defense.” Gillespie agreed with Zadek’s formulation that defense spending is “actually not defense spending, but offense spending” Nick Gillespie – The Voice of Reason (2011). Judge Gray said the U.S. had “become a Department of Offense instead of a Department of Defense” We Are All Libertarians (2013).
Ivan Eland, in a 2017 episode, accepted Zadek’s framing: “Most of our military is to project power overseas and to impose our will on other countries or defend other countries, such as South Korea, Europe, or Israel from countries that are actually poorer than they are” The Return of Big Spending Republicans? (2017). Eland said he had been using the term “defense” only because that is what the department and budget are called.
Foreign Bases and Global Policeman
John Glaser, in a 2017 episode, dated the massive overseas military presence to 1945, when the U.S. “really started to place military bases all over the world.” He said the U.S. had formal defense treaties or security arrangements with “70 or 80 countries” and that the foreign policy establishment had defined U.S. interests expansively, adopting the view that it was America’s responsibility to “play global policeman” and “go abroad in search of monsters to destroy, in the words of John Quincy Adams” Rethinking Pax Americana with John Glaser (2017). Zadek, in the same episode, said the Defense Department was spending “$60 to $120 billion with a ‘B’ dollars a year” on activities beyond its stated mission and asked why Congress was not examining this.
Judge Gray said there were “900 to a thousand military bases in foreign countries today” and ventured that 80% could be closed while leaving the country “fully as safe or probably even more so.” He singled out Germany and Japan as countries where U.S. troops were no longer needed We Are All Libertarians (2013). Johnson, in the earlier episode, said other nations had been able to fund public transportation and healthcare programs in Europe because the United States “picked up the tab when it comes to Defense” Straight Talk with Gary Johnson (2011).
War Powers and Perpetual War
Zadek, in a 2014 episode, described the constitutional design in which the President would go to Congress to seek approval before going to war and “could not go to war and commit forces without it.” He said that had eroded, that Congress had ceded its responsibility, and that the army had become “the private police force of the President.” The result, he said, was “a state of perpetual war, so that war is now the natural condition in which we live,” with middle-aged Americans who had never lived during a period without war United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014).
Gillespie, in 2011, noted the U.S. had been in Afghanistan “more than twice as long as we were in World War II” and that “nobody even knows exactly what we’re doing there.” He described Libya as “the latest in a kind of bizarre adventure which at this point doesn’t even have a fig leaf of constitutionally required congressional authorization” Nick Gillespie – The Voice of Reason (2011). Johnson, in the same year, questioned the Libyan intervention, asking whether it resulted from a national security threat from Libya and answering that it did not Straight Talk with Gary Johnson (2011).
Judge Gray said he had believed after 9/11 that going into Afghanistan was appropriate as an act of war, but that the mission should have taken three or four months to root out the perpetrators and bring them to justice, after which the U.S. should not have engaged in nation-building We Are All Libertarians (2013). He also cited the National Defense Authorization Act, under which, he said, a U.S. citizen could be arrested and detained without trial indefinitely or rendered to a foreign country without charges.
Across episodes: the same argument, no development
The same critique — that the Department of Defense is misnamed and spends most of its budget on offense and global power projection — appears in all six episodes, from 2011 through 2017. Gary Johnson and Nick Gillespie advanced it in 2011, Judge Jim Gray in 2013, Bob Zadek in 2014, Ivan Eland in 2017, and John Glaser in 2017. The excerpts show no development or change in the argument across the six years; each guest restates the offense-versus-defense distinction and the spending figures without engaging or revising earlier formulations.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the current size of the defense budget, the number of U.S. troops deployed, or the names of specific weapons systems or procurement programs. They do not identify which congressional committees oversee the department or name any statute other than the National Defense Authorization Act. No excerpt states the founding date of the Department of War, the city in which the department is headquartered, or the name of any Secretary of Defense. The excerpts also do not present any guest or host defending the department’s current scope or disputing the spending figures cited.