http://harpers.org/archive/2007/11/hbc-90001660
President Eisenhower (Republican, and former General) on the opportunity cost of defense spending: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” (Note that this is not a case of “even a Republican thinks spending money on defense is a bad idea”—at the time the Democrats were the foreign policy hawks, and even JFK was guilty of exaggerating the military threat from Russia. (See Fred Kaplan’s Wizards of Armageddon.)