The wrong defense The late 1980s was a turning point in global security: worldwide defense spending peaked, along with the number of men under arms and arms sales. During these last great years of the Cold War, the Pentagon spent an average of $4 billion annually on missile defense. That level of spending continued throughout the 1990s, only to double in the Bush-Cheney administration. As leading missile expert Joseph Cirincione notes in the current issue of Foreign Policy, President Bush's current budget request would elevate missile defense spending to roughly $12 billion, "or nearly three times what the United States spent on antimissile systems during any year of the Cold War."