That is disingenuous argument that should be banned from FR for its illogic. I'm tired of it, and I actually AGREE with Rummy. Here is the problem with saying "what's your alternative?" to every naysayer if you are a conservative: the liberals ALWAYS win the argument if that is the standard.
Liberal: GOVERNMENT should DO something!
Conservative: No, it shouldn't. It screws up too much when it does anything! Government should be minimally involved!
Liberal: What's your alternative?
Conservative: How about Government let private industry handle it? What about leaving the problem to people to resolve themselves?
Liberal: So you want to do NOTHING?
Rummy could be right or wrong, philosophy may be right or wrong, but if you in arguing mandate an alternative always be provided by those who disagree with you, first, you are simply demanding a solution be implemented by SOMEONE instead of letting conservative philosophy work, i.e., letting the market take care of itself and settle things naturally. Second, you cede ground to activists that a different "solution" is necessary.
I can give you a more extreme example:
Nutjob: "We must do something about the Sun! It keeps going up every day and going down--eventually it won't come back!"
You: Don't be silly.
Nutjob: What's your alternative plan to make sure it comes back!?!?
You: ???????
Do we really need to do ANYTHING about the Sun? The burden is, and should be, on the person proposing action to convince people to follow HIS proposed course, not upon people responding to provide a better one. We are not in a world where only by action directed toward progress may the planet move forward in a positive way. Everyday human activities lead towards progress naturally.
The alternative to a small cheap light force that will probably be optimized for "small" wars against second or third rate opponents is pretty obviously a larger better armored, more capable, and thus more expensive force. We had such a force the last time we went against Iraq, thanks to Ronald Reagan's build up.
President G.H.W Bush had a plan to downsize the military to account for the fall of the Soviet Union. Clinton implemented that plan, and about 2X more in reductions. Surely we don't need to cut any more, although we have since Clinton strutted off to Chapaqua, and we are planning to cut even more. We are grounding more than a third of the B-52 fleet, even though it was programmed to keep flying through 2040, we'd already slashed the B-1 fleet by about the same. We're going to reduce the number of aircraft carriers by one, IIRC. We've cut and stretched all kinds of R&D projects, so we are eating our seed corn too. We can't handle a pipsqueak country like Iraq without calling up the National Guard and Reserve. I think we've cut enough, but we are talking of cutting those reserve forces even as we use them.
Maintaining the mixed, heavy and light, force that we, IMHO, need won't come cheap. Heck we might have to devote the same fraction of the GDP to defense that we did at the low point of the Carter years. (4.7% in '78 and '79), now we are spending less than 4.0% of the GDP on the military. Where would the money come from? Well at that same time we were spending 9.9% of GDP on entitlements, in FY 2004 it was 11.6%, and has likely gone up since then. At the peak of the Reagan buildup we were spending 6.2% of GDP on defense and 10.5% on entitlements. In 1962, before the Cuban missile crises and the Vietnam war, IOW, a time of relative peace, we where spending 9.3% on the military and 6.1% on entitlements.
There's nothing in the Constitution on entitlements, there is something in there about Congress having the power to raise Armies, and a Navy. There is a requirement that the federal government protect the states from attack. I'd say we, and that includes President "W" Bush, have our priorities out of whack.