“We get ready for World War I, then we go all the way down into a bottomless pit,” Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) said Tuesday morning in an address to the conservative Heritage Foundation. “Then we try to ramp it back up for World War II, and we go back down into a bottomless pit. If we don’t have a steady state (of funding), and then a plus or minus, we will lose an opportunity to ensure that we protect America for the future, for our children and our grandchildren.”

In making the case for increased military spending, West, a retired Army veteran, drew upon several anecdotes from his 22 years of military service, telling the audience that at times, “my friends who were in tank units had to use golf carts to practice tank tactics.”