Tonight's missing foreign-policy issue: The national debt

Under that scenario, defense would account for roughly 11% of total federal spending in 2022 — a little below where the CBO otherwise projects it would be. Doing so would still leave the Pentagon with funding levels higher than they were under President Clinton and during the first term of President George W. Bush.

Romney has set very ambitious deficit-reduction goals — he’s aiming for a balanced budget by the end of eight years. But he has ruled out any defense cuts as part of that strategy.

In fact Romney is proposing that the Pentagon’s annual base budget be at least 4% of GDP. That means that over a decade he’d spend $2 trillion more on defense than Obama, or more than $1.6 trillion relative to policies under current law.