LONDON — Last week the Pentagon asked Congress for the biggest defense budget since World War II: $515 billion, plus an additional $70 billion to cover the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for part of the coming year. The United States is proposing to spend more on the armed forces, quite apart from the running costs of Iraq and Afghanistan, than it did at the height of the Cold War against the Soviet Union — and yet almost all the commentary and analysis in the U.S. media has focused on the spending on the two wars.

Even that is a lot of money. Congress has already approved $691 billion in spending on Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, and the total estimate for this year alone is $190 billion. Not only that, but some of the money in the regular defense budget can also be indirectly attributed to America's wars in the Muslim world, like the expenditure on new equipment to replace the weapons that have been destroyed or worn out in the wars.

But there is a great deal more money in the current U.S. defense budget — probably three times as much — that has nothing to do with the "war on terror." Even if you accept the deeply suspect proposition that invading foreign countries is a useful way to fight terrorism, invading the target countries (which generally do not inhabit the higher reaches of the technological pecking order) does not require 11 aircraft carriers and fleets of stealth bombers.