Al Gore ran on a platform of higher military spending than Bush did. Democrats’ proposed alternative to the 2001 Bush tax cuts involved higher military spending. The mainstream Democratic Party complaint about the Bush administration’s Iraq policy in 2003-2005 was that he hadn’t sent enough soldiers there. In 2004, John Kerry proposed to expand the size of the regular military and to send additional forces to Iraq. […] And here we are in 2013 with Barack Obama proposing to increase spending on (among other things) the military…

—Political economy of rearmament: Left-wing governments rearm more enthusiastically.