Cruz promised to reverse Obama’s policies. He vowed not to constrain the military with political correctness, said he wouldn’t force women to register for selective service, and promised to grant the Marines an exemption from putting women into combat positions. (There was also a somewhat peculiar complaint about “gluten-free MREs.”) Cruz got the biggest applause when, in reference to the detention of American sailors in Iran, he said, “Starting next year, our sailors won’t be on their knees with their hands on their heads.”

But the heart of the plan was the promise of more, bigger, and better. He deplored Obama-era reductions in force, but didn’t simply call for their reversal. “We can’t just pour vast sums back into the Pentagon,” Cruz said. “We need to make generational investments in our defenses that will keep not only us but our children and grandchildren safe.”

Cruz said he would cancel President Obama’s plan to shrink the Army to 450,000 by 2018, and he said the nation needs a minimum force of 525,000 soldiers. He promised to increase the Navy from its current 273 ships to 350, the largest fleet in recent memory. He wants 12 new ballistic-missile submarines. He wants to increase the Air Force by nearly 20 percent, from around 5,000 planes now to 6,000. Mentioning the increasing centrality of drones to American military operations, he said the force of drone pilots needs to grow. He vowed to expand missile-defense systems, improve cyberwar defenses, and protect American assets in space.

In short, Cruz wants to spend a tremendous amount of money.

Cruz didn’t put a price tag on his plan, though he acknowledged it would not be cheap. He offered a variety of partial answers to the money question. “If you think it’s too expensive to defend this nation, try not defending it,” he said. He promised to audit the Pentagon and root out waste, fraud, and abuse, an idea with bipartisan appeal. (He claimed the Department of Defense has 12,000 accountants.) And he trumpeted his plan to cut $500 billion in federal spending over a decade.

But the much-derided F-35 program—which Cruz did not mention on Tuesday—has already cost an estimated $1.5 trillion, as James Fallows has reported. How could Cruz possibly make his plan feasible? For that, there was some handwaving and some posturing.

“We can look to President Reagan as an example,” Cruz said. “He began with tax reform and regulatory reform that unleashed the engine of free enterprise. His policies brought booming economic growth, and that growth fueled building the military. That growth first bankrupted and then defeated the Soviet Union.”

There are a couple problems with that analogy. For one thing, Reagan’s military approach wasn’t especially fiscally conservative: He tripled the national deficit during his tenure. For another, the threat that the U.S. faces now is very different from the threat that Reagan faced. The Soviet Union was a huge, clunky behemoth that required massive spending. Cruz is not unaware of the threat of ISIS and other radical Islamist groups. He talked about them at length, and some of the most sustained applause came when he promised not to accept refugees who might have been “infiltrated” by ISIS. But it’s not clear how the Reagan plan would apply. Although ISIS has found itself cutting salaries as the price of oil plunges, it doesn’t appear that cash flow is the group’s main problem. Wouldn’t the U.S. end up bankrupt long before ISIS went broke?