An historic opportunity to refresh national security
Honey, I Shrank the Pentagon
By BILL KELLER, NYT
LET’S imagine you are the new secretary of defense, and, wow, has Secretary Panetta left you a full docket. You have to extract more than 60,000 troops from Afghanistan without leaving behind a Mad Max dystopia. You have to carry on shadow wars against homicidal extremists, refine contingency plans for Syria and Iran, keep an eye on China’s pushiness and Pakistan’s fragility, all without being too distracted by the frat-house antics of hormonal generals.
It’s easy to overlook in all that excitement, but your best opportunity to make a major contribution to the security of your country is none of the above. It is the unglamorous, unpopular, unfinished business of right-sizing our defense budget, without putting us at grave risk. What’s that you say? You’d rather go back to reading General Petraeus’s flirty e-mails? I sympathize. Imagine trying to get people to read a column about the budget.
Yet here you are with a historic opportunity to push the “Refresh” button on our national security. One long ground war is over, another is ending, and there is no prospect of (or stomach for) new wars of occupation. No new cosmic threat has arisen, much as hawks have tried to promote China, our biggest lender and one of our biggest trading partners, into that role. And, to cap it all, your budget is headed for that dread fiscal cliff. In the absence of a budget bargain between Congress and the president, half of the automatic spending cuts that take effect in January will come from your domain — almost 10 percent applied evenly across all accounts. This is widely viewed with alarm by military experts in both parties who see it, rightly, as budgeting by meat ax. So, then, what’s the alternative?
(More here.)
LET’S imagine you are the new secretary of defense, and, wow, has Secretary Panetta left you a full docket. You have to extract more than 60,000 troops from Afghanistan without leaving behind a Mad Max dystopia. You have to carry on shadow wars against homicidal extremists, refine contingency plans for Syria and Iran, keep an eye on China’s pushiness and Pakistan’s fragility, all without being too distracted by the frat-house antics of hormonal generals.
It’s easy to overlook in all that excitement, but your best opportunity to make a major contribution to the security of your country is none of the above. It is the unglamorous, unpopular, unfinished business of right-sizing our defense budget, without putting us at grave risk. What’s that you say? You’d rather go back to reading General Petraeus’s flirty e-mails? I sympathize. Imagine trying to get people to read a column about the budget.
Yet here you are with a historic opportunity to push the “Refresh” button on our national security. One long ground war is over, another is ending, and there is no prospect of (or stomach for) new wars of occupation. No new cosmic threat has arisen, much as hawks have tried to promote China, our biggest lender and one of our biggest trading partners, into that role. And, to cap it all, your budget is headed for that dread fiscal cliff. In the absence of a budget bargain between Congress and the president, half of the automatic spending cuts that take effect in January will come from your domain — almost 10 percent applied evenly across all accounts. This is widely viewed with alarm by military experts in both parties who see it, rightly, as budgeting by meat ax. So, then, what’s the alternative?
(More here.)
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