Smarter Security

Patrick Doherty

May 10, 2005

If you take the Bush administration's rhetoric at face value—that they accept the conclusions of the 9/11 Commission and want to focus more on diplomacy and democracy in their second term—then the budget should look something like the Unified Security Budget, released today. As it turns out, the Center for Defense Information and Foreign Policy In Focus report shows the real budget is leaving major domestic vulnerabilities gaping while funding billions in irrelevant Cold War-era weapons. That leaves America vulnerable while forcing cuts in essential domestic programs, like, say Medicaid.

However, if you reverse the USB Task Force's analysis and extrapolate Bush administration strategy from spending, the picture is even more grim. The administration is funding numerous weapons systems that are designed for great-power conflict while exacerbating those forces—energy insecurity, nuclear proliferation and fiscal imbalance—that are most certain to cause great power conflict.

Likewise on the Global War on Terror. Instead of funding the forces and operations necessary to defeat known terrorists and funding the development programs that reduce terrorist recruiting, the Bush team is fighting a war of choice in Iraq, prioritizing exotic weapons systems over counterinsurgency tools, and choosing to fund humanitarian relief instead of conflict prevention.

Enabling this dysfunction is the atomized Congressional oversight system. No one in Congress is responsible for looking at the entire security budget of the United States and as a result, oversight is crippled. Choices cannot be made that cross between committees, and the nation's security budget is never voted on in a single piece of spending legislation.

It's a good report, and useful for the provision of a laundry list of waste and gaps. That said, even the report's one major shortcoming highlights the inadequacies of the status quo. That shortcoming is the political necessity of assuming that the consensus between 2004 presidential candidates Bush and Kerry on the major threats facing America provides the optimal framework for securing our nation. It's not. It prioritizes symptoms, like terrorism and proliferation, while ignoring their causes.

Ultimately, this Unified Security Budget is light years better than the administration's budget. But it still won't secure the nation. For that, we need a progressive national security strategy.