The trick is to make the hard decisions the right way, avoid pork, subsidize merit, and, above all, prepare for the next, not the last, war. Spend what it takes but understand that spending alone is not what it takes. What it takes is the most expensive commodity of all because it is so rare, foresight, judgment and knowledge tempered by experience.
It is vital to understand the dimensions of asymmetrical warfare but equally to understand that the greatest threat to America is our misplaced priorities. We are hurtling toward a fiscal reckoning that will render all hopes of upgrading the military impossible. We are accelerating that rush toward the fiscal cliff with military bases at home and abroad which sap our strength as they drain our treasury and entangle us in peripheral wars which ultimately threatened to hogtie us like Gulliver.
On the one hand we face asymmetrical challenges from aggressive and militant Islam and on the other hand we face within a generation a Star Wars challenge from China. We must make our choices very wisely or we will find ourselves overmatched abroad and disintegrating at home. Those hard choices begin with closing useless and expensive bases.
