A Smarter Way to Spend on Defense | Tobias Gibson

A Smarter Way to Spend on Defense

Tobias T. Gibson
January 21, 2015 | The Hill 

The United States has historically had significant difficulty preparing for the kinds of conflicts it finds itself involved in. For example, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States continued preparing for conventional conflict during the 1990s. The result was a shortfall of necessary equipment and expertise in the early days of the War on Terror, with former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld infamously quipping that “You go to war with the army you have.”

Beyond challenges in adapting its hardware, the military and the intelligence community had difficulty adapting their intellectual talent to deal with emerging threats. The national security community has had to do without imperative language experts because too few had been trained in the multiple, disparate languages of the Middle East and South Asia. But the management of the trade-offs in underfunded intellectual preparedness for conflict and national security policy is difficult. As the United States began to rebalance towards Asia, then-Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell observed, “We have now built an unbelievable cadre of people that can tell you every aspect about how to do post-conflict reconstruction. … What I am hoping for and what I believe will be necessary … is to build a similar cohort of people that are deeply, profoundly knowledgeable about Asia.”

Gibson is an associate professor of political science at Westminster College in Missouri and a National Security Network (NSN) Fellow. The views expressed here are not necessarily the views of NSN.

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