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Words of WarcraftFred Kaplan takes readers' questions about fixing Bush's military, U.S. national security, and foriegn policy.

Posted Thursday, April 3, 2008, at 6:18 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

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Clifton, Va.: Bubba, has there been a terrorist attack in the U.S. since Sept. 11? No. Do I care what the rest of the world thinks about our military and foreign policy? No! What is most important is this country's national security and protecting U.S. citizens. I dont care what the rest of the world thinks. If anything, we need to spend more money on covert ops and chasing tangoes! If we are unlucky and Obama or Clinton wins in November 2008, then be prepared for ten of thousands of deaths from terrorist attacks here in the U.S. Dick Cheney is right! So!

Fred Kaplan: Hmm. The dollar's going down, our deficit and debt are spiraling out of control, we have a hard time maintaining 150,000 troops in Iraq and another 30,000 or so in Afghanistan. And you don't care what the rest of the world thinks of us. How are we going to lure allies to join our causes and contribute to our defense—yes, our defense (and our national-security interests abroad)? This is not a gooey liberal question. It's a very hard-headed one. We do not have the money, the manpower, or the stomach to do the things you would like us to do all by ourselves. Meanwhile, because the Soviet Union—the common enemy that held the Western alliance together—no longer exists, our erstwhile allies have realized they can go their own way, pursue their own interests, without much regard for what Washington thinks. We have no choice but to pursue allies—not at the expense or sacrifice of our vital interests or bedrock principles, but with active diplomacy, which sometimes mean tactical compromises.

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curiousgemini: What Carter and Kaplan forget is that a lot of these expensive cold war era weapons put a lot of money in defense contractors' pockets. These companies lobby hard and have close connections to the Pentagon. Also, many members of Congress have a political stake in the jobs these bloated programs create in their districts. This is all part of the "Military-Industrial-Congressional complex."

Fred Kaplan: Well, we don't exactly "forget" these facts. We spend a lot of time in our essay coming up with ways to deal with them, to form semi-rational policies despite these obstacles. Take another look. You're right, though: it's a very serious problem, especially at a time when we need to overhaul the military structure, if we're to retain our solvency and recover much of our influence.

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Orion838: Good ideas, but unlike what the authors suggest, Congress doesn't just sit around and passively go along with Pentagon plans to buy Cold War relics like aircraft carriers, nuclear subs, high tech fighter planes, etc. Congress mandates that these purchases must be made, even when the Pentagon would prefer to spend the money elsewhere. The reasons are job for constituents and campaign contributions from defense contractors. Given these congressional priorities, it's hard to see how we can ever find the money the authors show is needed.

Fred Kaplan: You're right—sort of. Many times, the Pentagon or one of the services will put forth a budget that cuts, even slashes, some of these much-cherished weapons systems—KNOWING that Congress will restore the budget fully, if not more. There's gamesmanship all round.

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Sun Prairie, Wis.: Mr. Kaplan: I noticed that your brief piece in Slate did not address the absurdly long time it takes to design, test and arrange for production of weapons systems and other defense platforms, or the added costs and security risks involved in having their production spread across the country instead of concentrated in a few places. I recognize that both these problems are to some extent imposed by Congress, but it's unlikely that we will get a more effective, less expensive military by ignoring them—meaning that at some point a President will need to confront Congress. Do you agree?

washingtonpost.com: GAO Blasts Weapons Budget (Post, April 1)

Fred Kaplan: This is a serious—and very old—problem. If the president wanted to order the cancellation of, say, a big fighter-aircraft program—or wanted to defer production of another $3.2 billion aircraft carrier—we would have to pay enormous delay or cancellation costs. Weapons contracts, quite reasonably, are loaded with these clauses. Then a defender of one of those weapons programs would argue: If we cancel this program, we will lose the skilled work force, we will lose the industrial base; if we want to manufacture it sometime in the future, there may not be the laborers—there may not be the corporation—to make it. For this reason, a lot of officials and legislators who have a lot of other things on their mind simply let it go; it's a fulltime job, plus some, to tangle with these obstacles. But for this same reason, somebody's going to have to do it, at some point, before the excess costs and anachronistic allocations send us into the poorhouse and wreck the army.

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Bethesda, Md.: "Bubba, has there been a terrorist attack in the U.S. since Sept. 11?" Hey, Clifton, I've got one word for you: anthrax. So, yes, there has been.

Fred Kaplan: I don't think it's at all clear that the anthrax scare was a terrorist attack. We don't know where the stuff came from. I seriously doubt it was some foreign terrorist group—or if it was, the leaders must have given it up as an ineffectual approach: it killed very few people, sired panic but not of the sort that damaged our economy in the slightest; in any case, it has not recurred. Not to be complacent, but still...

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kenl77: In regard to the Cold War era, the author says the following: "The world was dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union, and the countries in between often subordinated their own interests to accommodate—in the West by choice, in the East by force—the interests of their superpower protector."

It seems to me that American history since 1945 involved a substantial amount of coercion, ranging from flat-out declaration of war to CIA subversion of governments and elections, assassination of foreign leaders, support of ruthless dictators and economic destruction of third-world countries. To believe that somehow the United States was the good guy in the Cold War is another fable that Americans must shed before they ever can understand why they so roundly are hated in much of the world.