A National Narrative

If the CEOs of a handful of Fortune 500 companies  wrote an anonymous, frank, and well-reasoned letter saying that they had it too easy, and should have some privileges taken away for the greater good, it would be worth paying some attention. Likewise, when a group of defense experts pen an article about how we spend too much on defense, and not enough on education, infrastructure, and human capital, someone ought to read it.

A National Strategic Narrative is an open letter written by two current members of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff under the pseudonym Mr. Y so that they could offer their honest views on America’s long-run strategic concerns. Mr. Y argues that the US invests far too much public money overreacting to Islamic extremism as if it were an analog to Soviet Communism, and far too little on diplomacy, global economic development, and investment in our young people and the structures that gave America its traditional comparative advantages of invention, optimism, and opportunity. Also, in case you were wondering, Mr. X was already taken by a similar anonymous letter written in 1946, also worth reading.

I’ve often thought about how much greater an existential threat a few thousand Soviet warheads and an economic system that comprised half the world was in comparison to some religious nut with a suitcase full of C-4 and spent uranium, or at the helm of a 747. I’ve often chafed at the notion that, despite the pale shadow of a worse-case scenario we fight today when compared to nearly any time in the 20th century, we are embroiled in a trillion dollar set of wars, a doubled defense budget, and untold billions poured into the coffers of war profiteers. Where is all this money going? What are we really getting for it? Ten years into a defense binge that history will almost certainly judge a colossal waste, only now are we beginning to ask these questions in earnest. Only now.

Somewhere, muddled in the thousands of policy directions we can take as a country, there really is a choice between guns and butter. Is this country a war-fighting apparatus, or does it help foster a reasonable chance for its citizens to prosper? Are we 300 million fearful individuals, or are we the most fearsome mechanism for economic growth and invention the world has ever known? Is there any historical precedent for a country outside the Third World that prospered as it allowed its social protections to wither in exchange for carte blanc to fight? The Strategic Narrative tries to sort these choices out far better than I ever could.

Nobody thinks we can just jettison American global military presence without upending the delicate balance we depend on to keep things running. Everybody can imagine something better. In theory, most of us accept that guns and butter are both in order. In actuality, we spend far too much time in the gun shop, and not nearly enough in the grocery store.

The Strategic Narrative makes the case that in a complex, interdependent world where intellectual competitive pressures are greater than ever, we can’t view security as a matter of having the biggest guns around. Security in a knowledge-driven world means maintaining a country that continues to graduate classes of doctors and engineers. Security in an interdependent world means more diplomacy, more foreign aid and exchange, not less. Security in a competitive world means having the roads, rails, and power lines to keep our team in the race. Security means maintaining free expression and opportunity for as many of us as possible.

The authors of the Strategic Narrative conclude with these words, “Innovation, flexibility, and resilience are critical characteristics to be cultivated if we are to maintain our competitive edge and leadership role in this century. To accomplish this, we must take a hard look at our interagency structures, authorities, and funding proportionalities. We must seek more flexibility in public / private partnerships and more fungibility across departments. We must provide the means for the functional application of development, diplomacy, and defense rather than continuing to organizationally constrain these tools. We need to pursue our priorities of education, security, and access to natural resources by adopting sustainability as an organizing concept for a national strategy. This will require fundamental changes in policy, law, and organization.”

In other words, this isn’t about Christians or Muslims, Socialists or Capitalists. Those categories were variously useful in the era between the Crusades and the 1980s, but no more. We need a fundamentally new way of thinking about who we are and what we need as a people. We need to take a broad, long-term approach to what Americans need to live and thrive in the current realities. The combination of endless wars, callous negligence of working people, and frustrating political dysfunction isn’t a recipe for disaster—it’s a recipe for the slow demise of our way of life.

We need to do better.