Governance

"In our view, the field has moved away from a careful reliance on theory, and is just mindlessly going out and testing hypotheses without thinking very hard about what's really causing what."

"Having a professional military means that the United States can go to war while the vast majority of citizens are not directly affected. Therefore it falls upon the president, more than any other individual, to make sure the nation goes to war only if and when absolutely necessary."

The proliferation of threat systems and Anti-Access, Area Denial (A2/AD) strategies make performing special operations forces' (SOF) air mobility missions increasingly complicated and limit the capability to defeat air defenses and penetrate into denied airspace. Combined with an aging inventory, ill suited to evading these threats, Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) and the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) must look to technology to defeat the more modern threat systems and anti-access strategies. The best answer to penetrate future, denied regions is in stealth or low observable (LO) technology.

"Barring a dramatic event like a terrorist attack or a meltdown of historic proportions in Iran, Iraq or Afghanistan — even foreign policy will be viewed through the prism of the economy. Support for the war in Afghanistan is at an all-time low, driven in large part by the humongous amount of treasure — in both blood and dollars — we have spent in a place that seems as resistant to a western view of government as ever."

"The economy and our national security are inextricably linked. What we pay for and how we pay for it are decisions that are not simply about domestic economic policy. Likewise, the choices we make about our commitment to two wars and our willingness to engage in future wars have dramatic economic consequences."

"This has to do with the nature of military investments. The Center for International Policy details that military spending is more often capital intensive, not labor intensive. Take a single F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Only 1.5 percent of its total costs (estimates are about $200 million per plane) are spent on labor to assemble and manufacture the entire aircraft."

"Because we waged wars without paying for them with new taxes, we took on greater international debt, setting the stage for last summer's debt-ceiling debate. The failure of war planning in both Iraq and Afghanistan, which led to substantial violence in both arenas, caused unease in the global oil markets leading to higher prices. Global instability in foreign affairs is tied to global instability in economic affairs."

"The conventional wisdom among those who looked at the Middle East used to be that you had a choice either of supporting the autocrat or being stuck with the religious extremists. The extraordinary diffusion of information created in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries reveals a strong middle that we weren't fully aware of. What is more, new technologies allow this new middle to coordinate in ways unseen before Twitter, Facebook, and so forth, and this could lead to a very different politics of the Middle East. This introduces a new complexity to our government's dealings with the region."

"...[P]ossession of power resources does not always imply that one can get the outcomes one prefers. Even the recent death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of United States special forces does not indicate anything about American power one way or the other."

"Since the mid-1960s, American conservatism has waged a relentless and successful campaign to convince U.S. voters that it is wasteful, foolish, and stupid to pay taxes to support domestic programs here at home, but it is our patriotic duty to pay taxes to support a military establishment that costs more than all other militaries put together and that is used not to defend American soil but to fight wars mostly on behalf of other people. In other words, Americans became convinced that it was wrong to spend tax revenues on things that would help their fellow citizens (like good schools, health care, roads, and bridges, high-speed rail, etc.), but it was perfectly OK to tax Americans (though of course not the richest Americans) and spend the money on foreign wars."