Ken Allard on the State of America's National Security

I deeply appreciate the confidence of the editors at Real Clear Defense for inviting me to write a weekly column about national security issues. Frankly, that’s a much tougher gig than it used to be.

For example: A generation of Americans raised to take their own security for granted might dismiss Hillary Clinton’s email scandal as no big deal. But as John Fund reported in these pages yesterday, “Hillary’s reckless and cavalier use of her email system has infuriated the intelligence community.” Should Attorney General Loretta Lynch ignore or overrule their concerns, former Federal prosecutor Joseph Di Genova believes that the government “will never (again) be able to charge another federal employee with the negligent handling of classified information.” My Washington Times colleague Monica Crowley goes even farther. She believes the FBI investigation and the possible indictment of Hillary Clinton are sinister ploys to engineer a de facto Obama Third Term, with Joe Biden reprising the role of Evita Peron. If that happens, will we even bring up the hard contradictions of national defense? Or will our clueless media culture simply encourage us to obsess on an oh-so-intriguing electoral horse-race?

Speaking of those hard contradictions: How can Republicans (or even hawkish Democrats) argue that we need to re-build our military forces without giving voters more convincing reasons to believe this is true – or how that candidate would spend our tax dollars on re-construction? How much, how long and what strategic choices will give us the best edge over our opponents? Hard questions indeed, but with James Webb and Lindsay Graham having dropped out of the race, the only remaining candidate with any formal military training is Donald Trump. But sadly, the whole of his experience was limited to his high school education at the New York Military Academy – the same prep school which Tony Soprano believed might straighten out his wastrel son, JJ. Possibly The Donald was sent there for similar reasons, rather than as preparation to join Forrest Gump and Bubba in the jungles of Vietnam. While the sons of privilege easily found other pursuits, Mr. Trump’s possible qualifications as commander-in-chief do not include direct experience applying military force against the Vietcong, ISIS, Mexican immigrants, his fellow Republican rivals or, for that matter, anybody else.

One more familiar scenario for him may be The Big Short, the darkly comedic movie based on Michael Lewis’s best–seller about the housing bubble that precipitated the 2008 Wall Street crash. Conventional wisdom a decade ago was that the housing market was rock-solid. Anyone who thought otherwise was deranged while anyone selling it short was courting financial disaster. But with congressional encouragement, the real disaster was already occurring as Freddie Mae and Fannie Mac eased lending standards, all intended to make the American dream of home ownership more “affordable.” Over and over the short-selling protagonists ask themselves why no one else can see the looming disaster. Their conclusion: “Show me the difference between stupid and illegal and I’ll have my wife’s brother arrested.” Eventually four trillion dollars goes up in smoke even as greedy Wall Street traders and witless Federal bureaucrats escape unscathed.

So why should we laugh uproariously from the comfort of a darkened theater yet fail to ask why we can short-sell national security for a decade without reaping the whirlwind? Even worse: How can we replace a half-century of American statecraft with an uncertain trumpet without reinforcing the presumption of provocative weakness within the poorer but stouter hearts of every potential adversary? 

A former draftee, Kenneth Allard is a retired Army Colonel who served as Dean of the National War College and NBC News military analyst. Living in San Antonio, TX, he is a regular contributor to the Washington Times.