A Few Big Ideas

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Over the past several months, we’ve discussed the many, severe challenges confronting America’s military services and recommended a set of urgent fixes to relieve the stresses on the men and women fighting overseas and keep the country safe. It is also worth exploring more long-term ideas. Here are three that have particularly impressed us, that we hope will help stimulate a wider debate.

Mr. Gates Champions Diplomacy: Cabinet secretaries rarely go to bat for other departments, especially when their own budgets could be at risk. But Defense Secretary Robert Gates has pressed the case for more robust diplomacy and more spending on the State Department and foreign aid. “But not every outrage, every act of aggression or every crisis can or should elicit a military response,” he wrote in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. Wherever possible, he said, military action “should be subordinated to measures aimed at promoting better governance, economic programs that spur development and efforts to address the grievances among the discontented, from whom terrorists recruit.” That sounds pretty levelheaded to us.

It also is a big change from his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, who fought to control every aspect of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars — and pretty much everything else. Many of his generals were a lot smarter, pleading for more help from State Department experts on reconstruction, politics and foreign aid. Too often the State Department lacked enough people with the right skills to do those jobs.

America must ensure that its military remains strong. But the State Department also must develop more capacity for conflict prevention and for postconflict reconstruction. We’re glad to see that Hillary Rodham Clinton, President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for secretary of state, seems determined to bolster the agency’s role. We hope that she can depend on Mr. Gates for continued support, no matter how tough the budget fights may get.

So What About Transformation?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/31/opinion/31wed1.html?th&emc=th