Richard Betts sums up his latest essay in Foreign Affairs with the slogan “Half a trillion dollars is more than enough.”

The United States has become strategically insolvent, he argues, due to an inability “to think clearly about defense policy.” Current defense spending reflects the desire to maintain traditional military service priorities, pursue the frontier of military technology for its own sake and further “hubristic ambitions of remaking the world.” Conspicously missing from this list, Betts argues, is a broad and coherent link to how our $505 billion base DoD budget for FY08 counters actual enemy threats.

One would be hard pressed to find anyone willing to disagree with the general call for a more rational relationship between military spending and national security strategy. Betts offers a compelling context for his iteration of the message, referring back to the “remainder method” used by Presidents Truman and Eisenhower to calculate military spending.

Returning fiscal discipline to defense spending has proved to be a notoriously intractable problem. A significant element of the problem lies in the organization of the DoD itself, a topic Betts skirts. He discusses the size of the military budget throughout the 20th Century, yet he does not address the structure of the military establishment. In 1939, the US spent 1.4% of GDP on defense. Today, we are at 4.2%. Betts uses the comparison to set the illustrate the range of possible levels that the US has settled on for its defense budget. I raise the possibility that we may have gotten something vastly different for our 1.4% of GDP in 1939 than we would get for it in 2007 in large part because of the organization that spent the money. Can we honestly be surprised that an organization created to establish and maintain a standing army as a hedge against the USSR continues to focus its budgetary plans on strategic goals that look suspiciously like the Cold War?

Betts offers intriguing ideas on how to regain strategic solvency. “[O]ne could do worse than follow the old models,” he argues, referring back to the remainder method used by Truman and Eisenhower as a potential way to “tighten the system’s belt.” Missing from his discussion, however, is any discussion of Congress. He makes a single reference to Congress, recognizing that contractors have been exceptionally “adept at engineering political support by spreading subcontracts around to the maximu number of congressional districts.” (The planned distribution of F-22 production in 48 of the 50 states represents a classic example of this approach.) Therefore, I was surprised that Betts did not address the role Congress plays in pumping programs with questionable strategic alignment into the defense budget. For example, there was a strong Congressional lobbying campaign for the B-2 (I remember well some of the beautifully glossy viewbooks full of stirring illustrations of the B-2 slicing its way through air defenses). Congress represents one of the major hurdles in any reform of the strategic priorities in the American defense budget; after all, it exercises ultimate control over the budget. I’d have expected it to receive more treatment.

I also found it puzzling that Betts discounted the role of MacNamara’s reforms to the DoD budgeting process. Betts blames the reforms for turning “budget decisions into a test of civil-military relations.” This, he argues, crippled “a prime means of civilian control,” namely the “ability to divide and conquor the services and force military professionals to make tradeoffs between programs themselves.” This may ultimately be accurate, but the since the ultimate goal of MacNamara’s reforms aligns so closely with Betts’s thesis, a more complete accounting of why MacNamara failed would be in order. Any effort to implement Betts’s thesis would benefit from a close examination of the successes and failures of systems analysis. Betts even phrases the question as “how much is enough,” the same way Alain Enthoven articulated the problem (and titled his history of systems analysis in DoD).

Betts articulates the ultimate goal eloquently, stating that the armed forces “should be tailored to counter the threats and vulnerabilities the country actually faces,” necessitating “a net assessment of enemy threats.” He also points the way forward with the framework of an initial threat assessment (addressing, in passing: terrorism, WMD proliferation to DPRK and Iran, China and political/economic instability). This is a cry, however, that many other talented analysts have raised. As Thomas Barnett recounts when he’d tell DoD leaders that they were buying one military and operating another, they’d respond “Dr. Barnett, you are so right. Can you come back next year and remind us again?”

If we don’t move the debate forward to specific approaches for achieving strategic solvency, then we’ll find ourselves discussing this again in five years. So. How do we make it happen? The Congressional-military-industrial complex has proven to be a remarkably stable equilibrium. How much creative destruction will we need to kick us into a new equilibrium? Can we use the strain of OEF and OIF to speed the process? Is this already happening?