The U.S. military has an important purpose, protecting Americans, but that purpose has been distorted over the years. Here are five military spending cuts Congress and the President can make today while they undertake the harder task of rethinking the true purpose of the military and then restraining its use. These recommendations are derived from the report, “Budgetary Savings from Military Restraint.”

Shortly after unveiling a new uranium enrichment facility, North Korea has shelled a disputed island held by the Republic of Korea. A score of South Koreans reportedly were killed or wounded.

These two steps underscore the North’s reputation for recklessness. Unfortunately, there is no easy solution: serious military retaliation risks full-scale war, while intensified sanctions will have no impact without China’s support.

Instead, the U.S. should join with the ROK in an intensive diplomatic offensive in Beijing. So far China has assumed that the Korean status quo is to its advantage. However, Washington and Seoul should point out that Beijing has much to lose if things go badly in North Korea.

The North is about to embark on a potentially uncertain leadership transition. North Koreans remain impoverished; indeed, malnutrition reportedly is spreading. With the regime apparently determined to press ahead with its nuclear program while committing regular acts of war against the South, the entire peninsula could go up in flames. China would be burned, along with the rest of North Korea’s neighbors.

The U.S. also should inform Beijing that Washington might choose not to remain in the middle if the North continues its nuclear program. Given the choice of forever guaranteeing South Korean and Japanese security against an irresponsible North Korea, or allowing those nations to decide on their own defense, including possible acquisition of nuclear weapons, the U.S. would seriously consider the latter. Then China would have to deal with the consequences.

Beijing’s best option would be to join with the U.S. and South Korea in offering a package deal for denuclearization, backed by effective sanctions, meaning the cut-off of Chinese food and energy assistance. Otherwise, Beijing might find itself sharing in a future North Korean nightmare.

In public opinion research, “salience” is the word often used to describe what is at the forefront of people’s minds. Salience influences people’s responses to polls: If they’ve just thought about something, their responses will reflect what they’ve just thought about.

It makes sense, and it’s one of the theses of Jonathan Zaller’s public opinion reference book The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. Most people don’t hold fixed views on most matters of public debate. They merely improvise, when asked, based in part on what issues are salient for them.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll out today finds that most people support the body scanning machines the Transportation Security Administration is installing in airports. The new “enhanced” pat-downs don’t fare so well.

How do strip-search machines get the level of approval they do? The poll itself pushes terrorism to the forefront before inquiring about TSA security measures. The first question goes to frequency of travel. The second two are:

2. Are you personally worried about traveling by commercial airplane because of the risk of terrorism, or do you think the risk is not that great? (IF WORRIED) Would you say you are very worried or only somewhat?

3. What do you think is more important right now — (for the federal government to investigate possible terrorist threats, even if that intrudes on personal privacy); or (for the federal government not to intrude on personal privacy, even if that limits its ability to investigate possible terrorist threats)?

Before being asked about strip-search machines, poll-takers hear cognates of “terror” three times, “privacy” once.

Thinking about the taste of a dirty worm squishing around in your mouth when you bite into an apple, do you think pesticide use should be increased or decreased?

Radley Balko’s thesis that the media are more statist than liberal finds validation in a sampling of opinion pages, finds Matt Welch. You just might find it by sampling poll designs as well.

U.S. Representative Barney Frank (D‑Massachusetts) believes that cutting the military means rethinking the purpose of our military. He argues that the far-flung adventures that have killed thousands of American soldiers and consumed trillions of dollars simply haven’t been justified by U.S. defense needs. He also takes issue with President Obama exempting military spending from his so-called “spending freeze” proposed earlier this year. He spoke at the Cato Institute November 19, 2010.

Here’s Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot on NBC’s Meet the Press:

I think the danger here is that the public begins to revolt against these kinds of security procedures. And then you risk losing public support, not just for airport screenings, but for the whole war on terror and the whole national security regime post‑9/​11.

Exactly.

The “danger” Gigot is talking about is that the government might lose control of counterterrorism policy, ceding that control back to a frustrated and increasingly restless American populace. The “War on Terror” theme supports a host of policies—most acutely, these airport searches—that are at best unexplained by the goverrnment and likely not merited by actual security conditions. As I noted in an earlier post, in seven billion domestic passenger trips over the last decade, there have been zero bombings. Yet we are to be searched like prison inmates at the whim of the TSA. That simply doesn’t comport with common sense.

(Top government officials and people I know and respect sometimes say things like, “If you knew what I’d learned in secret briefings .…” I don’t accept these assertions. Just like in a courtroom, facts not put into evidence are not facts in the public debate either. “War on Terror” secrecy policies are a failing pillar of post‑9/​11 security policy.)

There is not real danger in shifting from today’s overreactive, fear-based security regime to one that exploits terrorism’s many weaknesses to secure the country cost-effectively, confidently, and consistently with Americans’ liberty and prosperity. The Cato book, Terrorizing Ourselves: Why U.S. Counterterrorism Policy is Failing and How to Fix It, contains the thinking that undergirds a new, better approach.

You’ve probably heard that a jury found Al Qaeda bomber Ahmed Ghailani guilty on only one out of 286 charges associated with the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

A predictable debate followed. Glenn Greenwald cited the outcome as proof that the system works, while Liz Cheney, Debra Burlingame and Bill Kristol described the trial as a reckless experiment. Thomas Joscelyn called the trial a miscarriage of justice.

The most insightful commentary I’ve seen is over at Lawfare. Benjamin Wittes and Robert Chesney summed things up pretty well: “Trial in federal court didn’t work out the way the Obama administration wanted, but it wasn’t a disaster–and we can’t honestly say it worked out worse than the military commission alternative would likely have done.”

I’ve disagreed with Wittes on lawfare issues before, but he and Chesney are right on this case: (1) the defendant will serve a minimum of twenty years in jail, possibly life; (2) it’s not certain that the military commissions would have allowed evidence obtained by coercion (Charlie Savage also made this point in his article for the New York Times), (3) the conspiracy conviction in civilian court is solid on appeal, but not necessarily so in a military commission (conspiracy is not a traditional law of war violation, and three sitting Supreme Court justices have questioned its application in that forum); (4) the forum of conviction is less ripe for attack in courts of law and public opinion.

That’s a good outcome.

The inherent vulnerabilities and shortcomings of an alliance created in 1949 to defeat an adversary that ceased to exist in 1989 will be on display for all to see tomorrow when President Obama and leaders of NATO meet in Lisbon. I predict that President Obama will try to put the best possible gloss on the alliance’s inability to resolve its internal differences over Afghanistan, and the leaders of the other NATO countries will surely do the same. But they can not obscure the fact that an alliance that was expanded on the premise that it was uniquely suited to deal with problems far outside of Europe has revealed itself to be all but irrelevant.

Much of the media coverage has focused on the NATO mission in Afghanistan, especially the new, new target date for the handover of security responsibilities to the Afghan government some time in 2014, ignoring the fact that a number of the NATO countries that contributed troops to the mission will have already headed for the exits by then. A story in today’s Washington Post notes that Canada expects to pull out its 3,000 troops next year, and Germany will begin withdrawing in 2012.

Beyond the Afghan mission, it is to be expected that President Obama and the other heads of state will reaffirm the supposed central importance of NATO to transatlantic and, indeed, global security through a new “strategic concept.”

The reality is very different. The U.S. government chose to retain NATO after the end of the Cold War, in part to discourage the creation of an independent European military capability. The net effect of this short-sighted decision is clear: European military capabilities have atrophied, European military spending has stagnated or declined, and U.S. military personnel, and U.S. taxpayers, have been forced to bear a larger and larger share of the burdens of defending a continent eminently capable of defending itself.

It could be argued that the Europeans wouldn’t have much need for more military spending in the first place, even if Americans renounced the security guarantee under Article 5 of the NATO treaty. After all, who are they going to fight? The persistent conflicts that defined Europe for centuries have been replaced by economic interdependence and growing political integration. The notion of France going to war with Germany is about as absurd as Kentucky going to war with Tennessee. 

Regardless, Washington should not be let off the hook for its past failures to encourage European countries to do more for their own defense. Lacking such capabilities, a number of NATO countries have made a show of supporting U.S. policies, most notably in Afghanistan. But public support for such missions is weak, and elected leaders of democratic countries risk a return to private life if they consistently buck the wishes of their constituents.

NATO has become an end in itself, rather than a means to an end — security — that could command support on both sides of the Atlantic, and unpopular one, at that. Germans aren’t willing to die in Afghanistan to prove that NATO is still relevant. Though the concept has fallen into disfavor thanks to the Bush administration’s shenanigans in the run-up to the war in Iraq, a “coalition of the willing” is a lot more useful than a “coalition of the reticent and feckless.”