Posted: 5/13/2007 7:44:45 PM EDT
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The Wall Street Journal May 11, 2007; Page W11 Security Deposit By NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117885408735399652.html?mod=taste_primary_hs On a stormy night here a couple of weeks ago, a group of men and women gathered at the U.S. Military Academy to discuss the future of national security. Nothing unusual about that. The group included military brass, naturally, and a few scholars. But it also included -- how to put this? -- some rich people. No, this wasn't a top-secret meeting of Halliburton executives. It was a conference called "National Security Studies and Military History: How Philanthropists Can Make a Difference." The point of the evening, sponsored by the Philanthropy Roundtable, wasn't to learn how to profit from government largess, Halliburton-style, but the other way around: to discuss how the government -- or at least the Pentagon and its mission -- might be helped by the efforts of America's philanthropic citizens. As it happens, there is a long tradition of the private sector bolstering national security. Hayim Solomon, an 18th-century New York City merchant, invested $350,000 in government securities to pay for Gen. George Washington's Yorktown campaign. During World War II, Henry Ford transformed his factories to manufacture B-24 bombers. These days, no one is suggesting that private donors sponsor, say, the troop surge in Ramadi, Iraq, but as Mark Smith, the conference's director, told me later, such help makes perfect sense: "It is really the American way for the private sector to roll up their sleeves and get engaged." But where to begin? Stephen Rosen, a professor at Harvard and a conference participant, believes that people in the national-security areas of government are focused too much on day-to-day "crisis management." They don't stop to think about the next decade or two. That is where philanthropists can step in, by sponsoring researchers who might think about -- and write about and talk about -- the long-term challenges we face: our relationship with, say the Islamic world, the use of nuclear weapons and the behavior of China. It is true that any number of scholars spend time thinking about the larger geopolitical dimensions of these questions and the diplomatic options for resolving them. But few devote themselves to the actual military issues involved. It is futile to expect universities to produce such people, at least so the conference participants believed. "A number of subjects subsumed under the subject of national security are looked down on or ignored by academia," said Josiah Bunting, a retired officer and the president of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. In his keynote address, he contrasted the meager study of military history on university campuses with the shelves of Barnes & Noble, which are "groaning" under the weight of books on military subjects. Mr. Bunting traces the current situation to the 1990s, with the retirement or death of the last college professors who served in World War II. "There was a much larger receptivity in that group toward military and strategic studies than in the generation that followed them." To revive that area of inquiry, Mr. Bunting recommends that patrons give money to a particular professorship or program that has a limited lifetime. Permanent endowments are likely to be misdirected. Another possible focus for philanthropy is the Combating Terrorism Center, based at West Point itself. Started in February 2003, the center is headed by a military officer but most of the people who work there -- about 20 in all -- are civilians, specializing in everything from bioterrorism to intelligence-gathering. As Mr. Smith explains, the center can "serve as a bridge between the military and the academic community." It can, for example, thanks to its high security clearance, "take documents that Special Operations has and translate them." Walter P. Stern, one of the conference participants, told me that he was interested in giving money to the center. "The resources are there in the private sector for this sort of thing." But aren't the resources there in the public sector as well? Yes and no. The Defense Department can spend millions of dollars on strategic studies, but the National Security Council and other agencies in the White House are more likely to rely on reports coming in from outside scholars and analysts. I asked one senior administration official who knew about the conference just how he would like to see philanthropists direct their money. He offered a short list, beginning with strategies for "the war of ideas in the war on terror." He wants some positive suggestions, though. "I could find you 30 critiques of the way we're conducting the war of ideas." |