Ask the Expert: John Norris on a Sustainable Security Budget

What is sustainable security?

Sustainable security is a fairly simple concept. It's the idea that we need to look at our foreign policy and national security policies in a fundamentally progressive way, that we need to look at all the instruments we as a nation have to interact with the world. We need to look at not only defense and defense spending, but we need to look at diplomacy, we need to look at development, and we need to look at how those tools impact not only our national security, but the sense of human well-being around the world, and collective security, that is the security that we enjoy with other states in our daily interaction with countries around the world.

Why is our current national security strategy unsustainable?

In the last decade, the United States has more than doubled spending on defense. It's placing an enormous drain on our national coffers. And, at the same time, it's probably not the best way to deal with the world. Our approach to the world has become very heavily skewed in favor of the military, at a time when even the Joint Chiefs and the senior generals at the Pentagon are saying we need more emphasis on development, we need more emphasis on diplomacy, we need to bring our tools for engaging the world into closer synchronization and better balance.

How can we reform the defense budget while still keeping America safe?

I think there's a great many opportunities to both bring down our overall spending on international affairs while actually having a more effective approach to national security to diplomacy and to promoting development. Right now we're spending an awful lot of money on the Pentagon, on weapons systems and other procurement issues that even the Pentagon itself is advocating against. And I think by taking a $40 billion cut out of the defense budget and investing a relatively modest $10 billion of that toward sensible investments in development that would help prevent crises around the world, help us be better positioned to prevent disasters and crises before they emerge, we'll not only do a great favor to our budget, but we'll be in a much more secure and safe position in dealing with the globe.