Testimony before the House Armed Services Committee on Oversight and Investigations Tuesday. I'm inclined to agree with him.

Yet there is a second way to approach questions of grand strategy. This alternative approach – which I will employ in my very brief prepared remarks – is one that emphasizes internal conditions as much as external threats.
Here is my bottom line: the strategic imperative that we confront in our time demands first of all that we put our own house in order. Fixing our own problems should take precedence over fixing the world’s problems.
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Since the 1970s, Americans have talked endlessly of the need to address this problem. Talk has not produced effective action.

Instead, by tolerating this growing dependence on foreign oil we have allowed ourselves to be drawn ever more deeply into the Persian Gulf, a tendency that culminated in the ongoing Iraq War. That war, now in its sixth year, is costing us an estimated $3 billion per week – a figure that is effectively a surtax added to the oil bill.

Surely, this is a matter that future historians will find baffling: how a great power could recognize the danger posed by energy dependence and then do so little to avert that danger.

Example number two of our domestic dysfunction is fiscal. Again, you are familiar with the essential problem, namely our persistent refusal to live within our means.

When President Bush took office in 2001, the national debt stood at less than $6 trillion. Since then it has increased by more than 50% to $9.5 trillion. When Ronald Reagan became president back in 1981, total debt equaled 31% of GDP. Today, the debt is closing in on 70% of GDP.
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In fact, the Long War represents an impediment to sound grand strategy. To persist in the Long War will be to exacerbate the existing trends toward ever greater debt and dependency and it will do so while placing at risk America’s overstretched armed forces.

To imagine that a reliance on military power can reverse these trends toward ever increasing debt and dependency would be the height of folly. This is the central lesson that we should take away from period since September 11, 2001.
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In the end, how we manage – or mismanage – our affairs here at home will prove to be far more decisive than our efforts to manage events beyond our shores, whether in the Persian Gulf or East Asia or elsewhere.
http://www.amconmag.com/blog/2008/07...tegy/#more-758