The financial meltdown is a reminder that managers have yet to find a foolproof way to predict the future. In the end, the shape of a defense budget characterizes the kinds of risk that defense planners are prepared to accept. It is possible to get it right for a long time and yet for it to fail at the crucial moment. Peter Bernstein, writing on risk, described the tension between those who believed it was possible to predict the future from the past and the inevitable tyranny of contingent events.‘The story that I have to tell is marked all the way through by a persistent tension between those who assert that the best decisions are based on quantification and numbers, determined by the patterns of the past, and those who base their decisions on more subjective degrees of belief about the uncertain future. This is a controversy that has never been resolved.’
The military should be prepared to face any foe, as the security of the nation is the prime directive of the Federal government, it should make up the lion's share of the spending, not the cuts.
Source: Heritage Foundation, Defense FY 2008 Budget Analysis: Four Percent for Freedom.
Posts
