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Contributions to International Peacekeeping Activities account.” The savings can also be used to “support Egypt’s burgeoning democracy through economic and humanitarian assistance.” Yes, the same Egyptian democracy currently seeing the Muslim Brotherhood, along with Islamist parties to the right of the Brotherhood, taking power. Another progressive recommendation: Use the savings to “increase the government’s investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency to a level that would achieve the Obama administration’s stated climate security goals.”
R EMOVE C ONGRESSIONAL O VERSIGHT OF M ILITARY S PENDING
    For now, Congressional oversight serves as a check to some of Obama’s ambitious calls for defense budget reductions. Some would even give Congress more power in this realm. The progressive groups, however, have concocted a plan to wrest budgetary control from Congress—where it is vested by the U.S. Constitution—and instead place our military’s purse strings in the hands of an “independent panel.” “Congressional power isn’t the solution,” contends the report, which then offers a range of options that “think outside the box of existing structures.” How “outside the box” is their thinking? The report first endorses a recommendation, from the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information, for an “independent panel to review the military’s procurement budget every year.” Membership would exclude both current and retired military officers who “have any financial ties to defense corporations or reserve the right to forge such ties in the future.” Another option for bypassing Congressional oversight would be a “Select Committeeon National Security and International Affairs” to examine our overall security needs and the best balance of available tools to achieve them. And it could be empowered with making changes to the committee’s own structure. Congress—especially one under the control of progressive Democrats—could also authorize a “Commission on Budgeting for National Security and International Affairs” made up of “similarly committed members, to examine the current balkanized budget process, and recommend a restructuring that would enable decision-making on security that more effectively considers the overall balance of security tools and puts the national interest over parochial interests.”
    The report recommends that the State Department and the ever-effective Department of Homeland Security have more authority over the Defense Department’s budget.
M ILITARY TO F IGHT P OVERTY , S O -C ALLED G LOBAL W ARMING
    After massively slashing the military and its funding, and wresting control of the funding process from Congress, the 2012 Unified Security Budget seeks no less than to change the very role and mission of our Armed Forces. It complains that, after the 9/11 Islamic terror attacks, the U.S. military’s “mission objectives have grown much more ambitious.” And what do the report authors recommend? Of course! Using the military to combat “global warming,” fight global poverty, remedy “injustice,” bolster the United Nations, and increase “peacekeeping” forces worldwide.
    As poverty is a key contributor to state weakness, it is imperative for the United States to be actively engaged in the fight to end global poverty as a primary focus of our national security strategy. Effective U.S. global development policy can support countries and people to manage their own way forward from poverty and injustice. As this helps improve the livelihoods of millions, it reduces the sources of discontent and disenfranchisement that fuel global security threats.
    In other words, if only the polar ice caps weren’t melting and our country’s wealth was only redistributed to the developing world,