PUBLICATIONS BY Jim Talent
Research
Commentary
Media Appearances
2009 Research
July 14, 2009
A Defense Budget to Recapitalize the U.S. Military with Next-Generation Platforms
By James Talent
(Special Report #61)
For three years, The Heritage Foundation has been advocating the “4 percent for Freedom” solution as national defense policy. This 10-year commitment would affirm the principle that the defense budget should be at least 4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Heritage believes that our leaders should commit to spending at least one out of every 25 dollars of America’s wealth each year on the national defense.
June 15, 2009
Obama's 2010 Defense Budget: Top Five Worst Choices for National Security
By Jim Talent and Mackenzie Eaglen
(WebMemo #2486)
President Obama has submitted a defense budget request to Congress for fiscal year 2010 that, if implemented, will dramatically reshape America's military.
2007 Research
December 13, 2007
Providing for the Common Defense: Four Percent for Freedom
By The Honorable Jim Talent and Mackenzie M. Eaglen
(Executive Memorandum #1028)
U.S. foreign policy needs a strong military. Allocating a minimum of 4 percent of GDP to defense spending would be a first step toward meeting both current and future national security requirements and would help to protect the military from a post-Iraq "peace dividend" similar to the "procurement holiday" that ravaged the military after the end of the Cold War.
2009 Commentary
October 08, 2009
A Clear and Present Danger: QDR Must Recognize Need for Two-War Construct
By Mackenzie Eaglen and Jim Talent
QDR must recognize need for two-war construct. As Defense Secretary Robert Gates completes the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), senior officials have indicated he will officially abandon the force planning construct used in some variation for roughly the last 20 years.
May 21, 2009
Best Defense: The Left has allowed its ideology to distort its perception of global risk
By Jim Talent
In an editorial on Sunday, May 10, the New York Times took the Obama administration to task for not cutting defense spending more deeply. Now, one wonders whether the Times is serious, or whether it is sending some kind of intramural signal intelligible only within the political Left.
April 23, 2009
Elephants in the Room: Of course the Pentagon cuts are about budget pressure.
By Jim Talent
It is always a hard thing to watch honorable and intelligent people torture themselves to avoid acknowledging the obvious. Unfortunately, the contradictions and incoherence of America's defense policy are beginning to make everyone involved in it look silly.
April 16, 2009
Nothing Stimulating about Defense?: On the cutting room floor.
By Jim Talent
Last week, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced he would ask Congress to cut a number of defense procurement and modernization programs. No surprise there. President Obama is a man of the Left, and ever since Vietnam, the Left has downplayed the importance and distrusted the use of American military power. The Obama administration has been pushing the Joint Chiefs of Staff to cut defense spending since its first week in office.
2008 Commentary
December 22, 2008
How to prevent terrorists from using weapons of mass destruction
By Bob Graham and Jim Talent
Seven years after 9/11, we were en route to Pakistan when a bomb blast destroyed the Marriott Hotel there.
October 17, 2008
A new American mission. A clear global strategy will help define defense policy
By Jim Talent
If you ask a foreign policy question of a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ultimately he would say that the question is above his paygrade. Defense policy is subordinate to foreign policy, in the sense that the military does the tasks it is directed to do to advance the policies that civilians determine.
September 15, 2008
Nuclear proliferation endangers world stability
By Bob Graham and Jim Talent
During the first presidential debate in 2004, President Bush and Sen. John Kerry agreed -- as stated by the president -- that ''the single, largest threat to American national security today is nuclear weapons in the hands of a terrorist network.'' Yet despite that consensus, the subject of weapons of mass destruction proliferation has quickly disappeared from the national agenda.
June 04, 2008
Dealing With the Middle Kingdom
By Jim Talent
The foundation of any successful China policy is American strength.
April 22, 2008
Strengthening America's Military Senator Clinton's
By Jim Talent
Senator Hillary Clinton recently gave a speech in Aliquippa, Pa., outlining her “solutions for strengthening America’s military.” She proposes a speedy withdrawal from Iraq regardless of the consequences on the ground, returning the Reserves to peacetime status, giving the troops enhanced GI Bill benefits, and huge new spending on VA health care. Now, it is important, for a lot of reasons, to sustain good compensation and benefits for America’s servicemen and women, but that is not primarily what national power is about. America’s Armed Forces are a military service, not a social service; Senator Clinton’s “solutions” are the kind of thing someone might suggest who was running for commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of, say, Denmark, notable chiefly because they show how far removed the Left is from taking cognizance of, much less preparing for, real threats to American security around the world.
2007 Commentary
November 29, 2007
Report and Retort: The Dangers of Ideology
By Jim Talent
I said in my November 20 article that there is approximately a $40 billion per year shortfall between what the United States is spending on defense and what is needed to fund the modernization programs that are the minimum necessary to sustain America's military at a level necessary to keep our security commitments.
November 28, 2007
New Wine in Old Bottles: Moving Towards a Post Cold War Policy
By Jim Talent
It has now been almost 20 years since the Berlin Wall came down, and almost that long since the Soviet Union became the former Soviet Union. In the 45 years before those decisive events, the democracies known as the "free world," anchored by the American-Western European alliance, worked together, under the umbrella of a policy jointly developed in the years immediately following World War II.
November 21, 2007
Report and Retort: A Weak America is an Unsafe America
By Jim Talent
Ted Galen Carpenter's November 15 article in National Interest online suggested that The Heritage Foundation is out of line in proposing to spend 4 percent of America’s GDP on national defense.
May 03, 2007
Can This Washington Be Saved? Can This War? After the veto.
By Jim Talent
On Tuesday, President Bush used his veto power for the second time during his presidency on the Democrats $124 billion Iraq supplemental appropriations bill that included a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops.
February 20, 2007
More: The crying need for a bigger U.S. Military
By Jim Talent
Why the military needs more of everything.
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