“Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice Betrays Impatience with President’s Toy Airplane Antics”

13 March 2007, 0212 EDT

Actually, this picture accompanies news of a leaked memo outlining plans to divert spending for high-tech weaponry, including the F-35, to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice witnesses the signing of the Joint Strike Fighter Memorandum of Understanding between the U.S. and Australia in the Treaty Room of the U.S. State Department in Washington, December 12, 2006. The White House plans to shift $3.2 billion in defense spending – partly from new weapons like the Lockheed Martin Corp. F-35 Joint Strike Fighter – to support troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, a trade publication reported on Monday. (Larry Downing/Reuters)

Part of me thinks this is merely a trial balloon designed to put pressure on Congress to allocate more money to the war. But it wouldn’t be a terrible thing to delay some of these projects–many of which really serve no short-term strategic purpose–to more pressing needs.

Of course, if the Administration really wants to adequately fund the war and ensure another hundred years of US conventional superiority, they could always eliminate a tax cut or two. After all, we are at war and all.

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.