OpinionJournal - Security Deposit

re: Naomi Schaeffer Riley: "WEST POINT, N.Y.--On a stormy night here a couple of weeks ago, a group of men and women gathered at the U.S. Military Academy to discuss the future of national security. Nothing unusual about that. The group included military brass, naturally, and a few scholars. But it also included--how to put this?--some rich people...[snip]... It was a conference called "National Security Studies and Military History: How Philanthropists Can Make a Difference."...[snip]...Stephen Rosen, a professor at Harvard and a conference participant, believes that people in the national-security areas of government are focused too much on day-to-day "crisis management." They don't stop to think about the next decade or two. That is where philanthropists can step in, by sponsoring researchers who might think about--and write about and talk about--the long-term challenges we face: our relationship with, say the Islamic world, the use of nuclear weapons and the behavior of China. It is true that any number of scholars spend time thinking about the larger geopolitical dimensions of these questions and the diplomatic options for resolving them. But few devote themselves to the actual military issues involved. / It is futile to expect universities to produce such people, at least so the conference participants believed. "A number of subjects subsumed under the subject of national security are looked down on or ignored by academia," said Josiah Bunting, a retired officer and the president of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. In his keynote address, he contrasted the meager study of military history on university campuses with the shelves of Barnes & Noble, which are "groaning" under the weight of books on military subjects..."...