Thinking Dark

Peggy Noonan is one of my favorite columnists (after Mark Steyn), and she hit a home run today in her Opinion Journal column. I posted along similar but narrower lines a while ago.

The title of her column is, "Think Dark," and the subhead is, "Don't close those military bases. We may need them someday soon."

She opens with the following:

The federal government is doing something right now that is exactly the opposite of what it should be doing. It is forgetting to think dark. It is forgetting to imagine the unimaginable.

Normally, I'm an optimist. I see the good side of things and have a positive attitude about life. But with the "hope for the best" attitude, I include, "be prepared for the worst." Just remembering that horrible things can happen helps people to deal with and roll with the punches.

But the Pentagon seems to have forgotten that the worst still lurks out there, waiting for an opportunity. And the base closure proposal is a sure way to provide more opportunity for the worst to happen.

The Pentagon says this huge and historic base-closing plan will save $50 billion over the next two decades. They may be right. But it's a bad plan anyway, a bad idea, and exactly the wrong thing to do in terms of future and highly possible needs.

The Pentagon has some obvious logic on its side--we have a lot of bases, and they cost a lot of money--and numbers on paper. They have put forward their numbers on savings, redundancies, location and obsolescence.

But they're wrong. What they ought to do, and what the commission reviewing the Pentagon's plan ought to do, is sit down and think dark.

In the rough future our country faces, bad things will happen. We all know this. It's hard to imagine some of those things on a beautiful day with the sun shining and the markets full, but let's imagine anyway.

Peggy Noonan goes on to describe her imagined scenario, which isn't far-fetched at all, but is merely what the terrorists hope to do to us. Be sure to read it. Her dark imaginings go beyond the terrorists and mention the North Koreans and the "limitless possibilities for terrible trouble." To which I can name Iran, Russia, and China as additional, imaginable threats. And that still leaves the unimaginable.

We don't need these bases for sentimental reasons. We don't need them because local congressmen want the jobs and money they provide. We don't need them because we must never change the structure and operations of our defense system. We need them because someday they may very well help us survive as a nation. (emphasis added) Seems worth the price, doesn't it?