--- title: Command Post: Too Many Guns, Not Enough Butter? | TIME description: Does the national security strategy of the United States have too many guns, not enough butter? Should the U.S. assign more diplomats and fewer soldiers to the world's trouble spots? canonical: https://time.com/video/50ymQIaq/ og:title: Command Post: Too Many Guns, Not Enough Butter? og:description: Does the national security strategy of the United States have too many guns, not enough butter? Should the U.S. assign more diplomats and fewer soldiers to the world's trouble spots? og:url: https://time.com/video/50ymQIaq/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/50ymQIaq/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Command Post: Too Many Guns, Not Enough Butter? twitter:description: Does the national security strategy of the United States have too many guns, not enough butter? Should the U.S. assign more diplomats and fewer soldiers to the world's trouble spots? twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/50ymQIaq/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Command Post: Too Many Guns, Not Enough Butter? > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Subscription: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition TIME is a general-interest news organization founded in 1923, reporting on the people, ideas and issues shaping the world. A TIME subscription provides full access to that journalism in print and digital, from $20 a year, and can be cancelled at any time. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Command Post: Too Many Guns, Not Enough Butter? [Watch (HLS stream): Command Post: Too Many Guns, Not Enough Butter?](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/50ymQIaq.m3u8) (5:17)  _Published 2011-07-21. Does the national security strategy of the United States have too many guns, not enough butter? Should the U.S. assign more diplomats and fewer soldiers to the world's trouble spots?_ --- Jul 27, 2023 3:15 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [There May Not Be Enough Food For Everyone in 2023](/video/l2c8wGY7/) ### There May Not Be Enough Food For Everyone in 2023 [Is Peanut Butter Good For You?](/video/Os9KFOXg/) ### Is Peanut Butter Good For You? [Command Post: Counter-Terrorism and the Soldier](/video/BDPNX8Ur/) ### Command Post: Counter-Terrorism and the Soldier --- ## Transcript This is Command Post, a series of discussions about military matters from Time and the Center for a New American Security. Now, does our global toolkit contain, too, too many guns? Not enough butter. I mean, Secretary, you know, before Secretary Gates left, he was always talking about how there were, you know, more folks on an aircraft carrier than there is in the foreign service core. Or more folks in the military bands than there is in a foreign serving off -, officers. And you know, as we pull out of Afghanistan, we're sort of pulling out all of our civilians as well. Seems like we never really got as many there as we wanted. Is this a problem? Yeah, it's a real problem for the United States. Particularly as we look towards possible areas where the United States is going to be engaged in in the future. Having those civilian tools of power that we can project into other countries in terms of diplomacy, development, working with local security forces, both millitary and police. All of those are fundamentally civilians tasks. The military has been taking those on in great, in great part in Afghanistan and in Iraq because the civilian capacity hasn't been there to do that. And there's frankly been very little movement towards developing a stronger base of civilian capacity. Some small steps. a, a civilian response corps, but it only has only a couple of hundred people, not enough to meet the nation's demands in, in this area. The reasons for that are complicated. There are many of them. I would say that probably the two most important ones, are the fact that the State Department has been given the leave for a lot of these operations. The transition in Iraq, for example, which is going to be going on this fall, is transitioning to almost exclusive State department control. And we're already seeing in the news some tensions with that, of the State department just not having the capacity to deal with the challenges that are arising, in particular, the rising levels of violence. So that's one side of the challenges. But another part of the problem is that Congress has consistently either cut funding or, or decided not to fund the improvements in civilian capacity that are necessary to build up this kind of capability that we're talking about. And that's incredibly short sighted in, in terms of return on investment. Civilian foreign service officers who can prevent conflicts can help governments make the right decisions that, that are in America's interest. USAID workers who can, can mitigate the effects of conflict early. This, this is one of the smartest investments we can make as a nation, and the fact that we have proven, over years and administrations, absolutely unable to find the resources, commensurate with, with the benefits that, that the civilian agencies provide to our national security. It is a great indictment I think of the ability of people like us to explain this to the American people and decisions made on Capitol Hill and, and in administrations of both parties. Well, I gotta tell you Mark, I don't think that's gonna change. and, and as much as we talk about it and, you know, explain it, and make the case for it, that's not the history, that's not our culture, that's not how we've spent money. Just this year alone, in 2011, the State department took a 17 % cut in their, in their operating budget, during the course of the year, $ 8 billion. That same time, the Defense Department took I think a cut of somewhat a smaller amount out of a budget of in excess of $ 600 billion. So the reality is, we're always gonna have a defense budget. Defense Department that's funded about ten to one at, at best case with the State Department. So the question is, how do we better leverage these capabilities? How do we get the military, the Defense Department, to do more in the conflict prevention realm and not simply be the fire alarm whose glass we break when, when the conflict busts out on, on the horizon. They, they have to have a bigger role integrated with the State Department. I think in the coming years, to help prevent some of these conflicts. I agree that in the constrained environment, it's not terribly likely that we're gonna see a large increase in the capacity. But I think it's important to know we don't necessarily need to change it from a ten to one ratio to a one to one ratio or anything like that. You can get a lot of capability out of relatively smaller investments in the civilian side. Part of the problem is that the Congressional Budgeting process does not look at an overall National Security budget, which would take the military elements of national power and the civilian elements of national power and then evaluate them together. This, the Armed Services Committees go over the defense budget. The Foreign Operations Committees go over the State Department and USAID and other foreign operations budgets. And so even though they're dramatically out of scale with each other they're not weighed relative to each other. You can't, you, it makes it very difficult to make the case that we should, you know, move a couple of billion dollars from the Defense Department budget for example, to the State Department budget to help deal with this capacity. That we might actually get more influence out of spending that money in that way. And this is something that Secretary Gates has talked about openly. This isn't just me saying this. Secretary Gates and Secretary Clinton at the beginning of Obama's term made the tour of the Hill talked to everybody they could about the need to do exactly that. But it didn't find a lot of resonance in Congress. And I think that's the reason why we're not likely to see a whole lot of movement there is cuz Congress has just proven so resistant to think in those terms. [ MUSIC ] ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Command Post: Too Many Guns, Not Enough Butter?","description":"Does the national security strategy of the United States have too many guns, not enough butter? 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