It might have sounded strange when Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen stated what he views as the single biggest security threat to the United States.
Adm. Mullen, our nation's top military officer, did not say that the biggest danger is the al-Qaida terrorist network, nor nuclear weapon-possessing Communist North Korea, nor even terrorist-sponsoring Iran.
"The most significant threat to our national security is our debt," he recently said on CNN.
But how can that be? Of course, nobody really "likes" the $14 trillion debt, which President Barack Obama proposes to make at least $7 trillion bigger over the next 10 years. We realize it's bad to have to pay hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes each year just to cover the interest on the debt. And we understand-or we should understand-that big entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare are going to go broke without serious reform.
But we probably don't often think of the debt as a national security threat.
We should.
Massive levels of debt force our country to make extraordinarily painful choices about the kinds of things the federal government can or cannot fund.
The money we are spending on interest on the debt, for instance, is money that we cannot apply toward ferreting out and stopping the next terrorist attack on our country by al-Qaida.
Our nation is also rightly troubled by Communist North Korea's belligerence toward free South Korea, particularly now that North Korea is believed to have constructed nuclear weapons. But again, the money that Congress spends on unconstitutional so-called "priorities" is money that will not be used to keep close tabs on whether North Korea might, for example, try to sell a nuclear weapon to a terrorist organization.
Then there's Iran. Its radical Muslim leaders want to wipe the nation of Israel off the map, and Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons tirelessly. Will we be able to dedicate adequate resources to heading off the Iranian threat if we continue to pour billions upon billions of dollars into programs that are not only unwise but unconstitutional?
In the face of such alarming threats, should we really be diverting taxpayer dollars to things such as subsidies for wealthy farmers? Should we be trying to build passenger rail lines across the nation when the existing, federally run Amtrak system is a huge money-loser year after year?
Not all national defense spending is sensible and economical, of course. There is waste throughout the government, including at the Pentagon, and no federal agency should be spared a close look at its finances to halt spending that isn't doing any good.
But defense spending is, at least, constitutional. In fact, it is the single most important duty of the federal government. Anything else that Washington does is obviously far less vital than protecting our nation and our interests around the world from attack.
People of good will can certainly debate what the most pressing security threat is to our country, but it should be plain to everyone that our crippling national debt is one of the most serious of those threats.