His campaign pledge to send two to three additional brigades to Afghanistan is necessary to prevent the situation from deteriorating further, but it will not be sufficient. Mr. Obama needs to seek more troops from NATO, establish a single unified command for all the military forces, provide significant nonmilitary assistance and explore the possibility of getting some elements of the Taliban to support the Hamid Karzai government.
These steps must be accompanied by a diplomatic "surge" involving all of Iraq's neighbors, including Syria and Iran, and renewed American involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
President Obama also needs to bring defense spending under control. Since 2001, the regular defense budget has risen by 35 percent in real terms, because weapons programs have experienced cost overruns of $401 billion and the military still buys too many weapons from a bygone era.
Finally, he should expand the ground forces, but only on the condition the services do not lower their educational, aptitude or moral standards. Raising the standards and relieving the pressure of deployments should help the Army deal with its recruiting and retention problems.
Lawrence J. Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
Dr. E. Albert Reece: Improve funding to NIH
As president, Barack Obama should increase funding to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the nation's primary funder of biomedical research, as one of his top priorities, not only for improving the health of the nation but also for jump-starting the national economy.
Since 2004, the NIH's budget has been reduced by more than 13 percent after factoring in inflation. This trend has not only significantly slowed progress on many critical biomedical research programs on diseases and conditions that threaten the lives of tens of millions Americans each year, but it is also harming our national economy.
The economic impact of the nation's nearly 130 NIH-funded academic medical centers exceeded $450 billion during 2005, and they are directly and indirectly responsible for more than 3 million full-time jobs in the United States. The University of Maryland School of Medicine and its affiliated hospital system generate nearly $5 billion in economic activity each year for the mid-Atlantic region alone. We are the state's third-largest employer.
