Tilting at windmills.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: Health care reform bill - The battle of Gettysburg and the Afghanistan Conflict

Affordable health care ... why would we want that?

Proposals for health reform now being considered by Congress include a "public" option that would give consumers a choice between private health insurance and insurance provided by government. The usual argument against the public plan is that the government's ability to control costs--I am now quoting the Wall Street Journal's Gerald Seib--"doubtless would make its plan the cheapest one, sucking consumers away from private insurers and opening the way to universal government health care."

Well, just what's wrong with that? If the government can do the job more efficiently, good for the government and good for us!

From Gettysburg to Kabul

If you've ever visited the battlefield at Gettysburg, stood at the point where Pickett's Charge began, and looked up the steadily rising ground leading to the Union position, you realize how little chance the Confederates had. Not only did the Union have a dominating position, it also had more troops. Furthermore, about two-thirds of the way up the incline there is a fence. It was there the day of the charge, meaning Confederate soldiers provided even clearer targets for the Union guns as they awkwardly climbed over it.

It is painfully obvious that Robert E. Lee should not have ordered the charge, but saved his troops for another battle where victory would have been more likely. This is the argument made by Col. Douglas Macgregor in the April Armed Forces Journal. The author is not just talking about Gettysburg and the Civil War, but about the broader subject of battles and wars like Vietnam and Iraq that we should not have fought or be fighting today.

Even when a war is justified in the beginning, as with Korea and Afghanistan, it may settle into a stalemate that consumes "America's military, economic and political reserves of strength." In such cases, Macgregor argues, it is wise to end the war as Eisenhower ended the futile mutual slaughter that the Korean War had become.

The same argument may well apply to Afghanistan today. As Macgregor points out, "If the foreign military presence provokes local hostility--and it usually does--the result will be more fighting, not stability."

George Washington was the great master of avoiding battles that could not be won in favor of conserving his forces for those that had to be fought or could be won. My wife recently came across the words Washington used to describe his approach: "a strategy of enlightened procrastination."

Responders without a clue

The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) recently asked what happens when a Pentagon official overcomes his fear of his bosses and nervously dials the hotline of the Pentagon's inspector general. Here's what happens: the call is answered not by a sensitive investigator skilled at getting the frightened to talk, but by a college student to whose employer the Pentagon has contracted out the job of answering whistle blowers' calls.

The un-blown whistle

POGO's director, Danielle Brian, declared in a speech a few weeks ago, "Whistle blowers have practically disappeared from the Pentagon in recent years." As the head of an organization that encourages government employees to speak out about what's going wrong in their agencies, she knows what she's talking about. Having heard the speech, I asked her to lunch to find out if she had any explanation for this disturbing trend. Her answer was that there has been a growing tendency among Pentagon employees, both civilian and military, to look forward to lucrative jobs with defense contractors after they retire. Both the income from their retirement pay and their salary with the contractor become firmly embedded in their plans for the future.

As this trend has grown, so has another--a steadily narrowing definition of conflict of interest that would disqualify a Pentagon retiree from working for a defense contractor. In fact, the only prohibition is against working on the same contract he had overseen at the Pentagon. Obviously, a wide range of jobs remain available to reward the employee who has...