Turf battles.

* I am not certain that you want to hear from cranky academics, but I think your Defense Watch piece in the July 2008 issue, "Pentagon Bracing for Yet Another Round of Turf Battles," was way off the mark. Inter-service rivalry is the solution to, not the cause of most important defense issues. The services when they compete for roles and missions reveal information about each other that jointness suppresses. This rivalry is a stimulus to new thinking--innovation.

And rivalry gives civilians leverage that they otherwise find difficult to gain in a discussion about war in a roomful of generals and admirals. Forcing a bit of competition is as beneficial in the Defense Department as it is in the marketplace. The services are fans of meaningless jointness--logrolling that provides no criticism of each others' plans or programs.

The inter-agency stuff is cant. The military will gladly give the State Department as much national building rope as it wants. Fortunately, being a colonial power has little public appeal these days. Do you think the State Department will be able to find a political solution in Iraq, still the civil war in Darfur, keep the peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and make the Congo into Hong Kong? There are 70 or so failing states and dozens of civil wars in the world. With the best coordination between our civilian and military agencies, we are sure to run out of willing soldiers and diplomats about the same time as the taxpayers run out of money and well before we make a dent in those numbers.

Harvey Sapolsky

Massachusetts Institute of Technology