So many valuable ideas have been advanced in response to my initial post that it's hard to choose which to address. But I do want to say that Andrew Bacevich's whimsical suggestion of a Pentagon run by Barney Frank is not as far-fetched as it might seem.

This past week, Frank advocated a 25% cut in defense spending, which as Joe Cirincione points out can be achieved without any decrease in our national security. Frank is often the father of some of the smartest and most counter-intuitive arguments ever to come out of Washington. For example, noting that many people who are pro-life also oppose social assistance programs for the living, Franks once joked that for such people it might appear that life begins at conception and ends at birth.

But apart from the hilarious rhetoric the public would enjoy at his press conferences as Secretary of Defense, a sober and courageous public servant like Barney Frank might actually be able to mount the kind of resistance needed to stem the inexorable tide of corruption and militarism that's undermining America and leading her to ruin. And this is not because Barney Frank is a civilian. Indeed, I do not buy whole-cloth Clemenceau's axiom that "war is too important to be left to the generals." If the last eight years have taught us anything, it is that it may be just as dangerous or even more so to leave war in the hands of trigger-happy civilians in air-conditioned conference rooms thousands of miles from the real-life consequences of their decision-making. So it is sobriety and a balanced vision of national priorities - that qualifies Frank, not his civilian status.

In my book, The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril, I explore the ideas of Dwight Eisenhower, who has become in recent years a formative figure in my thinking. You might be surprised to think that Eisenhower and Barney Frank could end up in the same blog, but indeed, so far has this country drifted from its republican origins that a figure like Eisenhower today has far more in common with Frank than he does with most of those in his party. This may explain why members of Eisenhower's family - notably his son John and granddaughter Susan -- have left the Republican party in recent months, no longer able to brook its violation of the nation's first principles. But this is not about party. It is about a national epidemic of misguided national priorities that infects both parties.

What Eisenhower offers us today is a holistic vision of national power -- the wisdom of a general-turned-president that a nation's strength is about more than just bombs. Though the most famous moment of Eisenhower's Farewell Address is his warning about the threat posed by the military-industrial complex, a lesser-known passage speaks volumes about our contemporary condition:

Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.

Eisenhower believed that a nation can never achieve perfect security, and yet in trying to pursue it, it risks "destroying from within what it seeks to protect from without." Instead, he counseled that the right approach to any national crisis is to seek "balance in and among national programs." This is to say that our best response to 9/11 would have been to fortify our health care system, rebuild our infrastructure, better educate our people, improve our national fiscal health and, yes, make more effective our military defense, but only with a measured view of its importance relative to other aspects of what makes a nation strong. For an uneducated country is an undefended country; a country without adequate health care is an undefended country; a country that acts without regard for the international community is an undefended country; and above all, a country whose people have lost faith in their leaders is a country they will not fight for.

My point, of course, is not to nominate Barney Frank to run the Pentagon under the next president. But it is to say that Eisenhower's kind of reasoned approach to national defense, whether it comes from a soldier, a civilian, or one like Eisenhower who was both - is what will be needed to help realize the public's demand for a real and meaningful correction of the nation's course.