Liberal friends of mine praised this Paul Krugman column today mostly for its headline but I liked this graf in particular:

And this is also a good time to engage in some serious infrastructure spending, which the country badly needs in any case. The usual argument against public works as economic stimulus is that they take too long: by the time you get around to repairing that bridge and upgrading that rail line, the slump is over and the stimulus isn’t needed. Well, that argument has no force now, since the chances that this slump will be over anytime soon are virtually nil. So let’s get those projects rolling.

Krugman begins the column by noting the familiar "prejudices" of those opposed to using fiscal policy as an instrument of national economic recovery. But applied to a counterinsurgency setting, this is actually orthodoxy. Clearly, we’re not facing an insurgent threat in the U.S. that requires COIN tools for remediation and so what I’m saying here is pretty silly and astrategic. But it’s always been weird to hear military officers moot suggestions for dealing with "root causes" of insurgencies by massive government jobs programs, increasing the capacity of the state and so forth, since if you ever suggested in the U.S. that people should deal with crime by, say, getting the goverment to give poor people jobs you’d be considered some sort of squish.

And yeah yeah the military is already a kind of socialist republic, but still. Let’s turn some dirt, America.