Health is a Security Issue.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies is one of the leading, if not The Leading, think tanks delving in to the health-diplomacy areas. They are initiating a Commission on Smart Global Health Policy which is focused on pushing the USG toward a global health strategy. Here's the announcement: http://www.csis.org/component/option,com_csis_events/task,view/id,2004/.

Intersecting with this, the Obama administration has initiated an interagency policy coordination committee on global health. The first order of business, apparently, is an inventory of which agency is doing what. There is discussion around D.C. about the focus of the US government's energies--on single diseases--and whether there are more appropriate strategies. The Institute of Medicine chimed in on this matter here:http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12506 in it's report to the Obama administration called "The U.S. Commitment to Global Health: Recommendations for the New Administration". The report calls on the President to "highlight health as a pillar of U.S. foreign policy," claiming "It is crucial for the reputation of the United States that the nation live up to its humanitarian responsibilities, despite current pressures on the U.S. economy, and assist low-income countries in safeguarding the health of their poorest members." OK, while this sounds really nice, it seems to be written in complete denial of the 48 million Americans who have no health care. Balancing the priorities of internal and external politics is key to national security. And it's no longer an either-or world. Internal IS external.

The health of our nation has strategic implications. For example, one of the biggest problems facing the Army Reserve component (which means the National Guard and the Army Reserve) is health. The U.S. Army has policies against deploying unhealthy service members. For example, if a service member seems to have a cavity that will become problematic within a year, that service member is considered non-deployable until the tooth is fixed. Because most Americans don't take care of their teeth, guess what the biggest health problem affecting deployments of Army Reserve component is? Right. Dental problems. While not an insignificant problem, I also want to caution that this is not a huge deterrent right now, but more of a useful example. If we don't have healthy Americans to serve in our Armed Forces we have a national security problem. And, so the discourse should be: how much should we spend on making our nation healthy vice making foreign populations healthy? Because first we need to be healthy to work and pay our taxes, defend our nation, promulgate foreign policy.

Where I'm going with this is that reports like the IOM's that place moral and policy imperative on creating healthy international communities should also recognize that we also need a healthy nation. The challenge is not calling for more attention to yet another cause. But calling for a balanced and integrated approach for attending to both a healthy nation as well as a healthy international community. It's easy to pick out a single disease or a couple of causes du jour. It's absolutely not easy to articulate the importance of health to national security internally and externally with a cogent explanation for action. But that, in fact, is what is needed.