Terrorists have struck again in a major European capital. Not that long ago the world was stunned by the attacks in Paris, and now we have Brussels.

As we wrote in November, shortly after the events in Paris, it appears Pentagon strategy and priorities are not adapting as quickly as terrorist tactics. Unfortunately, the military services are huge bureaucracies that adapt at a glacial pace – to use a Navy analogy, the services can change procedures about as quickly as you can turn a battleship. But for more than a decade the Pentagon has publicly acknowledged that terrorists are, “very adaptive, persistent, patient and tenacious.”

Defense department bureaucracy has kept us from fully adapting to counter this threat. Pentagon spending for Fiscal Year 2017 will be nearly $600 billion. Of that, we’re planning to spend a little more than $100 billion to buy new weapons and modernize existing systems. But how much of this spending will keep this country safe from the types of attacks we are seeing in European capitals?

Tell us what you think:

• Will spending $10.5 billion for 63 F-35 fighter jets keep us safe from terrorists with homemade bombs?
• What about modernizing the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal. Will that keep Americans safe from terrorists bent on attacking U.S. cities?
• Or how about using gimmicks like the OCO account or the National Sea-based Deterrence Fund to cram in more spending. Will that help us defeat terrorism?

The answers are all an obvious “no.” We could go on, but these three examples are enough to illustrate the systemic problems we see with how the Administration “proposes” the Pentagon budget and how the Congress “disposes” of the same.

Recently the Secretary of the Air Force, talking specifically about the two legs of the nuclear triad that are in the Air Force budget, said that she believes a national debate is needed on whether or not to modernize all three legs of the triad.

We agree and would go further down that path. The military services, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Office of the Secretary of Defense spend thousands of man-hours setting the policy and strategy for the Pentagon. Much ink (or, more likely, electrons these days) is spilled to create classified and unclassified versions of these policies and strategies. Congressional briefings and hearings are set up to talk about them. And then the budget process intervenes.

The budget is where the rubber meets the road in Washington. You can have all the policy planning in the world, and without the money to implement that policy, you’ve got a whole lot of nothing. Remember the “Pivot to Asia?” There was tons of talk about this “new” idea that the U.S. needed to be ready to counter whatever the unnamed threats (because hardly anyone ever uttered the words “China” or “North Korea”) might be in Asia. But objective analysis of budget requests prior to and after this “pivot” shows very little change in what the Pentagon was asking to buy in the way of weapons. In fact, most of the people talking about budgeting for a renewed emphasis on Asia were the contractors trying to sell something. (Cough – the F-35 – cough)

On the flip side, the increased saber rattling from Russia led to the hasty creation of the ill-thought out European Reassurance Initiative (ERI). This led to billions of dollars in the budget request for the ERI, but what exactly is the strategy behind this new program? And how does it differ from that venerable, more-than-65-year-old reassurance initiative called NATO?

What we need in Washington is a policy and strategy decision making process that leads directly to budget choices that can advance those policies and strategies. And we need the Administration and the Congress working together toward that end.

The terrorist threat isn’t a new one. It’s been recognized by the Pentagon for many years. But to effectively counter it, we have to work together in Washington to connect the threat first to the policy, and then to the budget. What happened in Paris, and now in Brussels, proves there is no time to wait.