GII has paid special attention over the past two years to a question that increasingly concerns advocates and policy makers working on issues ranging from the environment, to development to nuclear proliferation: what does a balanced approach to national security look like?

In late March, we hosted a mix of communications and policy people as part of 3D Security's effort to present Congress and the public with a fuller picture of the policy options available as we all think and talk about what makes us safer. And over the past year, several meetings in our Effective Aid, Effective Advocacy series and many online musings have focused on what it means to have a national security policy that effectively uses all our tools, not just the military ones.

But all this conversation needs to be grounded in facts: how do we spend our security dollars now? What do they buy us? Is this picture changing? How could it change for the better? These are the questions that Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF) set out to answer in creating its Unified Security Budget. Every fiscal year FPIF updates this Unified Security Budget to keep it current and apply these questions to current debate. You can read the executive summary (and click through to the full report) of the 2008 edition here.

If you're involved in efforts to help Congress rethink its security spending across categories, we highly recommend you take a look:

One useful, currently missing tool to ground this debate, we argue, would be a Unified Security Budget (USB). It would pull together in one place U.S. spending on all of its security tools: tools of offense (military forces), defense (homeland security) and prevention (non-military international engagement.) This tool would make it easier for Congress to consider overall security spending priorities and the best allocation of them.