I don't have any reference but I expand it from any war to any crisis. Ask for a new server at work and you are ignored for years until the old server crashes and cannot be recovered. Suddenly they will be funding for new server and approvals done within the hour. It is sad humans too often need a crisis to realise what is important and focus on it. No crisis no focus everyone just pulling in different directions.
That makes a lot of sense though, to the point of being tautological. When something is a crisis, i.e. an urgent problem, you deal with it. If it's not urgent, it can wait.
The fact that it would very often be "cheaper" or more efficient to deal with any individual problem ahead of time somewhat loses it's appeal when you consider the huge amount of potential problems that are costly to even evaluate as to the benefits of dealing with them in advance.