Barack Obama, Robert Gates, and the Rumsfeld Pentagon-State Relationship
Ordinarily pliant in response to Pentagon budget requests, Congress is drawing the line on 1206 spending. Lawmakers resisted Gates's demands in 2008 for a doubling of its budget, removal of oversight obligations, and exemption from legislation that prohibits U.S. support of regimes with poor human rights records. (The Defense Department had been working with Pakistan's autocratic Pervez Musharraf under a special exemption until his ouster in 2008.) Lawmakers also refused the secretary's request that 1206 authority be made a permanently budgeted item rather than a two-year revolving allocation.
"Section 1206 is just one step in the growing migration of civilian work from the State Department to Defense," says George Withers, a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America. "Clearly, Congress is concerned."
However welcome Gates's vocal support for a more robust diplomatic corps, his demand for enhanced funding authority and the expansive language of Directive 3000.05 contributes to the very militarization of U.S. foreign policy he claims to abhor. (He has an enabler in Condoleezza Rice, who by submitting to Pentagon aggrandizement of what was once the work of diplomats has distinguished herself as the weakest secretary of state since Dean Rusk.) It is not enough to call for parity between America's military assets and its diplomatic ones. Until the State Department is restored to the pre-eminence it enjoyed immediately after World War II, the constitutional imperative of civilian-led foreign policy will become more pretense than reality. If that means shifting at least a portion of the Pentagon's procurement budget to Foggy Bottom—the F-22 would be a good place to start—then so be it.
Stephen Glain is a Washington-based columnist for the Abu Dhabi National. He is writing a book about the militarization of U.S. foreign policy.
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Reader Comments
Civilian Agencies at Risk in some areas
The military has assumed many of the tasks normally associated with civilian agencies and NGO's because of the risks involved in these areas. The military (notably the SEABEEs and Red Horse) have been able to establish critically necessary infrastructure like roads, drinking water, shelter, and set security standards all at the same time. They can not only do the job by working alongside the locals - they can protect the worksite. NGO's often also have a track record of being co-opted and used by the recipients of the aid to further other political objectives - ie. many of the NGO's in the Philippines funneled cash and equipment to the CPP and other criminal groups. This doesn't happen with the USMIL. The Army Special Forces is particularly adept at establishing training bases that dove-tail with community projects in areas where a civilian organization would not be allowed to operate. All of this came about in recent times because of the instability in areas like Iraq and Afghanistan. The military became the defacto USG representative on some of these projects in Iraq and Afghanistan because of risk - not because DOD wanted to assume this responsibility. As far as something failing in Afghanistan - well - you have to go there to appreciate how that could happen. I think the writer Stephen Gaine must have been lobbied by a civilian agency with an agenda.
Civilian Agencies are over their heads
DOD is the only expeditionary organization in the US Gov. It trains its personnel to do deliberative planning and then to be brutally honest in its self critique. I may have taken years, and a immature private can cause strategic failures, but military leadership - at least at the "nuts and bolts" level - is based on effectiveness, not agendas and politics.
I have worked for civilian agencies and left to take a commission in the Army. As an Infantry officer in Baghdad last year, I particpated in the most meaningful work of my life. The civilians on the ground were completely ineffective and just too slow at execution. They hid on large FOBs and wasted money on silly, needless projects. Their fear bred contempt on the streets and they never gained the trust of the locals. Civilians complaining about the role of the military in Stability Ops do not have US policy or the people/nation we are help as their primary interest. They are mearly campaigning for more funds and their own self promotion.
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