Has Competence Returned? Posted by Gordon Adams

To hear the pundits tell it, competence and reason have returned to US national security policy. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, it is said, leads the charge, ably supported by National Security Advisor Steve Hadley, with Secretary Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney in eclipse. Policy will now competently balance the various instruments of statecraft and reach out to the international community for the kind of support US national security policy needs to be effective in the 21^st Century.

Evidence: the careful march to the UN Security Council on Iran; the President’s call for greater international cooperation in Iraq, Secretary Rice’s proposals for diplomatic transformation and the reform of foreign assistance, among others.

The just is out, however and the database for remaining confused and uncertain about our national direction is large and wide-ranging. The Middle East/Gulf region is at the very top. In Iraq, a civil conflict is underway – muted as it may appear, in part because it is hard for reporters to get at the hard news. Even Amb. Khalilzad seems discouraged by the demons let loose by the US invasion and occupation. As for Iran, the move to the UN carries echoes of how we walked into Iraq, though the international community is being held together a bit better. Rather than “jaw, jaw, jaw,” our diplomacy and that of the Iranians has taken on a schoolyard tone: “If you do this, I’ll do that.”

Afghanistan stays safely on the back burner of public attention, but the Taliban seems to be growing, suicide attacks are seen, and any country dependent for most of its economy on the production and sale of drugs is in danger of sliding into corruption and state weakness. Meanwhile, a hard line confrontation is underway, led by the United States and Israel, to starve the Hamas government into submission, with serious consequences for peace in the region.

Still other issues of competence lurk at the edges of public attention. The NSA listening program continues and Congress has stepped away from an investigation or from confronting the administration about its legality. Unusually warm weather and a rapidly disappearing arctic ice cap seem to have no effect on an administration determined to take the familiar ostrich position on global climate change. Our national “addiction” to petroleum products and growing dependency on imported oil has led to an insistence on more drilling, to the benefit of an industry with close ties to the administration. Rather than address the important issue of port security, the administration first defended, then backed off a secondary issue – port administration by an entity owned by the United Arab Emirates.

This lack of competent follow-through carries over into the administration’s strategic planning. It would be comforting, were the administration to put priority on “rebalancing” the instruments of statecraft, between diplomacy and foreign assistance, defense, and homeland security, to ensure we had support for a balanced national security policy. Sadly, the new budget proposed by the administration provides 85% of our national security investment to the military instrument, while leaving only 6% to diplomacy and foreign assistance (the rest is for homeland security).

And within the budget plans, there continues to be inattention to integration and strategic choice making, tied to national strategy plans. The defense planning process is virtually bankrupt. Instead of strategic planning at the top, the Pentagon leadership is consumed by Iraq, and left much of the budget decisions to the services. Needless to say, while some changes occurred (Special Forces and unmanned aerial vehicles, in particular), the bulk of the defense budget follows the logic of “business as usual” in the services, rather than “defense transformation.” 

Moreover, rather than plan, the Pentagon has now gotten used to “letting the supplementals do it.” Every year for the last six, the Pentagon has sought ever-larger amounts of supplemental funding. Much of this is for Iraq, Afghanistan and the war on terror; but a growing share is for programs and activities that ought to be carried in the regular budget – restructuring the Army, repairing existing equipment and buying new, even research and development (including R&D on IEDs that now costs more than $1 b.)

Congress has basically abandoned oversight on defense choices and spending (the House appropriators plan just one handful hearings on the defense budget this year, less than a third of what might have happened ten years ago). Few in Congress are prepared to stand up and draw a distinction between “sensible spending” and the pressure to “support the men and women of the military in Iraq.” Restraint has, as a result disappeared, and the Pentagon is seizing the time.

Homeland security planning has suffered the same fate. Funds have nearly tripled since 9-11, but there is no sense of strategic planning at the Department of Homeland Security. Plans 2003 to innovate by dividing the DHS budget into functional categories that dealt with major areas of homeland risk – critical infrastructure, borders, transportation, preparation-response-recovery, law enforcement – were thrown out; the default was to divide up the budget by legacy agency. Remember Katrina? Innovation has suffered, as a result, as has attention to first responders, communications, and port security.

Even Secretary Rice’s department has fallen short of the strategic challenge. Funding for counter-terror programs and democracy promotion is scattered and poorly integrated. The strategy for dealing with Iran (through a $75 m. supplemental for more NGO support and broadcasting) seems peripheral to the problem, focuses on a regime change goal it cannot accomplish, and has already been rejected by one House committee as poorly thought through. There does not seem to be a strategy for tackling the big ones: global poverty, failed governance, and ethnic and religious hatred. 

Our national security policy still carries an edge of confrontation and we have still not invested in the toolkit that will enable us to use all of the instruments in synergy in an effective way. The results may not be as promising as the pundit’s rhetoric would have us hope for.

Comments

[glenda]

With President Bush planning to take his usual Easter vacation at his ranch, the peace activists from around the country, including Cindy Sheehan and other Gold Star Families for Peace, will return to Camp Casey for five days of rallies, performances, teach-ins and more. Also at the heart of this event: Vets for Peace, Military Families Speak Out, Code Pink and more.

Mark your calendars, buy your tickets, plan your route, but find your way to Crawford Texas, April 13 - 16.

[Cal]

And it appears we have a new crop of incompetents, a dozens 30-something senior advisers at the NSC:

At the NSC, staffers said the [generation] gap is most noticeable when their boss, National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley, recounts his years as an arms control negotiator during the Cold War. "We're like 'Arms control, what's that?'" said Michael Allen, Hadley's special assistant for legislative affairs.

"I often hear about arms control from the old-timers, but it's so different now. It's about all the places we don't have embassies now and it's very rare, it seems, that [Congress] is lobbying the executive branch to engage. Most of the times it's isolate, how can we isolate a country even more?" said Allen...

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