The Civilian Side Needs Advocates Posted by Jacob Stokes

Dan Drezner has a good roundup on the challenge of breaking the civilian agency “feedback loop,” which he aptly characterizes as, “State loses operational authority and capabilities because of poor funding, which leads to more tasks for Defense, which leads to even more lopsided funding between the two bureaucracies, which leads to an even greater disparity in responsibilities, and so forth.”

What Drezner describes is a phenomenon, but it’s also the strategy for those who want to turn the Department of Defense into the Department of Everything. (Mitt Romney epitomizes this position in his book, “No Apology.”) You starve the civilian side of foreign policy, then lambast it for being ineffectual.

Drezner asks the right question: Will the QDDR do anything to tip the balance back towards the civilians:

Will the QDDR change that? That's sorta the point of the whole exercise -- the phrase "civilian power" appears 281 times in the QDDR. I'm dubious -- the only way this works is through greater staffing and greater funding for U.S. foreign aid, and in this Age of Austerity, the first things that get cut are.... diplomats and foreign aid funding.

I'd love to see Hillary Clinton make the case to Congress than an extra $50 billion for State would improve American foreign policy enough to cut, say, $100 billion for DoD. I'd love a free pony too, for all the likelihood that this will happen.

Clinton’s recent piece is Foreign Affairs was an attempt to make just such a case: that diplomacy and development are not only humanitarian, warm-and-fuzzy efforts. They’re hardheaded investments aimed at solving problems before they descend into the expensive and bloody conflicts that truly require a military response. (As Matt Yglesias wrote this week in the Prospect, the late Richard Holbrooke personified this viewpoint.)

In other words, the arguments are there – even if they don’t get enough air time -- and they’re important arguments to make. But the policy questions aren’t the only issue here. Even Robert Gates has said the civilian side needs to be in the lead. “There has to be a change in attitude in the recognition of the critical role that agencies like [the] State [Department] and AID [the U.S. Agency for International Development] play . . . for them to play the leading role that I think they need to play.”

The problem, as with so many issues, is Congress. Even Gates continues to battle Congress, imploring them not to appropriate money to Defense for programs the Pentagon doesn’t want. If Gates, the secretary of defense, can’t stop more money from coming to DoD, there’s something deeper going on. As my boss Gen. Paul Eaton likes to say, the main problem is that there are 535 advocates on the Hill for defense – 435 representatives and 100 senators, all of whom benefit from the defense economy in their districts and states.

How many advocates does State have with that sort of skin in the game? Many fewer would be an understatement. This is a vexing political problem that has very real consequences for America’s approach to foreign policy. Any good ideas out there for fixing it?

Comments

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