Everyone wants a larger State Dept

My thoughts on Obama's national security team:

Assuming things work out between Obama and Clinton at State and Bill Clinton wherever he is, then this looks to be a very good cabinet. And I think things will work out.

But what is even better news is that Clinton, Gen. Jones (the national security adviser), and Gates at the Pentagon all signed on to Obama's core idea of shifting resources away from the Pentagon and towards the State Dept. This is a great idea and people have been screaming about it for years. In one of the first workshops I did in grad school, the professor pointed at someone and said "imagine you are the State Dept. rep and you have to argue against all of the rest of us from DoD. OK, now in real life it'd be you against the rest of the entire graduate program." While the Pentagon's budget is over $500 billion and including the wars and future medical costs may rise over $1 trillion (and some idiots want to pin it to 4% of GDP), the State Dept had a measly $10 billion for FY 2008.

Despite almost universal agreement that the State Department is under-resourced, Pentagon budgets have continued to outpace State budgets in growth because of lots of Congressional pork.  Probably the largest pork item is the United States Air Force.  OK, that was an exaggeration, but stuff like the F-22 which is projected to cost at least $62 billion is equal to the State Dept budget for six years, and this is for an aircraft with no actual mission other than to defeat imaginary Chinese planes.  Unfortunately for the State Department, it's budget doesn't create jobs in Congressional districts because they invest in people rather than buying stuff, so Congress doesn't throw $5 billion (half the State Dept's budget) at the State Dept in unwanted pork projects like they do the Pentagon.

Because Obama hasn't appointed any intelligence people yet, the intelligence community hasn't really been a part of this "national security team" rollout.  However the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community will be the happiest of all due to the proposed enlarging of the State Deptartment.  When the State Department shrinks, CIA officers overseas have to pick up the slack from there being fewer Foreign Service Officers.  FSOs usually report back to Washington intelligence that is easier to collect (intelligence collecting isn't their main function), and that allows CIA officers to concentrate on targeting their collection on harder targets.  But that basic embassy/elite chatter that FSOs report on is still important, and when FSO positions are cut because the State Dept budget is cut, that means CIA officers have less time to spend on harder (and more interesting) targets and have to report gossip instead.

Bottom line: Obama's national security team looks good, and the intelligence community should be very happy.

Bunch of Imams and Priests fight each other

...on the soccer field! To benefit charity!  Check out this article from RFE/RL:

TUZLA, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- An unusual charity soccer game was recently played in the northeastern Bosnian city of Tuzla.

The match pitted a team of Catholic priests against a squad of Muslim imams and was played under the slogan "For Children's Smiles."

All proceeds from ticket sales and sponsorship were donated to the city's home for underprivileged children and to an association for children with special needs.

The game was hardly a classic, but it attracted a sizable crowd and a festive atmosphere reigned in the city's Tusanj stadium. The final score was the least important part of the occasion...

If the name Tuzla rings a bell, it may be from the Democratic primary campaign. Hillary Clinton bizarrely claimed to have come under sniper fire when she landed there which of course was false.

Now on to today's election results!

War on Terror in the Sahara

I have a long piece on the War on Terror in the Sahara desert up at Rob's Arabic Media Shack. I wrote it before the recent attack by AQIM in Mauritania, but oh well.

Also thanks to the Western Sahara Info blog that gave me a couple links. An apparent communique from AQIM that is translated there seems to confirm what I wrote tentatively about in my piece at the Arabic Media Shack - that Mokhtar Belmokhtar is no longer the head of AQIM-South (perhaps he's relaxing on the beach in Benin) and has been replaced by Yahia Djouadi.  I believe he was previously head of AQIM's military committee, so he's likely to be on board with Droukdel's pro-bin-Ladin-ism.  That will make it interesting to see whether there are a lot of defections from Belmokhtar's former gang, as Belmokhtar reportedly was not big on martyring himself for the greater glory of the Caliphate.

Also through Western Sahara Info's blogroll I found a few more good blogs: Parmenides' Fallacy, The Moor Next Door, and Nick Brook's Sand & Dust.

Weird politics (but one constant)

Arrived in Massachusetts. I listened to a lot of NPR on the way up here, and heard some strange stories - two in which I agreed with President Bush and one in which I almost agreed with Lieberman.

Bush vetoed the farm bill because it is full of pork for rich farmers and food prices are sky high anyway so they don't need it. Naturally all the Midwestern Congressman are screaming, as they feel entitled to billions in welfare from the federal government. Shooting down agricultural subsidies is one of the few things I agree with Bush on. It is strange to find myself agreeing with Bush.

Bush also signed a bill criminalizing genetic discrimination regarding health insurance, something I recently wrote about. Again, I agree with Bush, strange.

Even Senator Lieberman proved he isn't a total waste of oxygen today, pushing a cap-and-trade climate change bill. The bill isn't great, but it is better than nothing and shows how far the debate has moved - a few years ago this bill would have been described as radical, but now it's middle-of-the-road.

But in today's tumultuous political world, there is one constant - Dick Cheney. Today he told the graduating class at the Coast Guard Academy:

"The only way to lose this fight [Iraq] is to quit. That would be irresponsible. More than that, quitting would be an act of betrayal and dishonor."

Full text of his speech (which I haven't read) here.

Cheney believes the majority of Americans to be irresponsible dishonorable betrayers (of whom? not sure). Dick, America's leaders (which in eight long months will no longer include you) are going to have a tough enough time extracting the United States out a manpower-intensive counterinsurgency/foreign occupation already. You don't need to make their job harder by throwing in this "stabbed in the back" myth (Dolchstoss) for them to deal with as well.

Apparently Cheney and others responsible for the war would rather poison American civil-military relations than face the reality of their own mistakes.

Published!

While I was working at NDU, my boss Jim Keagle and I wrote a paper titled "Organizing for National Security: Unification or Coordination?" It has finally been published and is available for download at this link (thanks Gina!). It's part of the Defense Horizons series. If you want a paper copy, let me know and I'll send you one.

Recent INSA conference

The Intelligence and National Security Alliance last week hosted a conference on the sixtieth anniversary of the National Security Act. I went to one of the events, a panel on the National Security Council (NSC) with Tony Lake, Sandy Berger, and Brent Snowcroft. Here are some notes:

Sandy Berger was critical of people who think we need wholesale change. He feels that the current system hasn't worked for the last 6 years because of the Bush administration, but prior to that it worked decently. His position was 'don't blow the system up, reform it.' He had a list of recommendations for the next president:

1. Fix your priority issues at the outset;
2. Have a strong and honest National Security Adviser, in contrast to our last two;
3. Fix the implementation of policy
4. Get the best information and experts - this requires attracting academics into government, something we don't traditionally do (some recent exceptions include Rice and Mike Doran)
5. Do some strategic planning - not something the US has been good at, our horizons have generally been the start of the next administration;
6. More jointness/cooperation in the agencies;
7. Coordinate the National Security budget, in order to demilitarize policy by emasculating DoD and giving State more power.

Tony Lake noted that while he is troubled by the consolidation of power in the Executive branch at the expense of the Judicial and Legislative branches, he feels the consolidation of power in the White House and NSC is inevitable and good (and happening in foreign governments as well). The definition of "National Security" is ever-changing, and the White House and NSC are the only places to mediate between a fluid group of agencies.

Lake also had a list of general thoughts:

1. NSC should set the priorities, but allow implementation through departments. Whenever NSC gets involved with implementation they screw things up;
2. The National Security Adviser should stay out of the public eye and out of politics. NSC staff should be career people, not political appointees;
3. The NSC should be flexible, and should change to accomodate every new president's individual style;
4. Keep the National Security Adviser and NSC out of the command structure;
5. Clear up the confusion between who has in-country authority - whether that is the combatant commander or the ambassador;
6. Now new major legislation is required, just minor fixes;
7. Reform Congress - legislation is unwieldy and the committee structure is bloated, for instance the House and Senate intelligence committees should be combined.

Brent Snowcroft agreed with Lake that no two NSCs are the same - each are shaped by the President's style. Snowcroft argued to keep the NSC a small size so that it does not become inflexible - perhaps agencies that have specific interests (Commerce, Treasury, Agriculture, Energy, whoever) can come in for specific meetings, but not be present for every single meeting. Snowcroft again agreed with Lake that the NSC should stick to planning rather than execution, and agreed with Berger that a second Goldwater-Nichols would be infeasible. Goldwater-Nichols reformed one department (DoD), whereas a Goldwater-Nichols aimed at the NSC would have to reform the entire Presidential cabinet. Finally, the Department of Homeland Security is a disaster.

Snowcroft sees two changes since 1947. The first is the nature of warfare, changing from conventional to insurgency. The second, in my mind a logical outgrowth of the first, is the closer relationship between the military and diplomacy.

The audience was surprisingly sparse - less than half of the 150 or so seats were filled. All in all it was a well-spent hour seeing three (well, maybe only two...) of the most respected bigwigs in my field debate bureaucratic structure. I had a question regarding the National Security Act lined up but unfortunately there was only time for two questions before they had to get back to being bigwigs with stuff to do. Oh well - next time I run into Tony Lake on campus I'll surprise him.

Giuliani's Foreign Policy Vision - the Ugly

This is the final, Ugly, part of "The Good, Bad and the Ugly" looking at Rudy Giuliani's foreign policy essay.

The Ugly

"We are all members of the 9/11 generation."

My only response is to send you to this Onion article from February 21, 2007: Giuliani To Run For President Of 9/11. When the absurd passes without notice, satire is dead.

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"Whom we choose to talk to is as important as what we say... Holding serious talks may be advisable even with our adversaries, but not with those bent on our destruction..."
"...This is not to say that talks with Iran cannot possibly work. They could -- but only if we came to the table in a position of strength, knowing what we wanted."
"The lesson is never talk for the sake of talking... the theocrats in Iran need to understand that we can wield the stick as well as the carrot..."
"The time has come to refine the diplomats' mission down to their core purpose: presenting U.S. policy to the rest of the world."

Essentially Giuliani's conception is diplomacy is one of imperial diktat. Which is to say, it is exactly the same as Bush's vision of diplomacy his first 6 years in office (there are signs his stance on diplomacy is changing) and it will fail.
And as for talks with Iran from "a position of strength", that would require us leaving Iraq, as our 150,000 soldiers in Iraq are basically hostages to Iranian goodwill (see page 5 about American logistics in Iraq). In addition, our carrier task forces in the Persian Gulf are easily within range of Iran's Yakhonts and Raad cruise missiles, against which the U.S. Navy has no reliable defense, and our bases in the Persian Gulf are within range of Iran's 12 (at least) Kh-55 cruise missiles. The military situation between the US and Iran is one of offense and counter-offense, rather than defense, which points towards high casualties on both sides. The recent American tradition of launching airstrikes or cruise missiles on a third-world country with impunity is not applicable here. The American position of strength against Iran is a long-term economic one, not an immediate military one, so if Giuliani refuses to talk to Iran except from a position of strength, there is the prospect of a collapsing Iranian regime launching a war designed to capture southern Iraqi oil resources to shore up its own economy and solidify popular support. Such a war would be one American diplomacy could have prevented.

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"For U.S. diplomacy to succeed, the U.S. government must be united... Members of Congress who talk directly to rogue regimes at cross-purposes with the White House are not practicing diplomacy; they are undermining it."

This is a direct attack against Nancy Pelosi and other members of Congress for visiting President Bashar Assad of Syria, a (bipartisan) visit that drew a lot of criticism from people who think Democrats should stay home and leave the Congressional trips to meet the Syrian dictator to Republicans like Arlen Specter, Frank Wolf, Robert Aderholt, etc. The notion that the President is the sole determiner of foreign policy is at odds with American history, but totally congruent with the Bush/Cheney vision of how government works.

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"America must remember one of the lessons of the Vietnam War... Many historians today believe that by about 1972 we and our South Vietnamese partners had succeeded in defeating the Vietcong insurgency and in setting South Vietnam on a path to political self-sufficiency. But then American withdrew its support, allowing the communist North to conquer the South. The consequences were dire... a newly energized and expansionist Soviet Union, and a weaker America. The consequences of abandoning Iraq would be worse."

Giuliani repeats the myth that America's defeat in Vietnam was because it was "stabbed in the back" by liberals, Democrats, antiwar protesters, hippies, "the Other". The reasoning goes that since America never lost a major tactical battle yet lost the war, it must have been betrayed by un-American elements at home. This is similar to the reasoning of Paul von Hindenburg, Erich Ludendorff, and other Germans about Germany's loss of World War One. Both arguments are false. America lost Vietnam because its Army felt a possible conflict in Europe against the Soviet Army was a higher priority than the ongoing conflict against Vietnamese Communists (similar to John Nagl's argument), because of the irrationality, fear and overreaction of the policymakers who conceived and executed the policy (Barbara Tuchman's argument), and a variety of other reasons. The notion that many on the Right have that Democrats are "aiding the enemy" is scarily similar in my opinion to the "stabbed in the back" view in 1919 Germany and 1975 America.

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Overall, Giuliani's essay demonstrates the same obsession with power that I wrote about earlier. His view of the world as driven by the twin engines of power and ideology pervades the entire piece. Such a Welanschauung leaves no little room for compromise - ideology structures goals, which, being ideological, are non-negotiable, and power determines the ability to accomplish those goals. For more on this by a better writer than me, see Glenn Greenwald's essay on Giuliani's authoritarian traits.

And what did Giuliani ignore? In 6000 words, he says nothing about global climate change, an indication of the audience he is playing to. There was also nothing about Pakistan, particularly odd as it is pivotal to the century-defining conflict Giuliani believes in. I assume this is because in the case of Pakistan, Giuliani's approach of American imperial dictation based on hard power is not only practically impossible but conceptually impossible, as it is widely acknowledged that we have no leverage over any key actors.

Giuliani still scares me.