Like Two Rock Stars In One Day

Everyone knew President Obama was coming yesterday. It was in the Washington Post and the New York Times (I'm sure security just LOVED that).

I was glad that he did not come in with Secretary Clinton when she first came into the building in the morning. That was HER moment to shine. And to tell us that diplomacy matters again. President Obama then came later to re-enforce this new truth with the appointment of Senator George Mitchell as a special envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Ambassador Richard Holbrooke as an envoy for Afghanistan/Pakistan (and I love that we have a President who knows how to pronounce that!). Soft power, or as Secretary Clinton calls it, Smart Power, is back. And I'd have to say the Department is THRILLED!

I was disappointed not to be among the ones selected to hear him speak, but I did get to hear him, Vice President Biden, and Secretary Clinton via our Department broadcast on BNET.

Secretary Clinton, in her introduction, said, "Anything short of relentless diplomatic efforts will fail to achieve peace." Amen. Vice President Biden seconded that thought, saying: "We are going to invigorate our nation's committment to diplomacy....For too long, we have put the bulk of the burden on the military." Amen again!

President Obama's remarks were again inspiring (and I must add, some of the most balanced I have heard in a long time on the Israeli-Paelstinian conflict...I liked that he said: "Now, just as the terror of rocket fire aimed at innocent Israelis is intolerable, so, too, is a future without hope for the Palestinians"). Of diplomacy and those of us serving America's foreign policy objectives, President Obama said:

My appearance today, as has been noted, underscores my commitment to the importance of diplomacy and renewing American leadership. And it gives me an opportunity to thank you for the services that you perform every single day.

Sometimes I think the American public doesn't fully understand the sacrifices that you and your families make, the dedication that is involved in you carrying on your tasks day in, day out.

And I know I speak for Joe Biden, as well as everybody else on this stage, when we tell you that we are proud of you. You are carrying on a vital task in the safety and security of the American people.

And part of what we want to do is to make sure that everybody understands that the State Department is going to be absolutely critical to our success in the years to come, and you individually are going to be critical to our success in the years to come. And we want to send a signal to all kinds of young people who may be thinking about the Foreign Service that they are going to be critical in terms of projecting not just America's power, but also America's values and America's ideals.

[...]

You can read the entire text of his remarks at Dead Men Working.

There is also a nice piece in Time that explains a bit about why folks in the Department are so optimistic:

The euphoria that greeted Hillary Clinton's arrival at the State Department on Thursday was not unfamiliar. Every few years, the usually reserved diplomats at Foggy Bottom drop their world-weariness and get all googly-eyed over a new leader: When Colin Powell took charge in January 2001, he was mobbed by star-struck Foreign Service Officers hoping he'd reverse the department's diminishing stature under Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright. In early 2005, their adulation was even more desperate as they greeted Condoleezza Rice following Powell's four-year emasculation at the hands of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney.

What the downcast diplomats really seek is someone who will return the State Department to the central role it played in the days when American diplomacy shaped the most important world events. And they embraced Secretary Clinton with fervor, as she arrived promising a new era of robust diplomacy. With President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden at her side, she underscored that promise by announcing two high powered envoys to take charge of diplomatic efforts in two key hot spots: Richard Holbrooke was named Special Adviser on Afghanistan and Pakistan, while Senator George Mitchell was named special envoy for the Middle East.

[...]

There are reasons to be optimistic that Holbrooke and Mitchell, and Clinton herself for that matter, are part of a new beginning for American diplomacy. Obama had made rejuvenating diplomacy a centerpiece of his campaign, and he has named a serious and strong-willed team whose members, as much as anything, hate to fail. Both envoys are known to be energetic in the field and to have records of peace-making achievement, Holbrooke in brokering the Dayton Peace Accords that ended the Bosnia conflict, and Mitchell in negotiating the Good Friday Agreement that marked the beginning of the end of the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland.

[...]

If the weary diplomats at the State department want nothing more than action on the diplomatic front, they're certainly going to get it from Holbrooke and Mitchell. Whether the two men will actually succeed may depend on the policies that guide their efforts and on Hillary Clinton's skills in managing them. She had a simple message for everyone at Foggy Bottom on her first day at work. "This is a team," she told the gathered diplomats, and "We are not any longer going to tolerate the kind of divisiveness that has paralyzed and undermined our ability to get things done for America." Says Levy of the New America Foundation: "I think you can make it work."

As my A-100 coordinator Charlie used to say to us each morning when we came in, It is a Great Day to be serving this Great Nation!

Politically Appointed Vs Career Foreign Service Officers

Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post reported this item yesterday and I have noticed quite a few mentions of it in other blogs:

Obama Gives Political Ambassadors Their Pink Slips
By Glenn Kessler
The incoming Obama administration has notified all politically-appointed ambassadors that they must vacate their posts as of Jan. 20, the day President-elect Barack Obama takes the oath of office, a State Department official said.

The clean slate will open up prime opportunities for the president-elect to reward political supporters with posts in London, Paris, Tokyo and the like. The notice to diplomatic posts was issued this week.

Political ambassadors sometimes are permitted to stay on briefly during a new administration, but the sweeping nature of the directive suggests that Obama has little interest in retaining any of Bush's ambassadorial appointees.

Most ambassadors, of course, are foreign service officers, but often the posts involving the most important bilateral relations (such as with Great Britain, Japan and India) or desirable locales (such as the Bahamas) are given to close friends and well-heeled contributors of the president.

UN Dispatch was one of the blogs commenting on the development (which, just to be clear is not a HUGE development...all ambassadors, even career Foreign Service Officers, offer their resignation at the end of an administration. It is true that some are allowed to stay, at least for a little while. This is just more overt than usual).

Politically Appointed Vs Career Foreign Service Officers?

Matthew Yglesias links to this item explaining that President-elect Barack Obama has ordered all politically appointed ambassadors to vacate their posts by January 20th. Matt says:

"I had always just thought of this is a kind of casual, widely accepted corruption. But recently I did learn the official story as to why this is good practice, namely that an important political supporter or a friend of the president is likely to have a much easier time of getting access to the Oval Office than any mere foreign service officer would. Thus, it's arguably better for the host country to have a political appointee than a career FSO. Therefore, this practice helps build good-will and so forth."

This may be true, but it should be pointed out that many ambassadors to posts that require actual trouble-shooting are often career foreign service officers. The United States ambassador to Chad Louis J. Nigro, for example, joined the foreign service in 1980. Is it really more desirable that the Ambassador to say, Holland, have easier access to the Oval Office than say, Mr. Nigiro? I'm doubtful.

I admit I am a fan of reducing (I don't expect the practice to stop) the number of political appointee Ambassadors, for a number of reasons. First, you don't see political appointee Generals or Admirals. Why? Because we expect the leaders of our soldiers to be professional soldiers themselves, with the years of training and experience they have built up coming through the ranks serving them as they make life and death decisions. Can you imagine a "Brownie" leading our troops the way Mike Brown led FEMA? Of course not. It is the same with the Foreign Service. We are the "soft power" to the military's "hard power." We are professional diplomats with the training and experience to effectively serve our country's foreign policy objectives. Just knowing the President doesn't give you those qualifications. I will admit there are political appointees who are very very good and who bring useful skill sets to the job. But there are also political appointees who bring nothing more than a receipt for their contribution. Do they have better access to the White House? Maybe. But I would hope my President would be wise enough to listen to his Ambassadors from all countries, because crisis can strike anywhere and small countries can have big global impacts.

And second, political appointees hurt morale. Most of us serve knowing that no matter how good we are, we can't expect to attain the highest positions in the Department unless we win the lottery. Only one Secretary of State has been a career Foreign Service Officer (points if you know who), and many of the Under Secretaries, Assistant Secretaries, and the Ambassadors at the nicest posts are political appointees. Which sends a strong message that the rank and file don't measure up.

And the truth is we do measure up. We serve, year after year, advancing the President's foreign policy to the best of our abilities agenda regardless of who occupies the White House. Because we are professionals. And just like professional soldiers, we should be able to expect that the majority of our leaders have gotten where they are by succeeding on the same path we are walking, not by the size of their checkbook or the happenstance of their birth.

Mission for the national security team: rebuild America's 'soft power'

There are a couple of pieces today on rebuilding America's "soft power." From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Worldview: The focus is on 'soft power'
Obama's new security team must first rebuild America's diplomatic machine.

[...]

Gates and Jones want to bolster our capacity to project "soft power" - diplomacy, and foreign aid for development and reconstruction. They view soft power as an essential complement to hard, military power, and as a way to prevent future conflicts.

Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton supports this shift, though she sought to project a tough-guy image in the presidential race. It will fall to her to implement one of the hardest parts of the new strategy - rebuilding a State Department so depleted that it can't do what needs to be done.

For years, the Bush administration derided soft power as "social work" - no substitute for the tough work of war-making. Its attitudes shifted as Afghanistan and Iraq fell apart following U.S. military actions. But the United States lacked the civilian skills to help those nations recover.

This forced the military to take on nation-building tasks for which it wasn't trained.

Meantime, Gen. David Petraeus' new emphasis on counterinsurgency doctrine stressed that such fights could not be won through military means alone, but also require political and economic components.

[...]

"What is not ... well-known," Gates said in a 2007 lecture at Kansas State University, "was the gutting of America's ability to engage, assist and communicate with other parts of the world - the 'soft power' which was so important during the Cold War."

For example, the United States has more members of military marching bands than Foreign Service officers. Gates also noted that the number of Foreign Service officers was frozen as the number of embassies grew after the Soviet Union breakup. Meantime, "the United States Agency for International Development saw deep staff cuts ... and the U.S. Information Agency was abolished."

[...]

The extent of the problem was described graphically in a report on the crisis in diplomatic readiness recently released by the American Academy of Diplomacy and the Stimson Center (available at www.academyofdiplomacy.org). The report details the shortage of Foreign Service officers, and particularly of those with training in critical languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Hindi and Urdu.

At a time when America's need to engage with the world has never been greater, funding for public diplomacy has been shrinking. USIA libraries and cultural centers, where young Arabs once could interact with Americans, have long been shuttered. While terrorists set up Web chat rooms, we have no capacity to interact with a global generation that uses the Internet.

"We are not staffed to keep up with old needs, let alone new needs," said Ronald Neumann, president of the American Academy of Diplomacy. He calls for more staffing for public diplomacy, new Web outreach, reopened cultural centers, and more exchanges.

[...]

It won't be easy to rebuild - and fund - soft-power agencies at a time when Obama is beset by crises. We don't know whether Clinton has the needed management skills. Obama's team will have to work together closely to give him the soft-power tools he seeks.

You can read the entire piece here.

And from Politics and Soccer:

Everyone wants a larger State Dept
[...]

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. [...] 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.

[...]

You can read P&S's entire piece here.

Message for the next president

I've had a brief hiatus while I took a long weekend to visit family down South. So I will try to do a bit of catching up in the next few days. I hope you will bear with me.

WhirledView has a message for our next president regarding diplomacy and soft vs. hard power:

This guns-and-steel-first approach by which America has been engaging - or more accurately disengaging - the world throughout the past eight years has boomeranged. It has increased – not decreased – support for those who truly hate America. It has resulted in budget busting defense spending. It has created an overstretched and weary professional military unable to accomplish the Herculean tasks assigned it. And it is an unsung piece of the current financial crisis. This lethal concoction has weakened the country abroad and sapped our ability to meet our citizens’ needs at home.

Leading with Diplomacy: The Single Realistic Foreign Policy Option Left

The next president will, in reality, have only one foreign policy option. This is the imperative to rely far more on traditional diplomacy, public diplomacy and foreign aid delivered through civilian means to begin to repair America’s face and effectively conduct its business abroad. The military first “solution” has proven to be no solution. Fighting elusive militant terrorists ensconced in ungovernable areas is not akin to rolling back the Axis Powers in 1944 or facing off the Red Army and the Warsaw Pact over the Fulda Gap during the Cold War.

[...]

This system is in wrack and ruin and a new administration needs to change it sooner rather than later if it is to address America’s pressing foreign policy needs. Diplomacy is, in the end, our only option. We desperately need to change direction. To make it work effectively, those changes must begin at home.

You can read the entire piece here.

Anti-War comments on the issue as well:

While the Pentagon's budget has risen to heights not seen since World War II, US diplomatic and foreign aid assets have largely atrophied and must be quickly rebuilt by any new administration that takes office in January, according to a new report released here this week by former senior foreign service officers.

The report by the American Academy of Diplomacy (AAD) and the Henry L. Stimson Center is calling for a nearly 50 percent increase in the number of diplomats and aid and development specialists recruited into the foreign service over the next five years. This would cost about three billion dollars – or approximately what the Pentagon is currently spending every 10 days on military operations in Iraq – over current budget estimates.

''Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the diplomatic capacity of the United States has been hollowed out," according to the 26-page report, "A Foreign Affairs Budget for the Future." "The status quo cannot continue without serious damage to our vital interests."

The vacuum created by the lack of diplomatic resources – particularly in comparison to the Pentagon's budget and manpower – has translated into the militarization of US foreign policy, warns the report.

You can read that entire piece here.

Kristof: Make Diplomacy, Not War

This was in yesterday's NY Times op-ed section:

Make Diplomacy, Not War

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Iraq and Afghanistan are the messes getting attention today, but they are only symptoms of a much broader cancer in American foreign policy.

A few glimpses of this larger affliction:

* The United States has more musicians in its military bands than it has diplomats.

* This year alone, the United States Army will add about 7,000 soldiers to its total; that’s more people than in the entire American Foreign Service.

* More than 1,000 American diplomatic positions are vacant because the Foreign Service is so short-staffed, but a myopic Congress is refusing to finance even modest new hiring. Some 1,100 could be hired for the cost of a single C-17 military cargo plane.

In short, the United States is hugely overinvesting in military tools and underinvesting in diplomatic tools. The result is a lopsided foreign policy that antagonizes the rest of the world and is ineffective in tackling many modern problems.

After all, you can’t bomb global warming.

Incredibly, the most eloquent spokesman for more balance between “hard power” and “soft power” is Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Mr. Gates, who is superb in repairing the catastrophe left behind by Donald Rumsfeld, has given a series of astonishing speeches in which he calls for more resources for the State Department and aid agencies.

“One of the most important lessons of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is that military success is not sufficient to win,” Mr. Gates said. He noted that the entire American diplomatic corps — about 6,500 people — is less than the staffing of a single aircraft carrier group, yet Congress isn’t interested in paying for a larger Foreign Service.

[...]

With the Olympics unfolding in China now, the Navy and the Air Force are seizing upon China’s rise as an excuse to grab tens of billions of dollars for the F-22, for an advanced destroyer, for new attack submarines. But we’re failing to invest minuscule sums to build good will among Chinese.

[...]

Then there’s the Middle East. Dennis Ross, the longtime Middle East peace negotiator, says he has been frustrated “beyond belief” to see resources showered on the military while diplomacy has to fight for scraps. Mr. Ross argues that an investment of just $1 billion — financing job creation and other grass-roots programs in the West Bank — could significantly increase the prospect of an Israeli-Palestinian peace. But that money isn’t forthcoming.

[...]

The next president should absorb that lesson and revalidate diplomacy as the primary tool of foreign policy — even if that means talking to ogres. Take Iran. Until recently, the American officials in charge of solving the Iranian problem were not even allowed to meet Iranians.

“We need to believe in the power of American diplomacy, and we should not believe a military conflict with Iran is inevitable,” said Nicholas Burns, until recently the under secretary of state for political affairs and for three years the government’s point person on Iran. “Our first impulse should be a serious and patient and persistent diplomatic effort. Too often in our national debate we focus on the military option and give short shrift to the diplomatic option.”

So here’s a first step: Let’s agree that diplomats should be every bit as much of an American priority as musicians in military bands.

You can read Kristof's entire piece here.

Connecting the Dots shares Kristof's (and Digger's) frustration with the staffing levels of the Foreign Service when compared with the military, particularly as we have seen increasing threats to global stability in Pakistan and the Republic of Georgia. CDT notes: "All of this will require foreign-service brains, expertise and experience but, as Kristof points out, the US has more musicians in its military bands than diplomats."

Secretary Gates Still Stumping for State

In a speech given last Monday at the Brookings Institute, Secretary of Defense Gates showed he is still committed to strengthing the State Department and the nation's "soft power."

But even a reformed and transformed military establishment is not sufficient to protect our national security and advance our interests. America’s civilian instruments of national power, in particular the State Department, have suffered from chronic underfunding for decades, and were virtually gutted in the 1990s.

The U.S. Agency for International Development twenty years ago was an independent agency with some 15,000 employees and deployed experts all over the world. It now has about 3,000 people and is basically a contracting agency. USIA was an independent agency that conducted strategic communication on a global scale before it was folded into the State Department. Today, the entire Foreign Service –6,600 men and women – would not be enough to crew one air carrier strike group. The total foreign affairs budget is less than the DoD spends on health care.

In recent years, we have made progress towards rebuilding and modernizing tools of diplomacy and American influence abroad. The foreign affairs budget has about doubled since 2001, though it remains a tiny fraction of what we spend on defense. Secretary Rice has initiated a program of transformational diplomacy, moving people from where they made sense during the Cold War to where they make sense now. Increasing numbers of Foreign Service officers now serve with the armed forces, both on the front lines in provincial reconstruction teams and in military headquarters where their expertise and insight has been invaluable. This year’s budget request includes funding for more than 1,000 additional Foreign Service officers, as well as a reserve corps of civilians that can deploy on short notice. But the State Department must be strengthened even further – in money, people, and bureaucratic clout – to truly fulfill its responsibilities as the lead agency in American foreign policy.

There is strong support in the ranks of the military for building up this civilian capacity. In fact, it was at a Brookings event last year that Admiral Mike Mullen, as Chief of Naval Operations, told Carlos Pascual [Pass Kwall] that he’d be willing to give part of the Navy’s budget to the State Department – a small part, mind you – provided it was spent properly.

What is encouraging is that a consensus appears to be forming at long last among people of varying ideologies and of both political parties that we need to strengthen America’s nonmilitary instruments of national power. There is also a sense that we should take a hard look at the underlying bureaucratic structure of the U.S. national security apparatus inherited from the Cold War era.

Three weeks ago, I testified with Secretary Rice before the House Armed Services Committee. The subject of the hearing was interagency cooperation between State and Defense, with a particular focus on helping other countries build capable security forces. I was advised before the hearing to expect, at most, a couple of questions on these subjects, before the questions all turned to Iraq, or base closures, or the fate of a particular weapons system.

But in fact, for the better part of three hours, the questions and discussion focused on the topic of how our U.S. government civilians and military perform and cooperate together. Members of the committee, both Republicans and Democrats, were interested, they believed change was needed, and they wanted to know what they could do to help.

WAMU: The Future of the Foreign Service

Today at noon on WAMU (88.5FM, the radio station for American University) there will be a discussion of the FS. Streaming audio of the show will be available approximately one hour after the show ends.

The Future of the Foreign Service

They're a key tool in the exercise of America's "soft power"- civilian diplomats tasked with representing America across the globe. Kojo explores the major challenges confronting America's diplomatic corps in a time of evolving international challenges.

Guests
* Steve Kelly, Senior Foreign Service Officer and Division Director in the Career Development and Assignments Office, U.S. Department of State

* Steven Kashkett, Vice President, American Foreign Service Association

* Carlos Pascual, Vice President and Director of Foreign Policy, Brookings Institution; U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine (2000-2003)

* Ann Syrett, Chief of the Outreach Branch and Coordinator for the Diplomats in Residence Program, U.S. Department of State

U.S. Diplomacy has an interesting piece on foreign-policy decision making being handled more and more by the Department of Defense instead of the State Department.

State Department: Living in the Shadow of the Pentagon

A new report from the Washington, DC-based think tanks the Center for International Policy, the Latin America Working Group Education Fund, and the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) examines the gradual shift of foreign policy decision-making away from the State Department toward the Defense Department. Cleverly titled “Ready, Aim, Foreign Policy,” it can be downloaded here.

Here’s a snippet:

“…A disturbing transformation of U.S. foreign policy decision-making is quietly underway. The Defense Department’s leadership of foreign military aid and training programs is increasing. The State Department, which once had sole authority to direct and monitor such programs, is ceding control. Moreover, changes to the U.S. military’s geographic command structure could grant the military a greater role in shaping, and becoming the face of, U.S. foreign policy where it counts—on the ground.”

While the authors explain that the Defense Department has been gradually seeping into activities usually reserved for the State Department for the last two decades, three recent examples demonstrate that this trend has been accelarting in recent years:

“First, the Bush Administration endeavored to expand a pilot program, known as “Section 1206,” into a permanent, large-scale, global Defense Department military aid fund with few strings attached.

Second, the State Department, rather than contesting this challenge to its authority, called for a restructuring of foreign aid that would happily cede its management of military aid programs to the Defense Department and reduce congressional oversight.

Third, the U.S. military offered plans to restructure geographic commands to give them a greater role in coordinating U.S. civilian agencies’ activities.” [An example of this restructuring, the Defense Department’s new central command for all of Africa, or AFRICOM, was discussed in an earlier post on this blog].

The report’s authors underscore why it matters that the Defense Department increasingly controls military aid programs: “[These changes] diminish Congressional, public and even diplomatic control over a substantial lever and symbol of foreign policy. They will undercut human rights values in our relations with the rest of the world, and increase the trend toward a projection of U.S. global power based primarily on military might.” The authors go on to cite several examples from their region of expertise, Latin America, but maintain that the changes effect U.S. foreign policy in all regions of the world.

Veteran IPS correspondent Jim Lobe reported summarized the findings of the report and added some inside-the-beltway perspective:

“While the Pentagon, like Gates, clearly understands that Washington faces regional challenges that are not susceptible to military solutions, according to the report, its sheer size compared to the civilian agencies give it an increasingly dominant role in relations with other countries, greater even than that of the resident ambassador who traditionally has been the main coordinator of U.S. policy and representative of the U.S. government in foreign states.

The risk is that the security dimensions of the bilateral relationship are given greater weight, often at the expense of other key considerations, such as human rights, equitable development, and the rule of law, according to the report. In addition, a greater emphasis on sustaining and building up local militaries, which may be repressive and corrupt, may actually prove counter-productive.”

He added that this report is just the latest in a series of studies warning of the increasing militarisation of U.S. foreign policy. This is an extremly important, timely, report. It is essential reading for the next administration for sure, if not all of you interested in foreign policy issues.
Public Radio International’s The World show also broadcast a segment about the report, and interviewed Washington PostSenior Diplomatic Correspondent Karen DeYoung about the significance of this shift.

The report was released the same day that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had breakfast with the members of the House Foreign Relations Committee (HFAC) hearing to discuss what was called “the persistent imbalance between U.S. funding for defense and diplomacy.”
While no transcript of Gates’ remarks is available, Gates has made several public statements about the need for better funding for more “soft power,” civilian activities. In January, at an event at the Center for International Security Studies, Gates said that the challenges posed by the global war on terrorism “cannot be overcome by military means alone and they extend well beyond the traditional domain of any single government agency or department. They require our government to operate with unity, agility, and creativity, and will require devoting considerably more resources to non-military instruments of national power.”

At the hearing, HFAC Acting Chairman Howard Berman observed “Berman observed that “in his 2002 National Security Strategy, President Bush affirmed that diplomacy and development are just as important as defense. They will not be funded equally, but we should strive to strike a better balance than we have now. The budget for the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development together is anemic next to that of the Defense Department.”

Berman also expressed his concern for the problem: “This committee is examining the issue closely to guard against Defense Department over-reaching into areas traditionally under the authority of the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. We’re concerned that an overly expansive military role in support of short-term security interests could work to the detriment of long-term foreign policy goals, which would be dangerous and destabilizing. The face of America abroad needs to be, first and foremost, its diplomats. Secretary Gates’ breakfast with us is a welcome first step in making sure this happens.”

This is a good first step. But the following statement Berman made at the breakfast might reveal that in this tug of war of resources between the two Departments, he might be biased toward Defense: ”The gap in civilian capacity has over-burdened the military, which has assumed tasks best performed by civilian experts.”

This is true, but ut seems a little backwards to look at an underfunded State Department and focus on how its deficiencies burden the Defense Department, rather than the practice of diplomacy itself.

Secretary Gates Discusses Foreign Policy Budget

On The Hill discussed yesterday's meeting of Defense Secretary Gates with members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee

Defense Secretary Gates Discusses U.S. Foreign Policy Budget Imbalance With Committee

Defense Secretary Robert Gates met today with members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee to discuss an imbalance between U.S. funding for defense and diplomacy.

"We are grateful that Secretary Gates took the time and trouble to bring his message to this group and to hear us," acting committee Chairman Howard Berman (D-Calif.) says. "Years ago the U.S. Secretary of Defense came before the Foreign Affairs Committee regularly. Reinstating this custom will help Congress and the Administration work more closely together to restore some balance between what has come to be known as 'hard power' and 'soft power.' And Mr. Gates' own statements of late bear that out."

According to a statement from the committee, in a November 26, 2007 speech, Gates said, "The Department of Defense has taken on many of (the) burdens that might have been assumed by civilian agencies in the past...[F]orced by circumstances, our brave men and women in uniform have stepped up to the task, with field artillerymen and tankers building schools and mentoring city councils -- usually in a language they don't speak...But it is no replacement for the real thing -- civilian involvement and expertise."

And four weeks ago, the committee statement says, Gates noted at the Center for Strategic and International Studies that long-term security challenges "require our government to operate with unity, agility, and creativity, and will require devoting considerably more resources to non-military instruments of national power."

Before Foreign Affairs Committee members met with the defense secretary this morning, Berman observed that "in his 2002 National Security Strategy, President Bush affirmed that diplomacy and development are just as important as defense. They will not be funded equally, but we should strive to strike a better balance than we have now. The budget for the StateDepartment and the U.S. Agency for International Development together is anemic next to that of the Defense Department."

Berman says that the international affairs budget that supports diplomacy and development programs directly contributes to U.S. national security. "The activities under this budget help fight terrorism through a variety of means, prevent the spreading of nuclear weapons, and enhance the safety of our embassies around the world. They also support a plethora of programs to promote democracy, human rights and the rule of law; to give a boost to U.S. businesses abroad; and to provide much-needed aid for people in the poorest places in the world. And yet, ironically, this budget typically requires just more than one percent of total federal spending.

"On fighting terrorism in particular, Berman says, "We cannot win the fight against extremists by proverbially tying one arm behind our back. We need to deploy America's finest engineers, development experts and diplomats in the campaign for reconstruction and stabilization invulnerable countries. I welcome Secretary Gates' advocacy to help bolster the civilian agencies best suited for that fight.

"In a voice vote on Wednesday the House passed H.R. 1084, which establishes a Readiness Response Corps so that the United States can deploy civilian personnel in response to crises to support reconstruction and stabilization projects abroad -- such as in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Advocating the bill's passage in a statement on the House floor, Berman said that "there are only 6,600 professional Foreign Service officers today in the State Department. According to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, this is less than the personnel of one carrier battle group and, allegedly, less than the number of active military band members."

The Miranda Memo

I've been debating for a few days whether to respond to the Miranda Memo, a scathing attack on the State Department and Foreign Service officers who serve in Iraq, first began appearing on some of the blogs.

Miranda, for those who don't know, is Manuel Miranda, has been serving for the past year as the Director of the Office of Leglistative Statecraft in the Embassy in Baghdad. The memo in question was one he wrote to Ambassador Crocker. That is ended up in the press is of little surprise, since he is the same Manuel Miranda who gained access to the emails of Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee and leaked them to the Washington Times.

According to the New Yorker:
"Early in the George W. Bush Presidency, Miranda came to public notice as a fiercely partisan aide to the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee. He moved to the staff of Bill Frist, who was Senate Majority Leader at the time, and orchestrated a series of noisy attempts—including an all-night Senate session—to win confirmation for Bush’s judicial nominations. In November, 2003, after internal documents belonging to Democrats on the committee were leaked, the Senate opened an investigation that revealed that Miranda, through a quirk in the computer system, had been reading his adversaries’ e-mails and sharing them with right-leaning news outlets like the Washington Times. Senator Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican, called Miranda’s actions “improper, unethical, and simply unacceptable.” Miranda resigned, and a criminal investigation of him was initiated."

In the memo, Miranda says that:
"That civilian progress, and the Pax Americana, will not be achieved with the Foreign Service and the State Department's bureaucracy at the helm of America's number one policy consideration. You are simply not up to the task, and many of you will readily and honestly admit it. I believe that a better job can be done. It is simply that we have brought to Iraq the worst of America – our bureaucrats – and failed to apply, as President Roosevelt once did, the high-caliber leadership class and intellectual talent, whose rallying has defined all of America's finest hours..."

"Foreign Service officers, with ludicrously little management experience by any standard other than your own, are not equipped to manage programs, hundreds of millions in funds, and expert human capital assets needed to assist the Government of Iraq to stand up. It is apparent that, other than diplomacy, your only expertise is your own bureaucracy, which inherently makes State Department personnel unable to think outside the box or beyond the paths they have previously taken. "

The truth is that the State Department has far more experience than Miranda in managing multi-million dollar programs throughout the world. But Miranda seems to think highly-paid contractors rather than dedicated government servants who have experience throughout the world would be better at this mission. How offensive to those of us who have dedicated our lives to serving the country.

The Embassy is also severely encumbered by the Foreign Service's built-in attention deficit disorder, with personnel and new leaders rotating out within a year or less.


I find it ironic that he is criticizing Foreign Service Officers for rotating out after a year when he is also leaving after a year.

"Most notable, there is a near complete lack of strategic forethought or synchronization between Embassy staffing and program initiatives and funding. This is also true of PRTs. Only the military takes seriously the Joint Campaign and its metrics of achievement, while State Department leaders use it only when advantageous."

I seem to recall that it was the State Department that argued for a plan for rebuilding Iraq BEFORE we started the war, and the Secertary Rumsfeld dismissed us as feet draggers. We are now seeing the results of the lack of planning but it has somehow become the State Department's fault.

"This past year, the State Department and the Embassy has been led by two misguided premises: first, the obsessive aim that the Embassy be turned into a "normal embassy" and, second, that the State Department cannot be faulted for things that the GOI is not doing, i.e. "the Iraqis need to do this themselves.""

Again, if memory serves, we were told before this war that the U.S. was not in the business of "nation-building." Then we trumpeted the Iraqi election of a government of their own. And now the State Department is criticized for conducting the business of government-to-government relations rather than governing Iraq ourselves. The Department is not the Government of Iraq, nor should we be.

Overall, I found the memo to be pompous, partisan and, as someone who has very good friends serving in Iraq and who will no doubt serve there myself in the not so distant future, deeply offensive. It is full of the same old rhetoric about how the military is Iraq is perfect and the State Department is really just an impediment to the progress the military could make. The truth is we are part of the same team. Even Defense Secretary Gates recognizes the need for both soft power and hard power. No one blames the pitcher for not being a catcher and everyone recognizes that a baseball team needs both.

More "Troops" for U.S. Diplomacy

This Op/Ed piece is in today's Christian Science Monitor.

More "troops" for U.S. diplomacy
A proposed increase in diplomats is an important step toward greater "soft power."
from the February 8, 2008 edition

They must be pinching themselves at the State Department. Can it be that the White House wants one of the largest increases ever in the diplomatic corps? The request, revealed in the president's budget this week, shows Washington awakening to the compelling need for greater "soft power."

The condition of America's diplomatic service is not just shameful, but harmful.

When even Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the chief of "hard power," warns consistently about America's atrophied nonmilitary muscle, the risk to US national security must be serious.

Many embassies are staffed at only 70 percent. A new foreign service officer might arrive in Nigeria (Africa's most populous country) with nothing more than one morning of training at the Foreign Service Institute and no predecessor to help the transition. [Just a slight exaggeration - Digger]

Meeting the threats of the post-cold-war era – of weak governments, Islamist jihad, and destabilizing forces such as global warming and energy insecurity – is not just a matter of guns. It also requires the US to engage with the world, communicate (and listen), and provide nonmilitary assistance.

This is tough to do when its foreign service is so stretched it can't spare people to train for a new era.

In the proposed budget for fiscal year 2009, the White House is requesting 1,076 more diplomatic personnel. About 200 are to enhance security, but the rest will free up people to learn tough languages such as Arabic and Chinese, allow foreign service officers to study at US military colleges so they can better work with the armed forces, dedicate a small cadre of diplomats to military command posts, and build a corps of 350 experts who can assist in postconflict zones.

Over the next decade, the State Department wants to double the number of US diplomats. There are about 6,500 foreign service officers – less than an Army division. Congress should fund a diplomatic beef-up. But it's just one step in enhancing US soft power.

It has taken several years for the White House to realize it can't fight terrorism with military means alone. But a change of the guard will provide an opportunity for a more concerted effort. Think tanks, businesses, and NGOs agree, and have launched about 30 studies on this subject – many of them bipartisan.

Not all of their proposals require more spending. America would be well advised to change its often-patronizing tone and work more closely with friends and allies – adjustments begun under Condoleezza Rice and Mr. Gates. Some of the solutions involve greater American leadership, for instance, in climate change; others look outside the government – to people-to-people exchanges, efforts in world health, and charitable giving in disasters.

But there's also no avoiding the issue of government spending. The military took a huge hit after the cold war as Congress cashed in its "peace dividend." But so did US diplomacy, aid, and communication. They need rebuilding.

And what about the asymmetry between hard and soft power? The White House wants to spend $515 billion on the Defense Department (not including the supplemental requests for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) but only $38 billion on the State Department.

The presidential candidates need to think hard about soft power.

Delivering the Foreigners

Avuncular American, a retired Foreign Service Officer, has an interesting piece about what he calls "the increasingly subordinate role performed by American diplomats vis-a-vis the U.S. Military."

"What Diplomats Do: "Deliver the Foreigners"

Parents in the diplomatic service have to answer the same questions that other mommies and daddies do, but their answers are of necessity more complicated. Children aren't the only ones flummoxed by what diplomats do; many an American Foreign Service Officer working for the State Department has experienced the bemused looks of neighbors and family back home. "State" department sounds like you work in Harrisburg, Tallahassee, or any other American state capital bureaucracy. What you're doing in Tallinn or Algiers, they have no idea."

Digger comments:
This is definitely true. I was in NC when I joined the FS. I told one woman I was going to work for the State Department and she asked if I was moving to Raleigh. I finally gave up on telling people I was a Foreign Service Officer and just said diplomat instead, sacrificing my desire to not sound pretentious in exchange for at least a little clarity.

AA continues:
"But now, thanks to the increasingly subordinate role performed by American diplomats vis-a-vis the US military (see my blast when General David Petraeus insisted on referring to the US Ambassador to Iraq as his "diplomatic wingman"), we have a new wrinkle on the concept of diplomats-as-enablers. The January 18, 2008 Washington Times ("State Doubles Military Advisers," by Nicholas Kralev) tells us that diplomats are much in demand in the burgeoning US military:

The State Department is doubling the number of resident diplomatic advisers that it sends to the offices of the nation's top military commanders at home and overseas — a move encouraged by the Pentagon as its uniformed leaders take on larger public roles abroad.

The diplomats also help to "deliver the foreigners," as one official put it, whenever advice or assistance is needed from allies or other countries. Sometimes, they simply offer their counsel on foreign affairs, ensuring that the commander is familiar with current U.S. policy before making public remarks.

It's good that seasoned diplomats advise generals on current US foreign policy. After all, they have to do the same thing when US presidents persist in sending fat cat campaign donors abroad as political appointee ambassadors, in recognition of their generosity. But it's the preamble of the article that hits the core problem: "a move encouraged by the Pentagon as its uniformed leaders take on larger public roles abroad."

"Delivering the foreigners" for four star (and more junior) generals is increasingly the lot of American diplomats. Increasingly, the US military is taking on "roles and responsibilities" (to use a good Pentagon term) that are very far from basic soldiering. You need a website to bring the Muslims around to the American Way? The Pentagon has it. How about development projects, to win hearts and minds? We got that too: the Special Operations Command excels in "public safety, agriculture, finance, economy, and support of dislocated civilian operations."

In the recent "stand up" of the Pentagon's newest regional combatant command, AFRICOM, the US military proceeded to reinvent the diplomatic and development wheels that the State Department and USAID have had in Africa ever since President John F. Kennedy determined that the United States would have a "universal" presence in every one of the newly-independent African countries that started appearing during his tenure. A USAID veteran told me of his particular experience:

I've had conversations during 2007 with university colleagues whose brains are being picked by the Africa command folks on this side of the Atlantic. The content of these DOD-university dialogues is often incredibly basic. As a consequence, the new partnership crowds out long-established relationships that USAID and USDA [Agriculture Department] had/have with the university agriculture community. The Administration has duplicated USAID with MCC [Millenium Challenge Corporation], and now the Pentagon will do so again with the Africa Command's emphasis on civilian topics.

Meanwhile, USAID's well-planned agriculture projects in Africa limp along with stagnant funding. "

Digger comments:
I think much of this is a duel problem of State having too little money and too much focus on Iraq. I am not one of the nay-sayers who thinks we should withdraw immediately from Iraq (in fact, I hope the military stays there until at least after I serve my tour there, as we all will, because I am a big fan of having folks there with guns who are on our side!). I don't even think withdrawal is a realistic possibility, though I do think our embassy there is too large given the current environment (any other embassy on earth would have been long ago evacuated). I do think that having Iraq as our primary foreign policy focus is short-sighted (at a Junior Officer conference, department leaders from the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs (NEA) said anything outside of Iraq and the Middle East was just "fisheries." I suppose that means Russia and China are not important) and has lead to vast amounts of money being pumped into the military at State's expense. One might even argue that State's initial reluctance to go into Iraq without proper planning for reconstruction opened a door for the military to take the lead, and we have remained somewhat marginalized.

That the military is taking over so many of the functions we should be doing (and could do better because that is our area of expertise) is no surprise given the size of their budget. And no one can blame them for trying to increase their budget by taking on new projects. The problem is an issue of soft power versus hard power. We should be using diplomacy as a soft power before we use hard power and we should be properly funding the soft power so it can do the tasks it was meant to do. Regardless of what anyone thinks about the war, we are there, and we need to do our jobs. And conducting diplomacy abroad is the role of the State Department, not the military.

The point is we need both, each doing what we are expert at doing and letting the other do what they are expert at doing. The carrot and the stick approach only works when you have both a carrot AND and stick and the two are held in different hands.