The rank hypocrisy of veterans on OPSEC

I've written on these pages before about questioning the expertise of anyone claiming to have expertise and that arguments should be weighed as they stand. Most recently, I hit on IAVA for talking about civ-mil relations in a way that exceeded their understanding of it. But that sin is much less than those of groups who intentionally mislead the public through their own hypocrisy. Specifically, political veterans from the very right on OPSEC.

I don't think I need to go into a lot of detail - most of you know the background. This past summer the right end of the veteran (and non-veteran) blogosphere blew up with allegations against the President (and his administration) of leaking classified information about the SEAL raid to kill bin Laden for political gain. They didn't just get frothy-mouthed about this issue (of which they had some standing before they lost their reasoning faculties), they got active with at least one Super PAC started by a former Navy SEAL dedicated to OPSEC alone.

Fast forward a few months and the change in their position on OPSEC is so radical that it makes my head spin. Take the milblog This Ain't Hell - a staunchly conservative, veteran group blog that I occasionally visit for their amusing (if too serious) "stolen valor" posts. In primary contributor Jonn Lilyea's 11 June 2012 post, "Sanger defends Administration leaks", Lilyea says:

How about we let our secrets remain that way until whichever war we're fighting ends, so we don't intentionally get mired in the morass that the media made of this last war with their "open debate". ... And how about someone put a muzzle on the leaks out of the Obama Administration and let them debate the issues instead of smokescreening their failures.

Pretty straightforward position: secrets are secrets and should stay that way while the secrets affect current operations. But when it comes to Benghazi the tone changes. Lilyea posits today, in a post that quotes a report drawn from an "uncovered" Secret cable, "Who knows what other information they're sitting on today that will blow up in our faces and cost more American lives later." Again, this classified cable that affects current operations coming to light isn't an OPSEC violation, it's "uncovered". Blatant, reeking hypocrisy.

The previously-mentioned Special Ops OPSEC Super PAC does not even hide their hypocrisy on OPSEC. In a press release from 17 October 2012, the OPSEC president said:

President Obama wanted credit after our military killed bin Laden. Highly classified secrets were leaked, endangering real heroes and their families. But when terrorists killed SEALs and diplomats in Libya, this administration does not tell the truth about what happened.

In summation, this Super PAC was started because the President leaked classified info about something he shouldn't have leaked because it relates to ongoing operations. But the President is at fault because he doesn't leak classified info that relates to ongoing operations. Don't think about it too long or it will hurt your brain.

This hypocrisy isn't limited to fringe blogs (admittedly with more hits than this humble blog, but I'd rather be thoughtful than popular) or fringe political groups. A fringe blogger at a mainstream newspaper, Jennifer Rubin, supports hitting the President on the bin Laden leaks in a July post, positively quoting Governor Romney at the VFW, before accusing the President of "stonewalling" yesterday for not disclosing information that is rightly classified. I'm less concerned about Rubin as she's a pure political hack, but the point is that pure political hacks are taking their cues from veterans-cum-hacks because of the latters' perceived expertise.

These veterans and their hypocrisy is irritating at the least and dangerous at the worst. Because our veteran population is so small and our national defense so complicated, the general public looks to those few veterans who speak up to help explain how varied aspects of our national defense work. But the most vocal veterans on the issue of OPSEC, at least in volume, has been those who bathe in the fetid waters of hypocrisy. Their domestic political concerns are skewing how they present defense issues to the public, causing them to mislead the American public into believing the President is wrong for both leaking classified information and for not leaking classified information. And the American people don't know to juxtapose these two issues and see the hypocrisy of it all, even if there was some substance to the crux of their original position (minus the whole "Obama is a traitor" nonsense).

Obviously free-thinking people should always examine any argument for fallacies or validity, but too often we allow related experience to substitute for expertise. As my IAVA post made clear, being a veteran in and of itself does not make a veteran an expert on anything beyond his or her own experiences. Keep that in mind as you read through political discourse in the waning days of the presidential campaign.

Romney abroad: on culture, busts, and the categorical imperative of democracy

NOTE: I feel the need to introduce this post with a reiteration of the usual disclaimer. I'm not representing anyone else's views or analysis here but my own. I can't imagine why you would have assumed that I might be, but we don't normally veer into domestic politics and this post does so unabashedly. That said, I don't believe it's partisan, and I hope you'll evaluate the analysis as being up to the standards we typically uphold around here.

Mitt Romney’s recent travels abroad have caused a brief surge in commentary on the foreign policy and national security aspects of the presidential campaign. In this general category I include the re-animated flap over the Obama administration’s return to Britain of a Churchill bust that once graced the Oval Office; the sundry criticisms of the president for being “anti-Poland” in his Reset policy toward Russia; the hilarious and incredible suggestion that there are such things as pro- and anti-Israel camps among national politicians in America; and Governor Romney’s controversial and unsubtle suggestion that Israelis are rich and Palestinians poor because of something he failed to adequately explain but subsumed under the heading of “culture.”

It’s this last bit that has perhaps spurred the most discussion, if only because the rest is such well-trod ground. Social scientists and economic historians have criticized Romney’s claims in the press, both for oversimplification and for genuine factual errors. None of this will matter to potential voters, of course, who can’t be fussed to read the books that political candidates variously satirize, lionize, or otherwise caricature. By now we’re all very well acquainted with the fundamental reality of politics, which is that people don’t care so much about the truth as what their particular orthodoxy tells them is the truth.

But the “culture” comments – which are viewed as a gaffe by the left, but will likely serve as the sort of happily impolitic, plain-truth rallying cry so beloved by ignorant culture warriors of every stripe – are interesting for the way they distill right-wing ideology about ideas, circumstances, cause and effect in politics and history, and the triumph of one people over another. Put another way, what Romney said is the collectivized and nationalized version of basic conservative dogma: some people have good ideas, good values, good habits, and good personal qualities, and those people succeed in the world – including by getting rich – as a result. Be better, work harder, think the right way, and you’ll have a better life—it’s the foundation of the American Dream… isn’t it?

An admittedly amusing critical blog post on the Economist ignores the appeal of this thinking to a large segment of Romney’s base (and arguably to an even broader segment of the American electorate, including some voters who are currently undecided):

Comparing the income of the average Israeli to that of the average Palestinian, as though their prospects at birth had been equivalent and their fortunes today are largely the result of their own efforts and their "culture", is gratuitously insulting and wreaks damage to American diplomacy. Besides that, it's just wrong.

Wrong or right, this should sound familiar to those who have paid attention to other recent campaign imbroglios—most notably the “you didn’t build that” spat. With its efforts to paint the president as a socialist, a collectivist, an enemy of business, an impediment to Americans’ entrepreneurial spirit, the Romney campaign is catering to the sort of people who believe (against any and all evidence to the contrary) that personal success is far more attributable to hard work and right-thinking than to background, context, and circumstantial factors—including sheer good luck.

The entire American political and economic project is built around a shared commitment to this fantastical aspiration: that we can create a society that is so free, so fair, so basically egalitarian that the sole determinant of success and failure will be the quality of one’s ideas and one’s willingness to work. Left and right disagree, of course, about the various and competing merits of liberty and equality, and about whether the modern United States offers a sufficiently level playing field to permit pure freedom to fairly and effectively separate losers from winners. The important role played by American political and economic institutions and by the public goods that government has enabled are at the core of the Obama speech from which “you didn’t build that” has been so unceremoniously wrenched.

Romney understands this, of course, and his paean to the Israelis’ superior “culture” surely was founded on respect not simply for shared religious identity and classically liberal political ideals, but for the policies through which culture (and political culture) is mediated into economically productive activity. But he has a base to pander to, and that base includes a fair number of people who really do believe what Romney’s semantic imprecision made it look as though he actually meant: that Israelis are rich because they’re mostly Jews, while Palestinians are poor because they’re mostly Muslims.

But I digress a bit here. What we’re really dealing with is nothing more complicated than the most conservative (both in the literal and politically-partisan senses of that word) of all possible arguments: that the circumstances in which people and nations find themselves are fair and just, that they are a product of history’s implicit judgment (or fate’s, or God’s; Romney gave this one away in Israel when he referred to the “hand of providence”), and that as a result they ought generally to be left alone. What is is what ought to be. All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds! Israel’s triumph and prosperity is a validation of its goodness, to this strain of thought.

We needn’t look too far back in history for similarly conservative justifications of the status quo, and at least one bears in part an almost literally unbelievable similarity to Romney’s remarks in Israel. In his critical re-telling of Britain’s history abroad, Mark Curtis recounts a 1946 speech by a colonial administrator in Kenya who noted that

“the greater part of the wealth of the country is at present in [British] hands… This land we have made is our land by right – by right of achievement.” He explained to the Africans that “their Africa has gone forever,” since they were now living in “a world which we have made, under the humanitarian impulses of the late nineteenth and the twentieth century.” The Governor added: “We appear to Africans as being immensely wealthy and nearly all of them are in fact very poor… But these are social and economic differences and the problems of this country in that respect are social and economic and not political; nor are they to be solved by political devices.” Britain was in Kenya “as of right, the product of historical events which reflect the greatest glory of our fathers and grandfathers.” [Emphasis mine.]

One presumes that by characterizing inequality as “social and economic and not political” in origin, the governor meant to imply that social and economic change were a necessary precursor to the political resolution of the imbalance, or even that political arrangements were altogether irrelevant to it. (It takes no great imagination to see that this was wildly disingenuous. Britons justified their Empire with the perverse and thankfully obsolete rhetoric of the White Man’s Burden, but the practical administration of the empire was intended to head off the sort of independent political development that might threaten London’s essentially extractive relationship with the colonies, which were progressively liquidated as their economic value came to be outweighed by the complications and costs of their maintenance.)

Israeli conservatives and their American supporters view the matter of the Palestinian territories in a similar way: stop complaining about “occupation” and fix yourselves, as you’re the real cause of what’s wrong. Don’t tell us we’re responsible for your backwardness—look at how we’ve succeeded! We can talk about rights once you’ve built a properly liberal political culture and eliminated the extremist populism our own policies and attitudes help to perpetuate. And so it goes.

There’s intended irony in the parallel I draw between Romney’s attitude toward Palestinians and the British imperial view of Kenyans, considering the unhinged ramblings of Dinesh D’Souza and Mike Huckabee on the subject of President Obama’s alleged “anti-colonial ideology.” The author of a crypto-racist, pseudo-Freudian volume in whose telling the president’s position on everything from interior decoration to tax policy is foreordained by his father’s incontrovertible foreignness may assert that “my argument has nothing to do with the ‘birther’ claim,” but this is plainly untrue. As Amy Davidson notes in an excellent New Yorker piece on the aforementioned statuary controversy,  

[T]he shadow behind Churchill’s bust is birtherism, or its less conspiracy-minded companion, the conviction that Obama is, by virtue of his heritage, alien and un-American. This notion was most blatantly expressed by Dinesh D’Souza. […] This is part of a larger story about how Obama is really an anti-colonialist socialist who doesn’t like countries like Britain or America. In this telling, all that Obama keeps hidden about himself is exposed because he just can’t stand to look Churchill in the eye.

“Less conspiracy-minded” than a tale of document forgery is the belief that the President of the United States, driven by an un- and anti-American worldview, has repeatedly sought elective office in order to purposefully enact policies that would hamstring and damage a country that he secretly loathes? That even a writer unsympathetic to either narrative should describe them in this way reveals an unhealthy focus on the forms of criticism rather than their substance. To aver that the President is not legally an American is considered out-of-bounds to all but the most ridiculous figures in our political scene, yet it’s deemed acceptable and plausible for others to suggest not simply that Obama’s policies are bad for America, but that they are intentionally so!

A candidate for the presidency can’t say this, of course, lest he be made to look like a raving lunatic. Or worse, he may be accused of casting doubt on his opponent’s patriotism—and patriotism is a subject with which the American electorate simply will not tolerate you messing around. But he and his proxies and surrogates can insinuate as much, and this is exactly what both Bust-Gate and Culture-Gate are all about: boiling down complicated, ambiguous reality to proclaim an objective truth (Churchill was an unvarnished American hero! Israelis are comparatively successful because they think and act like Westerners!), framing that “truth” as an essentially American consensus, and then insinuating that the president simply stands outside this consensus. The message is this: Barack Obama does not share our American values.

You’ll note that I began this essay by referencing “the foreign policy and national security aspects of the campaign,” rather than simply “foreign policy and national security.” That’s because all of this has very little to do with other countries, or with advancing American interests, or with ensuring the safety of our people, a truth that’s made obvious by Romney’s adulation of foreign political figures (Churchill, Wałęsa, Netanyahu) whose own countrymen tend to view them with considerably more ambivalence. (The Republican often pays homage to Margaret Thatcher, which is risible when juxtaposed with his wife’s newfound enthusiasm about her Welsh heritage. The Iron Lady isn’t likely to have many fans in Nantyffyllon.)

Instead this talk of the special relationship is about – like everything else in the campaign – manipulating the feelings of U.S. voters by invoking code-words associated with the issues and seeding doubts about your opponent, signaling that I’m One of You and the Other Guy Isn’t. (This isn’t unique to Romney or to conservatives, as should be plain to see: the president’s campaign is largely based on the thinly-veiled assertion that his opponent is taking advantage of Regular People to further enrich the small minority of People Like Him.)

The code-words in foreign policy are simple to discern: victory, patriotism, American exceptionalism, American strength. Standing with the forces of freedom and democracy. Standing with those who Share Our Values. Standing with Churchill and Israel. Accept each of these elements wholeheartedly, without reservation or nuance, or be accused of enthusiasm for their Manichean alternatives: Defeat. Betrayal. Self-hatred. American weakness. Tyranny and terrorism. Appeasement.

Must it be this way? Surely the questions are not so simple, nor the answers so clear. Maybe D’Souza has done us all a favor by invoking the president’s alleged “anti-colonial ideology” instead of treating him as a “conventional liberal”; maybe we can pause and ask what exactly is so wrong with anti-colonial ideology? Are we only permitted to be anti-colonialists as private citizens, or as white people? Was not Dwight Eisenhower an anti-colonialist? Should we doubt the patriotism and integrity of that most eloquent critic of empire – a Serious Anti-Communist who wouldn’t be out of place on the list of Romney heroes – George Orwell?

And what of Churchill? His committed colonialism would surely find favor with D’Souza – in 1954 the prime minister wrote to Eisenhower that he was “a bit skeptical about universal suffrage for the Hottentots” – but he was far from uncomplicated. Does Romney name as “one of [his] heroes” not just the man who warned of “an Iron Curtain [that] has descended across Europe,” but the one who sat with Stalin and chopped up a continent on a slip of paper? What of the parliamentarian who introduced legislation creating a minimum wage and offering unemployment insurance? What about the man who supported eugenics, who wrote the prime minister in 1910 to warn that “the multiplication of the feeble-minded is a very terrible danger to the race”? Or the budgeteer who prioritized solvency over military strength, championing adoption of the Ten-Year Rule, whereby the armed services took as an indefinite and continuous planning assumption that no major war would occur in the upcoming decade? Are those Churchills among Romney’s heroes?

Such two-dimensional comic-book likenesses as we find in Romney’s description of foreign countries and leaders are not only inaccurate, they’re insulting. They lay bare a truth most thinking people will already know, and one that is far more damaging to American diplomacy than returned artwork: unless you can raise money, give money, or vote, you are meaningless to a U.S. political candidate, and so your proud history will be rendered in finger-paint to influence those who can.

Why do we allow these caricatures to dominate our politics? Why do even our very best indulge them, much as they do the flag lapel pin and the simple-minded platitudes about Supporting the Troops? Because they fear the consequences of trying and failing to broaden the discourse, of trying to lead and being seen to lecture or pontificate or condescend, of alienating voters by unreservedly embracing knowledge and nuance. Because the greatest sin in our democracy is not to lie, but to lose.

The sad reality is that it doesn’t matter a damn whether Mitt Romney is right or wrong about culture, or Solidarity, or Churchill, or whether he tells Americans the truth about them or just a pretty story. And the reason is doesn’t matter is even sadder: because we’re stupid, and we’re easily manipulated, and because we don’t care.

The world we live in: if you couldn't laugh, you'd have to cry

This morning the president will announce his intent to streamline the federal government by merging a number of trade- and commerce-related agencies. In order to do so, he is requesting that Congress grant him so-called fast-track consolidation authority; this would allow the president to propose consolidations to the legislative branch and get a clean up-or-down vote within 90 days. No president since Reagan has held this power.

As you might imagine, this proposal is expected to be politically contentious. Republicans in Congress are unlikely to accede to the president's demands in an election year, notwithstanding the fact that this sort of consolidation and streamlining is generally consistent with their political platform.

Now consider this: the president can go to war without even asking Congress. When he does deign to request approval, it is reflexively and near-unanimously granted. The executive branch has consistently interpreted the Constitution as granting unitary executive authority to the president in matters of war and foreign policy. What's more, every White House since Truman's has asserted the unilateral right to use nuclear weapons as the president sees fit.

The president must go to Congress with hat in hand in order to merge the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and the Small Business Administration, but he can embroil this country in expensive, bloody, and strategically dubious foreign wars with scarcely a phone call to the Hill.

He needs an up-or-down vote from the legislature in order to roll up a few sub-cabinet offices, but can invoke the "housekeeping privilege" to bar the release of executive-branch records to the judicial branch—including in cases where the very question of executive privilege and presidential power is at issue.

I vaguely remember a literary quotation I read as a kid (and which I am of course completely unable to track down or even attribute in my adulthood, even with the powers of Google) that said something to the effect of man's inattention to the most important things and attention to insignificant things are the mark of a strange disorder. Quite.

Defense politics: a lot of the time, what ought to matter most doesn't matter at all

First read this from a Politico story (mentioned by Charles Hoskinson today in Morning Defense) about Mitt Romney making calls to voters on Monday in advance of the New Hampshire primary:

[Romney] also secured the support of the second voter he reached, who was apparently a defense industry worker.

"I was a little disappointed to see the president pull back on the F-35 program," Romney said, talking on a cellphone and with a list of printed out list of [sic] names and numbers in front of him.

Now read the entirety of this article by Chuck Spinney, Thomas Christie, Pierre Sprey, and Winslow Wheeler. Here's the most important bit on the subject of the F-35:

Moreover, if the F-35 lived up to 100% of its depressingly modest design specifications, it would still be a complete failure in combat utility: a bomber of shorter range, lower payload and far higher vulnerability than the Vietnam War’s appallingly flammable, underperforming F-105 Lead Sled; an air-to-air fighter so unmaneuverable and sluggish in acceleration that any ancient MiG-21 will tear it to shreds; and a close support fighter that is a menace to our troops on any battlefield, unable to hit camouflaged tactical targets and incapable of distinguishing friendly soldiers from enemies. Individually and collectively, we often fretted with Boyd on the irresponsibility of equipping our people with such foolishly complex weapons designs, so bereft of practical combat effectiveness—and on the deep corruption of acquisition programs, such as the F-35’s, that deliberately plan to buy a thousand or more units long before user testing has fully probed combat utility.

The authors of this piece are experts in defense acquisition, weapon system design and testing, and the politics of national security. Mitt Romney seems to have a fair grasp of the latter, though he is not an expert in the other areas (and presumably neither is the voter that he spoke to).

The F-35 is a failed program. Mitt Romney doesn't care. Neither do any of the other candidates, which is primarily a reflection of the fact that most Americans – most voters – don't care, and the ones that do care are much less interested in the program's combat effectiveness than its function as a source of jobs and economic stimulus.

American taxpayers are pouring outrageous amounts of money into weapon systems that don't work as advertised, aren't delivered on schedule, and cost more than expected—but the costs are diffuse, spread over many years and several budget lines, and are unlikely to have a negative impact on the welfare of individual voters that is even remotely comparable to the effects of program termination. In short, to the people who matter to the political process – candidates and voters – all weapon spending is essentially good spending.

But what about our business? What about the so-called "defense intellectuals," the military analysts and journalists and budget wonks and policy writers and bloggers? Don't we have a bigger responsibility? That's where Spinney, Christie, Sprey, and Wheeler come in again—and they're at their excoriating best:

Here [citing uncritical advocacy for F-22 and F-35 by one think-tanker] is a paradigm of the moral decay so visible among contemporary Washington defense “intellectuals.” These dabblers in defense pretend to serve seriously the real needs of our national defense and our people in uniform—when, in fact, they are serving the needs of foundations, universities, non-profits or politicians funded by defense mega-corporations seeking to expand their sources of government largesse. And, even in a shrinking economy, these dabblers easily find comfortable home bases and plenty of venues to publish or broadcast their paeans to big ticket programs and budgets.

Here are the facts:

1) The F-35 has already cost a fortune and seems unlikely to perform adequately in the range of missions for which it is meant to be suited (though this is still uncertain, as the aircraft was rushed into large-scale production before sufficient operational testing could be completed).

2) Notwithstanding the above, Mitt Romney and Jim Carafano still are "a little disappointed to see the president pull back on the F-35 program." (I get the feeling Carafano's phrasing would be less delicate; again, those are the candidate's words.)

Somebody ought to say something, huh?

But really: how does this ever change? How can the incentive structures of American politics be altered to ensure that parochial concerns entirely peripheral to military effectiveness aren't permitted to dominate entirely the weapon system development and acquisition process?

I wish I knew the answer to this. But after several years of raging against the machine, I'm disappointed to tell you that I don't. Spinney et al. have some ideas, but one can't help but think that their collective decades of experience in the game and relative failure to enact meaningful change suggests that a sense of hopelessness is not only justified, but entirely appropriate.

UPDATE: In case you're not feeling melancholy enough, I should also have mentioned this excellent and topical piece by David Axe on the failures of another acquisition program, the Joint Tactical Radio System—headlined "Army seeks 'perfect' radio, creates boondoggle."

Grant aid to Egypt: the more things change...

On April 15 of this year, the president signed the spending bill (pdf) which kept the government from shutting down. Despite the ouster of Mubarak two months earlier, grant military assistance to Egypt remained the same as in past years: a $1.3 billion Foreign Military Financing (FMF) earmark, cash that expressly "shall be available for grants only for Egypt." That's consistent with the language of past years, and the dollar amount has held steady (pdf) since the late 1980s.

As you'll know if you pay attention to the news, we still don't have signed appropriations bills for 2012; there's another shutdown threat for the end of the week. In fact, there's not even any talk of a full-year spending bill at this stage in the game: the Congress is just trying to pass legislation to keep the lights on through the middle of November, when they'll have to take this up all over again. (The stopgap bill is currently being held up by disagreements over how to pay for something like $6 billion in disaster-relief funding, which makes perfect sense when you think about the fact that we're dealing with something like 0.2% of the damn budget.)

What we do have, though, is an FY 12 State Department and Foreign Operations spending bill (pdf) that's made it out of committee in the Senate, which is something, I guess. Language in that bill (especially where it's consistent with language in the draft of the House bill (pdf)) will probably make its way into whatever legislation ends up appropriating money for FY 2012, whenever that happens. Here's what's new:

[U]p to $1,300,000,000 shall be made available for grants only for Egypt, including for border security programs and activities in the Sinai: Provided further, That prior to the obligation of funds appropriated under this heading for assistance for Egypt, the Secretary of State shall certify to the Committees on Appropriations that the Governments of the United States and Egypt have agreed upon the specific uses of such funds, that such funds further the national interests of the United States in Egypt and the region, and that the Government of Egypt has held free and fair elections and is implementing policies to protect the rights of journalists, due process, and freedoms of expression and association [p. 49 of the pdf]

(The House draft merely states that funds will be made available "with the expectation that the Egyptian military will continue to adhere to and implement its international obligations, particularly the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty," which is also taken up later in the Senate bill. Of course, the SecState can waive that provision if deemed "important to the national interests of the United States," so there's that.)

Beyond the requirement for democratic and liberalizing reform, the certification provision is in there to make it clear that the post-Mubarak government can't suddenly re-imagine its military priorities and redesignate funds they'd previously committed to spend on U.S.-approved goods and services. It's not much for advocates of conditioned aid to latch on to, but it's more than the basically un-caveated aid written into previous spending bills. (All grant assistance is bound by the provisions of the Foreign Assistance Act, of course, which does require adherence to certain human rights standards, &c.)

Here's the bottom line: the money is still going to flow, whatever happens in the coming months on elections or civil liberties in Egypt. The distribution of military aid to Pakistan requires a certification that Pakistani government entities are fully cooperative in the fight against anti-Afghan insurgents and terrorist groups; ADM Mullen finally admitted last week that the USG can make no such declaration in good faith, and yet the aid still flows. The bilateral relationship with Egypt is much stronger and much more institutionalized, and many of the peculiar details of Egyptian aid are premised on the understanding and assumption of stability over the long term. (Egypt and Israel, for example, are exceptional among grant aid recipients in that they aren't required to pay the full balance of their purchase costs in the year of sales agreement; in fact, unspent aid is held by the U.S. in an interest-bearing account from year to year.) The money will keep on coming unless Congress acts to expressly block it.

One more thing that's worth noting in the Senate bill, however, is Sec. 7039(a):

Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act, funds appropriated by this Act under the heading ‘‘Foreign Military Financing Program’’ for assistance for Egypt may be transferred to, and merged with, funds appropriated for assistance for Egypt under the heading ‘‘Economic Support Fund’’ [p. 134 of the pdf]

This is interesting because it permits the transfer of money appropriated for military aid to an account used for economic assistance -- that is, to a fund specifically intended "for the purpose of improving the lives of the Egyptian people through education, investment in jobs and skills (including secondary and vocational education), and access to finance for small and medium enterprise with emphasis on expanding opportunities for women, as well as other appropriate market-reform and economic growth activities" (p. 135 of the pdf). It seems unlikely to happen, but the option's there.

Oh yeah, and while we're on the subject: PCCF is back! (See p. 10 of this pdf.) In the International Security Assistance section of the State budget! Instead of in the Defense budget! And with a billion dollars! That's $200 million more than the $800 million appropriated for FY 11! Foreign policy is saved from militarization! At least until somebody needs to slash a bil from the aid budget, anyway; then DoD will change the way it calculates inflation, or something, and slide that extra billion in under its catastrophically shrunken topline. Or something.

More money = more readiness, just as simple as that?

The infamous Rep. Forbes, chairman of the HASC Readiness subcommittee, brought the number two guys from each of the services over to the Hill on Tuesday to talk about how the imagined "sustained lack of resources" for defense has imperiled American military preparedness. (Read Spencer's and Philip Ewing's excellent pieces on the hearing.) Each officer made the standard, prosaic opening statement -- underpinned as always by a pledge about his service being prepared to carry out the country's missions and support the warfighter and blah blah blah -- before being poked and prodded into elaborating on the horrifying future we should expect if a deficit-reduction deal includes significant defense cuts. This line of reasoning, of course, is built on the premise that readiness is all about resources. But resources are always constrained in some way; what we ought to be talking about is whether or not we're making the best possible decisions about how to use them.

To wit, take a look at this snip from Air Force vice chief Gen. Philip Breedlove's written testimony. After running down a list of the many operational missions the service has executed in recent years, he drops this on us:

This level of activity reflects our commitment to provide Global Vigilance, Reach, and Power in today’s Joint fight. However, this high operations tempo (OPTEMPO) has had some detrimental effects on our overall readiness. Since 2003, we have seen a slow but steady decline in reported unit readiness indicators. Maintaining our ability to be ready for the full spectrum of operations at an acceptable level of risk is challenging, especially for the Combat Air Forces (CAF) and some limited-supply/high-demand units.

I know I sound like a broken record on this, but it bears repeating: operations erode readiness. War definitely erodes readiness, but so too do training and exercises and the whole range of peacetime missions that aren't accompanied by the extra burden and risk of combat losses. Simply put, we're spending more and ending up with less because we're using what we've bought, and using it harder and more than we usually count on doing. But resources are constrained, you know? So if we had a few extra bucks, we'd probably spend them in ways that helped to mitigate those readiness concerns, right... not just to do more of the same? Hold that thought.

Let's pause for just a second and kick it over to CSBA's Todd Harrison to explain what the Pentagon calls "unfunded priorities."

Each year, the Services rank and prioritize items for inclusion in the budget request. Unfunded priorities are those items not included in the budget request because they are a lower priority and do not fit within the funding ceiling set for the Department. The Services’ lists of unfunded priorities, sometimes referred to as “wish lists,” are routinely requested by Congress for consideration during their markup of the budget. The total amount of unfunded priorities grew dramatically over the past decade, rising from $9.5 billion in FY 2001 to a peak of $38 billion in FY 2008 (both figures in FY 2012 dollars). In the FY 2010 budget process, Secretary Gates required the Services to present their unfunded priorities to him for review before submitting them to Congress. Unfunded priorities for that year fell by an order of magnitude to just $3.5 billion. In FY 2011 unfunded priorities fell to $1.8 billion, and in FY 2012 they total only $1.2 billion. Nearly all of the unfunded priorities submitted to Congress are in procurement and O&M. This indicates that if the Services had additional funding available they would prioritize the maintenance of existing equipment and would procure additional equipment or spares to augment their inventory. (pdf, p. 4)

We're going to leave aside the interesting subplots here -- that Congress actually requires the Services to list the things they've decided not to ask for in the budget request, that "unfunded priorities" skyrocketed over the same period that the budget topline dramatically increased, etc. -- and get back to what the Air Force would do if it had a bit more cash.

The Air Force requests $124 million in unfunded priorities. At the top of the list is $42.5 million for 75 maintenance testers and spares to support the A-10 aircraft. According to the Air Force, the currently fielded testing equipment is “obsolete and no longer procurable,” and the lack of new testing equipment will result in some aircraft being grounded in FY 2013. An additional $33.7 million is requested for an EC-130H avionics upgrade to replace the air data computer, which if not replaced would result in Compass Call aircraft groundings, also beginning in FY 2013. The remaining $47.5 million funds the replacement of Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM), Anti-Missile Countermeasures Decoy Systems, Air-to-Ground Missiles, and Laser-Guided Weapons expended due to operations in Libya. (pdf, p. 5)

Look back at what Gen. Breedlove said: "a slow but steady decline in reported unit readiness indicators." So why is the extended budget ask entirely composed of new stuff? The VCSAF tells us elsewhere that the service is pumping efficiency savings back in to modernization accounts to pay for the next-gen bomber, more UAVs, F-15 radar modernization, and many other things... all of which are surely important to the development of future capabilities, but which have little to do with maximizing current operational readiness.

Obviously it's true that extra airframes and spares help to boost readiness by addressing maintenance shortfalls and recapitalizing aging fleets, and spare cash can be used to pay for more fuel, more flight hours, more time in simulators, and so on. But instead of asking leading questions like "wouldn't it be tough to do your job if the defense budget was cut by a trillion dollars?", why aren't legislators making a more committed effort to find out exactly how the resources they're meant to provide actually translate into readiness and combat power? To learn how the Air Force, for example, plans to reverse that "decline in reported unit readiness indicators" both by spending extra money and by adapting how they do business, making related changes to training, doctrine, organizations, and all things you've got to figure out how to do when the time comes that the dollar figure just ain't getting any bigger?

Forbes and his pals don't make a better effort because what they're doing is political theater, not strategic leadership. The chairman and his colleagues surely know that such an exploration would almost certainly reveal that sometimes the answer isn't simply to buy more, better, newer stuff. The recent focus on strategy development as the essential first step in a rational and comprehensive resourcing process is both refreshing and fundamentally beside the point. Here's how Forbes put it in Tuesday's hearing:

As we consider our deficit, federal spending, and the impact on our defense budget, I believe we should be asking four questions: 

First, "What are the threats we face?" Second, "What resources do our combatant commanders need to protect us against those threats?" Third, "What do these resources cost and how can we obtain them as efficiently as possible," and fourth, "What can we afford and what are the risks to our nation if we do not supply those resources?" 

I believe many in Congress and the White House have been asking only the portion of question four that asks how much they want to expend, and they have been ignoring the other questions almost entirely.

Fair enough, and the congressman is right to draw attention to the Department's (and the country's) strategy deficit. But it's disingenuous to pretend as if these questions aren't asked in some way, shape or form, because they are. It's also true that the answers are speculative, lack rigor or compelling rationale, and do little to help us set real priorities. And a big part of the reason it happens that way is that the folks tasked with asking the questions and generating the answers have absolutely zero incentive to make hard choices. They're rewarded for dreaming up an expansive list of threats, challenges, risks, and attendant "requirements."

To believe that we can ever draft a prioritized list of desired capabilities to meet projected threats, then arbitrarily draw a chop line below one program and above another based on somebody's assessment of "what we can afford" is simple fantasy. And beyond that, it's an economic nonsense: a laundry list in which all "priorities" can be or ought to be funded scandalizes the transactional philosophy that underpins efficient resource allocation. We all know there's no such thing as getting something for nothing, and to ignore the trade-offs that come with just spending more in the belief that security can be commoditized is dishonest and irresponsible.

I hate to keep repeating myself on this, but to parrot the former SECDEF's now-famous phrase, we have to do math and strategy. Yes, we need to take a look at fundamental roles and missions. Yes, we need to write real, meaningful, actionable strategy documents that can inform resource decisions instead of the unsatisfying pap we currently churn out. Yes, we need to try to get a handle on the role we want to play in the world, the tasks the military needs to be able to accomplish to enable that role, and the capabilities we think are best suited to accomplishing those tasks. That's strategy.

But strategy is also about thoughtful adaptation. It's about figuring out multiple ways to accomplish the same ends, particularly when the means get changed up on you. The credit-based economy has thieved this skill from most people and many governments; instead of thinking how to meet our needs with the resources we've got, we spend time thinking up ways to eventually pay off the tab we've run up collecting the things we want. If I say "write me some plans for defending America with a single infantry battalion," you might reasonably say that's nonsensical and a-strategic. But if I say "here's $300 billion, now buy me the best defense you can," you damn well ought not come back with a blank page and plead poverty.

If only defense spending had a domestic constituency! (UPDATED)

The tragic indifference of American political leaders, commentators, business executives, and senior military officers to the plight of the shrinking U.S. defense budget continues unabated today. Well, unless you read the op-ed pages of major American newspapers, watch cable news, use the internet, or have a conversation with any human being within 50 miles of the Pentagon.

Today in Politico, four Members of Congress go "On the offense over Defense cuts" -- Rep. Randy Forbes (R-Ft. Lee, JFCOM), Rep. Michael Turner (R-Wright-Patterson AFB), Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Hill AFB), and Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Goodfellow AFB):

The U.S. military confronts readiness shortfalls and a growing array of risks and security challenges. That is why I am deeply concerned about the avalanche of military spending cuts being discussed — from President Barack Obama’s $400 billion proposal to the Senate’s Gang of Six proposal that could cut up to $886 billion.

The time to draw a line in the sand, and go on the offense to support national security must be now.

Let’s be clear: Defense spending is not what put us in this position, and gutting the defense budget to pay the bills is unlikely to get us out of it. As a percentage of our gross domestic product, the defense budget remains just 3.6 percent. This figure is low by all historical standards.

Even if we start slashing major portions of the budget — say $50 billion each year over the next decade — that figure would still only add up to a fraction of the nation’s debt. Yet the additional risk to the nation could be substantial.

Surely the legislative interests of these honorable legislators have little to do with the location of major military facilities inside and alongside their Congressional districts. Such coincidences are inevitable when we consider such a large political body, right? The devoted advocacy of these men is no doubt motivated solely by a desire for "an open and objective review of the threats we face and the resources required to meet them."

Should we cut them a break for lying to us?

The defense budget does not represent "just 3.6 percent" of GDP. You get this artificially low number when you exclude from consideration funds being spent on current operations. Why would anyone choose to calculate defense spending without considering the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? This seems to me a lot like willfull disingenuity.

$749.75 billion. That's the total OMB gives for national defense outlays in FY 2011. (See page 132 of this pdf.) This includes money appropriated to the Energy Department for nuclear weapons, as well as a few other non-DoD incidentals, but the military-only figure still works out to more than $700 billion.

Four point nine percent. That's OMB's "national defense" outlays as a percentage of GDP for FY 11. Not 3.7%. 4.9%. That's a pretty big difference. Not only that, but 4.9% does not represent a "figure [that] is low by all historical standards"; in fact, it's only roughly a percentage point lower than the height of the Reagan defense buildup.

Nineteen point six percent. Here's the most important figure of the whole lot, and it's one that the good Congressmen left out altogether (they didn't even give us an artifically low alternative number, perhaps because even that one is distressingly high): the percentage of total U.S. government outlays that are devoted to national defense. Let's be clear about this, because the percent of GDP figures are bandied around all the time to mislead people (and apparently it works): about one in every five dollars the U.S. government spends goes to defense. (When President Reagan was patriotically defending America from peacenik budget-slashers, defense spending accounted for about one in four dollars spent.)

Ready for the most damning bit in the whole op-ed? Ok, here it is:

Even more concerning are the assessments from our Combatant Commanders in the unclassified portion of the Quarterly Readiness Report to Congress. This paints a distressing picture of a military stretched thin by nearly 10 years of war and a sustained lack of resources.

BREAKING NEWS: war erodes readiness. But you know what does NOT constitute "a sustained lack of resources"? A 150% increase in defense outlays over a ten-year period. (2001: $304.73 billion. 2011: $749.75 billion.) Defense accounts were bumped by approximately ten percent per year for a decade. This is what Forbes, Turner, Bishop, and Conaway call "a sustained lack of resources"? This is their definition of taking the strength of our armed forces for granted? This is their "growing readiness problems"?

If the wanton spending of the last ten years can't guarantee military readiness or national security, MAYBE YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.

The Congressmen want us to base our national defense planning on "an open and objective review of the threats we face and the resources required to meet them," and complain about how "we now have that process in reverse." They're right, we do -- and it's because of nonsense rationalizations like the ones given in this article, where they try to pretend like the Army's failure to incorporate iPad-like technology has anything at all to do with the cancellation of Comanche, FCS, EFV, and DDG-1000.

They even give us a cute little analogy to highlight what they suggest is the irresponsible way the White House and the Defense Department go about determining the budget.

In many ways, it’s like a family who is about to purchase a new home. The correct course would be to have an inspector look at the house and tell the family what the problems are and what they will cost to fix. What if, instead, that family told the inspector that they only had $1,000, and they wanted the inspector to go through and identify only $1,000 worth of problems to fix?

What if, instead, that family had an inspector look at the house to find problems and estimate required costs, but also told him they'd already signed papers with a contractor committing to $2,000 worth of demolition and paint work? And then when the inspector found that the house had termite damage, the contractor and his buddies started writing letters to the family and the bank saying that the special kind of paint they were going to use helps to solidify building foundations and kill termites. Because that's a much more apt analogy.

Stop lying to people. Stop rationalizing wasteful spending. Stop pretending like the thing that accounts for 20% of USG spending has nothing at all to do with our deficit problems. Stop imagining the spending that benefits your constituents is sacrosanct, while everything else is politically-motivated profligacy.

The government spends much more than it takes in. One-fifth of this spending goes toward defense. Considering the fungibility of money and the statutory mandate for certain types of non-discretionary spending, it is a simple absurdity to say "defense spending is not what put us in this position." If your teenager ran up tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt and said "I spent most of that money on food and rent and books! Only 20% of it was on hookers and blow! That's not what put me in this position!", you'd punch him in the face.

Punch yourself in the face, America.

UPDATE: More criticism of the Forbes-Turner-Bishop-Conaway piece from budget guru Gordon Adams, who also addresses the accounting gimmicks that go into making the end of the current wars look like a massive cut. He does so in considerably less shrill and aggressive fashion than I, it's worth noting.

Kagan: "defense has no domestic constituency"

No, this is not a joke.

Jennifer Rubin, writing on conservative criticism of the "Gang of Six" deficit-reduction proposal, quotes an email she received from alleged defense expert Robert Kagan:

[The proposed cuts are] utterly irresponsible and dangerous to national security. Also cowardly, since defense has no domestic constituency, while entitlements — the real source of our fiscal crisis — do.

It is simply remarkable that anyone could hold this view, especially someone even remotely acquainted with defense politics. (It may be even more remarkable that a second person would unquestioningly reproduce such a patently absurd statement.) So for Kagan and Rubin's benefit, let's go ahead and draw up an inclusive (but not exhaustive) list of those people and organizations that make up defense spending's domestic constituency.

1. The U.S. and global defense industry. Higher defense budgets means more spending on materiel and weapon systems. More money for weapon systems means more profit for the companies who manufacture them, higher stock prices, and pleased shareholders. This linkage is so simple that the requirement to explain it strains credulity.

2. Communities dependent on defense dollars. This group consists of people and governments across the country that are dependent for their economic and social health on defense-related funds. That could mean military bases that provide jobs and fuel local economies, or the facilities of armaments and materiel manufacturers that do the same. If these dollars go away, people lose jobs. And they get pissed about it. There's a reason defense contractors ensure the widest possible geographic distribution of essential work on major acquisition programs.

3. Members of Congress. Guess who starts getting phone calls when the ol' jet-engine factory closes down? Defense pork is the tastiest and most pervasive kind, and legislators benefit in more ways than one from the flow of defense dollars: they're able to maintain constituent support by bringing job-creating industrial facilities and economically stimulating military bases to their districts and keeping them there, and they often reap significant financial rewards in the form of defense industry campaign contributions. And we haven't even mentioned the way that politicians get almost consequence-free "strong on defense" cred just from lending rhetorical support to defense budget increases.

4. The Defense Department and the military services. Executive branch organizations can't expressly lobby Congress, of course, but don't believe for a second that they're objective and disinterested participants in the budgeting process. The significant majority of the "strategic thinking" generated by the Pentagon (some in the form of Congressionally-mandated reports) serve to justify major extant acquisition programs and rationalize force structure rather than informing capabilities-development, as strategy ought to do. Defense senior leaders are often caught in a double-bind: they have significant incentives to support the priorities of the defense industry, which will later offer opportunities for a comfortable and leisurely post-retirement career, while simultaneously recognizing that collaboration with those in Congress and industry whose interests align may be the best way to ensure plentiful resourcing of their statutory mission.

5. Commentators, advocates, and pseudo-scholars. A lot of people in this town make a living talking about defense (COUGHCOUGHROBERTKAGANCOUGH). Some of those people are financially supported by the defense industry. Some of them work for organizations that are ideologically committed to "strong defense," which as we've discussed always equates to more defense spending. Some of them simply find it impossible to consider challenging the conventional wisdom of their friends and colleagues, and come by their rabid support for MORE MORE MORE SPENDING NOW AND ALWAYS MORE totally honestly. But let's not pretend like most these people are indifferent to the defense budget, or that their professional and personal incentive structures don't mitigate in favor of advocacy for higher budgets.

These various constituencies so often work in concert with one another that we've almost ceased to find it noteworthy when the front men for such collaborations lie, dissemble, misrepresent, bullshit, and scheme to protect every last dollar in defense accounts. We're not even surprised when they conspire to shame their critics and ruin careers.

All of which leads me to wonder whether Robert Kagan and Jennifer Rubin understand precisely what is meant by the term "constituency," at least in the sense of budgets. Sure, entitlements have a clear domestic constituency: the citizens who get checks in the mail, the representatives they elect, and the businesses and organiziations that are supported by the dissemination of those funds. Does Kagan really fail to see that defense dollars seep into society and influence people in the same way?

Is he sweetly, charmingly ignorant of all this, or a disingenuous, self-aware participant in the whole scheme? Well, I suppose I'll leave it up to you to decide.

The suckiest DoD job that's not in The Suck

As we've discussed in the past, Geoff Morrell's job sucks. Now he has to put up with this (though admittedly it's coming from known anonymous-quoter and wild speculator-of-professional-motives-and-personal-feelings Michael Hastings):

No one knew whether McChrystal would keep his job; NATO officials had prepared two press releases — one for if he stayed, another for if he was fired. Even the military's top brass was kept out of the loop: Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell, viewed as particularly untrustworthy by the Obama administration, was frantically calling NATO headquarters in Brussels to find out what was happening across the Potomac at the White House.

The emphasis, of course, is mine.

So now I've got to ask: WTF did Morrell ever do to you, White House? He's loyal to his boss, he tap-dances like crazy to pitch the administration's line to an adversarial press corps, he traded in a pretty good gig on the outside for this thankless bitch of a job, and he's "viewed as particularly untrustworthy"? If by "the Obama administration" you mean Tom Donilon and Mark Lippert, then I can buy this, but it seems like a pretty unfair and unsupportable characterization. Of course, Hastings won't support it -- anonymous sources, you see. Ethics and whatnot.

Snort.

The rest of the piece is about how Petraeus has been boxing in the president and vice versa, etc etc, a whole bunch of stuff that seems basically true to me, and that there's already generally pretty broad (if speculative) consensus about. But I guess it's flashier stuff when you run it under this byline, so there you are.

Obama and the world at the halfway point: An Ink Spots narrative report card

Two years ago today, Barack Obama was inaugurated as president. With the full extent of the economic downturn still somewhat obscure, there were high hopes for an era of American resurgence and a reconsideration of the indispensable nation's posture to the world.

Many of those hopes have been dashed as the dual shocks of a decade of war and a crumbling economy pull our focus inward. But foreign and security policy still matter, even if no one's paying attention. We here at Ink Spots wanted to take a look at the successes and failures of the Obama administration's first two years out in the world, to do a sort of mid-term report card. A few of us took a crack at the subject by answering a dozen questions about where we've been and where we're going.

1. What's been the biggest surprise to you about U.S. foreign policy over the last two years? Any pleasant surprises? Any significant disappointments?

Lil: The biggest surprise? I really don’t know. Pleasant surprises (in no particular order): the lifting of the peacekeeping cap, the passage of new START, increased attention to conflict/crisis in Africa. Significant disappointment: continued failure to adequately fund and staff State and USAID.

Alma: I was surprised that transatlantic relations did not warm up more. President Obama came to office with high popularity ratings on the part of Europeans—and their political leaders. “Old Europe” was hoping for a drastic change in attitude on the part of the United States after the eight years of the Bush presidency. However, the relations have remained oddly distant. There has been a similar disappointment with Africa. The rest of the world expected Obama to bring to the U.S. presidency a more internationalist view, based on his multicultural background and education. But the United States did not want a President who devotes too much time to foreign policy while there is a crisis at home. And President Obama himself had an ambitious political agenda, in the pursuit of which he needed to make major strides very quickly after his election. As a result, he focused—understandingly—on gathering domestic support and downplayed what the rest of the world saw as his value added. An illustration of this is President Obama’s facial expressions when he received the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2009 (“for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”). Maybe I am reading too much into this, but I felt that in addition to the “Why, but why?” puzzled look, his uneasy smile hinted at a more daunting: “What is the backlash going to be at home?”

Gulliver: Frankly, I’m surprised the administration has spent so much time and effort on a subject that seems basically irrelevant to the president’s political fortunes: Afghanistan. Considering the state of the economy, it’s hard to imagine the mid-term elections having gone any worse for the Democrats if the White House had deemphasized the war effort and drawn down our overseas presence. The Woodward book gave me the strong sense that the president has a realistic view about OEF’s uncertain (and perhaps even damaging) relationship to genuine national security, so I’m shocked he lacked the conviction to stand up to senior military advice.

2. What do you think are Obama's, Clinton's, and Gates' biggest accomplishments and biggest disappointments in these two years?

Lil: I think one clear accomplishment is the improvement of relations with some of our key allies. Some of these relationships had been badly damaged during the Bush Administration and it seems to me that many of these problems, particularly in Western Europe have been resolved. Things have also improved at the UN, both with other Permanent Missions and in the Secretariat. I think a disappointment on that front has been the inability (or perhaps the unwillingness) to get the UN Secretary General to grow a spine and show some leadership. I really hope that the US doesn’t support Ban Ki-Moon running for re-election. His tenure has been disastrous.

Another, and I don’t know who the credit goes to on this one, maybe all three is the clear improvement in policy-making processes and dialogue at the most senior levels. It’s clear that the President, Clinton and Gates work together very well. That’s a good change. I think that the mutual support that Gates and Clinton provide each other has had clear positive repercussions.

I think one accomplishment for Gates has been his work to trim the defense budget. He’s been foiled by Congress at times but I think this is very important, along with his support for more capacity at State and USAID. It’s disappointing that he hasn’t been more successful so I guess a disappointment is the inability to work with Congress—though the passing of new START during the lame duck session was an accomplishment for sure.

Gulliver: I wrote this question, but I still have a hell of a time answering it. I think the president did great work to keep Bob Gates at the Pentagon longer than most people expected, and the level of coordination and collaboration – at least in the public eye – across the entire national-security team has to be considered as an accomplishment for all three. Avoiding a major political fight on the evolution of our missile-defense construct toward the Phased Adaptive Approach was another big highlight.

On the negative side of the ledger, I’m discouraged by the collective failure to take steps in the direction of major national security reform despite apparent (or at least expressed) unity of purpose across State and Defense. Without that, the QDDR doesn’t mean much of anything. And then, obviously, there’s Afghanistan: I wish one of these three would go beyond the boilerplate talking points and try to make a reasoned case for how the war will make Americans safer, but instead we’re treated to Bushian no-safe-havens rationales and appeals to the grievous threat of terrorism.

3. What do you think about the decisions the president has made about Afghanistan? Were you surprised about the escalation?

Lil: I think the civilian surge makes sense and I can’t remember whether I was surprised about it, more relieved I suppose. I was just at an event yesterday where PRT commanders complained (again) that they basically had four civilians on their team (though those numbers are growing). I think there are still huge problems with the amount of money we are spending in Afghanistan, mostly because Afghanistan lacks the capacity to absorb the money in a transparent and effective way. I haven’t yet seen the new US anticorruption strategy, which McClatchy said recently would instruct focus on low level corruption and avoid the political disasters of going after Karzai and senior Afghan officials. Of course, I think it’s disappointing that our leaders aren’t willing to go after officials whose corruption is so blindingly obvious that it makes us look like naïve children for not noticing (either that or hypocrites, depending on your perspective). I was shocked to discover that fighting corruption was not a focus on the Bush Administration and that efforts had basically begun just months after Obama took office.

Similarly, I think the troop surge also makes sense. I don’t feel like I know enough about how operations are being conducted to say how much it will help but it seems that if you say you’re doing population centric COIN and you want to secure the population, then you’ll need more troops to do it (so long as they’re not razing villages for obscure reasons).

Alma: Democrat presidents are rarely at ease with the military. They have to fight two common beliefs: that they do not know much about military issues and that they will make decisions that are generally adverse to the military. President Obama was aware of these pitfalls and accordingly refrained from micro-managing the conduct of the war in Afghanistan. He also gave a large amount of initiative to his top commanders there. And when is the last time a general asked for less troops rather than more? So: no, I am not surprised about the escalation.

Gulliver: I’ve already touched on this, but I think they’ve been almost universally terrible. “Obama’s Wars” probably made me feel even worse about this, because it reinforced earlier suggestions – contrary to campaign rhetoric – that the president is actually a thoughtful skeptic of the war-as-counterterrorism approach. So I suppose I’m retroactively surprised about the escalation, though it seemed basically preordained and unavoidable in December of 2009. There’s a lot of blame to go around on this one – the coordinated McChrystal/Petraeus/Mullen pitch for escalation, however inevitable and effective, was a real disappointment for me – but it comes back to the president giving strong guidance and having the confidence to make unpopular decisions. On this, he failed.

4. What's your expectation for what will happen to troop numbers in Afghanistan over the course of this year? How about by 2014?

Lil: I think there will be a small decrease this year and probably another in 2012 (basically for domestic consumption during the campaign). I think Administration have been steadily walking back the 2011 deadline and they’ll continue to do so. As for numbers by 2014, I think that will depend on how things go between now and then. The decision last week to push for a large increase in the size of the ANSF to me suggests that things aren’t going as well as military leadership would like and that increasing the nominal size of the forces will be the only way to ensure that there are enough forces, eventually, to guarantee some security. I don’t have much evidence to back to that but really the Pentagon’s quarterly reports on the state of the ANSF don’t give me much confidence.

Alma: Some U.S. troops will withdraw over the Summer, but most likely in very small numbers. The ¨surge¨ of troops has only now completely arrived to Afghanistan, and there will be pressure to use these big numbers to the fullest before they go back home—in other words, give the surge a chance. Also, since withdrawal has repeatedly been made conditional to improved security conditions on the ground, the whole process is likely to take years—probably extending beyond 2014. As for non-U.S. troops, the answer is easier: there will be fewer and fewer of them. There is no other country committed as deeply as the United States, and there is no other country that feels its credibility, where it to withdraw, would suffer as much as the United States’. This credibility issue has led U.S. presence in Vietnam or even Lebanon to last much longer than the interests they pursued and their chances of success warranted. Countries who do not have this credibility issue and public opinions hostile to the Afghanistan intervention will call it quits.

Gulliver: I think the numbers will remain basically static through the end of 2012, and that ISAF, the Pentagon, and the White House will juke the numbers by withdrawing support troops. I don’t envision widespread transfer of battlespace-ownership to the ANSF (maybe some in RC-West), though I don’t have nearly the detailed knowledge of operational geography to pass anywhere close to conclusive judgment on this. As for 2014… NATO’s on the record on that one, and I don’t see it slipping. Whoever’s in the White House will rationalize and justify, conclude that our work there has been productive and meaningful to national security, and we’ll keep a few thousand SOF and aviation assets at Bagram and Kandahar into the indefinite future.

5. Do you think the "Global War on Terror" still means anything? How about the Struggle Against Violent Extremism? Where do you think we are with AQ – do they still matter? Is terrorism the primary threat to the U.S., or should we be focused elsewhere?

Lil: Well, I don’t think either meant much in the first place. I think AQ (in its various regional incarnations) still matters but I don’t think that terrorism is the primary threat to the US. I don’t think I buy the argument that our focus on terrorism has been the reason why we haven’t been attacked again, I think we’ve just been lucky (and would-be terrorists were thwarted by their own incompetence). I think that rather than focus on AQ, we should be focused on what makes people want to join AQ. I know that varies from place to place but that’s what foreign policy is for. I’m not sure that we’ve yet achieved that balance in terms of either human or financial resources that are being spent on diplomacy and foreign assistance.

Alma: Did GWOT ever mean anything? It was a catchphrase whose reach and grandeur was a good match for the shock people felt after 9/11. As a political and military concept, it is empty of meaning and useless (and I feel like I am beating a dead horse here—so many people smarter than me have made that demonstration before me that I would not know where to start). Law enforcement is usually the appropriate response to terrorism—war is not. I am not denying the usefulness of a few well-targeted air strikes from time to time. But overhauling the entire political (and social) landscape of a country? This fulfills other aims: hubris, posturing, you name it. But not counter-terrorism.

Gulliver: I don’t think either of the terms have ever had any analytical or operational utility, but they’ve certainly informed the strategic context in which the military conceives of and explains its plans. There are other people who can speak in a far more informed way about the ongoing campaign against al-Qaeda, but I’d just say that I think we do a tremendous disservice to our national sense of self when we build our approach to the world around the one specific anti-globalist, rejectionist element that’s proven most capable of doing violence to our citizens. I don’t mean to suggest at all that 9/11 and terrorism aren’t a big deal, but I’d urge perspective: the reason AQAM are relevant is for their opposition to the global system of commerce and relationships that we’ve helped to create in our own image and still largely lead. Let’s not forget about the rest of it, and about how important it is to maintain that system and manage our place in it to positive effect.

6. Do you think "reset" with Russia is "working"? What does that mean to you? Do you foresee any further expansion of NATO during Obama's tenure? If so, which countries?

Lil: I really don’t have anything intelligent to say on Russia. So I’ll skip that. NATO expansion, something else I know next to nothing about so I’ll leave that to Gulliver and others. I do think though that it’s good that France came back.

Gulliver: I’m a Russia skeptic. I lived in a country that’s been partitioned and occupied by Russia four times. I wrote my master’s thesis about expanding NATO to hedge against Russian recidivism. I don’t believe Russia can be meaningfully deflected from the pursuit of its own interests. That said: yes, it’s working. A stable international system can only be maintained by taking Russia into account; this doesn’t mean we’re always going to win Moscow’s support, but Russian influence needs to be managed. Sometimes we’re just hoping they’ll clear a very low bar: continue to negotiate arms agreements, don’t escalate aggression in the Caucasus, don’t reflexively oppose U.S. interests in the Security Council. At other times, we’re looking for more meaningful and significant action: help crack down on piracy, line up with the rest of the world on Iranian nuclear progress, don’t sell sophisticated weapons to pariah states, take action to ease tensions with NATO. Sending the message that we view our relationship with Russia in a pragmatic, reasonable way – that we take their interests into account and don’t press for meaningless advantage – will pay off in the future, and we’re already seeing benefits.

I think NATO’s done growing, and that’s as it should be. There’s no one else the U.S. ought to commit to defending, no matter the circumstances – the Georgia troubles in 2008 underlined that – and such a pledge at this point could only be taken as a symbolic gesture of aggression (e.g. we’re going to protect Georgia because we like their political system better than yours, not because it serves our material interests). There could be meaningful progress with Ukraine, but their national politics have taken a turn over the last several years that makes that seem unlikely.

7. Can you envision a scenario where U.S. troops would be sent to the African continent in the next two years? Where might they go next, if anywhere?

Lil: I have to say, I really don’t see this happening, or at least not in very large numbers. Don’t get me wrong, I think that it would be great if the US sent more staff officers to work in UN missions. I’m not saying a US general should take command of a UN operation but really, after seeing for myself how the military parts of some missions suffer from lack of good staff, I think even a few US O-4s to O-6s could do a lot of good on jobs ranging from logistics, to operational planning, to intelligence.

US troops are doing things like training African militaries (for example in Congo) or providing support to operations in Uganda elsewhere. I don’t see US troops going into Côte d’Ivoire, I really hope there’s no need to go into Liberia Liberia and I just don’t see the US sending troops to Zimbabwe or Sudan, even if Mugabe’s regime collapses and Sudan implodes. I think the US should support another western country going in to help (say if the French increased their presence in Côte d’Ivoire or the UK went into Zimbabwe post Mugabe) but I really don’t see the US leading any kind of mission. As we’ve discussed before, I think the US could do a lot of good by helping to go after the LRA but since MK previously outlined how that would work, I won’t rehash it here.

Alma: US troops are already on the African continent, where they train numerous local armies. This “quiet intervention” should remain as quiet as possible to be effective, and I have no doubt it will continue in the next two years. But if we are thinking big deployment Somalia-style, then I very much doubt this will be happening.

Gulliver: I’ll let the others speak to possible African hot-spots, but I think the enthusiasm for deployments that could involve casualties is really, really waning. (One curious effect of the Bush Doctrine and the COIN revolution is that Americans are probably now even MORE opposed to overseas intervention in the absence of a strong self-interested rationale. “Counterterrorism” is the vestigial exception.) We’ll still do security cooperation and capacity-building, but the uniformed U.S. footprint for these missions is much, much smaller than most people think. (“U.S.-trained” Ugandan AMISOM peacekeepers mostly get their instruction from State-contracted DynCorp and MPRI folks in baseball caps, not green-suiters.)

8. Do you see isolationist/anti-engagement sentiment playing a significant part in the 2012 election? Or foreign policy at all?

Lil: Yes, I think this could play a big part, combined with concern over budget deficits, high unemployment at home, and a desire to appease the electorate here. I think that this could be a big problem because it could cause us to ignore problems or simply abandon challenging places and that this could later come back to haunt us.

Alma: Isolationism was already very present in the run-up to the 2010 elections. U.S. presidents are expected to focus on America first, and this is even more true in times of economic (and, inevitably social) turmoil. The President’s contenders are expected to show how the country’s leader really does not have his constituents’ interests at heart, and prefers to get busy with larger issues than help the average Joe get a job or keep his house. So yes, the 2012 election will be played largely on domestic themes, and with an isolationist mindset.

Gulliver: Perhaps surprisingly, I don’t. There might be some talk of restraint, retrenchment, or even isolationism among early Republican pretenders, but there’s simply no chance a Republican nominee will come at Obama talking national security as a fiscal responsibility issue. Eric Cantor and John McCain may make some noise about how defense spending is on the table for budget cuts, but no mainstream Republicans are prepared to reconsider firmly-entrenched ideas about American exceptionalism and global primacy, and the establishment is too afraid of tea-party extremism to propel an isolationist libertarian to the nomination.

The president, for his part, has spent the last two years insulating himself from traditional accusations of weak-kneed liberalism; the only way his opponents make any ground is by emphasizing alleged humiliations like “reset”, China’s rise, and “failure” on Iran. Foreign and security policy just doesn’t look like a useful campaign tool this time around, particularly with the economy in the tank. Engagement is here to stay, which is a good thing. Unfortunately, that means that interventionist mistakes like Afghanistan will probably stick around, too.

9. Any guesses on the next SECDEF? How long do you think Gates will stay?

Lil: Umm, I hope it’s not Joe Lieberman. Gates staying, I don’t know.

Gulliver: I keep hearing Danzig, and Flournoy’s an intriguing option, but I don’t think my guesses are better than anybody else’s. The fact of the matter is that the next guy (or gal) will 100%, ironclad, stone-cold, for certain not be as effective as Gates. And that’s a shame. Fingers crossed that he’ll stick around through the next election cycle, but I’m not even sure he knows the plan at this point.

10. Do you see a realistic possibility of significant cuts to the defense budget, significant increases of the State/foreign aid budget, or any combination of the two? Is a pooled resources proposal still alive? Do you think there's a chance of significant national security reform during the Obama administration? If so what should it (or will it) look like?

Lil: I think that budgets are going to be cut across the board but I hope that the cuts will be less significant at State and USAID. I think actually that rationalizing the Defense budget (or trying to) is one of Gates’ greatest accomplishments.

I haven’t heard about the pooled resources thing in a while. I wonder if it died with the UK budget cuts (my understanding is that was the model).

As for national security reform, I don’t know what the chances are (Congress) but I do hope we’ll end up sometime with some kind of national security career in the government that makes doing this job attractive and of course positive for our policies.

Gulliver: As I noted before, I consider it a massive disappointment that this isn’t already happening (at least not with any great alacrity) with a national security team in place that is perhaps more amenable to sweeping reform than any other ever has been or will be. We could use a root-and-branch reexamination of the fundamental roles and missions of our various departments and agencies, but I don’t think that’s going to happen: we’ll use the ongoing wars as an excuse (“you can’t drive and rebuild the engine at the same time!”), but that argument ignores the fact that in our new “security” paradigm, we’re always driving. Congress poses some pretty serious roadblocks to an effort like this, too, what with the impact on oversight and what could reasonably be seen as a consolidation of power in an Executive Branch optimally organized for operations. My great fear is that a failure to examine these important questions – what is the difference between foreign policy and security policy? Who should decide which partners we’ll build the capacity of? How do our security objectives nest within our broader foreign policy objectives… or have we unconsciously flipped the two? – will result in the accumulation of more authority, responsibility, and influence in the Pentagon: the much-feared “militarization of foreign policy” (a term that I really dislike despite its literal descriptive accuracy).

11. What's the national security/foreign policy story from the last two years that nobody knows, but everybody should?

Lil: No clue. I think we as Americans need to become better at educating ourselves about what other countries are like, what lives people have in countries we care about, and also what life is like in countries that have long suffered from conflict, violence, lack of resources, and the absence of democracy. I don’t think Americans should just be discovering that Ben Ali ruled Tunisia with an iron fist or that we care about Guinea because of tin (and of course pervasive human rights violations). I think though that this is a question of education. Maybe that’s the big story: how are problems in our educational system going to affect our ability to interact with the world and do so in a way that promotes peace, trade, development, and democracy. More generally, how is educational system going to help ensure that the next time we decide to intervene somewhere, we’re better prepared, we have more people available with language skills, cultural knowledge etc.

Gulliver: We’re spending billions of dollars a year trying to stand up and increase the capacity and capabilities of foreign security forces, and we really, fundamentally have no idea what we’re doing. The U.S. military knows how to translate weapon systems into capabilities with concepts, doctrine, training, TTPs, and so on, and then how to translate those capabilities into operational effectiveness; we don’t know how to teach a foreign partner to do this with any degree of consistency or effectiveness, and often the obstacles will be obscure and inaccessible to us. What’s worse is that we talk like we can do this in our sleep, and our senior leaders seem snowed enough by it to imagine that security force assistance is more about the sculptor than it is the clay. We’re a blind guy with four broken fingers trying to build the David out of tin foil and pebbles.

12. What's the most meaningful and effective foreign/security policy action Obama could take before 2012?

Lil: I think probably starting to increase capacity at State and USAID.

Gulliver: Predictable, but: withdraw the vast majority of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. It’s a shit sandwich, I know, but it’s one you’re gonna have to eat – letting it get cold isn’t going to make it taste better.

Overall F/SP Grade at mid-term?

Alma: There were some disappointments, but diplomatic efforts were made towards Muslims, the President handled well the McChrystal affair, and no outrageously wrong-headed foreign policy decision was made so far--a drastic change from the previous administration. So I think Obama's self-attributed grade of B+ is, overall, a rather fair one.

Gulliver: The president’s encouragingly pragmatic approach to our most important relationships and obvious willingness to manage the rise of global competitors have been outweighed by the lost promise of major national security reform and the disappointing cave-in on Afghanistan. I give the administration a D+.