The alpha and omega

IN THE NEWS
Draft Zinni! has an excellent discussion of the not-so-subtle way in which US foreign policy increasingly depends on military power. In fact, Congress is now making the State Department budget part of the Defense Department budget.

State has been on the short end of the budgetary stick for a long time. The DoD has a larger budget by necessity: people in uniform, carrier battle groups, nuclear warheads, foreign bases, and other line items cost far more money than diplomats and embassies. In Washington bureaucratic politics, the size of your budget and the number of people defines, in large part, the clout you have in decision-making and implementation.

But making the State Department effectively subordinate to the Department of Defense? That's a silly idea on a number of levels:

• Counterterrorism and counterinsurgency include military components, but victory isn't possible without the joint efforts of civilian agencies.
• In general, this approach to drafting a budget turns Clausewitz on his head. Force is the instrument of political objectives, not the other way around.

And who ultimately manages the DoD's budget? Why, the Secretary of Defense, of course. And which recently-appointed Cabinet official received hard questions about her ability to maintain an independent position on vital national security positions? Our newly-minted Secretary of State.

However, I don't want to personalize the important issues at hand. Congress' approach to the budget is distorting the institutional paths through which national security decisions are made and implemented.

Comments

[J.]

Very true. You might also add that the practice of using defense supplemental budgets for other than emergency issues, to include State dept projects, is another symptom of how Congress has lost its way on keeping national security decisions on the straight and narrow. It's ridiculous to say that DOD can't predict what it's spending in Afghan and Iraq ops, but Congress gets those stars in their eyes and goes comatose.

[Kingdaddy]

Especially in Afghanistan, they should know how much they're spending--and how much they SHOULD be spending. What a tragedy, to have lost interest in Afghanistan yet again, before the hard work is done.

[cabins in utah]

There are times which are manipulated by higher fathers. But still truth always prevails.