Demilitarize the C.I.A.

  This post is featured on, and the copyright held by, The New York Times.

Although the departure of General Petraeus is a significant loss for the intelligence community, it is also an opportunity to better balance intelligence support for military and diplomatic operations.

This will be no easy challenge. Roughly 80 percent of the intelligence budget is financed through the Defense Department – an old administrative arrangement that was never meant to bias intelligence agencies’ support for military operations over diplomatic ones.

Since the end of the cold war, however, well-informed observers on both sides of the political aisle have seen a trend toward the militarization of intelligence operations. As the United States engaged in wars in Somalia, the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan diplomatic budgets declined relative to military ones and the intelligence community increasingly justified operations by emphasizing support for the war planners and fighters.

Improved intelligence support to military operations is a good thing; we need to win the wars we fight. But perhaps the most important lesson from the Benghazi attack, during which an American ambassador lost his life trying to help Libyans build a new democracy, is that diplomacy is on the front line too. It also carries risks and needs strong intelligence to be effective.

The United States has over 280 diplomatic posts worldwide. They are working on drug interdiction, arms control negotiations, border security, counterterrorism, access to energy and trade, implementing sanctions, fair trade and the like. Intelligence helps diplomats recognize everything from cheating on agreements to social unrest and surprise attack. And it helps them make decisions that lower the risks and consequences of war.

The new director should rededicate the C.I.A. to supporting these diplomatic operations. Our ambassadors need robust intelligence to manage the Syrian crisis, ease the transition in Afghanistan, help advise and rebuild war-torn countries such as Libya, ensure the security of Americans and their borders, move food and other resources safely from ports to refugees, and resolve conflicts that cost U.S. companies money and jobs.

The new C.I.A. director needs to understand these non-military requirements and fight for the resources necessary to support civilian decision-making.

(Cowriten with Jennifer E. Sims)

Peering into the Intel Budget

Intelligence budgets are declining.  The Military Intelligence Program is down substantially from the 2010 peak and, while change in the National Intelligence Program (NIP) is far less dramatic, its value in 2012 also is below that from 2011.  But why?

Virtually everything about intelligence budgets is classified.  The only exceptions are the top-line requested and appropriated values – but even that small nugget of information provides insight into the change we observed in 2012.

Casting everything in dollars adjusted for 2012 inflation, the FY11 NIP appropriation was $55.5 billion.  The Office of the Director of National Intelligence reported in February 2011 that the FY12 NIP request was $55 billion, a decrease of $500 million (0.9 percent).  Late last month it indicated that $53.9 billion actually was appropriated, $1.1 billion (2 percent) less than the request.

Congress appropriates, and the NIP is falling in part because Congress is exercising its own discretion.  Still the White House budget request provides a great deal of framing for the process, and the NIP is falling also because the administration proposed it.  Congress accelerated that cut, but the difference was one of degree.  Both institutions agreed that the budget was going down.

Each of these points begs follow-on “Why” questions – why did the administration submit a request that fell short of inflation, and why did Congress choose to cut even further.  Unfortunately, this is where we hit the limits of intelligence budget transparency.  Budget pressures could be driving it further down, or shuffles related to war spending, or policy disputes between the White House and Congress – or something else.  For now we can only respond to “Why” with the answer “Because Congress (and the administration) chose it.”

Shout Out from Sonenshine

Our latest collaboration with the American Academy of Diplomacy, an update to 2008’s Foreign Affairs Budget for the Future, is a good one.  But don’t take our word on it – earlier this month Tara Sonenshine, Under Secretary of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, tweeted her endorsement.

“People matter in world affairs,” the Under Secretary remarked.  Nowhere is that truer than in her own mission area.  Our Diplomacy in a Time of Scarcity report determines that:

The need for public diplomacy is as strong as ever, if not stronger… The United States must manage its real and perceived role in the world… Public Diplomacy is the key tool to manage these perceptions, yet it remains under resourced despite the gains of the last few years. Now is not the time to stop building these tools and skills—resident in the State department’s public diplomacy personnel.

Communicating America to individuals around the world is a foundational manifestation of our open, democratic values and an essential part of diplomacy.  Our team is committed to tracking progress in this area, as well as how civilian and military institutions are balanced within it.

Sequester Sausage

Stimson’s Gordon Adams recently appeared on This Week in Defense News for an expert roundtable discussion on sequestration and the 2012 presidential election. He reminded us that:

Sequestration is not a doomsday machine. It’s just a tool in this negotiation.

The threat of sequestration was intentionally created by lawmakers to prompt negotiation. We’ve long discussed sequestration’s role as a tool that would force Republicans and Democrats to compromise over the federal budget.  As Stimson’s Russell Rumbaugh has emphasized, neither side wants sequestration to happen and both sides concur that the potential spending cuts would have real consequences for the Defense Department.

 Negotiations, especially about the federal budget, still are difficult and messy.  Hence the prognosis Gordon offered during the roundtable:

I don’t think you are really going to get a grand bargain. I think you are going to get sausage.

With just over a month left until sequestration would take effect, we look forward to seeing how that sausage gets made.



The $68 Billion Question: Sen. Coburn’s plan to save the Pentagon

This post is featured on, and the copyright held by, Foreign Policy.

We spend a lot in the Defense Department that doesn't have much to do with defense, and it costs us a lot of money. The latest documentation of this reality is in the report Sen. Tom Coburn released Thursday: Department of Everything. Coburn supported the draft Simpson-Bowles report a couple of years ago that proposed budget reductions and revenue increases, and he has been a consistent gadfly against wasteful federal spending, including defense.

In his new, well-researched and very detailed report, he concludes that we could save nearly $68 billion over ten years if we just got DOD out of doing things that have little or nothing to do with the basic mission of the forces -- in his words "fighting and winning the nation's wars." Things like breast cancer research, electric cars, wind power, running a U.S. school system for children of troops, searching for evidence of extra-terrestrials, tuition assistance programs, and one of the ten largest grocery store chains in the United States (the military commissaries).

Coburn's report is a worthy inheritor of the tradition of "Golden Fleece" awards handed out annually by another gadfly senator, William Proxmire, three decades ago to "recognize" wasteful federal spending. But he could have gone a lot further.

Click to read more ...

Report Release: A New US Defense Strategy for a New Era

Yesterday Stimson released a new report titled A New US Defense Strategy for a New Era: Military Superiority, Agility, and Efficiency. The report is the culmination of an extensive, year-long study conducted with the help of 15 former military officers, defense strategists, and international affairs experts, including Marine Corps General James Cartwright, Army General B.B. Bell, Admiral Bill Owens, Leslie Gelb, and Anne-Marie Slaughter.

The report highlights ten operating principles that emphasize relying on smaller military units that can be based in the United States and rotated quickly to more austere bases around the world; avoiding being drawn into protracted land wars; revising Cold War nuclear planning assumptions; rebalancing US forces to focus on Asia rather than Europe; and strengthening technological and scientific assets to ensure that the United States maintains its technological edge.

As Dr. Barry Blechman, Chairman of the Committee and Co-Founder of Stimson, explained to Reuters:

[This strategy favors] a shift, a greater shift, toward an expeditionary model of U.S. military power that moves away from the kind of static big bases that characterized our Cold War posture to rotational deployments of forces in and out of regions to exercise.

As Congress and the White House dive deeper into the budget negotiations that began today, we expect this report to provide a critical framing for the associated defense strategy choices.

Finding the Administrator Balance

“Diplomacy in a Time of Scarcity”, a collaborative report co-authored by The American Academy of Diplomacy and Stimson, is making news headlines. Government Executive has released a news article discussing the report’s call for increased hiring at the State Department. 

Ensuring a highly qualified and robust staff is a key factor in upholding America’s security and foreign policy objectives.  Although there has been an increase in State Department personnel over the past few years, many of the new employees are on the administrative side, rather than out doing fieldwork. Ambassador Thomas Boyatt, director of the AAD/Stimson effort, told GovExec that:

The growth over the past four years has a Washington bias and an administrator bias.

Specifically, of the more than 3,000 positions created in the last few years, 37 percent went to support functions.  Some of this growth may be explained not by State department personnel growth but the growing use of International Cooperative Administrative Support Services (ICASS). ICASS is the program created to reduce costs for US government personnel abroad by sharing administrative functions.

Ensuring that administration is effective and efficient is important to the diplomatic effort.  At the same time it does not negate the need for growing the core diplomatic staff. We hope that “Diplomacy in a Time of Scarcity” and the media attention it is getting will continue to highlight the importance of addressing core diplomatic personnel levels.



Fiscal Cliff Notes: The only things you need to know about the coming budget fight

This post is featured on, and the copyright held by, Foreign Policy.

With the November 6 election, the shadow play over the defense budget and the fiscal cliff has come to an end. For the past 15 months, we have been entertained by a drama scripted in the Budget Control Act that appears to threaten a fiscal cliff for discretionary spending in January 2013. Defense has played one of the lead roles.

President Obama has argued that if Congress wants to eliminate the threat of automatic spending cuts, Republicans need only put revenues on the table. In an election year? Unlikely. And, soon after agreeing to the fiscal cliff, the stalwart "defenders of defense" in the GOP came down with a sudden case of buyer's remorse, arguing that national security would be threatened unless defense were somehow exempted from the planned cuts.

Senators McCain, Ayotte, and Graham manufactured a circus big top that traveled to bases and defense factories, spreading "fiscal cliff fear" as far as they could. The defense industry, with a big stake in the defense budget, enthusiastically joined the chorus, threatening the loss of a million jobs. (That is, they went along until it was clear that their politicking might backfire, so they drew back.)

It was always a show, theater for the electorate. The need to "defend defense" was always exaggerated. The American military is far and away the strongest in the world. Moreover, in recent years the United States has been spending more on defense, in constant dollars, than at any time since 1945. While losing $50 billion through "sequester" from the planned defense budget this fiscal year would pose management challenges, it would be survivable.

But now that the entertainment portion of the program has ended, it's time to get real. Here are the five things about the defense budget the next administration has to deal with:

Click to read more ...

Triangulating Air Force Voices on Bomber’s Nuclear Mission

Major General William Chambers, the Air Force's assistant chief of staff for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration, took to AOL Defense last week to defend the long-range strike bomber.  Chambers remarked that:

Some also argue for eliminating the nuclear role of our bomber force, seeing little likelihood that they would be employed. The nuclear capable bomber remains a highly flexible deterrent critical in many potential crises. And, it is the most visible leg of the triad and therefore invaluable in demonstrating national resolve.

His focus is understandable.  The Two-Star undoubtedly heard his Four-Star, then-Chief of Staff General Norton Schwartz, when he told the House Armed Services Committee last year that the Air Force will delay certifying the bomber’s nuclear mission in order to reap the budget savings.  Same for the comment made much more recently by the Three-Start head of Global Strike Command, Lt. Gen. James Kowalski, who seemed to imply that the Air Force may be willing to compromise the bomber’s nuclear mission altogether if the cost trade-offs become strict enough.

All of these positions are compatible.  The Air Force can prefer full-speed development of the bomber’s nuclear mission even while delaying certification in response to budget pressures and possibly being willing to drop that requirement from this platform if those pressures increase significantly. 

Chambers’ column serves as a reminder that the Air Force isn’t going to just concede this cut, and it’s an important additional data point about where the Air Force presently stands on offering it.  The new bomber isn’t about to lose its nuclear mission.  But Chamber’s column also doesn’t mean that the Air Force won’t volunteer it as the circumstances of this build-down change.

Intel on the Intel Budget

On Tuesday, the Defense Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released their intelligence budget figures for FY12. For the second straight year, the US intelligence budget has decreased even before adjusting for inflation.  After posting $80.1 billion in funding for 2010, the 2011 intelligence budget dropped to $78.6 billion and the 2012 budget fell an additional $3.2 billion to $75.4 billion. US intelligence budget numbers are compiled by combining the funds of the Pentagon’s Military Intelligence Program (MIP) with the more strategic National Intelligence Program (NIP).

Intelligence costs are largely included in the 050 National Defense account. While the NIP budget seems to have stabilized since the 2010 intelligence budget peak, the MIP budget has declined over 20% during the same period. This is a much more significant percentage cut than the total defense budget (i.e., including wars), which has been reduced by 6% from its peak in FY10. Just as we observed last year, it will be interesting to see if this trend continues.

Diplomacy in a Time of Scarcity

Yesterday Stimson hosted a panel discussion to mark the release of “Diplomacy in a Time of Scarcity,” a follow up to the 2008 “Foreign Affairs Budget for the Future” and another collaboration with The American Academy of Diplomacy. Featured panelists included Ambassador Thomas Pickering, Ambassador Tom Boyatt, Ambassador Ronal Newmann, Stimson President Ellen Laipson, and BFAD Director Russell Rumbaugh.

The United States faces unprecedented challenges in conducting diplomacy and development as it responds to the residuals of three wars, a constantly changing global environment, and a stern, new era of fiscal austerity.  This squeeze threatens to end recent International Affairs personnel expansion before achieving the goals Stimson and AAD outlined in 2008 – or even to erode recent gains before the needed improvements have been realized or new missions have been absorbed.  "Diplomacy in a Time of Scarcity" examines the challenges of the world today and the progress in preparing our foreign policy personnel for those challenges.

As both a panelist and contributor to the report, Russell Rambaugh explained the importance of maintaining a full strength civil service to fulfill our foreign policy needs:

Diplomatic capacity has seen significant gains in the last four years, and over the last decade, but these gains should not be overstated. They represent efforts to address long-standing deficiencies and shortages, and have not readied our diplomatic capacity for the challenges we already faced, let alone set us to proactively engage the changing challenges of tomorrow's world.

We hope that “Diplomacy in a Time of Scarcity” and the accompanying panel discussion will ground the discussion on how to make American diplomacy most effective in the coming years.

PRTs Live by the CERP?

US development efforts in Afghanistan led by Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) are reportedly wrapping up, according to the Wall Street Journal. These joint civilian-military teams made up of service-members, troops, diplomats, and experts have been responsible for disbursing aid and overseeing development projects across Afghanistan and, earlier, Iraq.  That work has generated both praise and controversy: praise for expeditionary, interagency cooperation, and controversy about whether their short-term focus affects sustainability and if their heavy military fingerprint compromises the message.

Funding is one part of the military fingerprint.  PRTs have relied substantially on the Defense Department’s Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP).  Indeed, the Wall Street Journal article ties the PRT wind-down to reductions in CERP funding. 

CERP has plummeted since 2009-10, yet the data doesn’t seem to predetermine an Afghanistan PRT outcome.  One of the two wars consuming CERP money (Iraq) ended in the same time frame, contributing to that reduction.  Meanwhile funds were relatively stable in 2011-12 and are requested to remain so in 2013, as shown by the graph below:

PRTs will long be studied for their influence on civil-military relations.  If that case history is preparing to close, though, it would seem to be more related to the timeline for transitioning security and governance responsibilities to the Afghans, as the head of Helmand’s PRT observed, than because of CERP funding.



Validating the Public Opinion Trend

A recently released survey, conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, shows strong public support for defense cuts, along with growing support for a reduced American military presence abroad.

Sixty-eight percent of those surveyed said the U.S. defense budget should be cut as a means to reduce the deficit. These results are in-line with Stimson’s own poll, conducted together with the Program for Public Consultation and the Center for Public Integrity, which found that three-quarters of those polled wanted to cut defense spending by an average of 18%. Together the two polls portray an American public unwilling to shelter the Pentagon from the broader debate about reining in government spending.

The Council concludes from its poll:

Americans have a strong desire to move on from a decade of war, to scale back spending, and avoid major new military entanglements. Today, Americans seek a foreign policy characterized by extensive use of American diplomatic resources; by cooperation with other nations in the pursuit of common goals; and by selective, multilateral deployments of military force.

Findings like these suggest its not surprising we’re in a defense build-down.

No-Longer-Cooperative Threat Reduction

Last week the Russian government indicated it would not renew the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Program. This two decade-old effort was established to dismantle nuclear and chemical weapons in the Former Soviet Union.  According to Sen. Richard Lugar, one of its sponsors, it has succeeded in deactivating more than 7,600 nuclear warheads and eliminating 498 ICBM silos, 33 ballistic missile submarines, and 155 strategic bombers.

Friction between Russia and the US about ballistic missile defense is the obvious correlate to this decision, and the New York Times reported that President Putin sets higher priority on arbitrating that issue than on cooperative nonproliferation.  Yet later in the same piece the Times connected this decision to another that has been generally overlooked: last month Russia tossed USAID out of the country. The resulting loss includes USAID support for child welfare, public health, land rights, microfinance, as well as an independent election-monitoring group.

None of this involves big money.  That makes Russia’s choices all the more telling, since they found these foreign aid programs worth resisting despite them being low-dollar.  And, though shutting down CTR may be more about the influence it adds to US foreign aid than about missile defense, it serves as a reminder of the economy and efficiency CTR has brought to nuclear threat reduction going back to the early ‘90s.

Drawing Lines around the US Nuclear Budget

One of the routine questions of budget estimating is what to include.  The US' nuclear arsenal is no exception.  It was with this in mind that we structuredour June nuclear costing report to be as transparent as possible, itemizing costs piece by piece while allowing analysts that use our work to set their own parameters.  Our goal was to factually ground the figures for strategic offensive weapons so that the debate can move on to judgments about which programs warrant being included. 

A number of different events suggest that has happened, including a reference in a Senate Energy and Water Appropriations hearing as well as citations in a two-part Washington Post investigation. Last week we again saw that evidence. In its recently released “What Nuclear Weapons Cost Us” report, Ploughshares departed from our study:

A comprehensive Stimson study estimates that DoD will spend between $268.9 and $301.7 billion to sustain, operate, and modernize the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal over the next ten years. The National Nuclear Security Administration, part of the Department of Energy, is expected to spend between $91.8 and $99.1 billion on the strategic nuclear arsenal over the next ten years.

From that point Ploughshares added missile defenses, environmental and health costs, nuclear threat reduction, and nuclear incident management.  All of these have clear connections to the nuclear arsenal.  Adding them in generates Ploughshares’ cost estimate of $640 billion over the next ten years for the US’ strategic offensive weapons as well as other programs related to that arsenal. 

We at Stimson are glad to see that our hard work in costing nuclear weapons continues to ground the larger debate.

Never Mind about Those Defense Jobs Cuts

This post is abridged from a commentary featured on, and whose copyright is held by, Foreign Policy.

For months now the defense industry has been making an impressive effort, in the midst of a general election campaign, to exempt the defense budget from going over the fiscal cliff -- sequestration -- set to take effect on January 2, 2013. At the heart of their advocacy has been the argument that a defense sequester would be devastating to employment, forcing the layoff of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of workers.  Several threatened to send their entire workforces notifications, under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, that they were at risk of layoff.

Politicians have piled on, starting with Republican defense stalwarts like Senators McCain, Graham, and Ayotte as well as House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Buck McKeon.  Democrats, perhaps in self-defense, joined the call, including Armed Services Chairman Sen. Carl Levin, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse.

Now they all face the Emily Litella moment. Emily was Gilda Radner's character on Saturday Night Live, who would run through reams of erroneous commentary until someone told her that she had misunderstood the topic of conversation. Just like Litella, industry has just now caught on to the real subject at hand – a presidential election – and ended its monologue with an abrupt: “Never mind.” 

Left hanging are the trade associations and politicians that had backed industry during its wrongheaded riff.

Click to read more ...

Destroyers and the Pacific Shift

Over the past several weeks we have noted some ambiguity about what specific naval assets the Pentagon intends to move to the Pacific in order to meet its goal of a “60/40 split” between the Pacific and Atlantic.

Deputy Secretary Ashton Carter helped clarify this in late July:

We will have a net increase of one aircraft carrier, four destroyers, three Zumwalt destroyers, ten Littoral Combat Ships, and two submarines in the Pacific in the coming years.

Still, as our own Matthew Leatherman pointed out:

Carter’s comment is a little bit vague here – the three Zumwalts could be part of four total destroyers going to the Pacific, or they could be in addition to them.

Since then Kathleen Hicks, Principal Deputy Under Secretary for Policy, tackled that question head-on:

We will have in the Pacific a net increase of: one aircraft carrier, four Burke Class destroyers, three Zumwalt class destroyers, ten littoral combat ships, and two submarines.

So it’s a total of seven destroyers to be added in the Pacific. Even with that larger shift, however, the Navy still doesn’t seem to hit its own 60 percent ratio. By our calculation it will be in the neighborhood of 57 percent, up three points from the 54 percent already homeported there.

Int'l Affairs Wandering in the Desert

Regular readers are aware by now that the super-committee's collapse led Budget Control Act caps to reset and International Affairs (fn 150) to move out of a “security” category and into a “non-defense” category. Although this means International Affairs will no longer be competing for dollars with the Defense Department, it may now be more vulnerable: the State Department and foreign aid don’t have a large base of domestic support, and decoupling it from defense removes the protective “national security” connection.

Our own Gordon Adams drove the point home to Politico's Kate Brannen* last Friday:

From my experience, it is better to be stuck in the cage with the 800-pound gorilla than wandering in the desert of non-defense discretionary spending.

Neither of these are easy plights, of course, making this another of the reasons for the International Affairs budget's likely decline.

*Subscription required

In an era of draw down, Dempsey's Capstone Concept fails to set priorities

This post is featured on, and the copyright held by, Foreign Policy.

We are living in an era of a defense "draw down." We have been there for two years. But the Defense Department is still framing strategy with little reference to the reality that resources are limited.

The latest iteration of this problem is the Capstone Concept for Joint Operations released, to little comment, on September 10. It represents an effort led by Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to put military flesh on the bones of the DOD strategy document released earlier this year.

And it has the same weakness as that strategy. It does not fully recognize that resources and strategy, money, missions, and capabilities are intrinsically linked. In an era of draw down, it is critical to recognize that link by making choices, setting priorities, and analyzing risk.

Click to read more ...

Speaking of Foreign Aid

During last night’s presidential debate, Barak Obama and Mitt Romney duked it out on a variety of campaign issues – all of them domestic, as planned.  They will increasingly turn to foreign policy in the coming two rounds, however, and it will be interesting to see how much foreign aid features in them. With voters’ minds focused on the economy, job creation, and the biggest parts of the government budget, it may remain under the radar.
 
Yet there’s some evidence to the contrary.  In an interesting campaign choice, Romney made foreign aid the main focus of a recent speech, at the Clinton Global Initiative, and he may revisit it in his just-announced foreign policy address on October 8th.

Already he has emphasized that the combination of private enterprise and foreign aid can have a real impact:

If foreign aid can leverage [the] massive investment by private enterprise, it may exponentially expand the ability to not only care for those who suffer, but also to change lives.

Few voters are likely to give foreign aid much thought on Election Day, and there’s no way of knowing how much attention Romney would pay to the issue if elected.  Still, profiling his position during the campaign implies that foreign aid is registering on the agenda.