Debt, national security, and our evolving perception of the two

Americans are of two minds about terrorism.  One fixates on the shocking nature of the attack, the stark contrast in values it represents, and the insecurity of knowing that someone somewhere has the stone-willed resolve to do them the most brutal harm if ever given the chance.  Another lambasts the expense to which we’ve gone for disappointing results.  Costs include a new federal department and intelligence system, military commitments from Mauritania to Mindanao, and a dramatically-restructured legal code for national security.

Our conflicted attitudes were exposed sharply in a recent Gallup poll.  Respondents labeled two threats as the most serious to the U.S.’ future well-being.  Terrorism is one.  The federal debt is the other.  Only a rounding error separates the two.

The threat of a terror attack undoubtedly is the most probable threat to our national security mounted by anyone outside of our borders.  Replays of airplanes plowing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have seared that risk into our minds.  Degraded as the Al Qaeda organization is, we are reminded routinely that its franchisees are still active and capable, from Najibullah Zazi in Denver to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab over Detroit.  This threat will demand serious, concerted attention for the foreseeable future.

The threat of terror attack, however, requires context.  It is not the biggest threat we as a country have faced.  Global nuclear annihilation on a hair-trigger is impassable in that category, and terror attack is nowhere close.  Nor is it the most probable threat to our national security today.  Federal debt stands in that place.

The Office of Management and Budget estimates that publicly-held debt will reach 63.6% of GDP this year, its highest level since fiscal year 1951 and more than 15 points higher than it was when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor (47%).  Although historically high by U.S. standards, this debt burden is far below that of Greece (113%) and Italy  (115%) – but not for long.  The Congressional Budget Office estimates that, after accounting for likely policy changes, we’ll be in that neighborhood in about 15 years. (See Figure A-2)

Debt of this severity challenges our national security in two related ways.  Most overtly, it permanently displaces other federal spending, including defense.  Lower defense spending is a virtue today, after a decade in which we shattered the Cold War cost ceiling, but the future is unpredictable.  Nothing suggests an upcoming need for defense spending this high, yet those future budgetary decisions must remain at our discretion.  Being forced to pay interest on record debt would reduce our discretion and the security that comes with it.

More generally, a vigorous economy is the foundation on which national security is built.  Not only will discretionary government spending wither as debt grows, so too will the credit opportunities on which our private sector depends.  Such a constrained economy will build fewer of the business relationships that preempt conflict and will lose the technological ingenuity on which our defenses depend.

Accounting for these facts throws the Gallup poll into a troubling light.  Equating today’s  threats of terror attacks and federal debt reveals just how disproportionately we focus on the near-term and the sensational at the expense of long-term, structural problems.  We are fighting a lesser adversary while the true enemy flanks us from behind.  Al Qaeda’s damage tally includes more than just the lives lost, infrastructure destroyed, and civil liberties foregone – it also includes spending ourselves into the ground even as the economy is flailing.  Gallup data aside, today federal debt is a fundamentally greater challenge to our national security than terrorism.

Demographic Demands: Long-term solutions to long-term problems in Afghanistan

Afghanistan owns the attention of policymakers throughout the national security apparatus.  A change in military command and a recent cut to aid spending have forced our overall strategy back onto the discussion table. This time around, our strategy must account for Afghanistan’s frequently-overlooked youth bulge.

The Afghan population nearly quadrupled over the past 60 years.  The result is a very youthful country – 43% of their current population is under the age of 14. Knowing that children are the future, the youth in this bulge will define Afghanistan even as we try to shape it.

Such an imbalance promises to exacerbate already-rampant unemployment, leading to social and political dissatisfaction. At the same time, success for the American operation rests largely on the Afghan people supporting, or at least accepting, it.  Building that base despite these troubling demographics is an inherently long-term problem requiring a long-term solution.

That long-term solution can be found in the very kind of development aid cut last week by Rep. Nita Lowey, chair of the House Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations Appropriations.  Rep. Lowey cut $3.9 billion in foreign aid funding from Afghanistan amid reports of corruption and lack of accountability for American dollars in Afghanistan. Though the rationale behind this action is valid, the choice itself is misguided for reasons explained by Budget Insight among others.

Afghanistan presents numerous challenges and issues that require more than one kind of solution for the foreseeable future. Military operations cannot help the fact that the number of school-age children in Afghanistan—a number that grew by over 3% in 2009—greatly exceed the capacity of the limited educational facilities currently available. As the Stimson Center’s demographer-in-residence Richard Cincotta wrote in Foreign Policy magazine last fall, “even if the Taliban stopped destroying schools and obstructing attendance, the government would face a momentous challenge in furnishing classrooms and teachers for this burgeoning generation.”  That’s a very big and unlikely “if.”

Approaching the issue from the opposite perspective, this youth bulge helps explain why the Taliban encounters little difficulty in attracting new recruits to their cause.  When the educational system and labor force cannot handle such an imbalanced population, the Taliban offers a viable alternative.

As a result, the demographic imbalance in Afghanistan ought to be a more prominent concern in developing our strategy there. In order to avoid dealing with a far more challenging Afghanistan in the future, the U.S. needs to put more funding—not less—into establishing long-term solutions today. Education lies at the heart of a thriving democracy. To even hope of seeing genuine democratic development in Afghanistan means that we have to support and enable the expansion of local educational infrastructure so that this hope has a fighting chance of becoming a reality.

This is not about creating American curricula in Afghanistan; rather, it is about facilitating a central component of the democratic system that we ostensibly aim to establish. A glance at the breakdown of the population captures the extreme nature of the population imbalance and how it will progress over the next few decades. Long-term problems require long-term solutions, and the solution here is development aid directed at addressing Afghanistan’s “youth bulge” and the challenges that it will inevitable cause in the years to come.  Rep. Lowey would be well-advised to restore it.

Fact Sheet: 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review

The 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) lacks the prioritization of missions and assessment of risk fundamentally required by the U.S. government. Wrapping an ever-broader mission set into the Pentagon’s remit and maintaining a zero-tolerance policy for risk aggravates budgetary indiscipline. The country cannot afford such unconstrained spending or the lack of meaningful strategy that facilitates it.

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Gordon Adams Featured on NPR

If overspending now endangers U.S. security, is it in part because the country is spending too much on security? This was just one of the questions posed during a Morning Edition segment on the National Public Radio on Monday, during which the expertise of Dr. Gordon Adams was prominently featured. Press play below to hear the segment in its entirety.

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Don’t Blame USAID alone for Corruption in Afghanistan

Last week, the House appropriations subcommittee markup on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs cut foreign aid to Afghanistan for FY2011. It did so because that aid allegedly is a source of corruption. Congress did not reciprocate by calling for a reduction in military spending.

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Coordinators Today, Reform Tomorrow

CBO recently released its cost estimate of a Senate bill passed by the SFRC that would authorize $2 billion over the FY2010-2011 time period to support Haiti reconstruction. This bill also creates a Senior Coordinator of the United States Government for Haiti.

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Stimson Brief: The Future of S/CRS

As the long-awaited Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) proceeds through its summer schedule, there has been a lot of speculation about the future of one particular part of the State Department: the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS). This office was created six years ago in the wake of Iraq to coordinate all parts of the government in planning for and responding to complex crises overseas and to provide additional personnel who could deploy quickly.

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Spending smarter by sharing the burden with NATO

All the world’s strategies for saving money boil down to two ideas: spend less by doing less, or spend less by doing smarter.  “Doing smarter,” of course, is far less painful than doing less, but finding the efficiencies that make this possible is a much bigger creative challenge.  One of the few clear ways to do this in the world of national security is through alliance-based burden sharing.  (Graphical data from CRS.)

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen drove this home last week in a speech dedicated to the implications of budget constraint on NATO policy.  Acknowledging that “all Allies are having to cope with the serious effects of the economic crisis,” Rasmussen concluded that “by sharing the burden within NATO, individual Allies can achieve a far greater level of security than they could achieve through any national approach – and at far lower cost.”

Secretary-General Rasmussen’s conclusion is spot on.  Sharing the burden in Afghanistan under the auspices of NATO’s International Security Force Assistance (ISAF) mission, for instance, nearly halves the troop requirement for the U.S.  102,554 NATO troops were in Afghanistan in April, but only 62,415 (61%) of those are American.

ISAF, of course, is just the most visible example of effective burden sharing.  NATO’s Partnership for Peace and Mediterranean Dialogue programs influence North African states and former Warsaw Pact members toward internal and regional stability, democratic development, and civilian control of the military.  And, looking forward, the recently-concluded Albright-van der Veer Commission suggested even broader burden sharing, including in the costly areas of missile defense and maritime security (see pg. 10).

These burden sharing opportunities, and the spending efficiencies they generate, have not escaped the Defense Department’s attention.  Secretary Gates recently urged NATO allies to maintain their resolve, and their spending, for near-term challenges.  (See Gates’ June comments in London and Brussels.)  Unstated in this push is the reality that each dollar spent on NATO by the Europeans is a dollar the Pentagon doesn’t have to find itself.

Politically uncomfortable as that reality is, Secretary Gates is right to capitalize on it.  In fact, fiscal constraint requires even more.  Today’s historically high defense budgets are unsustainable in the face of escalating debt and ever more unnecessary as the U.S moves toward withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan.  In fact, the fiscal constraint and defense discipline that we need requires doing less and doing it smarter, in cooperation with NATO and others.  Prioritizing missions is the order of the day.

Burden-sharing with NATO and others can make priority setting somewhat less painful.  Missions that we otherwise couldn’t afford can be retained at far less cost, on the condition that decision-making authority in these areas is diluted among our allies.  That cost is outweighed by the benefits in many instances, but not in all.

A critical decision must be made when the cost to a mission in terms of decision authority outweighs the benefit of greater remit and influence.  Can and should the U.S. resource and implement this mission unilaterally, or is this mission undoable or undesirable?  We must be prepared to fund and implement a select few missions unilaterally, especially those that involve the defense of our territory and sovereignty.  We also must be prepared to jettison a number of other missions that are beyond our means, unrealistic, lesser priority, or all three.

It is in this area, the relinquishing of missions, that defense budget policy is most intractable.  Yet we cannot afford to cling to everything – and NATO burden-sharing is not going to be the panacea to this problem.  Instead, NATO’s burden-sharing impact is apparent on the margins, allowing us to retain influence in missions that are not quite affordable on our own but still high enough priority to warrant attention.  This is where we spend less by doing smarter – and below that standard is where we must start to spend less by simply doing less.

Defense Cuts Must Be on the Table: A Series of Analyses

Stephen Walt’s recent blog piece asks many thoughtful questions about how the defense and international affairs budget – and our national security - might be affected given the austere fiscal environment of the upcoming year.

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Fact Sheet: Interagency National Security Reform

Collaboration among U.S. government agencies is insufficient. Accomplishing our national security goals in the face of an increasingly complex international environment and impending fiscal austerity requires the situation to improve. Those improvements can be measured, in part, by the clarity of national missions set by the President and by the rebalancing of roles between the State and Defense Department.

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Haiti Relief Efforts Hindered by Excessive Bureaucracy

The words excessive fragmentation, stalled, disagreement, and difficult odds are not terms one wants describing a massive disaster relief effort, but they are all over this week’s report by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee regarding the slowed relief efforts in Haiti following the January 12 earthquake that devastated the country.

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McChrystal-izing a Problem: The Militarization of American Statecraft

General Stanley McChrystal’s candid disrespect for civilian leadership is being treated as an issue of bad judgment and personality. But this episode reveals a much deeper dilemma for American statecraft, one that has long roots but has reached near crisis proportions over the past ten years: the gradual erosion of civilian leadership and the militarization of our foreign and security policy.

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Skelton offers DOD modest nudge away from budget discipline tsunami

Two movements of tsunami-like size are bearing down on the Defense Department and the all-inclusive, un-prioritized mission set that it laid out in the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). As the drawdown dates for U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan approach, those missions will be seen more and more as outlier cases rather than models of the new normal. Budget discipline is the second movement, and that tsunami is peaking.

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Central and South Asia: A FMF - Section 1206 Comparison

Refugees flocking into Uzbekistan after fleeing ethnic violence in southern Kyrgyzstan have arrived with a surprising story. The first ethnic Uzbeks to arrive cited marauding bands of ethnic Kyrgyz as their persecutors, but those that followed later recount coming under fire by mutinous soldiers moving in official armored personnel carriers.

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Is anybody listening? SFRC report weighs in on the BBG

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee released a report with political and strategic motivations last Thursday in response to the ongoing efforts by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) to hold up the confirmation process for members of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). Senator Coburn has delayed confirmations of all eight pending BBG governors (including the role of Chairman, vacant since 2008) while describing the BBG as “the most worthless organization in the federal government.” The review, titled “U.S. International Broadcasting—is anybody listening?—Keeping the U.S. Connected” was commissioned chiefly by Ranking Member Dick Lugar of Indiana and focused largely on the BBG, an independent federal agency funded through the international affairs budget function.

The bipartisan board includes all U.S. civilian international broadcasting, including Voice of America and Middle East Broadcasting Networks. BBG broadcasters produce programs in 60 languages for approximately 171 million people worldwide through radio, TV, Internet, and other new media productions. Although Congress initially created the Board in order to protect broadcasting operations from political complexities, it seems to have spiraled into quite the opposite, with partisan politics preventing the confirmation of most of the Board thus slowing its operations significantly.

In spite of these procedural challenges, BBG’s budget has steadily increased over the last decade, reaching $746 million thus far in FY2010, as BBG represents a significant portion of total US public diplomacy efforts.
The Lugar report does not mince words when acknowledging the shortcomings of the BBG with regard to demonstrable success of its programming in closed countries such as Iran as well as organizational and strategic flaws. With regard to the bureaucratic slowdown marked by partisan infighting at BBG, the report states that what was intended to be a political “firewall” has instead become a “football,” as we see here with Senators Lugar, Coburn, and others tossing the issue back and forth while a $750 million federal budget allocation is allocated without a full Board of governors, let alone its Chairman. In playing football with the BBG, have we all but dropped the ball when it comes to BBG effectiveness?

The report states that the “chronic dysfunction of the confirmation process has had a profound impact on our broadcasting efforts” due to the paucity of clear leadership and thus ability to plan over the long term. Dealing with challenges such as the Iranian government’s ability to obliterate access to BBG broadcasting seems to remain on the backburner. The report states that “efforts to ensure that our programming gets through should remain a top priority,” but without a sufficient infrastructure in place to generate and implement an actual plan to achieve efforts, it seems unlikely that this could actually happen.

Moreover, comments made by BBG Governor Jeffrey Hirschberg do not bode well for the BBG’s fate on the budgetary chopping block. He stated that a “one-to-one correlation as to whether or not for every dollar we spend we can change hearts and minds” simply does not exist. Concern runs rampant in Washington that American dollars are supporting the promulgation of anti-American views that are often espoused by local broadcasts made possible by the BBG. On the other hand, if the ultimate goal of the BBG is to support democracy worldwide, then diversity of views is necessary. Hirschberg’s statement thus demonstrates the vulnerability of the BBG right now as it tries to defend its purpose in the broader context of U.S. foreign aid while scrambling to establish an actual full board of governors.

Lugar had hoped that the confirmations would have occurred by the time this report was published on June 9, but that did not happen. As we move towards the August recess, it is unclear if hearings and/or confirmations for the BBG make it to the top of the packed legislative agenda.

The Financial Crisis: A Double-Edged Sword for Budget Cuts

Trying economic times present a double-edged sword for those at the budgetary wheel in Washington. On one hand, financial scarcity can promote budget trimming and encourage efficiency. On the other, it feeds political incentive to throw money at anything that might create a job or secure a vote from constituents worried about their next paycheck.

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Gordon Adams on "This Week in Defense News" with Vago Muradian

Sunday, June 13, our own Dr. Gordon Adams appeared on This Week in Defense News, hosted by Vago Muradian. Dr. Adams was joined by Rick Maze from Army Times, Loren Thompson from the Lexington Institute and John Barry of Newsweek to form an expert roundtable on security and defense issues. Spirited discussion ranged from Obama’s potential veto of the National Defense Authorization Act over the unwanted F-35 alternate engine, to political bargaining with Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, Secretary Gates’ retirement and the future of the Defense budget following troop withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan. (Half)-jokingly dubbed “the Pentagon’s worst nightmare” while serving at OMB during the Clinton Administration, Dr. Adams predicted that Defense might see deep cuts a lot sooner than even Secretary Gates may think. But the experts all agreed: whether they come in six months or two years, topline cuts to DOD are coming.

See the full episode on the show’s website. Try full-screen for HD picture and sound!

Africa: A FMF - Section 1206 Comparison

Last Saturday night, Mohamed Alessa and Carlos Almonte went to New York’s Kennedy airport with the intent of traveling to Mogadishu to join Al Shabaab, an Islamist militia fighting to establish Somalia as a launching point for global terrorism.  The FBI had other plans, and they were arrested.  Neither Alessa or Almonte are of Somali background, but their case harkened back to the 20 young men from Minnesota’s Somali immigrant community that succeeded in joining Al Shabaab between late 2007 – late 2009.

This is the lens through which the Defense Department looks at Africa.  Across the continent is a ready supply of collapsed states hosting and attracting frustrated, young populations – fertile ground for organizations with terrorist ambitions.  Having been squeezed out of Afghanistan and stressed in Pakistan, Al Qaeda’s demand for safe haven exceeds even that ready supply.

The Defense Department thinks that supply and demand will connect in Africa. It’s putting its money where its mouth is, using its Section 1206 Train and Equip authority.  Sometimes, but not always, the State Department comes along in the form of Foreign military Financing (FMF).  Taken together, the U.S. national security policy for Africa that emerges appears schizophrenic.

Top-Level Security Assistance Picture: FMF and Section 1206 Combined

Two operations define U.S. security assistance in Africa: Operation Enduring Freedom – Trans-Sahara (OEF-TS) and Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA).  84% of aggregated FMF and Section 1206 spending between fiscal years 2006 – 2009 ($224M out of $268M) went to eleven of the states under these operations’ remit.

Meaningful security assistance is not going to the failing states on which OEF-TS and CJTF-HOA focus, though.  Somalia, the crux of CJTF-HOA, is not a state and thus receives no assistance.  Mauritania, Mali, Niger, and Chad are only marginally better.  Together, and along with Algeria, they drive OEF-TS but receive only 4% ($11.3M) of this security assistance.  Instead, 77% of aggregated FMF and Section 1206 spending between fiscal years 2006 – 2009 ($207M) went to six states (Morocco, Tunisia, Nigeria, Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Kenya) that border those in the OEF-TS and CJTF-HOA focus.  To the extent that there is a strategy, it seems containment is the order of the day.

Strategy schizophrenia: FMF and Section 1206 in detail

The reappearance of containment aside, considering FMF and Section 1206 individually reveals that U.S. security assistance strategy in Africa is conflicted.  The Defense Department’s Section 1206 authority to set security assistance policy is supposed to be a rare exception from the norm of State Department leadership in this area.  Yet the exception dominates the rule in Africa.  Section 1206 nearly doubles FMF assistance (62% and 38%, respectively).

Policy imbalance follows budgetary imbalance in this case.  The Defense Department has determined that twenty-seven African states warrant Section 1206 assistance while the State Department has made a similar FMF decision for only twelve.  This imbalance is even more pronounced among each department’s priority states.  Nine African states have received $5M or more in Section 1206 assistance but only three have received comparable FMF sums.  Importantly, all of the $11.3M given to the weak and corrupt states at the center of OEF-TS came from Section 1206.

Strategy schizophrenia in this case is driven by differing State and Defense Department priorities, evident in the resource decisions.  The Defense Department believes that strengthening states to control their territory best prevents an Al Qaeda toehold on the continent.  It’s ‘Building Partner Capacity’ mission flows from that belief.  The State Department, by contrast, finds arming most African governments to be counterproductive for our democracy, development, and human rights agenda and, by extension, for the counterterrorism mission.  Instead, development spending is its priority in Africa.  Coordination is wholly lost between the defense and diplomacy/development sides of the equation, with FMF and Section 1206 caught in the tangle.

Costs of strategy schizophrenia: CJTF-HOA

The CJTF-HOA mission involves far more than just FMF and Section 1206 assistance.  It is clear from this assistance, however, the Defense and State Departments have different regional priorities. 74% of Africa’s FMF assistance goes to states in OEF-TS’ area of operation compared to 18% in CJTF-HOA’s area.  By contrast, 49% of Africa’s Section 1206 assistance goes to states in CJTF-HOA’s area of operation relative to 30% in OEF-TS’ area.

Strategy schizophrenia results, in part, from this tension.  CJTF-HOA includes substantial development elements rather than just military assistance.  According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), “about 60 percent of its activities are civil affairs projects, such as community medical care and bridge construction” – reworded, USAID missions.  (GAO-10-504)

Using troops for development does not seem to be going well here.  The same GAO report determined that “some personnel lack needed skills for (1) applying funding to activities, (2) understanding African cultural issues, and (3) working with interagency partners at U.S. embassies.”  Six weeks ago, on the basis of these findings, GAO issued one of the most scathing recommendations a government agency can face: that the Defense Department and U.S. Africa Command evaluate “whether the task force should be retained.”

The Defense Department did not concur, of course, and the strategy schizophrenia that governs U.S. security assistance in Africa appears set to persist.  It will change only when decision-makers back in Washington tackle the difficult issue of clarifying policy authorities.

Dr. Gordon Adams testifies before HASC: Testimony in brief

Dr. Adams discusses issues and challenges inherent in reforming the interagency national security machinery and provides several tangible recommendations for making successful reform a reality.

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What Price Deterrence

As part of its push to secure Senate ratification of the New START arms reduction agreement, the Obama administration recently revealed its intention to spend more than $180,000,000,000 “over the next decade” to sustain and modernize U.S. nuclear weapons delivery systems and the nuclear weapons production complex. With Senate Republicans insisting for months that support for the treaty hinges in large measure on a specific plan to invest in the future of the nuclear arsenal—and in particular the facilities that design, test, and manufacture nuclear warheads—such a move was not surprising, although the actual figure was higher than many expected.

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