The Snowballing Pentagon

Gordon Adams, last seen in this space rightly carping about the Pentagon usurping other departments’ mandates, gave a rather interesting testimony to the Senate Budget Committee. Carl Robichaud, of the excellent Afghanistan Watch, distilled the important bits:

Adams describes the “snowball effect” of this cycle: “the more we ask DOD and the military to do, the more they become responsible for our overseas relationships.” Essentially, Iraq and Afghanistan have “become a test bed for a new concept in U.S. foreign and security assistance. Increasingly, the Defense Department is expanding its role in this area, altering an historic practice of State Department (and AID) policy supervision (and implementation) for security and foreign assistance.”

After listing components of this trend (see here) he argues that using the military as “one-stop shopping” “runs the double risk of underfunding and disempowering our diplomacy and foreign assistance agencies, and, at the same time, distracting the military from their core mission.”

His list of certain projects, which are normally funneled through State of USAID but now go through the Pentagon, is depressing. I find it troubling because, as Adams notes, it essentially militarizes U.S. foreign policy. Put another way, the way we have conducted ourselves in Afghanistan (and Iraq) has meant that, rather than having a primarily economic and diplomatic face to the world, we have had a primarily military one. Put slightly differently yet again, it is an unabashedly aggressive, hostile method of approaching the world, no matter how benign we imagine it to be.

The results are depressingly clear: military encroachment was a major reason why Medicins Sans Frontières pulled out of the country in 2004. Elsewhere, as I have written, the confluence of foreign aid and a military operating outside its normal mandate to kill people will result in things like murdered school teachers, and soldiers firing indiscriminately into a crowd. It’s not that the soldiers are bad people—no, it’s that they’re trained to kill then sent into the field and asked to be police, or diplomats, or economists. It is almost criminal misuse, and deeply unfair to every one involved.

This takes on a whole new meaning in light of a recent study that suggests (though, from the press accounts, does not yet prove) that larger and more powerful militaries are actually less capable of winning insurgency wars. In other words, all the efforts to make the U.S. military more capable, with higher technology, a greater degree of network centralization, and so on, all might just add up to make it less effective in dealing with future conflicts—crucial if there is going to be a major American presence in Afghanistan and the rest of Central Asia for years to come.

Place this into the context of Thomas Barnett, whose writings appear to have taken on near-biblical significance at the Pentagon (my problems with his “war without end” published works are here and here, along with other references on that blog). Combining NCW with 4GW, as he suggests, would be fundamentally flawed—so much so, that the severe mission bloat we currently see in Afghanistan would ruin not just the military, but the country—especially if they follow through with ideas like expanding SOCOM into practically its own branch, and invading every single nasty little “disconnected” country on the planet, like Uzbekistan, or Turkmenistan. Yet those are the ideas that are currently ascendant within the DoD.

The inherent defensiveness of the military (I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve heard, “why don’t you support the troops,” etc, during policy debates), combined with a frustrating tendency to write off diplomats as limp-wristed liberal pansies, has not been constructive, either. Hence, I am pessimistic of my government’s ability to avoid the mistakes it is currently paying for dearly in Afghanistan.