The Foreign Service Journal, December 2008

civilian capacity deficit. Further- more, focusing primarily on crisis response may lead us to ignore a key fact: our Foreign Service is simply too small and has too few resources to bring to bear when facing challenges. To remedy this, America needs foreign policy infrastructure invest- ment — and not just for special initiatives or boutique programs. Follow the Money But where to begin? Despite a doubling of military spending, the Pentagon finds itself stretched, juggling ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the asso- ciated need to re-equip, rebuild and augment our forces, as well as major continued modernization and weapons acquisitions. And, of course, the coming hard economic times will only intensify governmentwide budget pres- sure and the scramble for resources. Eight years of sky- rocketing deficits and supplemental budget spending mostly for defense have produced a poisonous budgetary status quo made up of jealous, stovepiped interests and nervously guarded resource streams, each with its own political and bureaucratic constituencies. Still, after spending eight months consulting with for- eign policy analyst colleagues across the political spec- trum, we have concluded that, given the difficulties, a head-on approach offers the only prospect of meaningful success. America’s national security system is out of balance. One indicator of this is the often-cited fact that there are more musicians in military bands than active-duty Foreign Service officers. Defense will always require more total resources than diplomacy and development, but our military capabilities are ill-served and our defense interests undermined when the civilian compo- nents fall short of the mark. Yet there is no policy process that looks at the totality of national security resources and the associated tradeoffs between military and civilian resources. In almost every organization, budgets are planned comprehensively to ensure that the right proportion of resources flow to various departments. The existing balkanized federal budget process poses an obstacle to any steps toward the urgently needed rebalancing of the relevant agencies. And since the issue is the overall effectiveness of U.S. foreign policy, the push for budgeting across stovepipes must come from the top, where overall responsibility resides. The new president should tell his national security team to pre- pare a joint international affairs and national security budget to bring the relative strength of the agencies into better balance. Under such a mandate, the FY 2010 budget and subsequent budgets for the Department of State and U.S. Agency for International Development will invest in their over- stretched and inadequate bureaus and underwrite sig- nificant growth in their work forces. As another metric of progress, the inordinately skewed ratio of defense to international affairs spending will start to come down. Whatever other reforms are undertaken, this new policy discipline would set a positive example of intera- gency cooperation on behalf of the national interest and against stovepiping. The budgets would be prepared jointly and supported by a common committee at the Office of Management and Budget and by the National Security Council. They would then be presented to and ushered through Congress jointly, as well. The senior and mid-level officer corps in the military has been among the loudest voices for stronger support of civilian agencies; they truly do “get it.” Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen has asked Congress to give the State Department more personnel and resources. “The U.S. government is not set up for the wars of the 21st century,” Mullen said in a speech last summer. “It doesn’t reflect the expeditionary world we’re living in. We haven’t recruited, hired, promoted, trained or educated the people in our civilian agencies for the kind of expeditionary requirements and rotations that we are actually doing right now.” The U.S. military was cut less than civilian agencies during the 1990s “peace dividend” era and has grown more than them since 9/11. A unified budget may final- ly force leaders to take the next difficult step of making trades across military and civilian programs, most likely trimming defense expenditures not absolutely critical to national security, so that civilian agencies can halt and reverse the erosion of America’s political and economic relations. Although wasteful spending can be found on F O C U S 30 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 8 Without effective civilian tools, we will find ourselves reacting to the world while others shape it.