Militarising foreign policy: what are the alternatives?

The first volume, first issue (rare, that) of Prism, the journal of the Center for Complex Operations, has been out for some time but features some articles with long shelf lives. Consider, for example, Hans Binnendijk and Patrick Cronin‘s article on the dangers of militarising U.S. foreign policy, where they also propose ways of addressing this problem. The authors succinctly and usefully summarise the dangers of letting DoD, with its resources, manpower and money, do the heavy-lifting in stability operations, at the expense of less well-prepared and resourced civilian agencies. I’ve adapted their list below:

1. the imbalance creates the impression internationally that U.S. foreign policy is being ‘militarized’;
2. the military performs functions that trained civilians with reachback to civilian agencies could perform more effectively;
3. it encourages a belief within the military that only DOD is at war, not the Nation;
4. civilian voices in interagency policy discussions carry less weight because they lack operational resources;
5. as a result, civilian agencies balk at the dominant role played by DOD; and finally
6. as ground forces come to focus almost exclusively on irregular warfare, some analysts grow concerned that inadequate attention is being paid to preparing for major combat operations.

With the possible exception of DoD’s ‘almost exclusive’ focus on irregular warfare, they are of course 100% right. Out of the four ways out of this dilemma (1: seek to avoid stability operations altogether; 2: allow continued DoD dominance; 3: rely on civilian contractors; 4: boost civilian government capabilities), Binnendijk and Cronin go for the latter and present a fairly ambitious proposal for a civilian surge, including the transformation of USAID into a much more robust operational ‘U.S. Agency for Development and Reconstruction’.

The proposal merits close attention, but will also require tremendous change and boosted funding for those civilian agencies with a role to play in stability operations. The recent and hugely informative RAND report on ‘Integrating Civilian Agencies in Stability Operations‘, by Thomas S. Szayna, Derek Eaton, et al., provides several reasons to be sceptical about such change. As the study concludes ‘the problems that underlie low collaborative capacity for SSTR operations are structural and deeply connected to a way the U.S. public administration functions’. The book, particularly chapter four, indicates the nature of the problem. Consider, for example that:

• ‘in the past five yeras, the total USAID appropriation has grown by 6 percent‘;
• ‘the operating expense appropriations of USAID have remained at approximately 7 percent of the total appropriation since FY00′;
• ‘USAID’s share of U.S. net official development assistance has dropped from 72 percent in 2000 to 39 percent in 2006’;
• or that ‘the Army’s Civil Affairs (CA) community has an authorized MTOE strength of 7,278 personnel… nearly equal to the entire USAID and significantly larger than its roughly 2,227 FSOs and U.S. Civil Service (USCS) professionals’ .

Added to the list of financial, resource and structural constraints is the lack of contingency funding and of any ‘slack in the system’ (preventing the creation of new positions without eliminating others), a hiring freeze, and the fact that USAID’s crisis-response offices (OFDA and OTI) represent a mere 2.5% of USAID’s total hire staff of approximately 1,500.

Now consider that all of these problems, along with the resistance on the part of many to a perceived ‘securitisation’ of U.S. development work, are all present in an organisation that is in fact directed toward foreign engagement; imagine achieving change in civilian agencies with no traditional role to play internationally.

The latter chapters of the RAND study provide some proposals of how the incentive structure can be changed so as to foster greater integration of civilian agencies in stability operations. But given the scale of the problem, and their apparent intractability, I think that the authors are right to advocate an approach that relies not only on boosting the civilian agencies, but that also recognises the need for the Army and DOD to prepare for a continued and potentially dominant role in such engagements, ‘should civilian agencies not be able to meet some of their obligations’ under the NSPD-44 process. It is not an entirely uncomplicated balancing act, as the RAND study also notes:

Planning for the possibility of the NSPD-44 process failing has the potential of helping to bring about that very effect, since such planning will remove the incentives for greater effort by the civilian agencies to meet the goals of NSPD-44.

While contradictory and possibly counter-productive, are there really any viable alternatives? Something to bear in mind in future discussions of the militarisation of foreign policy…

Originally published at kingsofwar.org.uk on February 17, 2010.