Author: Spencer Ackerman

It sure looks that way. As I mentioned in a previous post, Defense News got a leaked draft copy of the Quadrennial Defense Review, an important Pentagon planning document that will be officially unveiled next week. But reading down into its guts, the draft references a document that doesn’t even have a release date yet: the 2010 National Security Strategy, to be issued by the White House.

Recall that in 2002, President George W. Bush’s National Security Strategy centered around a declared right of the United States to “if necessary, act preemptively” against “rogue states and terrorists.” But the international legitimacy of preemption depends on the imminence of a threat — a foreign force coming to attack you. Bush considered that archaic, and sought to “adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries.” To many international-relations scholars, that collapsed the distinction between preemption and aggression, and its direct result was the invasion of Iraq, which turned out not to have the weapons of mass destruction Bush claimed as the justification for invading. The point is: these documents have real-world consequences.

So what will Obama’s National Security Strategy say? The document is still a work in progress, and it’s not clear if there’s a rollout date in mind. (Bush’s came out in September of his second year in office.) But the draft QDR is written as if it knows what the 2010 National Security Strategy will say. The relevant part of the leak concerns the definition of U.S. interests.

As outlined in the President’s 2010 National Security Strategy, America’s enduring interests are:

■ The security and resiliency of the United States, its citizens and their way of life, and of U.S. allies and partners;

■ A strong and competitive U.S. economy with a leading role in a vibrant and open international economic system that promotes opportunity and prosperity

■ Respect for values such as civil liberties, democracy, equality, dignity, justice, and the rule of law at home and around the world; and

■ An international order underpinned by U.S. leadership and engagement that promotes peace, security, responsibility, and stronger cooperation to meet global challenges, including transnational threats.

Leveraging and strengthening multilateral institutions for positive-sum action. Human rights and human dignity. Prosperity in an open global economy. All of this used to promote and protect American security. None of this is really new. In fact, you can read a piece from me during the 2008 campaign that, if I say so myself, discusses a whole lot of it. Or you can listen to Jim Jones, the president’s national security adviser, say earlier this week that “the challenge of restoring the reputation of the United States as a nation willing to commit to leadership, willing to commit to a new era of engagement based on mutual interests and mutual respect is probably the defining feature of our foreign policy.” That’s pretty much what the QDR draft claims the National Security Strategy says.

Apropos of my story today about the consistently-ballooning defense budget, Defense News has a leak of the Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon’s big planning document that, among other things, is supposed to shape the budget. This is just a leak of a draft, and not the final document. But the document is entering its absolute final phase, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will be testifying about it and next year’s budget (they’re released simultaneously) before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday. As I wrote today, Gates sent strong signals last year that the QDR would signal what further big-ticket items would get reined in or cut altogether.

And the draft suggests that Gates wasn’t playing around. Some bullet points:

The FY11 budget build on FY10, providing additional attention to key lines of investment that are highlighted in the reports

■ Taking care of our troops and our people

■ Reforming how we buy and operate

Rebalancing for:

■ The current fight

■ Plausible future challenges

Now, you can’t tell from that what will be cut. The defense budget is always a fight between the immediate challenges of the present and what each military service envisions as the future of war and its relevance to it. Gates has said, repeatedly — and conspicuously last year when he chopped a bunch of programs —  that he’s sick of buying stuff for every conceivable challenge, no matter how hypothetical. But we need to wait and see how that cashes out. The draft’s intro says:

QDR analyses centered on the following challenge areas: defending the United States and providing defense support to civil authorities, conducting irregular operations (including counterinsurgency, stability operations, and counter-terrorist operations), defeating adversaries armed with anti-access capabilities, countering weapons of mass destruction, and operating effectively in cyberspace.

That paragraph strongly suggests — as does Gates’ entire tenure, really — that the Pentagon ought to be reoriented around immediate, manifested challenges.  (I guess you could argue that the “anti-access capabilities” thing is the exception; my ignorant speculation is that’s in there so the South Koreans and Japanese don’t think we’re ignoring North Korea.) But here’s the thing: the services are really good at arguing that their existing priorities are applicable to new circumstances. That’s how the F-22, a Cold War-era fighter aircraft, survived until Gates killed it last year. So we’ll have to see how exactly the budget measures up to the QDR construct. Does it rebrand old wine or does it smash some corked bottles?

Luckily, Michele Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, will give a speech on Tuesday, before Gates and Mullen testify, on the QDR.

President Obama called on Congress to repeal the ban on openly gay people serving in the military last night. The path to doing so runs through the Senate Armed Services Committee, where Defense Secretary Robert Gates — who applauded the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” line in Obama’s State of the Union — is set to testify on Tuesday. And almost immediately after Obama’s call went out, the committee’s ranking Republican, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), took the surprising step of coming out in favor of DADT, a policy that affects the lives of an estimated 66,000 Americans serving their country — and quite probably deters many others from doing so — at a time of war.

Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.), a retired three-star Navy admiral who’s trying to win the Democratic nomination for Senate from Pennsylvania, has issued a statement checking McCain:

“As the senior ranking military Veteran in Congress, I am compelled to respond to Sen. McCain’s opposition to President Obama’s commitment to allowing all American troops to serve their country openly and honestly. How can a policy that has dismissed more than 13,000 trained, able, and honorable American servicemembers — including upwards of 800 troops with “mission critical” skills, like Arab linguists — be viewed as successful?

“Especially in a time of war, when our military is overstretched and our troops and their families are under unprecedented strain, we cannot afford to lose any more troops that the American people depend on for our national security. I agree with Sen. McCain that our military is the best in the world and the best in our nation’s history. That’s precisely why I have faith in the leadership capabilities of our officer corps and non-commissioned officers, as well as the dedication, professionalism, and integrity of our troops, to handle this transition without detriment to readiness or capability.

“The men and women who wear the cloth of this nation should be entitled to the rights they so heroically defend.”

Al Jazeera:

Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, has said his country must reach out to its “disenchanted brothers” in an effort to stabilise the war ravaged nation.

Addressing a one-day international conference on Afghanistan’s future in London, the British capital, Karzai said that fighters who are “not part of al-Qaeda or other terror groups” must be reconciled with the government.

The specific plan is to establish a reconciliation initiative that focuses on district-by-district Taliban outreach. In the past, the Karzai government’s security ministers have said that they wanted to target mid-level Taliban for reconciliation, while using jobs packages to lure away and reintegrate Taliban foot soldiers.  This new initiative appears more comprehensive. The New York Times:

“We see this program as the main pillar for bringing peace to Afghanistan,” said Shaida Mohammed Abdali, the deputy national security adviser.

“There’s an ideological motive for an insurgency like this, and the trouble will not be resolved unless you reach out to the leadership; they are the food of the foot soldiers and where they are getting ideological and political incentives. If we only concentrate on the foot soldiers it will not be a sustainable program.”

Karzai seeks $1 billion for his initiative from the London conference. But the question remains: why, absent a loss of momentum through military setback, would the Taliban leadership be interested in reconciliation?

President Barack Obama delivers his State of the Union on Wednesday. (White House Photo)

Steve Kosiak has spent much of his career as a defense analyst frustrated by military bloat. In early 2003, he found it was “impossible to say precisely” how much of the Bush administration’s military buildup was actually attributable to the post-9/11 emergency and how much was pre-existing defense pork. A 2005 paper he authored for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a leading Washington defense think tank, warned that rising defense costs could add “some $900 billion to projected deficits.” And in December 2008, he devoted almost 100 pages to carefully itemizing the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — $970 billion as of then, he found — and placing them in a broader social, economic and budgetary context.

The Obama administration is deeply familiar with Kosiak’s work. A year ago, the White House tapped him to oversee defense spending for the Office of Management and Budget. And that makes President Obama’s decision to exempt the hundreds of billions spent annually on defense and homeland security from a proposed overall freeze in discretionary spending — a policy he formally unveiled in his State of the Union address Wednesday night — particularly difficult for defense analysts to understand.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

Leading defense wonks, particularly those on the left, have harsh words for the exemption. “Ridiculous,” said Laicie Olson of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. “Completely inappropriate,” said Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress. “A political decision,” said Charles Knight of the Project on Defense Alternatives.

Obama’s first defense budget, submitted last spring, topped out at $663 billion when including the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — an overall increase from the final Bush administration Pentagon budget — but also terminated major defense programs hated by reformers, including the Air Force’s F-22 fighter jet, the Army’s Future Combat System vehicle and ground-based missile defense. But despite the real-dollar increase, conservatives criticized Obama’s budget when they saw that those program cancellations would bring down future defense spending. Similarly, Obama raised the Department of Homeland Security’s budget to $43 billion from $40 billion.

Reformers had looked to the release of the master Pentagon planning document known as the Quadrennial Defense Review, currently scheduled for a rollout next week, to guide future reductions in defense programs of questionable value, plagued by cost overruns or beset with design flaws, like the Marine Corps’ Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle. When announcing his cuts last year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates hinted that the so-called QDR would shape future decisions on cuts or program restructuring.

Several defense analysts said they have received indications the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle will survive the QDR relatively unscathed, however. It is unclear if the QDR will indicate any additional program cuts are forthcoming, but the document will be released alongside the administration’s proposed fiscal 2011 defense budget, which is expected to total $740 billion when roughly $33 billion for funding Obama’s Afghanistan “extended troop surge” is factored in. Reports indicate that Obama will seek to fund that through a supplemental budget request rather than one big budget document for all defense requirements — something candidate Obama pledged not to do.

But while Obama did not rule out future defense cuts in the speech, many of these defense wonks could not understand why an effort at deficit reduction would explicitly exclude defense spending. “Defense spending is over half our discretionary spending,” Olson said. “It would be crazy not to include it. It begs the question whether this is a real effort.” Shortly before the speech, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the speaker of the House, told reporters that any spending freeze ought to include defense spending.

The freeze will also exclude spending on entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. As a result, administration officials anticipate the spending freeze will save $250 billion over 10 years — a little more than a third of last year’s defense budget alone.

Korb, the senior defense analyst at the White House-connected Center for American Progress and a former Reagan Pentagon official, said the decision only made sense in terms of politics. “It’s another indication that Democrats are afraid of being seen as quote-unquote soft on defense,” Korb said, noting that no defense reformer was proposing cuts to any programs used for the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Still, Todd Harrison, an defense-budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said he believed the combination of massive defense budgets, massive federal deficits and a weak economy would inevitably compel Congress and the president to cut defense. “It’s likely in the future that everything will come under pressure, defense included,” Harrison said. But he conceded that a variable in that calculation is “political will” for such cuts — which is not in evidence in either the White House or, especially, the Congress, which loves to send defense money back home to individual states and districts.

While that political will may not exist in Washington, there is reason to believe it exists outside of the city. According to a Pew poll from December, defense spending ranked among the most popular sectors of the federal budget to cut. Eighteen percent of respondents identified “military defense” as a target for desired budget reductions, compared to six percent for education and 15 percent for unemployment assistance.

“Its absolutely ridiculous to think that we’re going to cut things like education and spend money on nuclear weapons and programs that don’t work, are faulty, have been faulty for years and continue to waste money,” Olson said.

The New York Times:

For the first time, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has spoken out against plans to stage the trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, accused mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, at the federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan, joining a growing chorus of people who believe the epic trial will be too disruptive and expensive for the city.

“It would be great if the federal government could find a site that didn’t cost a billion dollars, which using downtown will,” he told reporters on Wednesday.

It’s an economic issue for Bloomberg, not a security issue.

Politico’s Laura Rozen catches Hillary Rodham Clinton indicating to our old friend Tavis Smiley that she doesn’t envision staying on as secretary of state for two terms. Nothing really surprising: Dean Rusk, I think, was the last secretary of state to serve for eight years during the Kennedy-Johnson administrations. And she didn’t suggest she was out the door, either. But either way, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) is set to call dibs like he was waiting for his friend to finish playing Call Of Duty 2.

Don’t expect to see many detainees once held at Bagram Air Field return to the fight, Vice Adm. Robert Harward, detention operations chief for Gen. Stanley McChrystal, said on a blogger conference call this morning.

Asked by Jeff Schogol of Stars & Stripes about the recidivism rate, Harward said  ”very, very few” detainees leave U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan to return to the battlefield. He elaborated that about 3000 Afghans in eight years had been detained by U.S. forces, with 750 detained in the past year and 550 detained at the new facility at Bagram called Parwan. Out of those, Harward said he could document a total of  17 ex-detainees who had returned to the fight. “That’s less than half of one percent,” he said.

But it’s not the whole story. Harward said he couldn’t account for those detained insurgents turned over to the Afghan authorities and what their recidivism rate is. “I can tell you it’s very, very low for those that are captured by U.S. forces and go through our detention facilities,” he said.

Vice Adm. Robert Harward, a former senior officer with the Joint Special Operations Command and U.S. Joint Forces Command, arrived in Afghanistan in late November to take charge of detention operations for his longtime colleague, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. In those two months — his command formally stood up on Jan. 8 — Harward took the dramatic step of inking a deal with the Afghan government to transition responsibility for the infamous U.S. prison at Bagram Air Field to Afghan authorities over the next several months. It’s expected to turn over to the Ministry of Defense by 2011.

But there’s a lingering challenge facing Harward. Around the time he arrived in Afghanistan, The New York Times reported that the Joint Special Operations Command retains a detention facility off-limits to the Red Cross that human rights organizations and ex-detainees call the “Black Jail.” McChrystal wasn’t asked about it in his Congressional testimony last month. But in response to a question from TWI during a conference call with bloggers this morning, Harward said unequivocally that “all detainees under my command have access to the International [Committee of the] Red Cross.” The admiral suggested that The Times may have misconstrued “field detention sites” where detainees are initially in-processed for “a very short period” before transfer to detention facilities like the Parwan facility at Bagram, since the locations are undisclosed for operational security reasons.

“There are no black-jail secret prisons,” Harward said. “We do have field detention sites we do not disclose, but they’re held there for very short periods, and then they’re moved — if they’re determined to need additional internment, they’re moved to the detention facility at Parwan or released.”

There was supposed to be one this week in the Senate Armed Services Committee, but — as I told our editorial meeting with some embarrassment — it wasn’t placed on the panel’s calendar. Here’s why: the Obama administration and the military asked for a delay until President Obama addresses the subject in the State of the Union:

Levin said he does not know what Obama might say, but he expects it will be an announcement of the administration’s intentions. Hearings were supposed to start with military leaders, Levin said, but he might change the order to get hearings underway if senior military officials need more time to prepare. ‘I am willing to switch things up,’ he said. ‘I am committed to starting the hearings in February.’ Having junior officers and noncommissioned officers and petty officers testify could be an important step in getting the policy changed, Levin said, especially because he believes there are ‘generational differences’ in views about the presence of gays and lesbians in the ranks. Younger people are more likely to be accepting of a policy change than older people, Levin said.”

DADT is one of many, many issues where progressives — particularly in the gay community — have been frustrated by the slow approach to change that the administration has either acquiesced to or outright embraced.

The Dennis Blair Show continues:

Former Gov. Thomas H. Kean, New Jersey Republican, and former Rep. Lee Hamilton, Indiana Democrat, said U.S. intelligence agencies should have been consulted before the bombing suspect, Nigerian national Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was granted constitutional protections under U.S. law, known as Miranda rights, and initially stopped talking to investigators.

It doesn’t appear as if Kean and Hamilton actually object to Mirandizing Abdulmutallab, just the non-existent coordination between the FBI on scene and the intelligence community. Still, that might give some push to a forthcoming bill from Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) to compel such coordination. The director of national intelligence’s misstep last week continues to compound.

Since I’ve been singing the praises of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments all day, I leave this one to Colin Clark of DODBuzz:

“I can tell you there is no way the defense budget will be immune to budget reduction efforts,” Stan Collender, one of Washington’s most respected budget wallahs, said at CSBA’s annual budget briefing.

Yes, but the key word there is “efforts.”

And to think, I was just mentioning Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in this post about the Obama administration’s questionable decision to exempt defense and homeland security spending from its desired budget freeze. Here’s Harrison’s just-released paper (PDF) about the unsustainability of current defense spending.

The cheat-sheet paragraph:

[D]efense spending has risen to a historically high level, in real dollars. The [fiscal year] 2010 budget requested $534 billion in discretionary and $4 billion in mandatory funding for the base defense budget and an additional $130 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This exceeds the previous peak in total defense spending of $517 billion in Fy 1986, adjusting for inflation. However, defense spending as a percent of GDP is not at a historically high level because over the past several decades the overall economy has grown faster than defense spending. This suggests that the current level of defense spending, while high, remains affordable by historical standards. But given the state of the federal budget and the ongoing cost of the wars, it is unlikely the base defense budget will be able to maintain the rate of growth experienced over the past ten years.

Now, if you read through Harrison’s paper, you’ll see it contains a key assumption. Because defense spending is so bloated, and the deficit so big and the economy so bad, then obviously defense spending has to drop, so it makes sense to reprioritize what’s actually in the national interest. But that assumes political will — both from Congress and from the Obama administration — that is absolutely not in evidence. And it also assumes countervailing political pressures — i.e., the desire not to be demagogued as weak on defense — that are in abundance will suddenly abate. So we’re left with … an unsustainable defense budget and spending freezes/cuts in for more politically vulnerable clients, like the poor and middle class.

If it doesn’t make any sense to you to spare defense programs from the spending freeze, pay attention to next Tuesday. At 8:30 a.m., Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy heads to the Council on Foreign Relations to explain the results of the forthcoming Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon’s master planning document that spells out defense priorities and guides its medium-term budgeting. In any QDR, you can read between the lines and find defense programs that don’t fit into the overall document’s vision of a prudent defense. Cutting those programs is a good test of an administration’s commitment to fighting Pentagon bloat.

But only spend an hour with Flournoy! At 9:30 a.m., Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee about the next year’s defense budget. Watch to see if Gates and Mullen say that they’re using the QDR — as they’ve indicated in the past — to guide further defense cuts to wasteful programs.

Also, I don’t see a link yet, but CNN’s Dana Bash tweets that Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) says that the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security should be included in the spending freeze.

Rolf Mowatt-Larsen, a longtime intelligence official who works at the nexus of al-Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction, writes that al-Qaeda “has been far more sophisticated in its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction than is commonly believed.” And there’s no reason whatsoever to disbelieve him. But what ought to be pointed out is al-Qaeda’s capabilities, not just its aspirations.

For one thing, al-Qaeda has failed for over a decade to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Mowatt-Larsen notes that al-Qaeda accordingly scaled back its ambitions to get nuclear weapons in favor of less-lethal but relatively easier to acquire bioweapons. But even that effort was dealt a setback by the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

Instead, look at the pattern of recent al-Qaeda attacks or potentially al-Qaeda-inspired attacks. Lots of big-devastation conventional impact attacks in south Asia and the Middle East, with occasional forays into Europe and southeast Asia. In the United States, a failed attempt at conventional explosions of an aircraft — damaging if it would have succeeded, but it would have killed an order of magnitude fewer people than the sophisticated and complex attack on 9/11 to turn several planes into missiles and fly them into strategic targets. There’s an argument to be had over whether to put Nidal Malik Hasan’s attack on Fort Hood into the “al-Qaeda-inspired” category. If you do, you get a successful attack that killed 13 people and wounded 45, not dozens, let alone hundreds or the thousands killed on 9/11.

Then you get a criminal claiming after the fact that his murder of a soldier outside a Little Rock recruiting office was connected to al-Qaeda. And failed efforts that were busted up before they reached fruition, as with Najibullah Zazi.

All this is why in the just-published issue of a bulletin published by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, Martha Crenshaw, a terrorism scholar with the Center for International Security and Cooperation, concludes:

Al-Qa`ida is declining, but it is still a dangerous organization. It is not a mass popular movement, but rather a complex, transnational, and multilayered organization with both clandestine and above-ground elements. It has proved durable and persistent. The determination of its leaders to attack the United States is undiminished and might strengthen as the organization is threatened, but another attack on the scale of 9/11 is unlikely.

None of this is to say that vigilance against the prospect of an al-Qaeda WMD attack is unwarranted. But it is a call to put the chances of one into perspective.

(illustration: JoeAlterio)

Let me quote this comparison between the Pentagon and General Motors, as excerpted in a previous Windy post:

In GM’s case, its market share rapidly eroded as gas prices climbed higher, the economy slowed, and consumers turned to smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. GM found itself building a fleet of SUVs and trucks that consumers did not want and could not afford. Similarly, DoD now finds itself saddled with a number of weapon programs whose capabilities are ill-suited for the types of conflict the military currently faces and whose costs have risen beyond what the Department can afford. Many of the new weapons being funded today are optimized for middle-of-the- spectrum conflicts—that is, conventional, military-on-military conflicts such as Operation Desert Storm in 1991. But adversaries are well aware of the United States’ overwhelming advantage in the middle and are instead moving to either end of the spectrum: irregular warfare on one end and high-end, asymmetric warfare on the other. The challenge for DoD, as it was for GM, is that the competition is adapting faster than it can keep up.

That’s Todd Harrison of the Center on Strategic and Budgetary Priorities, arguably the best think tank in Washington for analyzing defense spending in the context of overall national questions. I can also throw Winslow Wheeler at the problem, a man who’s been on the Hill fighting Pentagon bloat longer than I’ve been alive:

The additional $33 billion will bring the total DOD budget for the current fiscal year up to $708 billion. That amount is more than we spent on the Pentagon in any year since 1946 – in dollars adjusted for inflation. It is an amount just under what the entire rest of the world spends for defense. It is about three times the combined defense budgets of China, Russia, Cuba,North Korea, and Iran. The Defense Department spends in a few hours more than al Qaeda spends in an entire year.

The point, in other words, is that the problem’s even worse than Glenn Greenwald portrays it. Everyone in Washington who studies the Pentagon budget quickly finds gobs and gobs of wasteful spending. Not some people. Not dirty hippies. Every. Single. Defense. Analyst. If I were so inclined, I could spend my days doing nothing but attending conferences on the latest defense jeremiad or policy paper about how to cut it. I already spend too much of my time reading this stuff on defense-community email listservs.

For the Obama administration to exempt defense spending from its kinda-sorta-spending-freeze is a position that makes no sense from a policy perspective. None at all. From a political perspective, it only begins to make sense because a brain-dead media would amplify the braying ignorance blasted from a GOP congressional megaphone about Defense Spending Cuts OMG. And even then it doesn’t make sense. A holdover Republican Defense Secretary is now the biggest advocate of an even slightly sensible defense budget in the Obama administration.

Whether or not the Obama administration’s spending “freeze” is a hatchet or a scalpel — see Rachel Maddow’s grilling of vice-presidential economist Jared Bernstein yesterday — defense spending is going to be unaffected. Why in the world should that be?

Not a single defense wonk believes that the $663 billion defense budget contains only necessary spending. You can find some who believe as an article of faith that defense spending should always increase. But those guys are mocked by the smarter think tanks at places like the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. In fact, check out this October assessment from CSBA’s Todd Harrison comparing the Pentagon to General Motors:

Another similarity between the two is that both organizations are in a period of disruptive change in the competitive environment. In GM’s case, its market share rapidly eroded as gas prices climbed higher, the economy slowed, and consumers turned to smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. GM found itself building a fleet of SUVs and trucks that consumers did not want and could not afford. Similarly, DoD now finds itself saddled with a number of weapon programs whose capabilities are ill-suited for the types of conflict the military currently faces and whose costs have risen beyond what the Department can afford. Many of the new weapons being funded today are optimized for middle-of-the- spectrum conflicts—that is, conventional, military-on-military conflicts such as Operation Desert Storm in 1991. But adversaries are well aware of the United States’ overwhelming advantage in the middle and are instead moving to either end of the spectrum: irregular warfare on one end and high-end, asymmetric warfare on the other. The challenge for DoD, as it was for GM, is that the competition is adapting faster than it can keep up.

Harrison’s specific solution is to rein in personnel costs — veterans’ healthcare, for instance — as much as to tackle useless defense platforms and unrealistic research and development costs. But the broader point is that he’s willing to have an adult conversation about defense spending and the Obama administration isn’t. It’s telling that the most important force in the Obama administration for rebalancing defense priorities is a holdover Republican defense secretary.

In case I left the impression in my previous post that the elevation of British diplomat Mark Sedwill to a new senior NATO civilian envoy to Afghanistan was a demotion for U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, let me correct it straight away. In Eikenberry’s dour November cables warning about the treacherous road ahead in Afghanistan, he explicitly called for a new NATO civilian partner for Gen. McChrystal to equalize civilian and military efforts:

The proposed strategy does not remedy an inadequate civilian structure. There is no civilian organizational counterpart to ISAF and no political leadership equivalent to NATO-ISAF commander [Gen. Stanley McChrystal], a deficiency that hampers civilian effectiveness and heavily skews the NATO-ISAF dialogue with the Afghan government. UNAMA [the United Nations mission to Afghanistan] is not capable of coordinating all the civilian efforts, because its role is not to serve as the civilian policy and program counterpart to NATO-ISAF. … [O]ur coalition efforts will remain less than optimum unless a stronger civilian structure is created.

That structure will be formally unveiled on Thursday in London.

As Adm. James Stavridis, NATO’s military commander, first confirmed to TWI two weeks ago, the transatlantic alliance will announce a new top representative in Afghanistan to corral political, diplomatic and developmental aid alongside Gen. Stanley McChrystal. The announcement, set for Thursday’s London conference on Afghanistan, will elevate Britain’s top diplomat in Kabul, Mark Sedwill, to the new position.

Ironically, the announcement of Sedwill’s new job comes at an inconvenient moment for McChrystal’s American partner, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry. Eikenberry has his November cables warning against a U.S. “extended surge” and railing against Afghan President Hamid Karzai as a hopelessly intransigent ally plastered all over The New York Times. (The cables leaked back then to The Times and The Washington Post, but not in full, and they caused a fracas.)

“Sending additional forces will delay the day when Afghans will take over, and make it difficult, if not impossible, to bring our people home on a reasonable timetable,” he wrote Nov. 6. “An increased U.S. and foreign role in security and governance will increase Afghan dependence, at least in the short-term.”

Of course, President Obama placed a transition date of July 2011 for beginning Afghan control, which presumably is what allowed Eikenberry to testify in December “without equivocation” that he backs the Obama plan for Afghanistan.

President Barack Obama talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in the Oval Office. (WDCpix)

On the eve of his first State of the Union address — a speech likely to be viewed as a response to a new Washington pessimism over his domestic agenda — President Obama is recording consistent support for his handling of foreign affairs and national security, according to an overview of recent polls. But despite this stable if mild support for his international agenda, dissatisfaction with his handling of foreign and security issues is growing.

Ahead of the speech, Obama’s top aides have delivered a thorough defense of his past year’s actions on foreign policy, contending — as national security adviser Jim Jones did in a Monday speech — that his first-year task was to revitalize international support for an America weakened by the Bush administration. An early burst of domestic enthusiasm for Obama as an anti-Bush even broke the Republican Party’s traditional opinion-poll advantage on national security earlier this year.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

More recently, a look at changes in major polls over the past several months yields a picture that favors Obama, if tepidly so, on foreign policy. The afterglow of his first 100 days is clearly gone. What remains are stable pockets of support for both his administration’s foreign policy in general and specific priorities of his.

A Pew Research Center analysis of Obama’s handling of terrorism recorded 51 percent approval in early January, essentially unchanged from 52 percent support in early November, even after the failed terrorist attack on Northwest Airlines flight 253. While the number of people who believe his government is doing a good or very good job of reducing the threat of terrorism is down 10 points since Pew’s November survey, it remains at a robust 65 percent. CBS places it at 60 percent.

Similarly, Obama’s decision to increase troops in Afghanistan registers 45 percent support, according to a Quinnipiac poll earlier this month, a number that has risen and stabilized from the high 30s and low 40s before Obama’s December 1 Afghanistan speech. Yet even though Obama has yet to attract significant GOP criticism of his Afghanistan strategy, his disapproval rating on Afghanistan, according to Quinnipiac, is also at 45 percent. Pew also has Obama at 45 percent on his handling of Afghanistan, up from 36 percent in November — but his disapproval on the issue has slid from 49 percent to 43 percent in the Pew poll.

And on a general handling of foreign policy, Obama’s numbers in the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll on foreign policy have remained steady at 50 percent since September, down from a high-water mark of 57 percent in July. Pew has a lower number — 44 percent — down from a June high of 57 percent. Quinnipiac pegs that approval at 45 percent, down slightly from 49 percent in October and November. CNN/Opinion research puts him at 51 percent approval, down from a 58 percent high in September. CBS places it at 49 percent, statistically unchanged since November.

All of which comes as a mild surprise for a Democratic president, whose party has been greeted with greater public skepticism about international affairs since the Vietnam war. Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the National Security Network, a progressive security policy and messaging organization, said the breadth of polling on Obama’s handling of national security shows “the core Obama national security bet — that he can balance heightened international outreach and diplomacy with a willingness to show toughness on terrorism, Afghanistan — is paying off.”

That apparent success comes in contrast to his eroding numbers on crucial domestic policy questions. A CNN poll released Monday found only 36 percent of Americans believe the 2009 economic stimulus bill will aid the economy. Obama’s health care plan registers a 40 percent approval rating — and 54 percent disapproval — in the latest CBS poll, and is imperiled after months of furious GOP opposition and the election last week of Scott Brown to the Massachusetts Senate seat held by Ted Kennedy. His foreign-policy and national-security numbers are slightly ahead of his overall job approval rating of 48.8 percent, according to Pollster.com’s average of major polls.

In an effort to portray Obama’s first year on the international stage as an expectations-defying success, Jones, Obama’s national security adviser, turned a Monday speech on Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy into a robust defense of Obama’s first-year accomplishments abroad. Speaking at the Center for American Progress, Jones said Obama’s major task in 2009 was restoring and strengthening U.S. partnerships, alliances and multinational fora to tackle a host of international challenges, from stabilizing the faltering global economy to rallying an “unprecedented level of international consensus” on Iran to abandon any nuclear-weapons ambitions.

“The challenge of restoring the reputation of the United States as a nation willing to commit to leadership, willing to commit to a new era of engagement based on mutual interests and mutual respect,” Jones said, “is probably the defining feature of our foreign policy.”

One challenge for the next year will be winning congressional support for that international engagement amid a larger and emboldened Republican minority typically suspicious of such efforts. Jones returned Saturday from a trip to Russia to discuss a nuclear-weapons reduction treaty under negotiation. But that treaty will require 67 votes for approval in a Senate, necessitating the cooperation of an obstinate minority committed to inflicting political damage on Obama. Senate support is also crucial for Obama’s international efforts on global climate change, another priority Jones cited on Monday. Anecdotal evidence on even baseline Republican support for either is grim: James Jay Carafano, a leading foreign-policy scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation, recently tweeted that a cap-and-trade system for carbon-emissions reductions is itself a “real national security threat” and that a pundit was “dead wrong” to assume the GOP will support the new treaty with Russia.

Still, the Republican opposition has yet to congeal around a foreign-policy alternative to Obama, despite a flurry of well-funded projects connected to former Bush-era figures like the Cheney family. Not only has the Bush legacy tarnished the Republican brand, but in May, for the first time in its history of national-security polling, Democracy Corps found that the Democratic and Republican parties were at parity on public confidence to keep America safe, erasing a decades-long Republican opinion advantage.

“The poll numbers suggest that the Cheney-led fear-mongering is not working,” Hurlburt said in an email. “Why? Because its chief practitioners are discredited, and because Obama’s had a consistent message — we face real threats and have better ways to face them — and a good team of messengers in [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates, [Secretary of State Hillary Rodham] Clinton et al. that the public takes seriously.”