The Stanley Foundation

The steady and steep growth of defense budgets, and lack of equivalent support for diplomacy and development, has led to a severe imbalance between the United States armed forces and their civilian counterparts.

The Stanley Foundation is working with the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) to address and find solutions to the problem of the weak state of the US civilian international affairs agencies.

To gain insight into the challenge, it’s useful to note a flaw of one of the most prominent proposed remedies: creating a Civilian Reserve Corps.

The idea of the reserve corps is to line up private-citizen specialists with key skills for post-conflict reconstruction so they can be sent at a moment’s notice wherever they might be needed. This would be a fine thing, but it’s naïve to think such a move could even begin to address the shortfall in the United States’ civilian capacity. It is a proposal to mobilize expertise from outside the US government, rather than equipping agencies with their own permanent capacity.

A related shortcoming is the focus on crisis response. The reserve corps would be used as “surge capacity” to help deal with the emergency needs (hopefully temporarily) of destabilized regions. There’s no question about the need to do better at stabilizing global hotspots, but the current focus on the problem is sparked by the incredible array of duties dropped in the laps of US armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan in the absence of civilian counterparts. The problem should not be viewed primarily as one of responding to emergencies. The United States needs to boost its steady-state capacity for international affairs—its ongoing interactions with the world beyond our borders—just as urgently as its surge capacity.

Major Effort Needed to Rebuild World Trust
The best way to look at the problem is in connection with a much broader crisis: the poor state of US relations with the rest of the globe. Everyone is familiar with the distressing opinion research showing America’s international unpopularity; this issue confronts us with the practical implications. The United States has fallen badly out of step with other members of the world community, and as we pursue our interests, we confront a great deal of skepticism and mistrust.

Recovering international trust and goodwill will be a major project, for which America will need the strongest cadre of civilian representatives it can get.

Indeed, the severe imbalance in the relative strength of our own military and civilian services is part of the problem. Our military officers too often find themselves out in the world looking around for a Department of State or US Agency for International Development colleague.

There are indicators of this imbalance: comparatively low funding levels for diplomats versus military bands, numbers of officers in the entire Foreign Service versus sailors in a single carrier battle group. A less well-known statistic, though, captures the problem better: there are nearly 200 cities in the world with populations over a million and no official US presence. For a global power, the United States does not really seem to have its finger on the global pulse. The promise of “transformational diplomacy,” a phrase coined by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, is to engage the world more deeply, more consistently, and more constantly. This cannot be achieved with “virtual presence posts”—it will be achieved with people and interactions.

Another way to understand the challenge is to look at recent events in Pakistan, with the resignation of Pervez Musharraf as president. This episode illustrates the trap into which the United States has fallen again and again: channeling too much of its relationship with another country through an individual leader. In the end, Musharraf’s unpopularity fed America’s unpopularity—and vice versa—and the United States is left having to rebuild its relations with a pivotal country. Maintaining a broader set of links to different leaders is certainly more labor intensive, but in a fast-changing world the United States can only succeed by having deeper, multilevel relations with other nations.

Reform Will Require New Resources
The Stanley Foundation-CNAS project has identified the essential elements for any truly holistic revamping of the international affairs agencies.

First, reforms must include resources. Increased effectiveness cannot be achieved solely by tinkering with the agencies and their organizational charts; after decades of flat budgets, the civilian instruments of power need added funding to achieve America’s international objectives. Second, human resources are particularly important; the number of people on the case, and their skill sets, is key to the ability of the US government to conduct America’s relations with the rest of the world. Third, as agencies are reformed, they and their staffs must also be given commensurate authority to achieve the reforms’ intended aims.

The connection between the discussion of civilian capacity and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan point to another challenge. Governmental reform efforts of this type are usually precipitated and driven by a dangerous threat—the recent creations of the Department of Homeland Security and Director of National Intelligence are two such examples. The civilian capacity shortfall arguably is tied to a danger to the country, but it is not the kind of danger over which policymakers lose sleep, though perhaps they should. Our inability to keep up with events, trends, and attitudes in the world hinders our ability to influence those events and attitudes. This is a danger, but it is also a lost opportunity to help build a strong global sense of common cause.

Underneath the gross imbalance between the budgets for defense, diplomacy, and development is the perceived ineffectiveness of the civilian agencies, particularly by those who control the purse strings. But civilian capacity must be seen as a problem in which we all have an ownership stake. One of the United States’ national assets is a dynamism that enables it to adjust and thrive amidst economic, technological, and political changes. The challenge of strengthening our governmental infrastructure for relating to the world is one of many current tests of that dynamism.