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U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates traveled halfway across the country yesterday to give a speech in which he urged that State Department funding be increased relative to the Pentagon's budget. Really!
Funding for non-military foreign-affairs programs has increased since 2001, but it remains disproportionately small relative to what we spend on the military and to the importance of such capabilities. Consider that this year's budget for the Department of Defense -- not counting operations in Iraq and Afghanistan -- is nearly half a trillion dollars. The total foreign affairs budget request for the State Department is $36 billion -- less than what the Pentagon spends on health care alone. Secretary Rice has asked for a budget increase for the State Department and an expansion of the Foreign Service. The need is real.Despite new hires, there are only about 6,600 professional Foreign Service officers -- less than the manning for one aircraft carrier strike group. And personnel challenges loom on the horizon. By one estimate, 30 percent of USAID's Foreign Service officers are eligible for retirement this year -- valuable experience that cannot be contracted out.
Overall, our current military spending amounts to about 4 percent of GDP, below the historic norm and well below previous wartime periods. Nonetheless, we use this benchmark as a rough floor of how much we should spend on defense. We lack a similar benchmark for other departments and institutions.
One generally does not hear the head of a large bureaucracy argue in such forceful terms for more parity in spending between his agency and others. This is all the more stunning given the historic rivalries between the State Department and Department of Defense. The new thinking, however, is borne out of necessity.
As Hans Binnendijk of the National Defense University wrote earlier this month in a Washington Post Op-ed: "America's civilian agencies are unprepared to contribute adequately to 21st-century global security challenges. Defense Department resources, missions and institutions have multiplied as counterpart civilian agencies stagnate or disappeared...It is not born of a Defense Department power grab but of an inability by civilian agencies to adjust to new missions. The Defense Department is at war while the State Department still suffers from the post-Cold War notion of a peace dividend. One is on steroids, the other on life support."
One could extend Gates' and Binnendijk's logic even further to include American financial support for UN Peacekeeping, which also comes out of the State Department's stagnant budget. As peacekeeping operations have proliferated, US financial support for missions around the world has not grown commensurate to the need. Still, it is heartening to see that a renewed focus on the civilian instruments of national security has permeated the top echelons of the national security establishment.
