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Unbalanced security: the divide between state and defense.

Article Excerpt
On February 7, 2007 Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice informed the House Foreign Relations Committee that she had requested 129 military employees to fill State Department positions in support of the President's new Iraq plan. Officials at the Pentagon, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, bristled at the request--insisting that they had personnel shortages of their own. This vignette may appear to be just another incident of bureaucratic turf battles, yet it has dramatic and far-reaching implications, both for national security and for the U.S. Government. Beneath this tussle lies a first order national security policy dilemma: What should our government's division of labor be for the post Cold War security environment? And, how should manpower and funding resources be distributed to prepare for this environment?

Sixteen years after the Cold War's end, the United States still lacks a comprehensive governmental process that takes into account the dramatic changes in the global security environment--a failure to act that inhibits America's ability to deal with today's challenges and will frustrate our ability to take advantage of tomorrow's opportunities.

State and Defense: Mars and Venus?

On the surface, the Departments of Defense and State could not be more different. One author even compared them to living on Mars and Venus, respectively. While State is event driven, attached to big-picture concepts and subtle progress, Defense has a linear, deliberate and hierarchical planning culture. It hates surprises. Moreover, its guiding principles center on operational effectiveness on the ground. Philosophically determined to take on all challenges, the military never says "no", it simply buckles down and adapts. These characteristics--on top of a tremendous disparity in resources favoring Defense--has caused policy makers both in the Executive Branch and in Congress to assign more and more national security responsibility to the Pentagon. The black and white simplicity of Defense versus the shades of gray at State made it easy for Congress to take the path of least resistance at the end of the Cold War--and not fundamentally change our national security policymaking process. Indeed, it makes it easy for them to continue to forge ahead on that path today.

A common chorus among advocates for a national security overhaul (including parts of the military itself) is that resource priorities as they exist are creating an unhealthy imbalance between our national instruments of power, namely diplomacy, information, military, and economic. In other words, national security is a burden that should be shared across the entire government, and not accrue overwhelmingly to the Pentagon. Inadequate integration between the Departments of State and Defense is an example of the imbalance.

Defense has taken on abundant civilian roles...

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