By PHK
Two years ago, Andrew Bacevich warned in his book The New American Militarism that:
“Americans in our own time have fallen prey to militarism, manifesting itself in a romanticized view of soldiers, a tendency to see military power as the truest measure of national greatness, and outsized expectations regarding the efficacy of force. To a degree without precedent in US history, Americans have come to define the nation’s strength in terms of military preparedness, military action, and fostering of (or nostalgia for) military ideals.”
He’s right. The continuing outsized, overblown, grossly distorted U.S. budget now dedicated to attempting to apply military solutions to international problems just underscores the point. Not only do the costs of over-militarization weaken the fabric of American society and the robustness of our economy, but the results over the past seven years have proven yet again that applying military might to political and economic problems abroad is not only costly but also doesn’t work.
Certainly, there are times when guns, tanks and APCs are appropriate – I’m no pacifist. But I am a foreign policy realist and as a realist I know from experience that a country has a variety of tools from which to draw upon to deal with the panoply of international problems.
Unfortunately, too many Americans have forgotten that non-military options still exist. Or maybe they never knew because the Pentagon has been so much more adept at currying favor with Congress and appealing to the American people through its outsized budget, extensive and effective lobbying efforts on the Hill, military bases in all or almost every state, helpful hands from the military-industrial complex and support from many veterans organizations, than the State Department that the diplomatic side of the house has not only failed to win hearts and minds at home as well as abroad.
The State Department might be well advised to take more than a few lessons.
The reality is that every single one of our non-military options is far cheaper, far less lethal – and often more effective than those that come out of the military tool chest.
The military is the most expensive and most deadly foreign policy tool available for any country in any number of ways. That is why it should be kept in reserve to be used as the last resort when truly threatened and all else has failed. Military hardware is incredibly expensive. So too is fighting in a distant land on someone else’s turf. And blindly stepping into the middle of a foreign turf war whether the war is being fought for political or economic reasons, or usually both is particularly fraught with risk.
As a foreign policy realist, I am not an isolationist. I do not think that filling the moat and raising the drawbridge will solve any country’s problems in today’s world. This will even ultimately sink Burma’s generals. As the defiant Eliza told Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady: “Just you wait, ‘Enry ‘Iggins, just you wait.”
Despite John Bolton’s continuing bluster - now thankfully coming from K Street not Foggy Bottom or out of the American microphone in the UN Security Council, the US is getting somewhere with the North Koreans – but it’s not by sending in the Marines. It’s by sending in Chris Hill who talks with the North Koreans. This could have happened all along: the Clinton administration had already achieved considerable headway. The process is known as negotiations – a centuries old diplomatic tool that previous administrations often relied on but which the Bush administration has too often eschewed because it means giving as well as taking and, oh my gosh, it takes time.
Instead, this administration has created crisis after fabricated crisis in the Middle East and elsewhere to keep W and Cheney in power by playing the fear card with a home town crowd sadly undereducated in the ways of the world and a media all too willing to give them and their henchmen far more airtime than they deserve while otherwise featuring violent events because – well, violence sells.
Earlier this week, the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) finally released figures that should, in my view, have been made public years ago. The association only did so in apparent response to searing – and I think unjustifiable – criticism from a right wing journalist in a column published in the New York Post. His criticism was that State Department employees were not “stepping up to the plate” in helping to fight this administration’s war in Iraq. Others in the neocon camp – scurrying for any excuse to blame the bureaucracy for the fiasco their own bad judgment has wrought- have made the same charge.
In my view, few diplomats belong in Iraq – or in any war zone. Diplomats are not soldiers. That is not their role. They do not carry weapons and unlike the US military which undergoes lengthy, intensive – and expensive – training and retraining for hazardous missions, US diplomats do not. The fact is our diplomats and diplomatic staff “receive less than two weeks of special training to serve in a combat zone.” Even during the Vietnam War, their predecessors – including some of my friends and former colleagues - received three to four months of training before deploying to South Vietnam.
What the AFSA data clearly demonstrates is the minuscule size of the State Department’s Foreign Service in comparison with that of the active duty military. Here’s how AFSA puts it:
“The State Department Foreign Service is made up of approximately 11,500 people. Of them 6,500 are Foreign Service Officers (for example, political officers) while 5,000 are Foreign Service Specialists (for example, Diplomatic Security agents).”
Of the 6,500 Foreign Service Officers, approximately 700 are public diplomacy specialists and of the 5,000 Foreign Service Specialists approximately 1,400 are Diplomatic Security Agents. Well over 2,000 Foreign Service Employees have already served in Iraq.
AFSA continues: “The US active-duty military is 119 times larger than the Foreign Service. The total uniformed military (active and reserve) is 217 times larger. A typical US Army division is larger than the entire Foreign Service. The military has more uniformed personnel in Mississippi than the State Department has diplomats worldwide. The military has more full colonels/Navy captains than the State Department has diplomats. The military has more band members than the State Department has diplomats. The Defense Department has almost as many lawyers as the State Department has diplomats.”
There is much more in the AFSA release and I strongly recommend a thorough read.
I think, however, at least one more point needs to be raised with respect to this country’s troubling over-militarization and its potential long term negative consequences. This is the military’s takeover of functions that until the late 1990s were handled by the civilian bureaucracy. Public diplomacy is just one such function - but it’s the one I know best. Since 2004, the US has substantially increased its overseas public affairs presence but much of it has been done – yet again - on the military side of the house. This has happened to the point where in some countries – far more that just Iraq and Afghanistan - military public affairs teams now operate in US Embassies along side the small State Department contingents of civilian public diplomacy officers. Remember, State only has 700 public diplomacy officers posted around the world and at its Washington, DC headquarters and there are 267 diplomatic facilities overseas – according to AFSA. If about 68 per cent of the Foreign Service is overseas at any one time, that means about 476 public diplomacy officers now serve abroad, or less than about 1.78 per facility (this means embassies, consulates and multilateral missions like NATO, the EU and the OSCE.) That’s not very many.
I don’t blame the military for looking for, well yet another military solution, to America’s image problem abroad. It understands how negative attitudes towards the US adversely affect the troops, their safety and overall mission. And besides, the Pentagon has the resources, better planning and coordination mechanisms and also far more staff than does State to devote to a truly enhanced public diplomacy effort.
Let’s face it, public diplomacy under State is just not as effective as it once was and at this point, the fault lies squarely with the Bush administration. The reason, I think, is its almost Pavlovian reliance on the military.
The administration still fails to understand that a decently financed, staffed well coordinated civilian public diplomacy effort is far more effective that sending in the troops or the military’s public affairs specialists.
But believe me, it’s a lot easier for experienced civilian press attaches to talk with foreign journalists and for civilian cultural affairs officers to meet with university officials, professors, students and artists than for those in uniform to do so.
Frankly, I think an increased armed forces public diplomacy effort – even if embedded in embassies – is, in the end, more likely to exacerbate America’s over-militarized image abroad than not - if it's not doing so already. That balance, in my view, needs changing.