A Bit Of Theory (Or, Actually Useful Stuff Learned In Grad School) Posted by David Shorr

It's been said many times many ways, our civilian international affairs agencies are too weak and resource-starved. I've been working with Vikram Singh and Derek Chollet of Center for a New American Security on a project that looked for ways to convert all this concern about the problem into meaningful action. Recently we drew up a memo proposing that President-elect Obama tell his national security team to collaborate on a joint FY 2010 budget for defense, diplomacy, and development. As I explain our idea, I want to share some academic underpinnings and give some hat-tips to others tilling these fields.

The intellectual debt is to Prof. John Kingdon and his 1980s classic (well, for wonks anyway), Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policy. Kingdon was interested in figuring out the difference between an idea whose time has come and an idea ahead of its time. What are necessary preconditions for the adoption of ambitious or innovative policies? The title contains a clue. An alternative is quite simply a policy option, while an agenda is the political and bureaucratic setting that leads to the consideration of options. In other words, the search for a policy solution doesn't really begin until a problem is considered, well, a problem.

When my colleagues and I cast our minds all the way back to grad school, this bit of theory clarified for us the challenge for increased spending on international affairs. Kingdon said that an agenda depends on some combination of a compelling political impetus and a bureaucratic process for consideration of the alternatives. Which in effect told Vikram, me, and Derek what we were looking for.

Aside from this purely intellectual debt, I should footnote more practical debts to several other complementary initiatives -- first of all, three that have been doing stalwart spadework for years, and then further below, two recent projects that offer more details than we do. The Unified Security Budget from Foreign Policy in Focus (written by Miriam Pemberton and Larry Korb) analyzes the relative cost-effectiveness, and basic soundness, of various programs and functions across the full range of foreign policy instruments. The Center for US Global Engagement, a self-styled "do tank," is a key center of advocacy on these issues, as is the 3D Security Initiative.

The essence of the proposal from our own project is for the Defense and State Departments and USAID to reach their budget numbers by common agreement -- with DoS and USAID receiving significant increases in funding, as well as, this is important, personnel. This budget discipline would be carried out with a minimum of formal reorganization or reform, at least at the outset. These essentials trace back to Kingdon. In terms of political impetus, there actually isn't any forcing event or popular groundswell at work here. And yet, the magnitude of this resource gap is so large that it will substantial political will to fill it. We propose that the president heed the broad consensus of experts and provide the impetus. And that policy mandate will, in turn, trigger the planning, interagency coordination, and congressional liaison required to deliver the budgets that the president has asked for.

Here are the premises of the argument:

1. This is not a limited set of discrete problems -- public diplomacy, post-conflict reconstruction, privatization of aid programs -- it is all one big problem of foreign policy effectiveness and atrophied agencies that are not strong enough to pursue America's aims in an increasingly complex world. At just the moment when our relations with the world are at historic lows, we find ourselves with shortfall in our capacity to rebuild those relations.
2. Human resources are the key. We're faced with a massive foreign policy workload, and we need a larger workforce to handle it.
3. If we're really going to reverse the trends and rebuild, we'll need more-than-marginal growth in the civilian agency budgets.
4. This should be viewed as an initiative to build the organizational strength of the civilian agencies. There will obviously be targeted resources to build up public diplomacy, post-conflict reconstruction, and development assistance, but not at the expense of the organizations' other core activities.
5. Such investment should start out right away. If we procrastinate to give more time to prepare or wrap together the question of resources and other needed reforms, then no serious response may happen at all. Investment delayed could well be investment denied. We look at this as a whatever-else-you-do-you-should-do-this proposition.
6. There are countless statements -- including in recent official expressions of the United States' strategy in the world -- stressing that military and civilian instruments are complementary, pursue the same national interests, and need to be rebalanced. Military and civilian defense officials alike have been among the loudest proponents of this view. We take all of these to be sincere. Now, let's run the numbers in the same spirit.

For our own part, we haven't crunched any numbers. We're not calling for any specific defense budget cuts or international affairs agency increases. We're merely saying that requiring the military and civilian agencies to arrive at budget numbers jointly will serve as a lever to shift resources into better balance. Actually, the claim is stronger than that: this is the only lever that can mobilize resources on a serious scale. Any measure that is less ambitious will bring incremental improvement, at best.

Now, for those of you who really want numbers and details, I have two more hat-tips. The Stimson Center and American Academy of Diplomacy have released an excellent blueprint (a number of participants in that study were quite helpful to us, especially Gordon Adams). If you want to know where the money and people are needed and how to rebuild these agencies, this study will tell you. Also, stay tuned for the forthcoming report of the Project on National Security Reform, which will be a magisterial study of how US foreign policy is organized and managed and how that structure needs to be retooled for the 21st Century (forthcoming in early-December).

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