From November 2002 to April 2004 I was the junior Marine officer on the personal staff of the Secretary of the Navy. My duties primarily related to correspondence and protocol, but I was also a member of what then was known as the Secretary's Action Team (SAT), a body that served as the Navy Secretary's internal think tank. I remember in the summer of 2003 helping the SAT to draft two articles on the Navy's strategic vision - reflecting Secretary Rumsfeld's and DOD's wider perspective of course - one that was fully drafted and submitted for publication and another that never made it much further than an expanded outline.
The Pentagon at the time was swimming in the intoxicated vindication of the previous decade's "Revolution in Military Affairs" and Secretary Rumsfeld's higher profile and more contentious efforts at "Transformation." Impressive and speedy victories in both Afghanistan and Iraq by light and nimble U.S. forces equipped with the latest high technology demonstrated that a new generation of warfare had been tested and proven. Traditional wisdom on warfare was out of date and no longer relevant. In that spirit, the article the SAT prioritized had a title along the lines of "Do the Principles of Warfare Still Apply?"
We on the SAT felt that some key principles had been disproved or discredited by our successes in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that this should be documented to ensure rapid victory in future campaigns. Of course, future campaigns did not come because the existing campaigns never finished. In fact, the underpinnings of those new paradigms turned out to be firmly rooted only in our own hubris. The U.S. over nine years later is still at war in Afghanistan, but now with over 100,000 troops committed to battle and at a projected cost of $119 billion this fiscal year. Close to eight years after the invasion of Iraq, an incredibly fragile state that could conceivably veer back into a civil war, 50,000 US troops remain, a number 20,000 greater than our plans expected for September 2003. Writing this note seven years after that article, to say I am chagrined is a wondrous understatement.
The second SAT article was to have addressed the lack of unity of command and unity of effort among U.S. government agencies at strategic, operational, and tactical levels worldwide (to include the lack of an effective inter-agency planning process in Washington). This article was clearly not in the spirit of Pentagon leadership. To the contrary, many defense leaders noted that the seeming triumph in 2003 had been achieved without interagency cooperation. This article, therefore, was not pursued.
Yet the lack of coordination and cooperation among U.S. government agencies has arguably contributed as much to the dysfunction, myopia, and counterproductive nature of our strategies and policies in Afghanistan and Iraq as any other single factor. Looking back at my involvement in both Afghanistan and Iraq, both in those countries and in Washington DC, the absence of formalized relationships and structures for both planning and operational purposes across agency lines has been a constant inhibitor of success.
I served on Embassy teams in Iraq (2004-5) and in Afghanistan (2009) and, in both cases, found that no formal or codified relationships existed to delineate tasks or authority among the various U.S. government agencies (e.g., DOD, State, CIA, USAID, USDA, etc). Political fratricide is common as U.S. civilian and military officials, reporting to different bosses with different and sometimes competing agendas, at best confuse local leaders or, at worst, get manipulated by them. This is especially damning in wars such as these, where the political element is much more important than military strategies. Development fratricide occurs as well. Military and civilian agencies plan and conduct reconstruction operations in segregation from one another, leading wasteful, duplicative, and ineffectual development programs - all at costs now running into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
This lack of cooperation and coordination is especially prominent in DC, which I observed while serving as a consultant on Iraq policy at the State Department (2005-6) and then with DOD (2008-9). It occurs at all levels and is endemic to the point of being cancerous. Petty political and bureaucratic concerns preclude the sharing of information or resources, limit effective decision making by senior leaders and, in turn, prohibit the creation of sound policy and strategy. In some cases, this can prohibit decision making altogether.
There have been steps made to improve relations and enforce collaboration across agencies, but this is often solely because of the combined efforts of like minded individuals at operational and tactical levels, not at headquarters. These individuals try to tie together plans developed echelons above them in a stove-piped national security planning process. Such individual efforts only last as long as each particular person remains in place and, in the long term, are of no match for a policy planning process that excludes diverse inputs and delivers incomplete assessments and courses of action.
Currently, there is little formal or legislative requirement to integrate and assimilate US government foreign policy planning and implementation across agency lines from top to bottom. Until such a requirement becomes law, something akin to the Goldwater-Nichols Act that forced cooperation and coordination within the Department of Defense in the 1980s, the U.S. will continue to plan and conduct foreign policy in a manner that provides short-term accomplishment to individual agencies, but hinders long term benefit to the overall U.S. interest.
Over seven years ago a decision was made to choose one article for publication over another. The decision was reached primarily due to parochial interests that accurately reflected a broken foreign policy and national security planning and implementation process. Unfortunately, based on the evidence of the last seven years, I'm afraid not too much has changed.
*I originally posted this as a guest blogger for the Stimson Center's blog The Will and the Wallet, a site devoted to budget insights for foreign affairs and defense policy. I have re-posted it here on the Huffington Post, because as we move forward into the next Congressional session a broader and larger debate must occur on reforming our national security process.