DB4uF

Chapter 8

Bureaucracy

Dateline: Fixing the State Department

Viewed in terms of lines on an organizational chart, the foreign affairs bureaucracy provides presidents with a powerful set of tools to use in promoting their foreign policy agendas. Examined more closely, these organizations cannot be used freely. They have their own histories, operating styles, and concerns. The inherent tension within these conflicting perceptions often leads to policy disputes, feelings of frustration, and laying blame. It can also lead to calls for organizational reform and creation of new organizations.

From the very beginning of the Trump presidency, reorganizing the State Department was a primary focus of his efforts to reshape the foreign affairs bureaucracy. This was not surprising. Two prominent themes of Trump’s campaign were “Make American Great Again,” and put 190“America First.” Trump asserted that too many existing international agreements were bad deals, in which other countries took advantage of the U.S. The Trump administration saw reorganization as long overdue. Foreign service officers saw it as an effort to cripple or dismantle the State Department.

The Trump administration’s structural reform agenda presented two different types of challenges to the State Department. One involved its relationship with other foreign policy bureaucracies. The most notable proposal was the possible merger of the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Under the existing framework, USAID operates as an independent agency under the guidance and supervision of the Secretary of State. The purpose of this reorganization was to begin the process of concentrating U.S. foreign aid programs spread across many military and civilian agencies under a single umbrella. Some within the State Department feared that this would result in a smaller and more politicized foreign aid budget.

The second structural challenge involved internal day-to-day operations. Here, public attention centered on the Trump administration’s proposal to cut the State Department budget by as much as 33 percent. Producing a strong negative response both inside and outside the State Department, this proposal was widely considered to be “dead on arrival” in Congress. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis went so far as to state, “if you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.”

Less visible was incoming Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s reorganization of decision-making. He quickly expanded the size of the policy planning staff attached to his office. Traditionally, it housed twenty to twenty-five people who provided strategic advice to the Secretary of State. Rumors were that Tillerson sought to double or triple its size. One consequence of this expansion was to isolate Tillerson from input by State Department professionals creating blockages in State Department decision-making. Some characterized his new advisors as a praetorian guard. One example of Tillerson’s isolation was the September 2017 meeting of the Community of Democracies, which was expected to be attended by leaders from more than a hundred countries. For months, Tillerson was silent regarding his approval for the meeting. Formal invitations to embassies were delivered only eight days before its scheduled start. As a result, only a small number of foreign ministers attended.

Structural reforms and personnel reforms go hand in hand. Along with calls for deep budget cuts came proposals for a potential nine percent cut in personnel, as many as 2,300 positions in the State Department. Downsizing the State Department began immediately and at all levels. Days into the new administration, even before Tillerson was confirmed by the Senate, the entire senior management team at the State Department 191either resigned unexpectedly or were terminated in a cloud of controversy. A hiring freeze ordered by Tillerson reduced the number of new Foreign Service Officers from 366 in 2016 to 100 in 2018. By November 2017, the number of minister counsellors (the equivalent of two-star officers) had declined by 15 percent, career ministers (three-star officers) by 42 percent, and career ambassadors (four-star officers) by 60 percent, as another wave of resignations swept through the State Department. There was no Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern affairs or ambassadors to Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt or Qatar to help formulate policy toward Syria.

Personnel changes brought about by Tillerson also resulted in a rise in tension within the State Department. An Assistant Secretary of State accused several career staffers as being disloyal and retaliated against those who had served under Obama. Another high ranking Tillerson appoint was forced out of their job because of how she treated the career and political staff.

The Trump administration’s reform agenda included a changes in the State Department’s mission. Some took the form of decisions made by Tillerson, such as removing Afghanistan, Burma, and Iraq from the list of countries ineligible for some forms of military aid because they were identified as using child soldiers; this decision produced an internal protest memo within the State Department. Others included removal of references to reproductive rights for women and of the term “occupied territories” (i.e. Israel’s presence in Gaza and the West Bank) from the State Department’s annual human rights report. Under Mike Pompeo who succeeded Tillerson as Secretary of State a new advisory commission on Human Rights was established that to reevaluate how human rights are thought about in U.S. diplomacy. Most fundamentally, there occurred a change in the State Department’s official mission statement. On May 1, 2019, it read:

The U.S. Department of State leads America’s foreign policy through diplomacy, advocacy, and assistance by advancing the interests of the American people, their safety and economic prosperity.

In the State Department’s Fiscal Year 2015 Report and on its website the following statement appeared:

The [State] Department’s mission is to shape and sustain a peaceful, prosperous, just and democratic world, and foster conditions for stability and progress for the benefit of the American people and people everywhere.

This chapter examines the organizational structure and internal value systems of the State Department, the Department of Defense, and the intelligence community, and takes a brief look at key domestic bureaucracies that have developed a foreign policy role. The chapter concludes with an examination of how policy makers respond to the challenges of dealing with the foreign affairs bureaucracy.

192

Presidents and the Bureaucracy

According to Henry Kissinger, “The purpose of bureaucracy is to devise a standard operating procedure that can cope effectively with most problems.”1 Doing so frees high-level policy makers to concentrate on the unexpected and the exceptional, and to pursue policy innovations. While true in theory, this view is misplaced. In practice, two problems arise:

1. Policy makers expect far more from bureaucracy than help in dealing with the normal—probably too much more. Consider President Gerald Ford’s statement about the U.S. involvement in Vietnam: “We could have avoided the whole darn Vietnam War if somebody in the Department of Defense or State had said, ‘Look here. Do we want to inherit the French mess?’ ”2 As you saw in chapter 4, the reality of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam was far more complex.

2. Policy makers often feel trapped by the bureaucracy. Obama put it this way: “There’s a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow. It’s a playbook that comes out of the foreign policy establishment. . . . But the play book can also be a trap that can lead to bad decisions.”3

One important player in the bureaucratic foreign policy playbook is the U.S. State Department.

The State Department

Then called the Department of Foreign Affairs, the State Department was created in 1789 as the first department under the new Constitution. According to historical tradition and government documents, the president looks first to the State Department in making foreign policy.

Structure and Growth of the State Department

The State Department serves as a transmission belt for information between the United States and foreign governments, and as a source of expertise and skills on which senior policy makers can draw. These are daunting tasks. Dean Rusk, Secretary of State under Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, estimated that he saw only six of every one thousand cables sent to the State Department each day, and that the president saw only one or two.4 By the end of the twentieth century, the State Department was electronically processing over fourteen thousand official records and ninety thousand data messages each day, and over twenty million e-mail messages per year. The full magnitude of this explosion of electronic messaging came into focus when the congressional investigation into the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi inquired into Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal computer to engage in official business. It found that some two 193thousand messages contained pieces of redacted information considered confidential. Of these, three-quarters dealt with “foreign government information,” a catch-all category including information obtained through meetings and conversations with foreign officials.

Annually, the State Department represents the United States in over fifty major international organizations and at over eight hundred international conferences. In 2019, the United States had diplomatic relations with 191 countries, and had 170 embassies, along with consulates and liaison and branch offices. Together, these overseas posts represented thirty different government agencies. Present in a typical embassy are representatives from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Departments of Defense, Agriculture, Commerce, and the Treasury, the CIA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Export-Import Bank.

The concept of a country team was developed to bring coherence to the welter of agencies and programs now represented at an embassy. The ambassador heads the country team. In practice, ambassadors have found it quite difficult to exercise enough authority to transform a set of independent and often competing policies into a coordinated and coherent program. For example, in 2005, the Pentagon requested that it be allowed to put special operations forces into a country without the explicit approval of the ambassador. Also complicating the problem is the ambassador’s background. Frequently, the ambassador is not a career diplomat. A study of ambassadorial appointments from 1960 to 2014 found that in twenty-nine countries and diplomatic missions such as the United Nations, 81–100 percent of ambassadors were political appointees.

The State Department’s basic structure remained largely unchanged for the duration of the Cold War. Beneath the Secretary of State were two Deputy Secretaries of State and six undersecretaries with responsibility for such matters as political, economic, and management affairs, and international security. The remainder of the State Department was organized around geographical areas and functional tasks. While the number and identity of the regional areas held steady, the functional bureaus showed considerable change over time. Certain units—such as the education and culture bureau—disappeared, and others—such as the refugee bureau and a bureau responsible for human rights and humanitarian affairs—were created. Today a very different picture exists. There are over sixty bureaus and offices covering geographic (Africa, Near Eastern Affairs), policy (Global AIDS, Arms Control, Verification and Compliance), and administrative (Budget and Planning, Human Resources) issues. There are also over one dozen Special Envoys (hostage affairs, Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, North Korean human rights issues); over one dozen Special representatives (the Arctic, international labor affairs); and six ambassadors at large (religious freedom, criminal justice).

Running parallel to this significant organizational growth is a “shrinking presence” overseas. In June 2008 there were 6,636 foreign service officers (FSOs). This was just 10 percent more than twenty-five years earlier. In an 194attempt to rectify this problem, a hiring initiative called Diplomacy 3.0 was begun; its goal was to increase the size of the Foreign Service by 25 percent by 2013. This goal was not met; the number of FSOs only increased to 8,000 by 2013 and dipped to just below that level in 2019.

The State Department’s Value System

Capturing the essence of the State Department’s value system is best done by looking at how Secretaries of State have defined their roles and how the FSO corps approach their jobs.

 The Secretary of State The job of Secretary of State is not an easy one. All too frequently, post–World War II Secretaries of State have left under a cloud of criticism. Among the charges leveled are lack of leadership (Dean Rusk), aloofness and arrogance (Dean Acheson), and overly zealous attempts to dominate foreign policy making (Henry Kissinger). Secretaries of State have also found themselves excluded from key decisions. Cyrus Vance resigned from the Carter administration partly in protest over his exclusion from decision-making on the Iranian hostage rescue effort.

In order to participate effectively in foreign policy making, Secretaries of State, like their counterparts at the Department of Defense and the CIA, need a power base from which to work. In practice, this has required them to either become advocates of the State Department perspective or serve as loyal allies of the president.5 Neither guarantees success, and each power base has its dangers and limitations. Adopting the first perspective makes them suspect in the White House, while the second makes them suspect within the State Department and runs the risk of letting the department drift for lack of effective oversight. Under President George W. Bush, Colin Powell’s primary role orientation was as a spokesperson for the State Department perspective. Condoleezza Rice built her power base around the close personal ties she had developed with Bush during the campaign and as National Security Advisor.

The greatest danger comes with the failure to establish any power base, a situation most recently experienced by Trump’s first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson. As noted in the Dateline section at the beginning of this chapter, Tillerson failed to establish support within the State Department. Referred to as “the phantom of Foggy Bottom,” his reform agenda was viewed as little more than an exercise in cost cutting and reorganization. It was seen not as an effort to improve the ability of the State Department to carry out its mission, but as an act of obedience to Trump. The problem for Tillerson was that he never gained the trust of Trump, either. Trump was attracted to Tillerson by his experience as Chief Executive Office of ExxonMobil and his reputation as a global deal maker. Once in office, Trump came to see Tillerson as weak, and the two were seldom on the same page. Tillerson supported the Iran nuclear agreement, but Trump opposed it and gave Tillerson no advance notice 195of his decision to terminate it. When Tillerson talked of negotiating with North Korea, Trump tweeted that “he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man.” After fourteen months, Trump used Twitter to fire Tillerson.

Mike Pompeo, who was an enthusiastic defender of Trump’s foreign policy as head of the CIA, replaced Tillerson. Pompeo took office announcing his intention to get the State Department’s “swagger” back. However, as information about his supportive role in Trump’s Ukraine policy and its undercutting of the State Department emerged, Pompeo’s standing dropped significantly.

 

Foreign Service Officers At the heart of the State Department system is its FSO corps. The Foreign Service was created in 1924 by the Rogers Act. Foreign service officers were intended to be generalists, “trained to perform almost any task at any post in the world.”6 The principal organizational device for producing such individuals is to rotate them frequently among functional tasks and geographic areas. The State Department relied on civil service, which existed apart from the FSO corps, to perform its “lesser” technical and administrative tasks. Increasingly, FSOs feel themselves under siege by the blurring of the line between civil service and Foreign Service personnel, and by increasing politicization within the State Department. Senior positions are routinely filled with short-term political appointees, a process referred to as political creep.

The distinction between FSOs and civil servants in the Foreign Service has long been the subject of controversy. In 1954, a reorganization proposal developed by Harry Wriston led to the merger of these two personnel systems. “Wristonization” was not a complete success. The hope had been this merger would “Americanize” the Foreign Service by bringing in individuals with backgrounds different from those of the typical eastern, Ivy League, and upper-class officers. This broadening of outlook was seen as necessary; many viewed FSOs with suspicion for becoming aloof and separate from American society. They were a prime target of the McCarthy investigations into un-American activities. In 1953 alone, some 70–80 percent of the highest-ranking FSOs were dismissed, resigned, or were reassigned to politically safe positions.7

The representativeness of the FSO corps continues to be a major problem. In 1976, a class action discrimination lawsuit was brought against the State Department. That year, only 9 percent of FSOs were women. In late 1993, the FSO corps was 56 percent white male, 24 percent white female, 7 percent minority male, and 4 percent minority female. In 2019, 6.3 percent of FSOs were Hispanic, 5.4 percent were African American, and 4.8 percent were Asian; 41.2 percent were female. Additional problems surround the nature of key overseas appointments. For example, under George W. Bush, there were only three Hispanic FSOs serving as ambassadors, all in Latin America. Only one of the thirty-two diplomats heading embassies or U.S. missions in Europe in 2009 was black.8

Impact of the State Department on Foreign Policy

Once the centerpiece of the foreign affairs bureaucracy, the State Department has seen its power and influence steadily erode. It has gone from being the leading force behind such policies as the Marshall Plan, NATO, and containment, to largely playing the role of the critic who finds fault with the proposals of others. It has become defensive and protective in interdepartmental dealings, unable to centralize and coordinate the activities of the foreign affairs bureaucracy.9

Two complaints frequently are voiced about the State Department’s performance. The first centers on the FSO corps value system, which consists of a clearly identifiable world outlook and set of guidelines for survival within the State Department bureaucracy.10 The FSO is empirical, intuitive, and cautious.11 Risk taking in the preparation of analysis or processing of information is avoided. The FSO mission is to keep intact the policy inherited from predecessors.12

Second, State Department recommendations are insensitive to the presidential perspective on foreign policy matters. Because it fails to frame proposals in ways that will produce political support for, or at least minimize political costs to, the president, State Department recommendations are easily dismissed. In the eyes of many, it has become more of a spokesperson for foreign viewpoints within the U.S. government than an advocate of U.S. national interests. This situation is not universally condemned. Some feel that it is an appropriate role for the State Department to play, and that it should stop trying to perform functions for which it is no longer suited.13

Efforts are underway to change the FSO system and the culture of the State Department. One change is in how FSOs are selected. A new selection process has been put in place for selecting applicants for the Foreign Service; it changes the focus from doing well on a lengthy national exam to emphasizing team-building abilities and résumés.

The Department of Defense

For most of its history, the military security of the United States was provided by forces under the command of the War Department and the Department of the Navy. No political or military authority, other than the president, existed to coordinate and direct the affairs of these two departments. During World War II, the ineffectiveness of this system became apparent, leading U.S. policy makers to take a series of ad hoc steps to bring greater coherence to the U.S. war effort. In 1947, the National Security Act formalized many of these arrangements by establishing a Department of the Air Force, giving legal standing to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), and creating a National Military Establishment and the position of Secretary of Defense. Further changes were made in 1949, when the National Military Establishment was redesignated the Department of Defense.14

Structure and Growth of the Department of Defense

A number of different organizational reform issues have arisen since the Department of Defensewas created. In the early 1980s, the pressing issue was improving the operational efficiency of the armed forces. The failed 1979 hostage rescue effort, the 1983 terrorist attack on the marines in Beirut, and problems encountered during the 1983 invasion of Grenada were cited by military reformers as proof that reforms were needed, beginning at the very top.15 Congress shared these concerns. Over the objections of the executive branch and many in the military, Congress passed two pieces of legislation in 1986 designed to remedy the perceived shortcomings. The Goldwater-Nichols Act strengthened the position of the JCS relative to that of the individual services. It also gave added weight to those areas of the Pentagon with an interservice perspective. The second piece of legislation, the Cohen-Nunn Act, established a unified command for special operations and created an Assistant Secretary of Defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict.

A recurring organizational challenge is budget size. Advocates of increased defense spending routinely identify four great waves of post WW II defense budget neglect.16 Each followed the end of a major U.S. military commitment, but also reflected the onset of additional economic and social problems facing the military. The first (1945–1950) followed the end of WW II; the second (1970–1980) followed the end of the Vietnam War; the third (1991–2000) followed the end of the Cold War; and the most recent period began in 2009 with the decisions to withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan.

President Trump has aggressively moved to end this fourth period in seeking a $54 billion increase over Obama’s proposed 2017 defense budget. He requested a $716 billion defense budget for 2019 and a $750 billion budget for 2020. Even though Trump got most of what he asked for in 2018 ($700 billion), budget problems remain. One issue is, where is the money coming from? As you saw in the Dateline section at the beginning of this chapter, reallocating money from the State Department to Defense was politically unacceptable to many in Congress; so, too, is simply spending more money. Another issue is whether authorizing the military to spend $700 billion is enough. According to a 2011 law setting limits on federal spending, Defense Department spending for 2018 must be capped at $549 billion.

A second, complex set of recurring challenges involves personnel issues. The military is facing a numbers crunch. In 2018, the Army missed its recruiting goal for the first time since 2005. With a goal of 76,000 (reduced from the initial target of 80,000), the Army signed up fewer than 70,000 recruits, despite offering waivers for previous marijuana use, bad conduct records, and health problems. Compounding matters, the Army is much smaller than it was at the end of the Cold War. At that timeit 198had 732,403 active-duty soldiers; a 2014 Pentagon study projected a 420,000-person army in 2019.

One part of the solution has been to outsource many tasks to private contractors. These tasks range from cleaning military facilities to supervising supply lines, operating combat systems, and training troops. At one point there were more than sixty private firms with twenty thousand employees in Iraq. While typically seen as a means of saving money and dealing with personnel shortfalls, outsourcing can also be used for political purposes, such as when use of U.S. forces would arouse negative public opinion or run against congressional limits on the size of U.S. military operations. An example of the latter occurred in Colombia during its civil war. Another part of the solution to the personnel shortage problem has been to rely more heavily on National Guard and reserve forces. By 2005, almost 400,000 of the nearly 870,000 members of the reserves had been activated since 9/11. This represents the greatest proportional use of the National Guard and reserves since World War II. Part of the solution to the personnel problem may be to rethink the all-volunteer army. In 1973, military conscription in the United States ended for a variety of reasons; the leading arguments made for ending the draft included demographics, cost, moral arguments about imposing military service, and opposition to Vietnam.

Related to the numbers crunch problem is how representative the military is of American society and how individuals are treated by the military. More and more, the military has come to rely on young men and women from economically depressed rural areas. There has also been a decline in the number of African American recruits. The Historical Lesson reviews the path toward integrating African Americans into the military. Today, much of the focus is on its treatment of women, LGBTQ+, and immigrants. At issue here are both the roles they are allowed to play and the respect they are shown.

Historical Lesson

Integrating the Military

On July 26, 1948, President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981:

WHEREAS it is essential that there be maintained in the armed services of the United States the highest standards of democracy, with equality of treatment and opportunity for all those who serve in our country’s defense:

NOW THEREFORE, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States, by the Constitution and the statutes of the United States, and as Commander in Chief of the armed services, it is hereby ordered as follows:

1. It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin. This policy shall be put into effect as rapidly as possible, having due regard to the time required to effectuate any necessary changes without impairing efficiency or morale. . ..

Executive Order 9981 went on to create a President’s Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services one of whose tasks was to examine how rules, procedures, and practices might be altered or improved upon to carry out this policy.

The history of black American participation in the military shows a continued pattern of white reluctance to allow it along with the military necessity that it occur. From the very outset, free and slave blacks fought on both sides in the American Revolution. New England states offered freedom to slaves who fought, as a means of meeting their quota of troops in the Continental Army. Some southern states did likewise, but to a lesser degree. For its part, the British also offered freedom to blacks who joined with them.

During the Civil War, manpower shortages led Congress to pass legislation to allow blacks to fight but required them to serve in racially segregated military units; 180,000 blacks fought for the North. It is estimated that one-fifth of the Northern Army was black. After the war, many of those promised freedom remained in slavery. After the war, four black regiments were established, which fought in the Indian wars and the Spanish-American War.

This policy of segregated military units was still in effect when World War II began. An additional policy was a quota system, which limited the number of blacks in the military to their percentage of the total American population. Once again, pressures of wartime led to de facto changes in policy. With an insufficient number of Allied forces available to counter the German offensive at the Battle of the Bulge, black soldiers were allowed to volunteer to fight alongside white soldiers rather than serve in support roles but were placed in separate platoons.

After the end of World War II, political pressures mounted for ending segregation. A 1945 Army report called ending discrimination a desirable goal but concluded that it was impractical. In 1947, the Army permitted states to determine the level of integration of their National Guard above the company level. New Jersey ended military segregation at that point. As a result, some states had partially integrated reserve units, but the active military was still segregated.

Also in 1947, A. Philip Randolph helped establish the Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service and Training as part of a broader civil rights movement effort to end discrimination in the military. The focal point of their concern was Truman’s plan for universal military service; while it did not endorse discrimination, it was perceived by Committee founders to endorse segregation. It was against this backdrop that Truman issued his executive order. It came shortly after he was nominated to run for president, an election many expected him to lose, especially since southern democrats, unhappy with the party’s endorsement of civil rights, decided to run their own candidate for president under the banner of the Dixiecrats.

Truman’s executive order encountered resistance and was not uniformly accepted. In 1949, the secretary of the army was forced into retirement for refusing to desegregate the army. That same year, 32 percent of white army personnel opposed integration in any form. During the Korean War, a shortage of white enlisted men and increasing black enrollment created yet another crisis. Ninety-eight percent of blacks still served in segregated units, and black soldiers were trained at a segregated military base. In 1951, while General MacArthur was still the commanding officer in Korea, evidence surfaced that far more black soldiers than white soldiers were being court martialed. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) sent Thurgood Marshall to investigate. He defined the military situation there as one of “rigid segregation.” As a result of his investigations, charges against most black soldiers were dropped. In September 1954, under the Eisenhower administration, the last all-black military unit was abolished. Many consider the endpoint of segregation in the military to be July 26, 1963, when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered an end to discrimination against blacks outside of military bases.

Applying the Lessons

1. Did Executive Order 9981 go far enough to address discrimination and segregation in the military? Explain your answer.?

2. To what extent should the military be representative of all groups in society?

3. How do you measure the extent to which real change takes place in the military, the Foreign Service, intelligence agencies, or other national security bureaucracies?

On December 3, 2015, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter announced that the Defense Department would open all combat jobs to women. “There will be no exceptions.” When the announcement was made, the Navy and Air Force had already opened most of their combat positions to women, and the Army was moving in that direction. In September of that year, the Marine Corps, which was 93 percent male, had asked for an exemption for its infantry and armor positions. With this announcement, their request was denied. An estimated 220,000 military jobs were now available to women.

While the history of women serving in combat positions in the military goes back to the American Revolution, it was not until the passage of the Army Reorganization Act in 1901 that women could formally join the military (through the Army Nurse Corps). The 1948 Women’s Armed Forces Integration Act gave women a permanent place in the U.S. military, but limited the number of women to 2 percent of the enlisted force and 20110 percent of the officer corps. Since the 1970s, the military has repeatedly turned to the question of the role of women in combat. An early 1990s Presidential Committee on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces called for determining military assignments on the basis of qualifications, not gender. The War on Terrorism and the military conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which lacked clearly defined combat zones, brought this issue into sharp focus. Women soldiers searched homes and people for weapons, engaged in door-to-door neighborhood patrols, and were embedded in special operations forces. By the end of 2015, at least 161 women had died and 1,016 had been injured in these conflicts.

The role of women goes beyond their ability to engage in combat. It extends to the problem of harassment, which potentially affects all active-duty service members. In 2015, the Pentagon reported 6,131 cases of sexual assault, more than double the number in 2007. In 2018, that number jumped to 7,623. According to estimates, about 20,500 service members (13,000 women and 7,500 men) were sexually assaulted in FY2018, up from 14,000 in 2016.

Controversy over the ability of gays to serve in the military long centered on the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy put in place in 1994, which allowed gays to serve, but did not stop them from being discharged. In December 2010, after months of political maneuvering by opponents in Congress along with a Pentagon study supported the policy, President Obama signed legislation repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

The major point of controversy in the Trump administration has been the ability of transgender individuals to serve in the military. A June 2016 directive banned the military from involuntarily separating transgender individuals in the military and allowed them to begin receiving medical treatment. In June 2017, just before the new policy was to take effect, Mattis delayed its implementation. One month later, Trump announced on Twitter that transgender individuals would not be allowed to serve in the military, calling their presence disruptive and overly expensive. Trump indicated that he had consulted military leaders on the decision, but Mattis had received only one day’s notice. A 2016 RAND study had concluded that the costs were not that high, and that only two thousand to eleven thousand active-duty personnel were transgender. In March 2018, Trump issued a revised order, which took a step back from the previous total ban on transgender troops and deferred implementation to the Pentagon. To many observers, it echoed the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. A series of lawsuits have accompanied the Trump administration’s efforts to implement a transgender ban. On January 22, 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed President Trump’s transgender military ban to go into effect while it was still being contested in lower courts.

Trump’s policies have also highlighted the place of immigrants in the military. The primary avenue for immigrants to enter the military has been the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest (MAVNI) program. 202Since 2009, more than 10,400 individuals with language, medical, and other skills, considered vital to U.S. security and in short supply, entered the military through the program with the promise of citizenship. Some five thousand immigrants were recruited in 2016. That same year the Pentagon, citing espionage dangers, put new security measures in place, which added considerable time to the process of gaining citizenship, placed MAVNI under review, and closed it to new recruits indefinitely. The waiting time was so long that a thousand recruits lost their legal immigrant status, risking deportation. In July 2018, it was revealed that the Pentagon was discharging immigrants who had entered the military through the MAVNI program. In August 2018, the Army announced that it was reviewing the matter and suspended the discharge program.

The Value System of the Department of Defense

Understanding the internal value system of the Department of Defense requires examination of how Secretaries of Defense and the professional military have defined their jobs.

 Secretary of Defense Secretaries of Defense generally have adopted one of two roles.17 The first is that of the generalist. Generalists recognize and defer to military expertise. They are concerned with coordinating and integrating the judgments they receive from military professionals and see themselves as representatives of the Department of Defense in the policy process. In contrast, the functionalist is concerned with consolidating management and policy control in the office. Functionalists reject the notion a unique area of military expertise exists and see themselves as first among equals in defense policy decision-making. Above all, the functionalist seeks to manage the system efficiently in accordance with presidential policy objectives.

James Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defense, adopted the generalist perspective. As Secretary of the Navy, he had opposed creating a unified military establishment, and his tenure as Secretary of Defense was marked by repeated efforts by the services to protect their standing as independent organizations. Since Forrestal, the most prominent Secretaries of Defense have adopted a functionalist perspective. Robert McNamara, who served as Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, was a functionalist who sought to move decision-making power out of the hands of the military services and into those of civilians in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. To do so, he brought Planning, Programming, and Budgetary System (PPBS) analysis to the Department of Defense. Instead of organizing the budget by department (Army, Navy, Air Force), the PPBS examined spending by its principal missions, such as conventional defense of Europe or nuclear deterrence.18

Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush’s first Secretary of Defense, sought to alter the fundamental direction of American military policy and 203organization. Military professionals saw his presence as a “hostile takeover.”19 Victory against the Taliban in Afghanistan and early military success in Iraq appeared to vindicate his positions. However, subsequent problems with the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq led to open questioning of his ideas and management style.

Retired Marine Corps General Jim Mattis, Trump’s first Secretary of Defense, was also a functionalist. He took office with a clearly defined set of views regarding the structure and operation of the military; his goal was to create a better equipped, more deadly, and more effective fighting force less dependent on alliances, but he did favor working with allies. As stated in his military defense strategy, the focus of the U.S. military was on countering Russia and China, not counterterrorism and corralling rogue nations. Trump delegated Mattis significant leeway on issues such as implementing the ban on transgender troops and sending more troops to Afghanistan, but Mattis often disagreed with Trump’s policies In his letter of resignation, he stated his opposition to the announced removal of troops from Syria and Afghanistan, the downgrading of NATO, and the threat that Russia posed to U.S. security.

Professional Military To understand the system of values inside the Defense Department, it is necessary to examine the outlook of the professional military toward policy making at two different levels. At the highest level is the general pattern of civil–military relations. Two different general sets of perspectives have long shaped thinking about this relationship.20 The traditional view sees professional soldiers as above partisan politics. They are expected to restrict themselves to speaking out only on those subjects that fall within their sphere of expertise. In turn, policy makers stay out of military matters. In the fusionist perspective, the professional soldier must acquire and use political skills in order to exercise an effective voice on military matters.

Neither approach is without its problems. The line separating military decisions from political ones is anything but clear, making it difficult—if not impossible—for the professional to stand above politics. The challenges to a president created by an embrace of the fusionist perspective were on full view in both the Trump and Obama administrations. The commanding general in Afghanistan called for increasing the U.S. presence in opposition to Obama’s view, publicly challenging Obama’s Afghanistan policy. Trump repeatedly had policy disagreements with Mattis, who resigned in protest over his Syria policy. Trump later angered many military professionals with his intervention into the case of a Navy SEAL accused of war crimes in Iraq.

One level down from civil-military relations, there are differences in outlook among the military services, each of which has a different “personality.”21 It is said that the Navy worships at the altar of tradition, the Air Force at the altar of technology, and the Army at the altar of 204country and duty. The services also have different views of their own identities. The Navy sees itself, above all, as an institution with a stature and independence that must be protected. The Air Force sees itself as the embodiment of the idea that air power is the key guarantor of national security in the modern age. The Army views itself as artisans of warfare. A challenge facing the U.S. Army today is how to conceptualize modern warfare. The success of the Persian Gulf War in 1991 gave impetus to the idea of a Revolution in Military Affairs, in which technological advances are central to success on the battlefield. At the same time, the development of counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare thinking (see chapter 4) emphasizes the soldiers and their interaction with the local population.22

Impact of the Defense Department on Foreign Policy

The professional military’s impact on foreign policy is a subject that is often discussed with great emotion, as evidenced by concerns expressed about Trump’s appointment of Mattis, Mike Flynn, and H. R. McMaster as National Security Advisors, and John Kelly as Chief of Staff. All were retired generals who Trump often referred to collectively as “My Generals.” The fear was that the generals would set a confrontational tone to Trump’s foreign policy and use military force rather than diplomacy as the foreign policy instrument of choice. Reality proved to be more complex. Trump’s initial foreign policy did take a hawkish turn, but it was only after the exit of the generals and their replacement by civilians that U.S. foreign policy took on a more aggressive and high-risk profile, with the Venezuelan crisis and the possibility of U.S. military action in the Persian Gulf.

Overall, historical evidence suggests that military professionals are not necessarily more aggressive than their civilian counterparts.23 Where the military professional and the civilian policy maker part company is over how and when to use force, not whether to use it. The military prefers to use force quickly, massively, and decisively, and is skeptical of making bluffs that involve the threatened use of force. Diplomats, on the other hand, prefer to avoid using force as long as possible, because they see its use as an indication of a failure in policy; they are positively predisposed to making military threats.

The military’s real policy influence comes through its ability to set the context of a decision through the presentation of information, capabilities, and tactics. Bob Woodward, author of The Commanders, similarly reflects on the variability of military influence on decisions regarding the use of force.24 The Pentagon, he notes, “is not always the center of military decision making.” “When the President and his advisors are engaged, they run the show.”

205

The CIA and the Intelligence Community

The intelligence community comprises sixteen agencies plus the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The Director of National Intelligence (DNI) is the head of the intelligence community. Until this position was created in 2004, the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) served as head of both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the intelligence community. Members of the intelligence community are charged with working independently and collaboratively to gather the information necessary to conduct foreign relations and national security activities.

Structure and Growth of the CIA and the Intelligence Community

Two points mustbe stressed before turning attention to three of the most prominent members of the intelligence community: the CIA, the National Security Agency (NSA), and the ODNI. First, the intelligence community is not a static entity. Its composition, and the relative importance of its members, has changed over time as new technologies have been developed, the international setting has changed, and bureaucratic wars have been won and lost. The status of charter membership is best conferred on the CIA; the State Department’s intelligence unit, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR); and the intelligence units of the armed forces. All of these were given institutional representation on the National Security Council at the time of its creation in 1947. Three institutions that have a long-standing but lesser presence in the intelligence community are the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Treasury Department, and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which is now part of the Energy Department. The newest addition to the intelligence community is the Department of Homeland Security.

Second, the concept of a community suggests the existence of a group of actors who share common goals and possess a common outlook on events. In these terms, U.S. intelligence is a community in only the loosest sense. More accurately, it is a federation of units with varying degrees of institutional autonomy that both work together and challenge one another.

This point can be illustrated through several examples. The CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) have often been in conflict over matters of intelligence analysis. The DIA was created in 1961 for the purpose of unifying the overall intelligence efforts of the Department of Defense. During the Vietnam War, the CIA and DIA were often at odds overestimates of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troop strength; CIA estimates were far more pessimistic than those of the DIA. During the Iraq War, the challenge to the CIA came from a newly created Office of Special Plans (OSP) within the DIA; its mission was to provide independent review of raw intelligence and dispute the mainstream interpretations by the intelligence community.

Selective examination of members of the intelligence community begins by looking at the CIA. For most Americans, the CIA is the public face of the intelligence community. In addition, since its director was also the head of the intelligence community until the DNI came into existence, it long enjoyed the status of first among equals within the intelligence community.

The organizational predecessor of the CIA was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was created by a 1942 military order and tasked with collecting and analyzing strategic information and conducting special operations. At the end of World War II, Truman disbanded the OSS and assigned its intelligence duties to units within the State Department, the Army, and the Navy. The 1947 National Security Act reestablished the CIA as a stand-alone intelligence unit.25

The CIA began a major reorganization in 2015. According to CIA director John Brennan, the goal is to break down organizational “stove pipes” that artificially separate CIA personnel into different operating units, making communication between them difficult. Central to the new organizational structure are ten mission centers that will bring together analysts and covert action operators on a day-to-day basis. The mission centers are modeled on the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and will focus on such issues as terrorism, weapons proliferation, global issues, and the Middle East. Until the reorganization, analysts were housed in the Directorate of Intelligence and operators were in the Directorate of Operations. These units were two of the four major operational arms of the CIA. The Directorate of Intelligence has been the primary producer of government intelligence documents, which range in frequency from daily briefs to weekly, quarterly, and yearly summaries, and occasional special reports. The best known of these reports are the National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs). The Directorate of Operations, more recently identified as the National Clandestine Service, has had three basic missions: the secret collection of information, counterintelligence, and covert action. Those missions will continue to exist, but the National Clandestine Service will now focus on recruiting and training personnel to be assigned to the centers. The two other arms (the Directorate of Science and Technology and the Directorate of Personnel) continue to operate.

These four directorates will be joined by a new directorate: the Directorate of Digital Innovation. It is tasked with such responsibilities as cyber espionage, protecting the CIA’s internal e-mail system, and monitoring global social media and other open source information sources. No timetable has been set for completing the reorganization.

The second prominent member of the intelligence community, the NSA, was the first major addition to the intelligence community. It came into existence in 1952 and operates as a semiautonomous agency of the Department of Defense.26 In 2013, the NSA became the center of unwanted public attention when the media began reporting on the existence of a 207secret domestic surveillance program (discussed in the Dateline section in chapter 5). Controversy over the NSA’s intelligence collection practices resurfaced more recently. In 2017, there was a major leak of its highly classified hacking tools by a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers. In 2019, it was revealed that Chinese intelligence agents already possessed these NSA hacking tools, and had redirected them for cyberattacks on U.S. allies and private companies operating abroad.

The NSA has also undergone major internal organizational changes. In 2009, the U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) was created and placed inside the NSA under a “dual hat arrangement,” in which the head of the cyber command was also the head of NSA. Its focus was to be on developing policy and legal frameworks for the defense of the military’s computer systems, along with protecting private sector computers that provide a potential entryway into government computer systems. In 2013, following a Department of Defense study concluding that the military was unprepared for a full-scale cyberattack, the Pentagon began a major expansion of its cybersecurity force capabilities. Three different missions now have been identified for the expanded Cyber Command: (1) national mission forces to protect computer systems and other infrastructures from foreign attack, (2) combat mission forces to plan and execute offensive operations, and (3) cyber protection forces to strengthen the computer networks of the Department of Defense. In 2017, USCYBERCOM was elevated to the status of a full and independent unified combatant command; it is scheduled to be split from the NSA and become an independent agency. Most recently, in 2019 the NSA announced that it would create a Cybersecurity Directorate to pursue a more aggressive cyber policy and more closely align its offensive and defensive cyber operations.

The third organization is the newest agency involved in intelligence; the ODNI came into existence as part of the post-9/11 reforms of the intelligence community. Its head, the DNI, is identified as the principal intelligence advisor to the president and is charged with overseeing and directing the implementation of the National Intelligence Program. The two principal organizational subunits within the ODNI focus on collection and analysis.

Two broad areas of concern have been raised about the operation of the ODNI. The first is its size. As originally envisioned, the ODNI was to be a lean management organization sitting atop the intelligence community. It quickly grew into an organization with a staff of over 1,500 people. In 2010, the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board concluded that the ODNI had become “bureaucratic and resource heavy” to the point that its ability to coordinate the intelligence community was impeded. A second concern is the powers of the office, particularly its budgetary powers and ability to shape intelligence programs. Only the CIA exists as a separate organizational entity within the intelligence community. All other organizations are parts of larger departments, most often the Department of 208Defense. Consequently, the other members of the intelligence community look with only one eye to what the DNI demands, while keeping the other eye firmly fixed on departmental positions and priorities. Shortly after its creation, the FBI moved 96 percent of its intelligence budget into units that were not under the jurisdiction of the DNI. More recently, the DNI reached an agreement in principle with the Department of Defense that the civilian portion of the Pentagon’s intelligence budget will come under its control. The Pentagon’s covert action/spy budget will remain under Pentagon jurisdiction.

The Intelligence Community’s Value System

Periodically throughout its history, the CIA has found itself an institution under siege, both because of covert action and intelligence failures. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was so outraged over the CIA’s failure to anticipate the fall of communism in the Soviet Union that he called for its abolition.27 One area that has received a great deal of attention is the manner in which both its top leadership and professionals approach their jobs. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report placed a major portion of the blame for the intelligence failures on Iraq and preceding 9/11 on “a broken corporate culture and poor management.” Let’s turn our attention to the informal organizational side of the CIA.

 

Director of Central Intelligence Because the DCI was simultaneously head of the intelligence community and head of the CIA, the office has had many role orientations available from which to choose. Few sought—and none achieved—real managerial control over the intelligence community. The most recent to try was Stansfield Turner, President Carter’s DCI, who ran into stiff and successful resistance from Secretary of Defense Harold Brown.

When defining the role of head of the CIA, three outlooks have been dominant: managerial, covert action, and intelligence-estimating. Only John McCone (1961–1965) gave primacy to the intelligence-estimating role, and he was largely an outsider to the intelligence process before his appointment. Allen Dulles (1953–1965) and Richard Helms (1966–1973) both stressed the covert action aspect of the agency’s mission. Since the replacement of Helms by James Schlesinger, DCIs have tended to adopt a managerial orientation. Although their particular operating styles have varied, a common theme has been to increase White House control over the CIA. Mike Pompeo, Trump’s first head of the CIA, very much fit this mold. He has been characterized as the most openly political head of the CIA in a generation. Not only was he a strong public supporter of Trump’s foreign policy agenda, but he actively participated in White House policy discussions. Pompeo received a mixed reception at the CIA, where he was valued for his support of intelligence gathering operations but faced misgivings over his contradictory public statements; on occasion 209they supported the intelligence community’s analyses, but other times they echoed Trump’s criticism of intelligence. Pompeo’s successor, Gina Haspel, a career professional described by some in the intelligence community as “the consummate insider,” also adopted a managerial orientation on taking the position. During her confirmation hearings, she called for returning the CIA to its traditional mission of focusing on foreign states and less on counterterrorism. Haspel’s nomination was politically controversial because of her involvement in the CIA’s post-9/11 torture programs; she had run the Thailand prison where waterboarding took place. It was welcomed from those within the agency, who saw it as placing intelligence professionals back in charge of the CIA.

According to critics of the managerial role orientation, one frequent result of this outlook is politicization of the intelligence process. In other words, the heads of the CIA have used their managerial control over intelligence products to ensure that its findings are consistent with the policy preferences of the administration rather than reflecting the judgment of intelligence professionals.

Politicizing intelligence, a charge directed at William Casey, Robert Gates, and George Tenet, was also a major concern raised from the outset of the Trump presidency. While some concern was directed at Pompeo’s deep engagement in policy making and his open support of Trump’s agenda, most (from retired DCIs Michael Hayden, John Brennan, and James Clapper) pointed to Trump’s repeated public attacks on the intelligence community’s findings concerning Russian interference in the 2016 election. Especially troubling to the intelligence community was his statement at the Helsinki summit with Vladimir Putin: “They said they think it’s Russia; I have President Putin, he just said it’s not Russia. . . . I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be. I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.”

 

Director of National Intelligence The DNI is torn by the same types of role conflicts that have afflicted DCIs: the need to establish a power base and the need to define an orientation to intelligence. There have been four DNIs in a little more than five years. John Negroponte, the first DNI, moved quickly to solidify his position as the president’s primary intelligence advisor by personally presenting the president’s daily intelligence briefing.

Later DNIs have struggled to establish an effective working relationship with both the president and the intelligence community. Dan Coats, Trump’s first DNI, joined with DCI Pompeo in resisting an attempt by Stephen Bannon and Jared Kushner to bring in a political ally to head a White House review of the intelligence community. In another step in the direction of politicizing intelligence in the new administration, at Trump’s request Pompeo rather than Coats began briefing the president on intelligence. Coats resigned in 2019 following a series of conflicts with Trump 210over intelligence assessments on North Korea and Russia and Trump’s critiques of the intelligence community. Coats was to be replaced by Representative John Ratcliffe, a staunch Trump supporter on the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees who was considered by some Republicans and Democrats in Congress to be too political and not experienced enough for the position. Within days of his nomination, Ratcliffe withdrew his name from consideration. When it became clear that she would not be nominated to be the next DNI, Susan Gordon, a career professional who Coats had recommended as his successor, resigned from government service.

 

Intelligence Professionals Views on intelligence within the intelligence community are far from uniform. Differences exist both between and within organizations.28 For example, some suggest that, within the cyber command, four different outlooks can be identified, all of which should be present: cyber priests (who think in terms of deterrence), cyber prophets (adaptation), cyber designers (resilience), and cyber detectives (resistance).29

With these outlooks in mind, it is possible to identify four tendencies in the approach to intelligence by members of the intelligence community.30 One tendency is to be a current-events-oriented “butcher,” cutting up the latest information and presenting the choicest pieces to the consumer. A second tendency is for analysts to adopt a “jigsaw theory” of intelligence. Here the analyst acts like a “baker”; everything and anything is sought after, classified, and stored, on the assumption that at some point in time, it may be the missing ingredient to solving a riddle. Similar to the butcher’s role, the baker’s orientation is consistent with the policy maker’s notion of intelligence as a free good and the assumption that the ambiguity of data can be overcome by collecting more of it.

A third tendency is the production of “intelligence to please” or “backstopping.” This occurs when consumers desire only the intelligence that supports their policy preferences, ignoring efforts at providing anything but supportive evidence. The final role orientation is the “intelligence maker,” who acts as an organizational broker, forging a consensus on the issue at hand. The danger here is that the consensus reached may not be based on an accurate reading of events. Facts bargained into existence provide an equally suitable basis for consensus, but can lead to policy failures.

Impact of the CIA and the Intelligence Community on Foreign Policy

The challenges the intelligence community has faced in interacting with Trump are not unprecedented. Intelligence is not easily integrated into the policy process.31 The relationship between intelligence and policy makers is marked by a series of tensions that often serve to make the impact of 211intelligence on policy less than what it could be under optimum circumstances. As Paul Pillar, who once served as deputy director of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, observed about the Iraq War: “Had Bush read the intelligence community’s report, he would have seen his administration’s case for the invasion stood on its head.”32

A starting point to understanding the challenges that intelligence faces in influencing policy is the view held by many policy makers that facts are self-interpreting. Intelligence is about connecting the dots, not providing meaning to the data. 33 The limitations on the influence of intelligence produced by this perspective are reinforced by the tension between the logic of intelligence and the logic of policy making.34 The logic of intelligence is to reduce policy options by clarifying issues, assumptions, and consequences. The logic of policy making is to keep options open for as long as possible and build policy support. As such, policy makers are most eager to get information that will help them convince Congress or the public about the merits of a policy. 35 Finally, intelligence produced by the intelligence community is not the only source of information available to policy makers. Interest groups, lobbyists, the media, and personal acquaintances all compete with intelligence, and presidents are free to listen to whichever intelligence they choose.

The Domestic Bureaucracies

The most recent additions to the foreign affairs bureaucracy are organizations that, traditionally, have been classified as domestic in their concerns and areas of operation. Their foreign policy involvement parallels a development after World War II, when the Defense Department, rather than the State Department, was instrumental in shaping global arms development programs and international security arrangements.36

Integrating these newcomers into the foreign affairs bureaucracy has not been an easy task. At the core of the problem is finding an agreed-on balance between foreign policy and domestic concerns. In the early post–World War II period, the foreign policy goal of containing communism dominated over private economic goals; more recently, domestic goals have become dominant and are often pursued at the cost of achieving broad foreign policy objectives.

Treasury, Commerce, and Agriculture

Of all of the domestic bureaucracies, the Department of the Treasury (also called the Treasury Department) plays the most prominent role in foreign policy. By the mid-1970s, its influence had made the State Department become more of a participant than a leader in the field of international economic policy. It now takes a strong Secretary of State to neutralize the influence of the Treasury Department and its domestic allies.37

212

The two departments approach international economic policy from quite different perspectives. Like the other domestic bureaucracies, the Treasury Department takes an “America first” perspective (a term used long before being embraced by Trump), placing the needs of its clients at the center of its concerns. One author describes it as having an “undifferentiating adversary attitude” toward world affairs.38 In contrast, the State Department’s tendency is to adopt a long-range perspective on international economic problems that is sensitive to the positions of other states. A type of standoff for influence in the policy process currently exists between the State Department and Treasury Department,; however, Treasury has been ascending in importance due to the rise in the use of economic sanctions, the recent global economic downturn, and the central role played by China in holding U.S. debt and maintaining an undervalued currency. Treasury gained additional importance as a foreign policy actor when, along with trade restrictions, economic sanctions began to include financial sanctions directed at individuals.

The Department of Commerce (also called the Commerce Department) has also emerged as a major foreign affairs bureaucracy. However, it is more involved in administrative or operating issues than policy ones. Until 1969, the Commerce Department’s primary foreign policy involvement stemmed from its responsibility for overseeing U.S. export control policy. These controls were aimed largely at restricting the direct or indirect sale of strategic goods to communist states. Since 1980, the Commerce Department has become the primary implementer of nonagricultural trade policy and the chief administrator of U.S. export and import programs. The Commerce Department is not without its own challengers for influence on trade policy. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has also benefited at the expense of the State Department, and its activities enjoy a great deal of congressional support.

The Department of Agricultural (also called the Agriculture Department) remains a junior partner in the foreign affairs bureaucracy. Active in administering U.S. food export programs, Its best-known foreign policy role is as administrator of P.L. 480, the Food for Peace program, which provides free export of government-owned agricultural commodities for humanitarian and developmental purposes. In 2003, the Agriculture Department became embroiled in controversy for providing export help to American tobacco companies. Its Foreign Agriculture Service provided market information to firms about where the demand for American cigarettes was high, and where control laws were weak.

Numerous others play occasional roles as well. The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has eighty-six foreign offices in sixty-seven countries, where it carries out bilateral investigations; sponsors and conducts counternarcotics training; participates in intelligence gathering activities; and provides assistance in developing drug control laws and regulations. The DEA gained notoriety recently, when its agents accompanied Honduran counternarcotics 213police in two firefights with cocaine smugglers. One of these incidents left four people dead, leading to demands that the agency leave the country.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has become more active in foreign policy issues through its inspection program of drug and food imports into the United States. Some 150 countries export FDA-regulated products to the United States. As of 2008, the FDA operated foreign offices in China and India, as well as countries in Europe and Latin America. Movement in the opposite direction (decreases in influence) have also taken place. In 2017, the Trump administration closed the Department of Energy’s Office of International Climate and Technology, which was established in 2010 to provide technical advice to countries trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Homeland Security

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is an uneasy fit in the foreign affairs bureaucracy. It has elements of both foreign and domestic policy, given the wide range of activities that fall under its jurisdiction. The DHS was established on November 25, 2002, as a response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Its creation combined twenty-two different agencies from eight different departments with a total of 170,000 employees, and had a projected budget of $37.45 million. It absorbed all of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Coast Guard, the Secret Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Customs Service, and was charged with overseeing the new Transportation Security Administration. The FBI and the CIA were not directly affected by the creation of the DHS, but the new department was given an “intelligence and threat analysis” unit that would serve as a customer of FBI and CIA intelligence for assessing threats, taking preventive action, and issuing public warnings. In 2017, the DHS had an estimated two thousand individuals stationed in over seventy countries, who engaged in activities ranging from flying surveillance aircraft to questioning travelers at airports.

The DHS has encountered problems in virtually all aspects of its work, beginning with the ineffective color-coded terrorist warning system put into place after 9/11 and the tracking of activities of peaceful war protestors. As recently as 2015, it faced the possibility that Congress would deny it operating funds. In December 2017, the DHS announced the creation of a new office to deal with weapons of mass destruction. Between 2015 and 2017, it was at the center of the political controversy over Trump’s travel ban on people from seven Muslim countries. John Kelly, then head of the DHS, took responsibility for failing to hold up the policy announcement until Congress had been briefed. A DHS study contradicted Trump’s assertion of the existence of a terrorist threat requiring the ban. Later, Kelly’s successor Kirstjen Nielsen was roundly blamed in cabinet meetings for DHS failure to secure the southern border from illegal immigration effectively.

214

Policy Makers’ Response to Bureaucracy

Policy makers have adopted three different strategies for dealing with bureaucracies that are perceived to be failing them.39 The first is to replace senior leaders. The second is to reorganize bureaucracies. Rare is the bureaucracy that is simply eliminated. Instead, the solution is to combine the offender with another or rearrange its internal structure. In the extreme, this solution takes the form of creating a new bureaucracy to address an ongoing problem. Finally, policy makers may simply choose to ignore the bureaucracy, either by becoming their own experts or by establishing an informal in-house body of experts to produce policy guidance.

This last strategy is not without its shortcomings that can affect the content and quality of foreign policy. British Ambassador to the United States Kim Darroch resigned in 2019 after a leaked correspondence characterized the Trump administration as “clumsy and inept.” Two years earlier, revelations in the Mueller Report showed that Russian officials were frustrated in dealing with the incoming Trump administration because it could not find out who was in charge of matters.

It also needs to be noted that bureaucrats have their own view of the problem of integrating the bureaucracy with policy makers. When asked by President Kennedy what was wrong with the State Department, career diplomat Charles Bohlen replied, “You are.”40 Indications are that this sentiment still exists. In January 2017, some nine hundred State Department employees signed a dissent cable criticizing Trump’s travel ban citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries. The year before fifty-one State Department employees signed a letter to President Obama in which they asserted his policy toward Syria would not end the civil war and called for the ousting Syrian president Assad.

Over the Horizon: U.S. Space Command

This chapter began by recounting efforts by the Trump administration to restructure the State Department, an existing foreign affairs bureaucracy. It ends by looking over the horizon to the challenge of thinking how best to organize the military after next,41 one geared to addressing future defense needs: Trump’s plan to create a U.S. Space Command.

Trump first advocated the establishment of a separate military space force in March 2018. In June of that year he signed an executive order directing the Pentagon to construct a space force as the sixth branch of the military. (The other five are the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard.) This was followed in December by a memorandum authorizing the Department of Defense to create a new space command.

A U.S. Space Command had existed from 1985 to 2002, and had been given the task of coordinating the Army, Naval, and Air Force space forces. The command was disbanded after the 9/11 terrorist attack so that homeland security efforts could be better funded. Its operations were taken 215over by the U.S. Strategic Command and the Air Force. The first political steps in the direction of creating a true space command came in 1999, when Congress established a Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization. Advocates argued that this was necessary because treaties had negotiated away the U.S. space advantage. The commission’s report warned against the dangers of a “Space Pearl Harbor,” and called for creating a military department for space operations. In 2017, a bipartisan proposal was introduced in Congress to create a separate space service within the Air Force, along the lines of the Marine Corps’ status in the Department of the Navy. Doing so would allow the space force to develop its own organizational and professional culture, and speed up the acquisition of space technology. The proposal was defeated, but language was added to the 2018 defense bill requiring the Defense Department to conduct a study of how to organize military space forces.

Trump’s endorsement and authorization of a space command provided few details on what was to be created, and left many obstacles in place. The most significant obstacle is that only Congress can create a new military service. While Congress contains supporters of the concept of an independent Space Command, it also has powerful opponents who serve on the House Armed Services Committee. Not to be ignored is the political competition over which state receives the economic benefits that would accompany its creation. Alabama, California, and Colorado were the early finalists in the competition.

Many senior military officials who had publicly opposed the idea of a separate military branch before Trump’s announcement, especially those in the Air Force, argue that creating a separate space force would only complicate national security decision-making, weaken the military capabilities of existing services, and create internal conflict within existing branches of the military, as many of their uniformed and civilian personnel would have to join the new service. According to one estimate, the new space command would pull some six hundred people from other military space operations in the Army, Navy, and Air Force, and then add at least another one thousand staff members.

Another complicating factor is the nature of space warfare. James Moltz argues that Cold–War era thinking about the nature of space warfare and space power is obsolete42 and needs to be reshaped, with greater attention to the idea of networked power and the collaboration of military and commercial/entrepreneurial space power resources. Doing so may require creating a Space Command quite different from the one being proposed.

In February 2019, Trump issued Space Policy Directive (SPD) 4, centralizing all military space functions under a new Space Force Command led by a civilian Undersecretary of the Air Force and a four-star general. This announcement marked a step back from creating a sixth military service, but found added support in Congress. In December 2019, Congress approved limited funding for the Space Command.

Critical Thinking Questions

1. Is the formal structure of a bureaucracy or the value system of its members more important to the quality of bureaucratic performance? Explain your answer.

2. Is there a place for the domestic bureaucracies identified as making American foreign policy or should their tasks be taken over by more traditional foreign policy agencies? Explain your answer.

3. Can the State Department lead in the making of U.S. foreign policy? Should it lead? If not, who should lead?

Key Terms

· “America first” perspective, 212

· civil-military relations, 203

· country team, 193

· foreign service officers, 193

· military after next, 214

· outsource, 198

· political creep, 195

· politicizing intelligence, 209

· Revolution in Military Affairs, 204

216

Further Reading

Gordon Adams and Shoon Murray, eds., Mission Creep (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2014).

This book argues that a militarization of U.S. foreign policy has taken place as a result of the Defense Department’s involvement in the implementation and formation of foreign policy programs in nontraditional areas such as foreign aid, public diplomacy, economic development, and covert action.

American Diplomacy at Risk (Washington, DC: American Academy of Diplomacy, April 2015).

This study of American diplomacy is critical of the politicization of American diplomacy, which it argues has contributed greatly to the disappearance of foreign service professionals. It concludes with recommendations to improve the State Department’s organization and management.

Roger George and James Bruce, Analyzing Intelligence, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2014).

The authors provide an excellent overview of the analytic challenges facing the intelligence community and the dynamics of intelligence analyst—policy maker relations.

John Harr, The Professional Diplomat (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969).

This book provides an early but still valuable and frequently cited study of the attitudes and values of professional diplomats.

Benjamin Jensen, Forging the Sword (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016)

This book, which traces the process of doctrinal reform within the U.S. Army, finds that “incubators” and advocacy networks are central to bringing about change 217in military organizations. Together, they can bring about changes in elite thinking that otherwise would not occur.

Thomas Mackubin, “Military Officers: Political without Partisanship,” Strategic Studies Quarterly 9 (Fall 2015), 88–101.

According to tradition, military officers are to remain apolitical in carrying out their duties. This essay examines this tradition and several ways in which military officers exercise influence in public debates over military policy.

Amy Zegart and Michael Morrell, Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: Why U.S. Intelligence Agencies Must Adapt or Fail,” Foreign Affairs 98 (May 2019), 85–96.

Commenting on the intelligence community’s failure to identify the magnitude of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, the authors argue that the major challenges it faces include open source information and artificial intelligence.