Charles W. King

The last time the United States Congress passed a budget on time was 1997. Since then there have been dozens of continuing resolutions, which kick the can down the road anywhere from a few months to a year, and multiple shutdowns of the federal government. These long term budgetary difficulties have significant and damaging effects on the American foreign policy and defense strategy.

The Budget Control Act of 2011 implemented sequestration in 2013. Meant as a sword of Damocles hanging over the collective necks of Congress to force them to pass a budget or suffer cuts to sectors dear to both Democratic and Republican parties that in 2011 were considered to be so harsh as to be unthinkable, since 2013 theses dramatic decreases in federal spending have become the baseline from which American policy-makers must now work.

The United States is now suffering the long term effects of these failed attempts to resolve the budget. This is because the nature of federal spending means that some things are more directly affected by budget sequestration and government shutdowns than others. Shutdowns of the federal government resulting furloughs of indeterminate length for hundreds of thousands of civilian federal employees, but military service people must stay regardless of whether or not they know they are going to be paid. These furloughs, while exempting many positions that are deemed ‘essential to national security’, significantly affect the ability of the United States to conduct foreign policy and geopolitical strategy effectively by sending home anyone whose position isn’t related to crisis response. While this retains the federal government’s ability to react to global events, its ability to plan and strategize for the future suffers.

These budgetary measures also affect different kinds of federal spending differently. It is relatively straightforward to tell federal employees to not come in to work, but for acquisitions and federal contracting the government has agreed to contracts and pays in lump sums rather than weekly paychecks. Contracts for shipbuilding for example are places almost a decade in advance in some cases. Additionally when it comes time to trim the defense budget in particular the nature of large defense acquisitions leads them to be protected by the Representatives and Senators whose states they are being built in. This is part of the reason why the Department of Defense continues to spend large amounts of money on large and expensive pieces of new kit while the budgets for training, maintenance, and readiness have suffered for decades.

In recent years the U.S. military has run in to multiple shortages of spare parts and required emergency funding for their purchase. The Seventh Fleet has experienced a number of deadly collisions that have been directly attributed to a lack of adequate training time due to lack of funding and personnel. The Department of Defense is tasked with training and equipping military forces with a vision to what new threats and military innovations may occur decades in the future. Large military assets like bombers and aircraft carriers have lifespans of forty years or more, the best of military personnel spend decades in uniform. The long term nature of defense assets and forward thinking requirements of effective foreign and defense policy is put under tremendous strain when it is unclear year-to-year or even month-to-month whether or not the Department of Defense is going to be able to train and equip its soldiers and sailors in the field. Compounded by the ease of protecting bulk expenditures than ongoing spending, the past two decades have seriously distorted the spending of the Department of Defense in ways that has been deleterious to national security. The United States desperately needs a budget process that ensures both fiscal responsibility and strategic thinking by the Department of Defense.

Charles W. King

At the height of the Cold War there existed within the Western intelligence community a cadre of analysts who specialized taking whatever their agency could get on events within the Soviet Union—human and signals intelligence, Soviet Propaganda—and attempting to divine the inner workings of the Soviet state. These Kremlin watchers, also called Kremlinologists, used the slightest hints: changes in the order of portraits and standing position overlooking parades, and the arrangement of articles in the part’s newspaper Pravda. Kremlinologists resorted to this kind of piecemeal clues to determine who was currently influential within the Soviet Politburo because getting information out the Soviet Union was extremely difficult, but knowing who was pulling the strings behind the Iron Curtain was tremendously valuable. Knowledge of who was in control of Soviet policy, what their tendencies and beliefs were, and who their rivals were could potentially be the difference between escalating a tense situation and finding a resolution that averted a third World War.

Kremlinology was a high stakes exercise in anthropology, taking what information that could be gleaned from the Soviet Union as a whole to elicit fine detail about the day to day politics of the most powerful men in the Soviet government. The Soviet government did not work like any western government, knowledge of how it did function, which was itself scarce in the West, was treasured knowledge. Even then Kremlinologists often got things wrong, or failed to predict sweeping changes in Soviet policy. The underlying assumption of Kremlinology, that Soviet politics are fundamentally different from Western politics demonstrates how the Anthropologist’s Dilemma can affect policy-making and national security in a number of dangerous ways. Knowledge of the extensive dysfunction of the Soviet Union could lead analysts to distain Soviet methods; conversely there are examples of western experts on the Soviet Union becoming disillusioned with Western liberal democracy and becoming Soviet agents. Both are examples of errors endemic to the field of anthropology, because the core assumption of anthropology is that another society is different than one’s own it becomes exceedingly tempting to categorize that society as inferior or superior. Doing this in academia is problematic; doing it in policy-making is dangerous.

Kremlinology did not disappear with the Soviet Union. The term is still used to describe analysis of the internal politics of the Russian Federation. The most famous use of anthropology by the United States in recent years may be the Human Terrain Teams that were deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. These teams ended up being controversial, but they did demonstrate the fundamental value of understanding the society that American and coalition forces were operating in. On the other side of the curtain, it has been repeated many times when attempting to deal with the Soviet Union, Russian Federation, or People’s Republic of China that those governments do not understand the constraints and pressures of democratic political systems. The United States and others will continue to engage in Kremlinology, both of the Kremlin itself, and the general principal of watching the internal politics of foreign powers, but analysts and policy-makers must be cognizant of the assumptions and pitfalls inherent in such endeavors.

Charles W. King

Perhaps the most famous peace-time shipbuilding program in modern history was the Royal Navy’s ‘Two-Power Standard’. While it has been the informal objective of the Royal Navy since the 1850’s, the Naval Defense Act 1889 enshrined the standard in official policy and committed £21,500,000 over five years for the Royal Navy’s expansion. From 1889 onward it was the official policy of the United Kingdom that the Royal Navy would maintain a fleet of battleships at least equal the combined number of battleships to the next two largest navies, France and Russia in 1889.

However the Two-Power Standard raises an important issue, how would an organization like the Royal Navy know how many ships of what kinds the French, Germans, Russians, or Japanese were constructing? The answer was an organized system of Naval Attachés at embassies abroad reporting on the construction and movements of foreign flagged vessels. The United Kingdom created the Foreign Intelligence Committee in 1882, which was renamed the Naval Intelligence Department in 1887. The NID was responsible not only for gathering intelligence on foreign navies through naval attachés and the reports of British merchant marine captains and other sources, but also for strategic planning. By giving the NID these responsibilities the British Admiralty directly linked the both long term shipbuilding planning, and strategic war planning to the intelligence gathered by the NID on foreign naval assets and movements.

The late nineteenth century saw the creation of a number of the forerunners of NATO’s current foreign intelligence services, many of them directly associated with naval affairs. The United States’ first intelligence service was also founded in 1882. Like its Royal Navy counterpart the Office of Naval Intelligence was created alongside a new shipbuilding program and had its responsibilities including the monitoring of foreign naval construction and movements. Imperial Germany’s Nachrichten-Abteilung, known as ‘N’, was not created until 1901 due to the internal politics of the Imperial Navy, but it would also have the remit to monitor foreign shipbuilding and naval movements, focusing on the Royal Navy. Prior to the World War One despite a public hysteria about German spies there were very few German agents working in the U.K.. This is in part because Imperial Germany’s intelligence operations remained split between the Army and Navy. Those German agents that did operate in the U.K. prior to and during World War One were almost exclusively operatives of N, responsible for monitoring naval construction.

Even before the advent of dedicated naval intelligence operations beginning in the 1880s, such information was deemed of critical importance during both peace and war time. The Union carefully monitored British shipyards during the American Civil War for the construction of potential warships for the Confederacy. Members of nation’s merchant marine were relied upon to report when and where they saw foreign vessels in port and who had purchased a hull being laid down in dry-dock was prized information.

Today the intelligence operations of the United States and others are focusing more and more on direct action and covert operations, but historically the origins foreign intelligence services is strategic rather than operational. Naval intelligence efforts remain essential to both current naval operations and planning for future construction and potential conflicts. Human and signals intelligence about foreign military movements and capabilities are of immense strategic value and should remain a major focus of intelligence operations.

Charles W. King

President Trump is expected to decertify the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly referred to as the Iran Nuclear Deal, this week. He intendeds to do this despite statements from the United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Association, who is responsible for monitoring Iran’s compliance, and the United States Departments of Defense and State stating that Iran is complying with the deal. This past week in testimony before Congress Secretary of Defense James Mattis said that he believed it was in the national interest of the United States to continue the JCPOA.

Given these conditions, the Trump administration is finding it hard to completely scuttle the deal. It is unlikely that any of the other signatories to the deal would agree to re-impose sanctions. The White House has found a work around. For weeks a trial balloon has been floating inside the Beltway; the administration will declare that the JCPOA is not in the “national interest” of the United States, and make Congress responsible for determining its future. This is a shrewd move for the administration domestically. It allows Trump to claim victory against the deal without dangerously escalating the situations as Mattis and Tillerson understand unilateral decertification would.

Putting a decision like the continuation of the JCPOA in the hands of Congress is inherently dangerous. Despite the extensive support of congressional staffers, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and Congressional Research Service (CRS), Congress does not have the resources and expertise that the executive branch does. The foremost asset for the executive branch in these matters is the National Security Council (NSC). Established by the 1947 National Security Act, signed by President Harry S. Truman, the NSC truly came into its own under his successor, President Dwight D. Eisenhower. As Supreme Allied Commander Europe Eisenhower was known for the importance he placed on staff work and planning, and is quoted as saying, “Plans are useless, planning is essential.” Eisenhower continued this as president, and used the NSC’s staff to create comprehensive assessments of global events that reflected military, diplomatic, intelligence, and economic perspectives.

In the decades since 1947 the NSC has been an unqualified success, bureaucratically speaking. President after president have imbued it with more and more power as they have steadily eroded the authority of older parts of the executive branch, the State Department in particular. In the twenty first century the most important presidential appointment is the National Security Advisor (NSA). Unlike the Secretaries of State and Defense and their Undersecretaries and staffs, the NSA and the staff of the NSC do not have to be approved by Congress. The need to select compromise candidates for head the Departments of State and Defense has slowly increased their role as bureaucratic managers and decreased their policy influence, a trend that can be seen in the administrations of George W. Bush and Barak Obama especially.

In the twenty first century the government body with the resources and expertise effectively assess and make policy recommendations on important policies like the JCPOA is the National Security Council. The Constitution invests the executive branch with responsibility for foreign policy for a multitude of reasons; the Senate is responsible only for the ratification of treaties. Making Congress responsible for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is both reckless and could herald a new era in American foreign policy making; Quarterback by Committee.