Five successive Secretaries of Defense have asked Congress for permission to reduce excess and unnecessary military bases. The fairest and most transparent way to make such cuts is through another Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) round. So far, however, the SecDefs’ requests have gone unanswered. For their sake, but mostly for the sake of the men and women serving in our armed forces, I want one, too. All I want for Christmas is a BRAC.
According to the Pentagon’s latest estimates, the military as a whole has 19 percent excess base capacity. If it helps to visualize the nature of the problem, nearly 1 in every 5 facilities that DoD operates are superfluous to U.S. national security, or their functions could be consolidated into other facilities elsewhere. This is important because requiring the military to carry so much overhead necessarily compels the services to divert resources away from more important things — from salaries and benefits for military personnel, to maintenance and upkeep for their equipment, and even to the purchase of new gear.
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Defense and Foreign Policy
All I Want for Christmas…Is Information about U.S. Military Deployments
2017 has been a year of massive expansion for the Global War on Terror, but you could be forgiven for not noticing. In addition to the media focus on the ongoing chaos in the Trump White House, the Pentagon has consistently avoided disclosing where and who America’s armed forces are engaged in fighting until forced to do so.
Take Syria, where the Pentagon long claimed that there were only 500 boots on the ground, even though anecdotal accounts suggested a much higher total. When Maj. General James Jarrard accidentally admitted to reporters at a press conference in October that the number was closer to 4000, his statement was quickly walked back. Finally, last week, the Pentagon officially acknowledged that there are in fact 2000 troops on the ground in Syria, and pledged that they will stay there ‘indefinitely.’
Even when we do know how many troops are stationed abroad, we often don’t know what they’re doing. Look at Niger, where a firefight in October left four soldiers dead. Prior to this news—and to the President’s disturbing decision to publicly feud with the widow of one of the soldiers—most Americans had no idea that troops deployed to Africa on so-called ‘train-and equip’ missions were engaged in active combat.
Yet U.S. troops are currently engaged in counterterrorism and support missions in Somalia, Chad, Nigeria, and elsewhere, deployments which have never been debated by Congress and are authorized only under a patchwork of shaky, existing authorities.
Even in the Middle East, deployments have been increasing substantially under the Trump administration, with the number of troops and civilian support staff in the region increasing by almost 30% during the summer of 2017 alone. These dramatic increases were noted in the Pentagon’s quarterly personnel report, but no effort was made to draw public attention to them.
The fundamental problem is simple. With only limited knowledge of where American troops are, and what they are doing there, we cannot even have a coherent public discussion about the scope of U.S. military intervention around the globe. We should be discussing the increase in U.S. military actions in Africa or the growth in U.S. combat troops in the Middle East, but that discussion is effectively impossible—even for the relevant congressional committees—with so little information.
So if I could ask for one change to U.S. foreign policy for Christmas, I’d like to know where American troops are and what they’re doing there. It’s past time for a little more transparency, from the Trump administration, and from the Pentagon.
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Postscript: THINTHREAD-TRAILBLAZER DoD IG Report
I’ve had lots of requests for a non-Scribd link to the 2004 DoD IG report on the THINTHREAD and TRAILBLAZER programs I mentioned in my JustSecurity.org piece yesterday, so you can now find it here.
I should point out that at the end of the excellent documentary on this topic, A Good American, the film’s creators noted that Hayden, NSA’s Signal Intelligence Division director Maureen Baginski, and two other senior NSA executives involved in this affair declined to be interviewed on camera.
Hayden, NSA and the Road to 9/11
Like most such memoirs by high-level Washington insiders, Hayden’s tends to be heavy on self-justification and light on genuine introspection and accountability. Also, when a memoir is written by someone who spent their professional life in the classified world of the American Intelligence Community, an additional caveat is in order: The claims made by the author are often impossible for the lay reader to verify. This is certainly the case for Playing to The Edge, an account of Hayden’s time as director of the NSA, and subsequently, the CIA.
Fortunately, with respect to at least one episode Hayden describes, litigation I initiated under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has produced documentary evidence of Hayden’s role in the 9/11 intelligence failure and subsequent civil liberties violations. The consequences of Hayden’s misconduct during this time continue to be felt today. First, some background.
The Malady of Excessive Interventionism
There is a lot that’s wrong with U.S. foreign policy right now, but a broader look at U.S. grand strategy in the post-Cold War era reveals just how broken things have been across administrations of both parties.
The post-Cold War era has seen a continuation of a long global trend toward greater peace and stability, lower rates of conflict, and zero great power wars. More peace and diminishing threats have merely enhanced the remarkable security already enjoyed by the United States thanks to its geographic isolation, weak neighbors, unparalleled economic and military power, and its nuclear deterrent.
But America doesn’t act as if it is safe. Instead, we have a hyper-interventionist foreign policy. Over the last century, according to the Rand Corporation, “there was only one brief period – the four years immediately after U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam – during which the United States did not engage in any interventions abroad.” Indeed, “the number and scale of U.S. military interventions rose rapidly in the aftermath of the Cold War, just as [rates of global] conflict began to subside.”
According to data from the Congressional Research Service, the United States has engaged in more military interventions in the past 28 years than it had in the previous 190 years of its existence.* About 46 percent of Americans have lived the majority of their lives with the United States at war. Twenty-one percent have lived their entire lives in a state of war.
This suggests a truly perverse defect in the way we are carrying out foreign policy. In an era of unprecedented peace and stability, which should permit a less activist foreign policy, we are finding reasons to intervene militarily at an extraordinary pace, making the past three decades a significant outlier in U.S. history.
America’s role in the world underwent a massive expansion following WWII and again at the end of the Cold War. Washington adopted policies and built bureaucracies that incentivized interventionism. As Joseph Schumpeter once put it in an essay on imperialism, “Created by the wars that required it, the machine now created the wars it required.”
In some ways, Americans have been insulated from the worst effects of this aberrant post-Cold War foreign policy (the costs have been borne more acutely by certain foreign populations on the receiving end of it). However, there have been costs here at home. The United States has spent almost $15 trillion on its military since 1990, an enormous price tag that far exceeds what any other country has spent. This constant state of war also tends to undermine liberal values at home by eroding constitutional checks and balances on war powers, incentivizing excessive government secrecy, and infringing on civil liberties in the name of security. In the oft-cited words of James Madison, “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
As predicted, Donald Trump has maintained and in some ways expanded America’s militaristic and interventionist role in the world. And Trump’s rise is arguably another indication of how democratic norms can erode in the midst of continual warfare. As with most things, however, America’s unusual post-Cold War foreign policy and Trump’s convention-violating brashness has in many ways become normalized.
If we are ever to break out of this apathy and return once again to a realistic and prudent foreign policy commensurate with the low-threat environment we currently inhabit, we will have to reckon with the steep costs of this expansive grand strategy and wrangle the self-sustaining national security bureaucracy into the austerity it desperately needs.
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How Tom Cotton Will Undermine U.S. Foreign Policy
It is no secret that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and President Trump haven’t been getting along. According to the New York Times, the administration has developed a plan to replace Tillerson with current CIA director Mike Pompeo. If ousted, Tillerson would have one of the shortest stints as secretary of state in U.S. history—not the worst consequence of that position, though an embarrassing one for Tillerson, and perhaps the administration. But the most troubling consequence of Tillerson’s departure would be to replace Pompeo with Senator Tom Cotton as CIA director.
To begin with, it’s difficult to believe Cotton is being considered for the position because of his qualifications. Cotton is a freshman senator with no experience in intelligence. Instead, it seems he is being considered for the prestigious role as director because of his “easy” relationship with President Trump. His support for Trump has indeed been unfaltering: he consistently endorses the president’s incoherent foreign policy, and exhibits what seems like blind loyalty rather than objective analysis. For example, on October 9, on The Global Politico podcast, when speaking about Iran, Cotton seemed to indicate that Tillerson and Defense Secretary Mattis should resign if they are unwilling to execute the president’s policies. Trump’s promotion of Cotton also highlights the president’s own desire to surround himself with yes-men who will tell him what he wants to hear.
Second, he supports torture and other extreme interrogation techniques, like waterboarding, and voted against anti-torture safeguards. Cotton has gone as far as to say that waterboarding, currently illegal, is not torture. If Cotton becomes CIA director, he may push to end restrictions around it, which would contradict the assessments of experienced intelligence professionals.
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Ethnic Cleansing vs. Genocide: The Politics Behind Labeling the Rohingya Crisis
On November 22, after some reluctance, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson joined the United Nations and United Kingdom in calling the current Rohingya crisis an “ethnic cleansing.” Holding Myanmar’s military, security forces, and local vigilantes responsible for the crisis, Tillerson stated that the United States could pursue accountability via targeted sanctions. While some hailed Tillerson’s label of ethnic cleansing as a start, it’s worth taking a closer look at the politics behind it. First, ethnic cleansing does not elicit a legal response, whereas the labels of “crimes against humanity” or “genocide” do. Second, targeted sanctions are known to be ineffective, so threatening Myanmar with them seems unproductive.
The current humanitarian crisis began on August 25, when the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army coordinated an attack on Myanmar’s police and security forces. Myanmar’s military crackdown on the Rohingya population was severe, resulting in a mass exodus that is now called the fastest growing refugee emergency in the world. Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world, is now host to at least one million Rohingya refugees, and relief agencies like the United Nations Children’s Fund are struggling to establish a health system to try to limit malnutrition and the spread of disease. Stories of burning villages, massacres, sexual violence and rape are emerging daily. So, then, why is there a global unwillingness to label the Rohingya persecution by the Myanmar government and military as genocide?
There are three main reasons why “ethnic cleansing” is preferred as a label over “genocide.”
First, labeling a crisis “ethnic cleansing” has no legal implications—and hence is easier for states to deal with. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide has declared genocide to be a crime under international law, and defines it as “the intent to destroy an ethnic, national, racial or religious group.” Ethnic cleansing, on the other hand, refers to the expulsion of a group from a certain area, but there is no treaty that determines its parameters. Even though the lines between ethnic cleansing and genocide are blurry, the former requires no domestic and international legal action. The label of ethnic cleansing, therefore, seems like a call for action but in reality is less politically charged, and is more like a “feel good” option for the international community.