In their infinite wisdom, the Founding Fathers warned against the dangers of standing armies and determined that it should be civilians, not military leaders, who had final authority over the size, shape, and use of America’s armed forces. Their reasoning was simple. Without civilian control of the military there would be no bulwark against military coup or dictatorship. 

But civilian control should not stop at simple control over the armed forces. Civilian officials must provide active leadership and management of the full spectrum of American foreign policy efforts, from intelligence gathering and alliance building to arms sales and crisis diplomacy and, most importantly, the decision to make war. The old chestnut that “War is too important to be left to the generals” is an old chestnut for a reason: It’s true.

Civilian leaders have institutional incentives to be responsive to the full range of considerations that must inform foreign policy. Military leaders, as well informed and dedicated as they may be, operate with too much occupational bias to be the only source of input to the foreign policy making process. Their input on military matters is critical – but not sufficient. Socialized to look at every mission in black and white military terms, military leaders are in fact poorly suited to exercise the kind of political judgment required in a liberal democracy.

And this is where we have a problem. Since taking office, Donald Trump has made it achingly clear that he has little or no respect for the concept of civilian control, and little interest in exercising the sort of political judgment necessary from the White House.

As a candidate Trump exhibited signs of militarism, but it was his appointment of several current and former generals that signaled the coming erosion of civilian leadership. McMaster, Kelly, and Mattis are all clever and competent people, but putting military leaders in charge of the Pentagon and the National Security Council began the tilting of the playing field, ensuring that Trump would get a larger dose of the military worldview in every conversation about world affairs.

The real proof of the loss of civilian control over foreign policy, however, has been Trump’s abandonment of diplomacy. First, Trump appointed Rex Tillerson, a man he had never met and whom he clearly did not really trust, as the Secretary of State. Then, he made sure that Tillerson’s main job would not be to act as the nation’s top diplomat and top foreign policy advisor to the president, but instead to perform radical surgery on the State Department. Tillerson’s plans to shrink and reorganize the State Department have already led a large percentage of the department’s most talented people to resign or retire. The failure to appoint new leaders for a vast number of top State Department jobs not only echoes Trump’s disinterest in diplomacy, but also undermines the broader concept of civilian control in foreign policy.

Of course, it’s not clear that Trump even thinks he needs a State Department. When Tillerson was trying to encourage North Korea to sit down for talks with the United States in late September, Trump hamstrung his efforts by issuing a contradictory pair of tweets: “I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man…” and then, “…Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what has to be done!”

The implication is clear: not only aren’t Rex Tillerson and the State Department part of the solution, Trump doesn’t even think of Tillerson as being part of his national security leadership team in the first place. It’s hard to imagine any previous president saying “we” with respect to a foreign policy issue and the Secretary of State not being part of that “we.”

Beyond the loss of diplomatic influence and engagement it portends, Trump’s breathless militarism and the loss of civilian control also puts the nation at grave risk. Less than two weeks ago one of Trump’s generals, National Security Adviser Henry McMaster, warned that the potential for war with North Korea was increasing by the day and that there “isn’t much time left” to prevent it. Rather than working with a wide range of civilian and military leaders to figure out how to make diplomacy work in North Korea, it looks like Trump has already decided that the military option is the only one that matters.

When Trump took office, many people hoped that “responsible adults” might be able to moderate his foreign policies. Without greater civilian leadership, however, the prospects for sound foreign policy look grim.

All I want for Christmas is for the U.S. to only fight the wars it has to and to stay out of all the others. The lives of young Americans are too high a price to pay for wars driven by threat inflation, ego, or fool-hardy social experiments.

First, we’re Americans. Enough of the hand wringing. Islamist-inspired terrorists do not hide around every corner. Instead, we have been and continue to be quite safe. The threat from groups operating within failed states like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and so on pales in comparison to Hitler’s armies marching across Europe and our nuclear Cold War with the Soviet Union, despite President Trump’s attempts to equate the three.

Second, the unseemly traits of ego, vanity, and hubris should not push us to fight when we don’t have to. Teddy Roosevelt had it right: Walk softly and carry a big stick.

Third, American lives and financial treasure should not be spent on cool sounding social experiments like, “democracy will flourish in Muslim-majority states in response to U.S. invasions.” Since 9/11, though, all three U.S. administrations have referred to Afghan and Iraqi leaders as “reliable partners” at one time or another, while extolling democratic progress in both countries.

The data, however, provide no support for those claims. As of today, Freedom House gives both countries it’s lowest rating—“not free.” And, in terms of corruption, Iraq and Afghanistan’s governments rank worse than 94 and 96 percent of all governments worldwide.

All war is darkness. My Opa spoke those words to me 40 years ago. I remember it vividly because as he shared that one sentence, he pointed to the bullet hole in his shoulder and the shrapnel scar on his neck. He had barely survived the war as an enlisted man in the German army; and when the war ended, he found his home country had become East Germany. Three years later, he took my Oma and (then) three year old dad and they escaped to the west. Eventually, they made it to America.

My war experiences have been much briefer than my Opa’s, but I get his point. All war is darkness, so for the sake of those sent to do the fighting, the war has to be a necessary one. And our war on terror isn’t.

Let’s bring America’s sons and daughters home for the holidays. We’ll all be the better for it.

On December 4, 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the third version of the President’s travel ban, which limits the entry of citizens from eight countries, to go into effect. The White House claimed the Supreme Court decision as a victory, with spokesman Hogan Gidley saying, “The proclamation is lawful and essential to protecting our homeland. We look forward to presenting a fuller defense of the proclamation as the pending cases work their way through the courts.”

While the domestic implications of the Supreme Court’s decision will unfold in the next few weeks, the foreign policy implications will be widespread, and potentially damaging to U.S. interests and reputation.

Before delving into the foreign policy implications, however, it is important to note two important aspects of the U.S. Supreme Court that determine the impact of its decisions on U.S. foreign policy. First, even though the judiciary is constitutionally designed to check against executive power expansion, past administrations, along with the Court itself, have taken a narrow view of the Court’s authority when it comes to interpreting international laws and foreign policy. Second, and most importantly, the Supreme Court has interpreted the Case or Controversy Clause of Article III of the Constitution in a way that prohibits the courts from issuing advisory opinions. The Court’s decision on the travel ban, however, is to stay the district court’s preliminary injunction, which is a temporary maintenance of the status quo. The Court has decided to the let the ban be implemented while the merits of the ban continued to be argued in lower courts.

Yet, even though the Court’s decision does not necessarily mean that the ban will ultimately be upheld, the decision has had three immediate—and negative—foreign policy implications. 

The first, and most obvious, implication is the sustainment of the faulty link between immigration and terrorism. Cato’s Alex Nowrasteh and David Bier have written extensively on the flawed logic and harmful effects of the travel ban on immigration to the United States. One of the unintended consequences of the Court’s decision was a reinforcement of President Trump’s troublesome rhetoric on immigration, highlighted when the president commented on the most recent failed terrorist attack in New York City. President Trump argued that the current immigration system is, “incompatible with national security” and that Congress must end “chain migration,” which refers to the ability of U.S. citizens to sponsor their siblings for U.S. visas, even though there is little evidence indicating that such a measure will make America safer.

The second implication of the Supreme Court decision is connected to the growing anti-Muslim sentiment within the United States, which has entered the Trump administration’s foreign policy in the form of the travel ban and policy on refugees. Six out of the eight banned countries are Muslim-majority (Chad, Iran, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen) and the president has often referred to the ban as the “Muslim Ban.” Similarly, the president has stated that his administration will prioritize Christian refugees. While the Supreme Court decision is not a final ruling on the merits, the Trump administration has called it a victory. Thus, the Trump administration appears to have taken the Court’s decision as a signal that its third attempt at a travel ban will ultimately survive judicial review. 

The third, and final, implication of the Court decision is the worsening of U.S. relations with both Iran and North Korea at a time when tensions are already high. Anti-Americanism is steadily on the rise in Iran, while relations with North Korea have been escalating to a point where some analysts fear an onset of a nuclear war.

So for Christmas, if I could have one wish granted, it would be to end the travel ban in its entirety. Not only is the ban based on a false narrative and poor empirical analyses, but it also fails to make the United States more secure. Furthermore, it constantly undermines U.S. interests abroad. 

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.

As Secretary of Defense James Mattis said in congressional testimony earlier this year: 

Of all the efficiency measures the Department has undertaken over the years, BRAC is one of the most successful and significant – we forecast that a properly focused base closure effort will generate $2 billion or more annually – enough to buy 300 Apache attack helicopters, 120 F/A‑18E/F Super Hornets, or four Virginia-class submarines.

There are two leading arguments against a BRAC, but neither is very convincing. The first envisions a vastly larger military — especially a larger Army — and concludes that a BRAC at this time would be premature because it would deny some hypothetical future military the land and other facilities it needs in order to train and operate effectively.


But BRAC rounds don’t eliminate every square inch of infrastructure not deemed essential in the present-day; they merely grant the Pentagon the authority to more efficiently allocate scarce resources, and respond to changing circumstances. Each of the past five BRAC rounds have cut an average of about 5 percent excess capacity. The military will always retain a surplus as a hedge against future contingencies. 


What’s more, the latest estimate was constructed around the force structure from 2012, when the U.S. military was engaged in major operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Given other pressures on the defense budget, and federal spending in general, it seems highly unlikely that the military will grow back to 2012 levels. But in the extreme scenario in which the military’s needs are dramatically greater than at any time in the recent past, I’m confident that the federal government could obtain what it needs. After all, the U.S. military was tiny for most of our history, and yet we somehow managed to find new locations for bases when they were truly needed for the nation’s security (e.g., World War II). 


The second argument against BRAC has less to do with the military’s requirements, and is more about the impact of base closures on local communities. For the Pentagon, BRAC is like a shiny package wrapped with a bow under the Christmas tree. For locals, BRAC is a lump of coal in the stocking.


Except that we shouldn’t look at BRAC in this way. To be sure, base closures are disruptive to communities that have grown dependent upon the economic activity that a base generates. A few places have struggled to adapt after their local base closed and the troops moved away. But the actual experiences of defense communities reveal a more complex, and ultimately more optimistic, reality. Most communities are able to find more productive uses for properties previously trapped behind fences and barbed wire. Most are able to attract new businesses, from a diverse array of industries. Some have taken pride in granting the public access to newly open space. The array of uses for former bases is practically limitless (see, for example, Atlanta, Georgia; Austin, Texas; Brunswick, Maine; Glenview, Illinois; and Philadephia, Pennsylvania). A future BRAC round could be less disruptive than in the past if affected communities plan well, take account of lessons learned elsewhere, and apply some best practices to ease the transition.


As Secretary Mattis practically pleaded in a cover letter to the most recent report:

every unnecessary facility we maintain requires us to cut capabilities elsewhere. I must be able to eliminate excess infrastructure in order to shift resources to readiness and modernization.

If Congress doesn’t grant his wish, perhaps Secretary Mattis will climb onto Santa Claus’s lap, and whisper his desires into the jolly old elf’s ear — but I hope, for both men’s sake, it doesn’t come to that.

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. 

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 Just​Se​cu​ri​ty​.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.