Gates on Diplomats, Again...

Consider how strange the times we live in are. The nation has become hyper partisan in an election year with the nation engaged in two wars with challenges emerging on every policy front. Of all the places in government, we continue to observe the current Secretary of Defense, a position that has not had a strong showing for most of the administration, is where the voice of reason comes from most often in foreign policy. Who would have thought it would be the Secretary of Defense leading the charge for more civilian diplomats, definitely a telling sign of our time.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates spoke today at the American Academy of Diplomacy and did a 45 minutes question and answer with the audience. Even though we don't always agree with him, we really like Gates. Once again, he makes his Kansas State argument.

Another part of the K State speech, and really one of the premises for it, was that the institutions that essentially dominate American national security policy today, apart from the State Department, were largely a creation of the post-war period and especially the National Security Act of 1947 -- the Department of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, CIA, the National Security Council itself and so on. And one of the premises of the speech was those institutions were fine for fighting the Cold War. But do they properly organize us for the kinds of challenges that will face American diplomacy and national security in the 21st century?

And the implicit answer was no, that there is a need for a much greater integration of our efforts. There is clearly a need for a better way to organize interagency collaboration. The degree of exchange of people between the Defense Department and the State Department -- there have always been a number of Defense folks assigned to the State Department, but there are a growing number of State Department people now assigned to the Department of Defense and especially the combatant commands. And one of the two deputy commanders of the new Africa Command in fact will be a State Department ambassador.

And so are we organized properly and particularly, for example, when we're being out-communicated by a guy in a cave? And the other side of it is as we've tried to put together these provincial reconstruction teams, what's clear has not been a lack of will on the part of other agencies, it's a lack of capacity.

There aren't deployable people in Agriculture and Commerce and Treasury and so on that are prepared to go overseas, you know, when, just by comparison, at the height of the Cold War, AID had 16,000 employees. It has 3,000 now. And AID was a deployable expeditionary agency. People expected to go overseas, and they worked in developing countries, and they brought agronomic skills, and they brought rule of law and governance skills and how you execute a budget and all those kinds of things.

We don't have those kind of people now. So how do you organize the government to do these kinds of things where we can, if we get into a place early enough, we may not need to deploy military force?

So the basic question of the speech was, what would a National Security Act of 2007, last year, look like? And I said, I, frankly, don't have the answers. We've got a contract out from the Department of Defense to some academic institutions and think tanks to see if we can't come up with some ideas.

Frankly, that proposal was ready to go when I arrived. And I've put the stops to it because I said if the Department of Defense does this it will look like we're trying to take over everything, so let's have the NSC do it. That's the proper place to have a study on how you reorganize the institutions of national security. It just never got off the ground. And so finally we went ahead with it about three or four months ago. And my hope is we'll have something that we can give a new administration and that they can pursue.

But my view is we are not properly structured to deal with the challenges of the 21st century, which are very complex and have to do not only with security issues but economic development, rule of law, governance and so on.In many ways the structural changes he is advocating could be useful domestically too.

It is too bad every election means both parties have to propose massive new spending programs, when reconstituting existing agencies and transitioning them to deal with 21st century problems, both foreign and domestic, would be a very sensible, less expensive yet more productive election platform.

The entire Q&A was interesting, particularly the comments on Iran at the end of the session. Transcript here.