By Michael R. Gordon and Gordon Lubold
The military staff at the Pentagon is dominating deliberations over strategy and the deployment of forces to such an extent that it is undermining the principle of civilian control of the armed forces, according to a congressionally mandated study by former high-ranking national-security officials.
“There is an imbalance in civil-military relations on critical issues of strategy development and implementation,” states the study, which is being issued Wednesday. “Civilian voices appear relatively muted on issues at the center of U.S. defense and national security policy.”
The study was prepared by a bipartisan commission established by Congress in 2017 to assess the Pentagon’s defense strategy, which casts China and Russia as the principal threats to U.S. security.
The chairmen of the commission were Eric Edelman, who was an undersecretary of defense during the George W. Bush administration, and Gary Roughead, a retired admiral who served as the chief of naval operations.
Gen. Joe Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, disputed the panel’s conclusions. “Everything we do is done under the principle of civilian control of the military,” he said in an interview.
Gen. Dunford said all of his recommendations on military plans and the movement of forces are “run through” the Pentagon’s senior civilian policy official before they are presented to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.
The commission is scheduled to present its findings later this month to the Senate Armed Services Committee, which authorizes military spending and has been concerned with the state of civil-military relations.
Mr. Mattis, a former Marine general, heads the Pentagon and has a close relationship with Gen. Dunford, a Marine officer who was once one of Mr. Mattis’s subordinates.
The overall pool of civilian policy officials has been seen by many defense specialists as less influential than counterparts in previous administrations. A slow pace in filling civilian slots made Mr. Mattis especially dependent on the uniformed Joint Staff, which reports to Gen. Dunford, during the early part of the defense secretary’s tenure. The role of civilian officials has expanded as more have been hired, some Pentagon officials say.
Still, the commission concluded that the influence of the Joint Staff tends to overpower that of the civilians.
An important area where the commission said civilian officials should have more influence pertains to decisions to move ships, aircraft and other assets around the world in response to changing threats—what the Pentagon calls “global force management.”
“The military has moved in and taken on a more significant role,” said Adm. Roughead in an interview. “It struck us as a commission that the balance has shifted too much.”
John Rood, the undersecretary of defense for policy, a civilian post, disputed the critique, saying in a statement that he works “hand in hand” with the Joint Staff that reports to Gen. Dunford.
Another glaring deficiency, the commission says, is the Defense Department’s civilian analytical capabilities used to determine which weapons and forces to develop, which the report says has greatly atrophied since it was established in the 1960s by former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.
The study comes as the Pentagon is contending with multiple threats and the possibility that its budget will level off, or perhaps even decrease, in future years—all of which heightened the debate about whether the Defense Department’s civilian staff members have sufficient influence on strategy and how best to implement it.
Although President Trump has boosted military spending to $700 billion in fiscal 2018, the soaring federal budget deficit has jeopardized the Pentagon’s hopes of receiving sizable spending increases in the 2020 fiscal year and beyond.
“It will flatten out, without question,” national security adviser John Bolton said earlier month, adding that the amount will be sufficient if the Pentagon undertakes procurement reforms and finds other ways to cut costs.
The commission’s study, however, suggests that carrying out the Trump administration’s defense strategy likely would require steady spending increases that could be in the range of 3% to 5% a year.
The study also questions whether the Pentagon has effectively allocated the billions in additional funding that it has already received.
“Many of the additional resources made available so far have been distributed uniformly across the defense bureaucracy so that ‘everybody wins,’ rather than being strategically prioritized to build key future capabilities,” it said.
The commission members include former officials in Republican as well as Democratic administration, including who held prominent roles in overseeing the Pentagon’s plans, strategy and budgets.
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