[House Hearing, 111 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Printing Office]
[H.A.S.C. No. 111-55]
COUNTERINSURGENCY AND IRREGULAR
WARFARE: ISSUES AND LESSONS
LEARNED
__________
HEARING
BEFORE THE
TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL THREATS AND CAPABILITIES SUBCOMMITTEE
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
HEARING HELD
MAY 7, 2009
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TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL THREATS AND CAPABILITIES SUBCOMMITTEE
ADAM SMITH, Washington, Chairman
MIKE McINTYRE, North Carolina JEFF MILLER, Florida
ROBERT ANDREWS, New Jersey FRANK A. LoBIONDO, New Jersey
JAMES R. LANGEVIN, Rhode Island JOHN KLINE, Minnesota
JIM COOPER, Tennessee BILL SHUSTER, Pennsylvania
JIM MARSHALL, Georgia K. MICHAEL CONAWAY, Texas
BRAD ELLSWORTH, Indiana THOMAS J. ROONEY, Florida
PATRICK J. MURPHY, Pennsylvania MAC THORNBERRY, Texas
BOBBY BRIGHT, Alabama
SCOTT MURPHY, New York
Bill Natter, Professional Staff Member
Alex Kugajevsky, Professional Staff Member
Andrew Tabler, Staff Assistant
C O N T E N T S
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CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS
2009
Page
Hearing:
Thursday, May 7, 2009, Counterinsurgency and Irregular Warfare:
Issues and Lessons Learned..................................... 1
Appendix:
Thursday, May 7, 2009............................................ 31
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THURSDAY, MAY 7, 2009
COUNTERINSURGENCY AND IRREGULAR WARFARE: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED
STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
Miller, Hon. Jeff, a Representative from Florida, Ranking Member,
Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee 2
Smith, Hon. Adam, a Representative from Washington, Chairman,
Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee 1
WITNESSES
Kagan, Dr. Frederick W., Resident Scholar, The American
Enterprise Institute........................................... 6
Kilcullen, Dr. David, Partner, Crumpton Group LLC, Senior Fellow,
EastWest Institute, Member of the Advisory Board, Center for a
New American Security.......................................... 2
Lund, Dr. Michael S., Consulting Program Manager, Project on
Leadership and Building State Capacity, Woodrow Wilson Center.. 10
Schirch, Dr. Lisa, Director, 3D Security Initiative, Professor of
Peacebuilding, Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, Eastern
Mennonite University........................................... 14
.................................................................
APPENDIX
Prepared Statements:
Kagan, Dr. Frederick W....................................... 43
Kilcullen, Dr. David......................................... 37
Lund, Dr. Michael S., joint with Dr. Lisa Schirch............ 50
Miller, Hon. Jeff............................................ 36
Smith, Hon. Adam............................................. 35
Documents Submitted for the Record:
[There were no Documents submitted.]
Witness Responses to Questions Asked During the Hearing:
[There were no Questions submitted during the hearing.]
Questions Submitted by Members Post Hearing:
[There were no Questions submitted post hearing.]
COUNTERINSURGENCY AND IRREGULAR WARFARE: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED
House of Representatives,
Committee on Armed Services,
Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities
Subcommittee,
Washington, DC, Thursday, May 7, 2009.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:05 a.m., in
room 2212, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Adam Smith
(chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. ADAM SMITH, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM
WASHINGTON, CHAIRMAN, TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL THREATS AND
CAPABILITIES SUBCOMMITTEE
Mr. Smith. Good morning. I will call the committee to
order. I apologize for being a little bit late. We were in
back-to-back hearings this morning, from 9 to 10 and then from
10 forward. So there was a little transition time, but thank
you very much for being here.
We are here this morning as part of our continuing
discussion on irregular warfare and how we design our national
security defense apparatus to deal with the changing threats
that we face: the basic, principal threat being that we now are
most likely to face our main threats from non-state actors and
terrorist groups, and we are moving into the debate of the next
defense budget which talks a great deal about where we should
be spending our money to meet this threat.
As we evolve forward from the Cold War days and the notion
that we should be prepared to fight two major conventional wars
at the same time is the idea of how we can confront many
different terrorist organizations in many different areas,
principally interested in counterinsurgency tactics. But there
are many, many implications for policy and budget that we need
to work out as we go forward to confront this threat.
And we are very lucky today to have four experts in these
fields to tell us a little bit about what they think we ought
to be doing so that we can get ready for the budget cycle.
I have a full statement which I will submit for the record,
but I will leave it at that so we can get to the witnesses as
quickly as possible. And I turn it over to the Ranking Member,
Mr. Miller, for any opening statement he may have.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Smith can be found in the
Appendix on page 35.]
STATEMENT OF HON. JEFF MILLER, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM FLORIDA,
RANKING MEMBER, TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL THREATS AND
CAPABILITIES SUBCOMMITTEE
Mr. Miller. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Absolutely,
we all await this budget cycle to see the details of Secretary
Gates' vision in the fiscal year 2010 Defense budget. I look
forward to hearing from the witnesses today and yield back. I
would ask that my statement be entered in the record.
Mr. Smith. We will do that, and thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Miller can be found in the
Appendix on page 36.]
Mr. Smith. With that, we will turn over to the witnesses. I
will introduce all four. We will work our way left to right.
Try to keep your statements somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes.
We will then get into questions after that.
First, we have Dr. David Kilcullen, who is a partner in the
Crumpton Group, LLC, and a Senior Fellow at the EastWest
Institute and member of the Advisory Board, Center for a New
American Security, also is very, very involved in the campaign
that was developed in Iraq. Look forward to hearing your
testimony.
Dr. Frederick Kagan, Resident Scholar of the American
Enterprise Institute, also regularly testifies before the Armed
Services Committee, has done so about Iraq and other national
security policies as well. Always a pleasure to see you.
Dr. Michael Lund, Consulting Program Manager, Project on
Leadership and Building State Capacity, from the Woodrow Wilson
Center. Good to see you as well.
Dr. Lisa Schirch, Director from the 3D Security Initiative,
Professor of Peacebuilding, Center for Justice and
Peacebuilding, Eastern Mennonite University.
Thank you all for being here. Look forward to your
testimony.
Dr. Kilcullen.
STATEMENT OF DR. DAVID KILCULLEN, PARTNER, CRUMPTON GROUP LLC,
SENIOR FELLOW, EASTWEST INSTITUTE, MEMBER OF THE ADVISORY
BOARD, CENTER FOR A NEW AMERICAN SECURITY
Dr. Kilcullen. Mr. Chairman, thank you for having me. I
would just like to take a moment to thank your professional
staff for being so incredibly flexible over the past week while
I have been sitting on my ass with flu, not swine flu, just
regular old human kind.
Mr. Smith. Did that make it better that it wasn't part of
the great threat?
Dr. Kilcullen. I would like to focus my opening remarks
mainly on counterinsurgency and unconventional warfare, because
there is a lot of expertise in other areas at the table, and I
would like to just give the areas that I am most focused on.
Since 9/11, I have fought and worked alongside some
incredibly professional and brave American men and women from
the Department of Defense (DOD), from the United States Agency
for International Development (USAID), State, Justice, the
Department of Agriculture, Department of Homeland Security, in
theaters right away across the war on terrorism from Iraq,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Horn of Africa, parts of Southeast
Asia and even Latin America. So I am offering these comments as
a non-American but one who has seen a really incredible process
of adaptation and improvement across all the branches of the
U.S. Government since 9/11, and I think that is something that
you and they should be very proud of.
Regular army units--that is, conventional, standard
infantry, artillery or cavalry units operating on the ground
today have techniques and capabilities that only existed in
certain Special Forces units in 2001, and special mission units
have capabilities, as you well know, that only existed in
Hollywood in 2001. So they have seen an incredible,
development, adaptation and improvement.
We have learned a lot of lessons on the way, and we still
have some lessons that I think we need to lock in as we go
forward. So let me focus on two areas. One is best practices
for counterinsurgency, and the other is surrogate forces in
unconventional warfare.
In my written testimony, I have listed what I consider to
be the eight key best practices, and I just want to run through
them very quickly.
The first one, the most important, is that to be successful
in counterinsurgency you need to have a political strategy that
builds government effectiveness and legitimacy, while
marginalizing insurgents, winning over their sympathizers, and
coopting local allies. That is the most important thing. It was
our most important weakness in Iraq and Afghanistan going in,
and fixing that has been one of our most important successes.
Second key best practice is that you need a comprehensive
approach that closely integrates civil and military efforts----
Mr. Smith. I am sorry to interrupt. You said Afghanistan.
Did you mean Iraq in terms of fixing it in this one of our most
important successes, or did you mean Afghanistan?
Dr. Kilcullen. I think actually both, much more so in the
case of Iraq. But in Afghanistan I think we are on the right
track to getting a viable political strategy in the sense of
what kind of Afghan government do we want to see, how do we
want that Afghan government to function, what are the steps we
are going to take to put that government in place. That is what
I mean by a political strategy, not so much a U.S. political
strategy, but a strategy on the ground for standing up the
government that we are trying to support.
So then the second best practice is a comprehensive
approach that integrates civil and military efforts based on a
common diagnosis of the situation and a solid long-term
commitment to the plan. The third is continuity of key
personnel and policies and people having sufficient authority
and resources to do their jobs.
The fourth one is population-centric security which is
based on presence, on local community partnerships, on making
populations self-defending, and on small unit operations that
keep the enemy off balance.
The fifth one is cueing and synchronization of development,
governance and security efforts, so that the three work in
parallel together to generate a unified effect.
The next one is close and coordinated and genuine
partnerships between intervening coalition forces and the local
communities on the ground. The seventh one is strong emphasis
on building effective and legitimate local security forces,
with the emphasis on local.
And then the final one is a region-wide approach that not
only deals with the insurgency in the country where it is
manifesting but also tries to disrupt insurgent safe havens,
control borders and frontiers, and undermine terrorist
infrastructure in neighboring countries.
We can expand on each of those if you would like to in Q
and A, but my observation across all the theaters where we have
been operating since 9/11 is that where we have applied those
best practices we have done better than in places where we
haven't. So I think there is some pretty good empirical
evidence on that, that that is the way to go.
These are basically lessons we learned. We already knew
this stuff in the sixties. We almost deliberately forgot it
after Vietnam. But the next category is something that is a
little different, which is the use of surrogate forces, and I
guess as a cautionary point here, that we sometimes learn the
wrong lessons from campaigns that we conduct.
I want to take you back to 2001 where we did the lightning-
fast, seven-week campaign to topple the Taliban. After the end
of that campaign, Secretary Rumsfeld said that we engaged in a
transformational campaign that basically changed the rules of
warfare, and he focused on the use of small, light-footprint
Special Operations Forces (SOF) on the ground, backed by
precision air power, and that was sort of his description of
what the recipe was for success.
General Franks who commanded the force also said that
Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) coming
from space-based and high altitude and also unmanned systems
was critically important. And he said in his memoirs that he
had the kind of god-like perspective that Homer gave to his
heroes based on all that. He was obviously very pleased with
his performance in Afghanistan.
I won't agree with both those points, but I think they
weren't actually the main reason why we succeeded in
Afghanistan. On 7 December, 2001 when the last Taliban
stronghold fell, which is Kandahar, we only had 110 Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers and about 300 U.S. Special
Forces operating in that part of Afghanistan, but we had 50,000
Afghans fighting on our side against the Taliban. That, I
think, is the real reason why we succeeded in 2001.
I have talked to hundreds of Afghans on the ground since I
have been working in the field since 2006. None of them has
ever described to me what happened in 2001 as an invasion. They
always talk about we kicked out the Taliban and you assisted
us, and I think that the use of surrogate forces and building
partnerships with local communities was actually the critical
element of our success in 2001.
Mr. Smith. How did that happen so fast--sorry to
interrupt--pre-9/11, these forces were out there but they
really weren't making much progress. And then in a matter of,
gosh, a month and a half after 9/11, was it as simple as, you
know, the Afghan warlords saying, we see which way the wind is
blowing and it is blowing against the Taliban so we are going
to go against them? What made that rapid change?
Dr. Kilcullen. It was an extremely conscious approach,
based on our CIA campaign plan of winning and generating
partnerships with local commanders. And you know, I wasn't on
the ground with those teams, but my boss was, and he has told
me in detail and we have published accounts of how they
operated where they essentially dropped in by helicopter,
established relationships with people, identified what the
critical requirements were, and were able to back them up
rapidly, whether it be medical supplies, blankets, food aid and
so on, on the one hand, or a Joint Direct Attack Munition
(JDAM) to clear away a Taliban position on the other.
So a full spectrum approach of clearing the obstacles out
of the way of our local partners and bringing them on our side
led to basically a cascading series of defections from people
that supported the Taliban, and groups in the civil society,
coming alongside U.S. Forces, leading to that success.
I want to point also to al Anbar in 2007 where pretty much
exactly the same thing happened, where we had enough forces on
the ground finally to make people feel safe enough to turn
against al Qaeda. And once we were able to enable that, we had
the whole of civil society on our side, and we were able to
push al Qaeda in Iraq out of that province relatively quickly,
after years of failure, based on building a population alliance
with people on the ground.
So the arithmetic of local security forces is actually very
important here. We do not have and we will not ever have enough
forces to generate that sort of dominant 20 counterinsurgents
per thousand head of population, which is sort of the
theoretical number that people talk about. But if you generate
local alliances, you can really radically compensate for that
lack of forces.
Let me give you an example, and then I will finish on this
point. Imagine that we had had 50,000 U.S. troops to put into
Iraq in 2007, extra troops. We didn't have those, but imagine
we did. If we had put them in, we would have had a benefit for
that 50,000 troops investment of about 10,000 out on the ground
at any one time, because you have to run your headquarters, you
have to look after your lines of communication. That takes
about 20,000 troops out of your 50,000. And then the remaining
30,000 have to be on a rotation plan. They have got to be out
patrolling but then resting and then preparing. So you only
have about a third of those guys out on the ground at any one
time. So the bang for the buck is 10,000 out of an investment
of 50,000.
Now, let us put an alternate possibility. Instead of
putting 50,000 U.S. troops in theater, we recruit and gain on
our side 50,000 Iraqis, which is actually what we did. Instead
of getting a benefit of your investment for 10,000, you get the
full 50,000 out on the ground all the time. There is no
headquarters, no lines of communication, no rotation plan. They
live there. So you get a benefit of 50,000. But actually it is
more than that, because those 50,000 guys who work for us used
to be in the enemy's recruiting pool. They used to work for the
enemy. So the benefit is a net benefit of 100,000. We gain 50,
the enemy loses 50. So the benefit of recruiting and employing
local security forces on our side is 10 times the benefit
putting in American troops into the same environment.
When you look at the dollar cost as well, it is
dramatically more cost-effective to work by, with, and through
local partners. And as you know, that is what we talk about in
terms of foreign internal defense. It is one of the areas that
we have been weakest on in terms of our lessons learned since
9/11.
What I will do is stop there and let the other witnesses
testify and then perhaps you may wish to pick at some issues.
Mr. Smith. Certainly. Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Kilcullen can be found in
the Appendix on page 37.]
Mr. Smith. Dr. Kagan.
STATEMENT OF DR. FREDERICK W. KAGAN, RESIDENT SCHOLAR, THE
AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE
Dr. Kagan. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, members of
the subcommittee; and thank you also, congressional staff, for
being very gracious about the outrageous lateness of my
testimony and I apologize.
Mr. Kline. Did you have the flu?
Dr. Kagan. I didn't even have that excuse, I am sorry, but
I am sure I will have the flu now.
Customarily, when Dave and I do our traveling road show, we
spend a lot of time saying, I agree with everything he said. In
this case, I agree with almost everything that he said. But
since there are actually a couple of things that I am not so
sure I disagree with, but I would like to put a little bit
sharper point on it, I would like to start with that.
First of all, the difference between surrogate forces and
local security forces and I think it is very important to
highlight that distinction which Dave made, but to bring that
out. Surrogate forces are forces that you use instead of your
own troops to fight on your behalf, pursuing your interests as
well as their own, and that is what we did in Afghanistan in
2001.
I am less pleased with the outcome of that operation than a
lot of other people have been, and I have always been less
pleased with the outcome of that operation because the 50,000
Afghans that we had--and Dave is absolutely right about how
that war was won, unquestionably true--but the 50,000 Afghans
did not form a cohesive force, could not be allowed on their
own to form a government because the government would not have
been legitimate, and were not in fact able to hold the country
on their own. And there was no way that you were going to build
local security forces in that context rapidly enough to fill
the security gap that was created by the collapse of what
little government the Taliban had been providing in time to
prevent what actually happened, which is sort of a
fragmentation of the country and some renewed warlordism and,
in general terms, creating conditions for some of the problems
that we now face.
The answer to that, of course, is not to send 500,000
American troops into the country, but it was to send some
American troops, and ideally international troops, into the
country because the thing to take away here is that the 20-odd
thousand population requirement for counterinsurgency is real,
it is a real requirement. Dave is absolutely right that you
have to count local security forces in that mix, and it is not
a question of we have to put 20 troops on the ground for every
thousand of population, nor would it be desirable or
sustainable in any sense for us to do that. But you do have to
meet that requirement; otherwise you run the risk of real deep
lawlessness that can set conditions for long-term failure, even
after what looks like a very stunning success, which is what
happened in 2001.
And so the question is, how do we initially fill the gap
between whatever exists after we have helped someone else take
down a government, or whatever we have done, and how long it
takes actually to develop the local security forces that will
be necessary. That is our exit strategy, if you will, is
developing local security forces, legitimate government, civil
society, and all those things that are necessary. But we do
have to have a plan for filling the security gap with our own
forces, with international forces, otherwise you can't get
there from here.
And so I think that leads into the point that I tried to
emphasize in my testimony, which is although we are engaged in
wars against unconventional enemies fighting irregular warfare
against us, what we need to fight those wars are the
conventional true tools of state craft that we actually have.
We need to apply them properly.
There is a lot of sort of search in this town and around
this country for some sort of magic bullet that would allow us
to fight our enemies without maintaining large, expensive,
conventional forces, and without having to deploy our troops,
and by using local proxies and so forth. And I know that that
is not what Dave is advocating, but there are a lot of people
who are advocating that. And it is distressing that a lot of
arguments that we heard during the strategic pause of the 1990s
about how to be a cheap hawk are resurfacing now with, really,
virtually no changes made to them, as though the last eight
years didn't happen. And that is very distressing to me because
that didn't work. We tried that.
The problem is, it is not that we haven't tried that. We
did try that. That is what we did in 2001. That is what we did
in 2003 in Iraq. We experimented with this. Small footprint,
high technology, blitzkrieg, get in, get out. And the problem
is that it doesn't work.
And so I am worried that we are being led down a path again
of trying to persuade ourselves that there is some way to do
this that is less painful; and as usual, I am here to say, no,
it is going to hurt. We need this capability to fight the kind
of enemies that we face. We are going to have to pay for this
capability, and there really isn't any alternative.
I would like to ask that my written testimony be submitted
for the record. I don't want to recite it for you. What I would
like to do instead is listen to the words of my favorite, the
greatest novelist of all time, Leo Tolstoy, who said in
describing his writing process, ``The key is show, don't
tell.''
And so instead of sort of lecturing you about general
principles, I would like to take you through the three map
slides that I have given you to underline the point that I
don't think you can actually have an abstract conversation
about how to do this beyond what Dave has laid out, which is
very solid and spot-on.
But if you are going to take it to the next level and
really understand what we need to do, you actually have to put
enemies on the ground in context and talk about what you are
facing and how you have to deal with it. And since obviously
the most significant intellectual challenge we face right now
is in Afghanistan and Pakistan, I would just like to quickly
take you through what the enemy set is and talk very, very
briefly about what we need to be doing about this.
If you start with the first slide that is labeled Major
Enemy Groups, the point that this slide attempts to make is
that we are facing seven, eight, nine, ten significant enemy
groups in Afghanistan right now, of which only about three
actually have objectives within Afghanistan. And that would be
the Quetta Shura Taliban of Mullah Omar, the Haqqani Network
that is now based in Meydan Shahr in north Waziristan, and the
Hizb-e Islami Gulbuddin (HIG), Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's group
which is much less significant than the other two and operates
in the east.
These are the only groups that are actively trying to
achieve objectives in Afghanistan, and these are the groups
that are the principal threats to American mission failure or
mission success in Afghanistan right now. If we don't, in
conjunction with the Afghan government and while setting up
civil society and a variety of other things, defeat these
groups, then we are not going to succeed in Afghanistan.
The problem is these groups are very heavily focused on
Afghanistan. That is really what they are focused on, and if
you look at them and ask are these major threats directly to
United States national security, are these groups going to
attack us, the answer is no, that they are not. These are not
global jihadist groups. These are not, right now, even regional
jihadist groups. These are Afghan-focused groups. So why are we
fighting them? We are fighting them because we need to succeed
in Afghanistan. Why do we need to succeed in Afghanistan if
these groups aren't trying to actively hurt us?
Well, part of the answer is because we know that Mullah
Omar previously provided safe haven to Osama bin Laden, is
certain to do so again. Jalaluddin Haqqani has personal
friendships with Osama bin Laden; invited him to his territory
in the eighties, would certainly do so again. So we could have
the recurrence of a safe haven, but that is a secondary
concern.
The real concern is that when you look across the border
into Pakistan, what do you see? You see a collection of other
groups that are playing in Afghanistan. They are sending
fighters to Afghanistan, they are working on killing Americans
in Afghanistan, but they don't actually have objectives in
Afghanistan.
And those groups include the Tehrik-e Taliban in Pakistan
(TTP) with Baitullah Mehsud's group. They include Tehrik-e
Nafaz-e Shariat-e Mohammadi (TNSM), Sufi Mohammad's group, and
they include the Lashkar-e Tayyiba (LeT) and, of course, al
Qaeda.
Why are those guys fighting in Afghanistan? Well, it is a
good place to kill Americans, and for those groups, it is
always a good day when you can kill an American. It is live-
fire training for their cadres. This is where they send their
troops to experience war and get blooded. They are willing to
accept much higher attrition rates in training than we would
be, and it is also a way for individual commanders to gain
combat patches and then bid for participation in one of the
shuras in Pakistan.
So it is a very strange dynamic. And you could say, well,
if we pulled out of there wouldn't these guys stop fighting us?
Well, if we weren't there, they wouldn't be fighting us, that
is for sure, and they might well lose interest in Afghanistan
to some extent.
But here is the thing. These are the groups that pose the
principal threat to the stability of Pakistan, and, if you
include Lashkar-e Tayyiba, to the stability of the entire
region. Lashkar-e Tayyiba is commonly identified as a Kashmiri
separatist group, which is the one thing it is not. It is not
primarily Kashmiri. It is primarily Punjabi. Its headquarters
are not in Kashmir. They are in a small town called Muridke
which is near Lahore. It has something like 2,200 offices
throughout Pakistan.
And if you flip to the next slide, I tried to give you some
idea of the major LeT bases, which include a significant base
in Karachi from which parts of the Mumbai attack were launched.
This is a very significant challenge to the region and
global security order, because the objective of LeT is not to
regain Kashmir but to destroy India; to destroy Hindu India and
sort of make the world safe for India's Muslims. That is what
LeT is all about. If it is allowed to proceed, it will destroy
the subcontinent. That is its objective. This is a major
problem for us.
TNSM and TTP are much more focused on Pakistan. I know that
Baitullah Mehsud said he is going to blow up the White House,
and I wish him luck with that; but fundamentally, these are
groups that are a threat to Islamabad.
Mr. Smith. You don't exactly wish him luck.
Dr. Kagan. I don't exactly wish him luck. I don't wish him
luck at all. I thank you for correcting me.
Mr. Smith. Just for the record.
Dr. Kagan. Just for the record I wish him failure, but I am
not going to lay awake nights worrying about him doing that
either. But if we succeed in Afghanistan, we have the
opportunity not only to see these groups, as we now can, and to
interact with them to some extent, as we now can, but also to
influence the populations among which they exist, because the
most important bases for these groups lie in the Federally
Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in Balujistan and in the
Northwest Frontier Province, a part of that which is another
problem, and those populations are heavily influenced by what
goes on in Afghanistan.
As an example, we have recently, working with the Afghans,
succeeded in making something of a success out of the town of
Khost. Khost is the home base of Jalaluddin Haqqani, and it is
a major problem for Haqqani that Khost looks like it is
succeeding in the context of American and Afghan efforts.
Haqqani and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) have said it
is a priority to defeat our efforts in Khost, because if they
don't defeat our efforts in Khost it delegitimizes their
movement in their heartland. Their heartland extends into
Waziristan.
Where am I working to with this? I reject the notion that
there is some grand unified field theory of Pakistan that will
get us magically to the solution of all of our problems there.
I don't think there is. I think it is a vital American national
security interest to work toward the stability of Pakistan. I
think we need to use the instruments and opportunities that are
available to us to do that.
I think when you understand what the enemy laydown looks
like and how the groups overlap and how the populations
overlap, you can see how important it is to succeed in
Afghanistan as something that we can affect directly in
Pakistan, in contrast to the many, many things that we can't
affect directly in Pakistan, to work toward Pakistani
stability. And I think your successful Pakistani strategy, at
best, will end up being a composite of a variety of things that
we can do and leverage that we can generate, and pressures and
incentives that we can apply, put together over a long period
of time to move Pakistan in the right direction.
But that is why I think it is, in many respects, less
useful to talk about general, how do we fight the
unconventional war, how do we fight the global insurgency, if
you will--even though I think that is a valid concept, and I
think those principles are important--than it is to say let us
look at the specific problem that matters most to us and let us
talk about what the challenges are, what the enemies and the
threats are, and what our capabilities are. And if we do that
in a number of areas, including areas that I am not competent
to talk about--like Somalia, Yemen, Egypt, Algeria and so
forth--that is the only way you can really figure out what your
force requirement is. That is the only way that you can really
figure out what your large strategy is going to be, because the
solution set for each one of those problems is going to be
different. It is going to be based on the principles that Dave
identified and some other general principles, but it will be a
unique solution, because each one of those problems is unique.
And so what I would like to leave you with is let us have
the general conversation but let us also talk about specifics
as we think about this defense budget. And I would encourage
you to press Defense Department officials and the military
officials who testify before your committee and your
subcommittee to speak in detail and not just offer you general
bromides about how they are going to address these problems.
I thank the committee.
Mr. Smith. Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Kagan can be found in the
Appendix on page 43.]
Mr. Smith. Dr. Lund, I understand you are going to testify
and then Dr. Schirch is going to be available for questions.
Dr. Lund. That is correct.
Mr. Smith. Please go ahead.
STATEMENT OF DR. MICHAEL S. LUND, CONSULTING PROGRAM MANAGER,
PROJECT ON LEADERSHIP AND BUILDING STATE CAPACITY, WOODROW
WILSON CENTER
Dr. Lund. Thank you. Well, thank you all for this
opportunity to present some insights and ideas about a phase of
conflict which does not get as much attention as the active
ones.
Basically, we are going to talk about what is actually
going on in societies that are on early warning lists and are
threatened with the potential for insurgencies and terrorism or
other kinds of conflict, in terms of what we have learned from
these experiences or what needs to be done to make them even
more effective.
If you want to put it in military jargon terms, we have a
chart on page three that came from DOD. We are talking about
what is actually going on out there in phase zero, what is
called the steady state, in terms of nonkinetic activities on
the part of both civilian and military agencies and
Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs), and how can we use those
activities, those programs, those tools, to avoid getting into
phase II, III, IV and V altogether.
Let me say a little bit our own experience. Lisa and I have
had the privilege, I think you might say, of going to lots of
obscure, relatively obscure, remote places like Tajikistan,
Guyana, rural Georgia, northern Kenya, Uzbekistan, Zimbabwe,
Indonesia, Serbia, Lebanon, Sri Lanka and so on over the last
several years, some of which are in active conflicts as you
know, some of which at least show indicators of potential
conflict.
What we would like to do is share some of our insights from
both our direct observation, as well as our research. We are
both sort of half practitioner and half analyst. So we try to
take an independent position vis-a-vis the various clients that
we may serve at various times.
The need for difficult, often deadly, counterinsurgency,
counterterrorism campaigns, can be reduced to some extent, not
completely, by targeted strategic efforts to preempt the
ability of insurgent groups to capture the hearts and minds of
the populations in these kinds of vulnerable societies. The
typical conditions that the populations are motivated by or
concerned about are lack of daily security, absent or corrupt
government services, discrimination against certain regional
groups or ethnic and sectarian groups, lack of job
opportunities, especially for young men, lack of any political
voice, and lack of unity and great factionalism at the higher
levels of the governments, as well as the addition of extremist
ideologies that seem to offer a way to remedy these grievances.
Addressing these factors in a very specific and targeted
way, through close analysis done on the ground, and using a
variety of actors with various kinds of programs addressing the
various drivers of conflict, can avoid the need for getting
involved in militarily internal wars or for humanitarian
intervention to prevent a genocide like we have seen unfolding
in Darfur, as well as save the money that is spent on many
post-conflict reconstruction countries.
We cite some data from research that has compared the costs
of wars of this type with the preventive efforts that were made
in similar situations. Other countries where there were risk
factors evident but preventive activities were taken, such as
Macedonia, and the ratios between the costs of military efforts
and other efforts compared to the preventive efforts are really
incredibly great. The average in one study was 1:59; that is,
the preventive activity costs, the ratio, 1:59, however you put
that.
The good news is the thousands of low-visibility programs
in mediation, governments, governance development, human
rights, as well as track two diplomacy and so on in these
countries from Azerbaijan to Zambia. For example, I did a study
of what USAID has been doing in southern Serbia, in the Presevo
Valley east of Kosovo, where as you know there was an Albanian
insurgency in 2001, in terms of what kind of reconciliation,
what kind of building of defense against a reemergence of
conflict between the Albanians and the Serbs might occur.
And in Presevo city itself, town itself, there are several
activities that are sort of working in tandem to create a more
responsive budget process in Presevo, vis-a-vis that particular
district, as well as at the village level, bringing together
Serbs and Albanians in joint projects to do development.
Those are just a couple examples of thousands of projects
and programs that are going on and being carried out not just
by the U.S. Government but by the U.N., the Organization for
Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), some of the
multilateral organizations, regional organizations like the
Economic Community of Western African States (ECOWAS).
In some ways what this hearing is bringing out is that
there has not been a lot of conversation between the security
communities and the development communities, so that this area
called phase zero is basically zero. I mean, it is an unknown
territory for the security community. But what I am saying is
that those of us in the peacebuilding or development
communities have been actually working with a number of these
sorts of activities, programs, and there is just a lot going on
there that we need to understand better and link up to a more
coherent strategy: police training, microcredit, nonarmed
protective accompaniment, election monitoring, civic education,
disarmament, Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration
(DDR) activities, civil society forums and so on.
And as I say, organizations like ECOWAS, for example, in
West Africa have been quite active in mediating some of the
election disputes coming up during the campaigns in places like
Guinea-Bissau and so on. One doesn't read about this in the
newspaper because it is not particular exciting information,
but it is very important and it has had its definite effects.
Over these years since the middle nineties, a number of
researchers have tried to collect some of the lessons from some
of these situations. I will just mention a couple of them, and
you will find that they are quite compatible, quite
supplementary and corroborative of what has already been said
by David and Fred.
Among the most successful examples in the Baltic, South
Africa, Slovakia, Albania and, for example, Kenya last year,
where there was fast-track diplomatic effort by the U.S. and
U.N., most of them have been multidimensional in nature; that
is, they are a short-term diplomatic effort that is brought to
bear immediately on the behaviors, the most threatening
activity by high-level leaders. But there is also effort at
addressing reconciliation issues and so on at the lower level
among the general population. So a combination of carrots and
sticks, along with dialogue that is applied in a fairly
concentrated and synchronized manner in both situations where
there are threatening clouds on the horizon, and when that is
best----
Mr. Smith. Sorry, Doctor. Could I ask you a specific
question about that? This is actually an area that this
subcommittee, and myself in particular, are very interested in,
the merger of sort of global development strategy with security
strategy. And some of those conversations actually are starting
a little bit, particularly with Special Operations Command
(SOCOM) and State Department, and it is an awkward
relationship. They have different sorts of viewpoints on the
world, and to a certain degree don't trust each other. But it
is beginning, and I think making that happen is absolutely
critical to our security strategy; leveraging all of our
national ability, you know, from State Department, Agriculture,
whatever is necessary to do the development piece that you
talked about, meshing that up with some of the stuff that DOD
is doing. Particularly with SOCOM, because SOCOM does, what
creeps up to being development in a lot of areas, and how they
work together with the State Department I think is critical.
The two questions I have about that, that I would like you
to try to address in the remainder of your testimony, is how
can we better coordinate development strategy in our country. I
have a very strong bias that it is hopelessly screwed up at the
moment, but there are a lot of good things going on in
isolation, but they are in no way coordinated and do not come
together in any sort of cohesive strategy.
One little sub-piece of that is the degree to which that
strategy is based on a general approach to reducing poverty,
which would be a good place to start, but, on the other hand,
meshing that with our security needs. That is where the
development community tends to freak out a little bit. It is
like you care more about poor people and devastating things
happening in Pakistan because of security than you do in, say,
somewhere in Latin America, because you don't think you have a
security interest. But we have to care about our security in
terms of how you put out that money, how do you mesh that.
And then beyond coordinating our global development
strategy as a country, how do you see the meshing of security
and global development happening? What would be the best way to
develop an interagency process to make that happen so that we
are working more in concert?
A big challenge there, of course, is dividing up
responsibilities, you know, and trusting each other in terms of
their talents. But I am curious, your thoughts on those two
things.
This is me kind of cheating and working in one additional
question to the question time that I will have when you are
done, but if you could address that.
Mr. Marshall. You are not giving up your questions, then?
Mr. Smith. No, I am actually not.
Dr. Lund. Would you like us to address those questions?
Mr. Smith. If you can take a stab at it. I realize you
could give an hour-long answer to that. It would probably be
better if you could do two or three minutes.
Dr. Lund. Maybe Lisa has some things to add. I think you
are right; the conversation has started, quite actively.
The particular mechanisms, formulas and so on haven't been
arrived at yet. Among the recommendations we were going to make
were certainly to push that process much further, more
vigorously. And we both had the experience, along with David a
couple of weeks ago, to be involved--and Mr. Natter addressed
this group--a week-long simulation that was designed and
organized by the Center for Irregular Warfare of the Marine
Corps that focused on a Horn of Africa scenario. And they
brought together over 200 representatives, playing different
roles, from DOD, State, USAID, multilateral organizations like
the U.N., World Bank, France, Italy, U.K., and so on, to sort
of ask the question, how would you behave in responding to this
particular situation.
It was an incredibly illuminating and, I thought,
enlightened activity in terms of what has happened in this
field so far. I have been working on conflict prevention for
over ten years, and I thought this was the most coherent and
on-the-case event that I have been at. And a number of
recommendations came out of that which address exactly your
concerns. So I would really advise----
Mr. Smith. I will take a look at that, those
recommendations.
Dr. Lund. I don't know how much I can get into the details
of exactly whether a central direction should be in the Office
of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (SCRS)
in State Department or the National Security Council. Maybe the
other panelists have specific ideas of that.
That event spent quite a bit of time working through
obstacles and funding authorities and so on. I don't think
there is a magic, clear--there is a consensus that that needs
to be figured out. That was one of our main points. I don't
think it would be that helpful for me to run through one
approach or another.
[The joint prepared statement of Dr. Lund and Dr. Schirch
can be found in the Appendix on page 50.]
Mr. Smith. Dr. Schirch, do you have something quick you
want to say? And then I think I will go to Mr. Miller and begin
the questions, unless there was something else.
STATEMENT OF DR. LISA SCHIRCH, DIRECTOR, 3D SECURITY
INITIATIVE, PROFESSOR OF PEACEBUILDING, CENTER FOR JUSTICE AND
PEACEBUILDING, EASTERN MENNONITE UNIVERSITY
Dr. Schirch. Thank you, Chairman Smith and committee
members, for inviting us here today.
The field that we are talking about is conflict prevention,
and this conference that Joint Forces Command (JFCOM), and the
Marine Corps put on together was called ``Whole of Government
Conflict Prevention.'' And many of us in the NGO community are
working actively now to try to figure out how to build a more
comprehensive approach to the issues of terrorism. And for the
NGOs, we have been working actively on the ground in Iraq,
Afghanistan, and we have many partner networks who are
indigenous Iraqi NGOs and Afghan NGOs who have been sharing
their perspective on counterterrorism and how best to prevent
the spread of the kinds of insurgencies we see in these
regions. And they very much want to be able to feed into the
process.
And part of the challenge here is that the interagency
coordination is so new here in Washington that there are really
no points of contact for NGOs who are on the ground, who have
cultural intelligence, information to share that would inform
U.S. strategy.
Over the weekend, Dr. Kilcullen made some statements that
were in the media about the drones flying over Pakistan,
bombing villages, actually having a counter-effect to our
national interests in the U.S.; that the drones ended up
creating more fuel on the ground for recruitment into Taliban,
al Qaeda insurgencies. We have been hearing that in civil
society and NGOs for several years, that this kind of drone
activity is counter to U.S. interests.
So that is the kind of information civil societies want to
give over and have conversations with the government. So it is
actually very much in our interest as civil society to help to
foster and think about what is the best way for the defense
development, diplomacy tools of American power, how they are
coordinated, because this impacts then how civil society can
feed into the process.
Again, we don't take particular stands on whether it is the
State Department's Coordinator for Reconstruction
Stabilization, although we very much support that, or the
National Security Council (NSC). There are a variety of models
that I think we need to have more hearings on how is this best
going to be done in this country, because it is very urgent.
The ratio of cost prevention versus response to terrorism
is not met in terms of our U.S. budget in terms of national
security. So several of us have argued for a unified security
budget that would try to balance out more of these preventive
responses because, right now, if you look at one tax dollar,
less than half of a percent is going to all of our development
activities abroad, whereas almost 60 percent of that dollar
goes to defense approaches.
So this balance is off and makes coordination in this
interagency process very difficult. For USAID at the simulation
on conflict prevention, they couldn't really risk a lot of the
staff time because they have so few staff to even give over to
this conversation.
Mr. Smith. It also pushes DOD into doing a lot more
development work than they are actually qualified to do because
they have the money.
Dr. Schirch. Right. And there were comments at this
conference that DOD is being forced to create its own internal
USAID, its own civilian response corps, which is mirroring
structures that also exist in the State Department and USAID,
which is a waste of taxpayer dollars.
[The joint prepared statement of Dr. Schirch and Dr. Lund
can be found in the Appendix on page 50.]
Mr. Smith. I will yield to Mr. Miller to begin the
questioning.
And the other piece of that is the NGO community just gets
really freaked out about the DOD getting involved in that, a
little bit of paranoia there. But part of it also is good
reason that when you are trying to build the type of support
within a community that you need, there is a perception of the
U.S. military that is different than a perception of an NGO or
USAID that in some ways makes that mission more difficult.
Dr. Lund. Another concrete answer to your question of how
to move toward more coherent coordination is starting with a
really good on-the-ground conflict assessment or field-state
assessment and getting people on the same page in terms of what
is going on in the situation, at the country level but then
also at the Washington level region.
Mr. Smith. Several of those have been done, Brookings and a
few other folks. But with that, I really impinged upon the
patience of my committee members here. So I will yield to Mr.
Miller. We will stick to five minutes as we go around. Mr.
Miller.
Mr. Miller. You probably impinged on the patience of your
colleague, Mr. Marshall, at the other end.
Mr. Smith. He is always impatient. I am used to that.
Mr. Miller. Dr. Kilcullen, would you care to expand on your
comments regarding the drone activity?
Dr. Kilcullen. Sure. In fact, the media report on the
weekend was a quote from my congressional testimony in front of
the House Armed Services Committee, which I think some
committee members may already be aware of.
Since early 2006, we have conducted a number of drone
strikes into Pakistani territory. In that time, we have killed
14 mid-level al Qaeda leadership and Taliban leadership targets
in that area. In the same time frame, we have killed about 700
noncombatant Pakistani civilians. That is a hit rate of about
two percent: 98 percent collateral damage, two percent accurate
hits.
The strikes themselves, based on what we hear from
community organizations in the FATA, actually are not
particularly unpopular. There are people in the FATA who think
it is actually a good thing that the bad guys have been struck.
Where they are particularly unpopular is in the Punjab and
Sind, and we have seen a very substantial rise in militancy in
those parts of Pakistan over the time frame since 2006.
What I said to the committee last week, or the week before,
was there is no doubt that the strikes are very, very
tactically useful in disrupting al Qaeda and in hampering their
operations. Right now, because of the situation in the rest of
Pakistan, they also have a downside, which is they are
contributing to political instability.
What I suggested to the committee was that right now our
biggest problem is not the networks in the FATA but the fact
that Pakistan may collapse if this political instability
continues. And so I suggested that we may want to return to a
much more narrow targeting approach of focusing only on al
Qaeda senior leadership, only on targets that are in areas
where the Pakistanis don't control the ground, and working with
the Pakistanis rather than doing it unilaterally.
So that is just to expand on the comments. But if you look
in the testimony record from last week, there is a lot more
there in that discussion.
Mr. Miller. I yield back my time and give a chance to other
members.
Mr. Smith. Thank you. Mr. Marshall.
Mr. Marshall. Dr. Lund, the idea of an ounce of prevention
is worth of pound of cure, the statistic of the relationship of
$1 of prevention might equal $59 of cure is very tempting. I
wonder, Dr. Kilcullen, if you agree with those statistics.
Dr. Kilcullen. I certainly don't know. I don't have any
data to prove or disprove the 59:1. But I think it is certainly
true that in considering intervening in countries, we often
underestimate how much time, money and blood is going to be
involved. It is a consistent pattern. Overall, nations that get
involved in counterinsurgency over the last 200 or 300 years
have tended at the outset to underestimate the costs and the
difficulty of the process.
I think where we can, we should most certainly be working
to prevent rather than to treat conflict environments. I don't
think that is necessarily a sound basis for capability planning
within the DOD, though. I think we need to be focusing on the
military as the force of last resort and structuring it so that
it can actually get--it is like the difference between fire
prevention and firefighting. You have to structure the fire
department to fight the fires.
Mr. Marshall. The problem that we--well, this is not new
news. This has been a consistent worry of ours since World War
II, actually----
Dr. Kilcullen. Yes, and before.
Mr. Marshall [continuing]. When we put a lot more money
into foreign aid than we do right now. And the reason we don't
put as much money into foreign aid is, politically it is very
difficult to sustain that in a country that has lots of many
other needs, and many of those needs are internal. So sometimes
it is quite difficult to justify sending a dollar to someplace
remote that could have been spent right here on your folks. And
that is an easy target for politicians.
We do routinely, however, spend huge dollars through DOD on
preventive measures that may or may not be essential. For
example, parking large numbers of soldiers in Europe and in
Korea for extended periods of time, a cost of billions and
billions of dollars.
And I wonder to what extent, as you think about how we get
more money into prevention, you think also about how whatever
is set up can be politically sustainable. And if you look at
history, you might wonder to what extent this does need to go
through what is classified as national security somehow, as
opposed to State Department; because if it just goes to State
Department, it is going to get ultimately viewed as feel-good,
generous money that American taxpayers are sending elsewhere,
when that feel-good, generous American money could be spent
meeting needs here at home. And so in the long run, it is very
difficult to sustain.
So that is just an observation I have been quite concerned
about. We ought to take every opportunity we can to start
putting more of this money through our security side as opposed
to our State Department side, and if money goes to DOD and then
somehow winds up in State, that is fine.
How do you know when you need to spend a dollar for
prevention? It seems to me that a dollar spent for prevention
at the right place might be this 1:59 return because we avoided
having to take corrective action, but a dollar spent for
prevention, where, in 100 different places around the globe? We
don't really know which of those places is ultimately--if we
don't spend that dollar, we are going to wind up being
something where we are going to feel like we need to take
corrective action.
So the ratio winds up being, really, when you think of the
challenge of identifying where corrective action should be, it
can't be 1:59. It is going to have to be a heck of a lot more
than that.
Dr. Schirch. Absolutely, these are important questions. Let
me answer your first one in terms of the American public,
because polls of Americans have consistently shown that they
support foreign aid, and they assume that we are giving much
larger quantities than we are. They assume that 25 percent of
their tax dollar is going to foreign aid. They have no idea
that it is less than one percent.
Mr. Marshall. It could well be that they assume that
because they are outraged at the very thought.
Dr. Schirch. Absolutely. When they are asked what
percentage of their tax dollars should go to foreign aid, it is
10 percent, which is far above what we are even talking about
in terms of prevention.
Mr. Marshall. So it is less than 25 percent, so they are
basically communicating that they want less spent on
foreigners.
Mr. Smith. I have been down this road a thousand times, and
that is not the best argument that I have heard. I respect it
being made, but the bottom line is, Mr. Marshall is right. The
public has no idea what goes into the budget. All they know is
they think too much is going in, and so they want it cut. That
is not as helpful as it first appears, and I am pro-foreign
aid. I say it as a friendly comment.
Mr. Marshall. And me, too. It is just trying to figure how
to do it in a sustainable way. But history shows it is
unrealistic in a democratic political system to sustain it on
just sort of feel-good stuff.
Dr. Schirch. Although there is an assumption that we have
of first resort, so that defense is our last resort. And I
think if Americans understood how weak our first resort is in
terms of State Department and USAID, and looking at the
proportions of the budget--and I often speak to American
audiences where I show them pie charts of where things are
going, and they are stunned at that ratio.
The other thing is in terms of choosing where we spend
those preventive dollars, there is an extensive network, global
network of early warning systems to identify, narrow down,
prioritize those areas, so there is a recognition that we have
to make choices.
Mr. Smith. We will have to come back to this, if we could.
I want to get to Mr. Kline.
Mr. Kline. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am reluctant to jump
into this particular piece of it, but our perception is that
the perception of the people in our districts think we are
spending way too much on foreign aid, and it is an easy target
for them. So it is tough politically.
I am impressed by the number of NGOs that are around the
world and the terrific work that they are doing. I remember
being in Mogadishu back in the 1992-93 time frame. We were
there for Operation Restore Hope and I was standing on the ramp
out in front of my helicopter, getting ready to go do
something. And this man walked up, and he was an NGO and he
looked at my name tag and it said ``Kline'' on it. And he said,
``Kline,'' he said, ``are you any relation to Vicky Kline?''--
who is my wife. They had served together. She was an Army nurse
and they had served together some years ago. And so it is a
small world thing, and they are everywhere, and there was no
doubt that they have a good sense for what is going on.
I am interested in knowing how better to tap into that, but
it seems to me the one thing we have here is a very serious
indictment of the country teams. We have ambassadors, we have
embassies, we have people, we have State Department and all
manner of representation in these country teams who, in theory,
should be able to tell us what is going on in that country,
that should be able to tell us if this is a country that maybe
we need to intercede earlier. But somehow that is not
connecting, and I am not sure exactly why that is. We have
intelligence----
Mr. Smith. Let me interrupt, just quickly. I think what the
country team needs to tell you, they are telling you. And they
know they only have the resources to deal with about five or
so----
Mr. Kline. Reclaiming my time, Mr. Chairman. If they are,
then they are ineffective in the telling, because we are
obviously not interceding, perhaps, where we should. So the
system, I guess, is what I would say, Mr. Chairman, isn't
working as it should.
Mr. Smith. Absolutely.
Mr. Kline. I want to go very quickly, and anybody can feel
free to comment on any of this stuff. But I want to in my
couple of minutes left, I was very interested, of course, in
Dr. Kilcullen's points. And I wrote down, I think, the numbers
three, four, six and seven on your list that have to do with
personnel, continuity, population-centric, local security and
so forth.
And in going to the specifics that Dr. Kagan talked about
in Afghanistan, we are in the process right now in putting in
some 21,000 more U.S. Forces, and there are a number of issues
here which aren't matching up with your list. For one thing,
there are Marines going in, and the Marines on the ground are
going to be there for seven months. Leadership will be there
for a year, so we have got a little continuity problem going
there. And the Commandant has told us he has big concerns about
the other three that I went through there.
There are not Afghan partners. The Afghan National Army
isn't there in big numbers. The Afghan police isn't there in
big numbers. There isn't a local security force. And so I am
wondering what your thoughts are about what can we do. I mean,
we are in the process of this now. I think everybody from the
Commandant of the Marine Corps and General Petraeus and
McKiernan and everybody across the road would like to see more
interagency, and they would certainly like to see faster
development of the Afghans. So, a comment from anybody.
Dr. Kilcullen. Well, I might make a brief comment but then
defer to Dr. Kagan who knows a lot about this topic.
I think to a certain extent what we are doing in
Afghanistan is filling in the gaps in the current North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) plan. So if you look at
where the NATO allies were located before the Afghan surge, we
are putting U.S. troops into areas where there were not a lot
of European troops to kind of fill the gap.
I would argue that we ought, instead, to be identifying
where the population lives primarily and focusing on securing
the population as distinct from territory. That would be my
first point.
And the second point would be we need to be taking a
partnering role where a U.S. unit always operates with an
Afghan military unit and an Afghan police unit.
Mr. Kline. Excuse me, but that is the complaint right now
from the Marines, is there isn't that partner unit available.
Dr. Kilcullen. Yeah, that is right. And so those would be
my two sort of points of concern about where I am seeing things
develop in Afghanistan.
If I could just jump back very quickly to a previous point
that you made, sir. There is a thing called the Regional
Security Initiative that was created by the Counterterrorism
Bureau in State precisely to address this question of reporting
from posts and understanding the security environment. And
there is a report, Country Report on Terrorism to Congress,
that comes every year, which actually addresses all of those
questions as well. You may be interested in holding a hearing
on that issue because there has been some very substantial
development inside State in the last few years on that.
One other final point is two big changes happened to the
foreign assistance world under President Bush. Firstly, a very
substantial expansion of the foreign assistance budget. In 2000
it was $11 billion; by 2008 it was $20 billion. So a lot more
was being done in terms of foreign assistance.
But the other big shift was that as of the end of the Bush
Administration, more than half of that foreign assistance was
being delivered in conflict or post-conflict environments, and
yet we have an aid organization that is primarily structured to
do aid as a poverty alleviation tool and not necessarily well-
organized or conceptually well-focused on operating in a
conflict or post-conflict environment. I think we could do a
lot to assist the USAID without necessarily spending a lot more
money, with simply helping them get their heads around the new
environment they are operating in.
Mr. Smith. Dr. Kagan, go ahead.
Dr. Kagan. Thank you. I think the last point is really
critical, and I want to emphasize it. Mr. Chairman, I was
itching to make a comment on your question along those same
lines.
The problem is exactly as Dave said. We have, you know,
USAID, why is USAID in State? It is in State because of the
Foreign Assistance Act. Why did we have the Foreign Assistance
Act? Because we saw foreign assistance as being an aspect of
our public diplomacy, and because we felt as a Nation that is
very generous in their international giving, we felt that it
was both in our interests and ethical for us to alleviate
poverty.
If you ask the question, why is this system broken now, the
answer is the system isn't broken from the standpoint of what
it was designed to do. The system was designed to be an adjunct
of our public diplomacy. It was never designed to be a major
element of our national security policy. And what we have come
to realize over the course of the last eight years--which,
granted, we should have known before--is that this kind of
assistance is a critical part of our national security policy,
and it ranges from everything from phase zero engagement to try
to avoid conflict--and by the way, that includes military
components as well. As you know, when military talks about
phase zero, it doesn't mean fighting, but it does mean things
that military forces can and should be doing. And it continues
through conflict and post-conflict. But when you start beating
up the State Department about why the country teams aren't
doing this sort of thing and why the State Department isn't
able to do this, this is not the State Department's job. The
State Department is American----
Mr. Kline. Country team is much more than just State.
Dr. Kagan. Absolutely. And I was referring only to your
comment. There is a tendency to beat up State about this a lot
and say we really need to pound State into doing this right. I
question that.
The State Department is a diplomatic service, and we need
to have a diplomatic service, and the purpose of a diplomatic
service is to pass paper. That is what diplomats do--and have
negotiations. Not only that, but primarily you don't have a
diplomatic corps to conduct major operational planning and
oversee the expenditure of huge amounts of money over large
areas. That is not what a diplomatic corps does.
So if you are going to look for an aid organization that
can be a player in national security policy, I am not at all
convinced that that should be State, and I think we really need
to revisit it. It is a very fundamental question you raised,
sir, and I think it really merits a lot more discussion than it
has had.
If I could beg your indulgence to comment briefly on the
specifics in Afghanistan. I was last in Afghanistan in March of
this year, and I had the opportunity to meet with the commander
of the 205th Afghan Corps, who is based in Kandahar and has to
fight in the south where the Marines are going to be going. And
he raised a very interesting question. He said, ``Are you
Americans trying to create an expendable Afghan Army or an
enduring Afghan Army?''
And what he meant by that was that we have been creating
Afghan security forces, and the Afghans have been assigning
them into combat without, as Dave says, rotational periods,
which also means without rest periods, which also means without
relief. There is no red, amber, green training cycle in that
corps. If you are assigned to the 205th Corps, you are fighting
all the time until you either retire or die, and that corps has
been having some retention problems, and there are a variety of
other things going on.
Although I supported the President's statement of his
policy--and I do support it and I strongly support it and I
think it is the right policy--I was very disappointed by one
thing in his speech. He did not commit to increasing the size
of the Afghan National Security Forces. And this is a big, big
problem, because if you look at the 20 counterinsurgents on the
1,000 ratio that you need and you look at the population of
Afghanistan, which by the way is an absolute swag, no one knows
how many Afghans there actually are. We haven't had a census in
30 years. And this is a major problem, as Dave was alluding to.
But let us say there are about 30 million Afghans. You do
the estimate and you would need about 600,000-some-odd
counterinsurgents. Okay, let us cut it down and say that we are
not fighting in parts of the country, although I don't find
that persuasive, but okay. What are we aiming at?
With the current augmentation of U.S. Forces, with the
current planned end state for Afghan national security forces,
by the end of 2011 we will have 316,000 forces total on the
ground. Now, there are two problems with that. First is it
doesn't get you the counterinsurgency ratio; and second is,
since that is right now the permanent end state of the Afghan
National Army, it doesn't give us an exit strategy. Because if
we pull out even 100,000 foreign troops out of there, then you
have got 216,000.
So this is a problem, and it is really unfortunate that we
have not focused enough on the expansion of the Afghan National
Army, and I privilege that instead of the Afghan National
Police for a reason. I think that we really need to consider
the phasing of the development of security forces more than we
have done hitherto. We want to get to an end state where you
have police doing policing and not Army, but in the context of
a war-torn society, with an ongoing counterinsurgency, right
now that is not what we are focused on in the counterinsurgency
area.
The Marines are not interested in local beat cops on crime.
The Marines are interested in how many counterinsurgents are on
the ground. If you are trying to raise a police force to beat
counterinsurgents, then you are not raising them to be a police
force; and if you can't raise them to be a police force because
the situation doesn't permit it, then you should be raising
more counterinsurgents, and that means Army.
So what we should be doing in Afghanistan, among other
things--and I agree entirely with Dave also that we are seeing
gap-filling with these soldiers and we have not seen a
fundamental review or revision of American strategy in
Afghanistan or international strategy in Afghanistan parallel
to the review that accompanied the surge in Iraq in 2007. We
have not yet seen that on the ground in theater, and I think we
urgently need to.
Mr. Smith. We could explore--but I am begging Mr.
Thornberry's indulgence, and I want to give him a chance to ask
his questions. We will follow up on that. We will try to come
back to this, but Mr. Thornberry.
Mr. Thornberry. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I appreciate
very much the work of each of you.
Dr. Kilcullen, one of the things this subcommittee has
focused on a fair amount the past couple of years has been what
we call strategic communications. I notice in your book you use
a slightly different term, but as I recall, you put some
importance on the government communicating in a clear, unified
way as part of dealing with this accidental guerrilla, noting
that what we do talks louder than what we say, admittedly. But
I would be interested in your thoughts on where we are with
that as a government and where we should go.
And I am reminded--I am little hazy about this, but I think
the radio woke me up this morning talking about allegations
that we killed a bunch of civilians in Afghanistan this
morning. And the military was saying, well, it wasn't really
us; it was Taliban who may have played a role. And we have
looked into a number of instances in the past where bad guys
get in a firefight with our folks, and then before we can get
back to the base, they have made it look like the bad guys were
in prayer and were shot in the back of the head. I mean, they
are really sophisticated in this area, and it looks to me like
we are playing catch-up. So I would be interested in your
views.
Dr. Kilcullen. Thank you, sir. I would just make two quick
comments. One is that we place a different priority within the
military on information operations to the priority that our
enemy places.
The Taliban, as I have observed them in the field since
2006, put informational propaganda first. So the first thing
they do is they decide what is the propaganda mission that we
are trying to send. Then they figure out what operations to
design and carry out to meet that propaganda objective. We do
it the other way around. We design how we operate, and at the
last minute we throw it to the information ops folks and say,
hey, can you just explain this to the public. So we use our
information operations to explain what we are already doing.
The enemy uses their physical operations to send a message, and
I think that is the fundamental mental shift that we need to
make.
We have tended to treat information ops as a black art and
as akin to artillery planning and of fixed targeting. So we
have people looking at it as a targeting problem. It is
actually not that. It is a political maneuver problem. And in
the book, I get into a lot of detail about the political
maneuver that we did that succeeded in eastern Afghanistan. The
same would be true in Iraq. We carefully maneuvered to send a
message in 2007.
So I think some people, notably General Petraeus and people
associated with the surge in 2007, do get this; but it is not
necessarily structurally built into the U.S. Government. Some
people have talked about recreating the U.S. Information Agency
(USIA), which as you know was disestablished in 1998, became
the odd bureau within State. I think it certainly couldn't
hurt. But the information environment has changed a lot since
USIA was designed. It is a much more itemized and fragmented
media marketplace out there. So I think civil society is
actually a very key part of this message that we are trying to
send, and I would emphasize that element.
And one final legislative issue. We had a lot of trouble in
Iraq trying to counter al Qaeda in Iraq--propaganda--because of
the Smith-Mundt Act, which meant that we couldn't do a lot of
things online because if you put something on YouTube, and it
is deemed to be information operations and there is a
possibility that an American might load onto that page and read
that and be influenced by that, that is technically illegal
under the Smith-Mundt Act. And so we had to get a waiver, as
you may recall, to be able to do that.
I think for Congress it might be worth looking at how that
legislation may need to be relooked at or reexamined in a lot
of the new media environment, so that it still has the same
intent but doesn't necessarily restrict us from legitimate
things we might want to do in the field.
Mr. Thornberry. Good point.
Dr. Kagan, could I just ask you, briefly, as my time runs
out, I understand what you are saying about we need to look at
each place individually. But don't we need to push increased
capabilities, for example, taking this, that could be available
to be tailored to each particular location?
Dr. Kagan. Yes, absolutely. And the thrust of my written
testimony is anything we do anywhere, we draw from a pool of
general purposes forces, both military and nonmilitary, that
has to be adequately sized. And all I am trying to say on the
specifics is the only way to size it is to basically look at
each of the specifics and sum them up, which is not what we do.
It is a question of we have always had this discussion
about threat-based planning versus capabilities-based planning
and so forth. Capabilities-based planning is just a way of
deciding that you are not going to look at what the actual
real-world requirement is, because it is budgetarily
unpleasant. I don't think that is a good way to go in a world
where we have active enemies who are actually shooting at us,
trying to kill us every day.
And I think what we should be doing is looking at what the
real-world requirement actually is by going place by place, and
the military can do this and does this to some extent, although
not, frankly, it doesn't sum this up in the way it should,
again because it is budgetarily unpleasant.
I don't know the civilian side of things well enough, but I
strongly doubt that this is done in that coherent fashion on
the civilian side. So I don't think Congress is being presented
with the information that it needs to understand what the real-
world requirement is. You are not going to fund the real-world
requirement at 100 percent, of course, because that would be
tantamount to insuring everything, so you can never take a loss
on anything, and it is unreasonable. You have to accept risk.
But until you have gone specific-by-specific and summed
that all up and looked at what the real-world requirement is,
you don't even know what risk you are accepting. And in the
context of the current defense budget, where it has been made
clear that we will be accepting risk, but where there has been
virtually no public discussion anyway of how much risk we are
actually accepting and where we are accepting it, I think this
is a matter that Congress should interest itself in.
Mr. Smith. Thank you. A couple of observations and a couple
of questions.
Smith-Mundt is something we have looked at and it
absolutely needs to be fixed because of the way the Internet
works, frankly. And the way other things work, you put any
message out anywhere, it is going to get to an American, and
Smith-Mundt did not contemplate that.
The problem we are going to have and as you are lobbying
and talking about this issue, it is something we want to try to
fix. The problem we are going to have is sort of the paranoia
of the American public right now that the government is trying
to manipulate them. It certainly didn't help when we had the
incidents of the reporters being paid.
So if we open up the Smith-Mundt window--and I would love
to be able to open it up, make that little tweak that you
talked about, because I think it definitely needs to be done,
maybe just expand the waiver ability, something--you are going
to have a whole lot of folks on the other side who are going to
come in and say, gosh, no, anything we need to do with Smith-
Mundt, we need to strengthen it. We need to make sure the
government is doing none of this. And I just worry that if we
walk down that path we will wind up with more of a problem than
we can handle.
On the country team thing and on whether or not it is the
State Department job to sort of organize this, Mr. Kline was
pointing out, let us know what is going on in country, what the
threat environment is. I think you are absolutely right, Mr.
Kagan. State Department is supposed to be about diplomacy. I
think they do more than push paper, but it is diplomacy that
they are focused on.
Dr. Kagan. I mean that with the greatest of respect.
Mr. Smith. It is important paper that is being pushed. I
think the problem we have discovered as we have gone around,
just did a trip to Africa and sort of ran through a bunch of
different countries with a bunch of different problems, Yemen,
Kenya, Morocco, Egypt. The problem is the Ambassador, the
Charge D'Affaires, whoever, the Chief of Mission is the person
who is in charge of the country. And yes, there are a lot of
other people there who do a lot of other things, but they all
respond to him. We are having a little bit of a problem with
that actually in SOCOM and Military Liaison Elements (MLEs),
DOD chain of command versus State Department chain of command.
But I think Mr. Kline is essentially right; that if we are
going to do this sort of holistic approach to a threat
environment and take a walk through the messed-up world that we
have and say, you know, where do we start at that zero point
and how do we do that, the country team head has got to be the
person who is, you know, this is where we are at, okay, and
this is kind of what we would like to be done, and he is
orchestrating it. Then you sort of move up from the country-by-
country level, maybe a regional organization, however you do
it. I think that needs to be done.
And I want to let Dr. Schirch comment on this, but ask an
additional question, because the other thing that struck me as
we look at this, the Brookings Institute did a study on failed
states. Someone else did one about the same time. It is great.
It is also like walking into your room where you haven't picked
anything up in 15 years and going, where the hell do we start.
There are so many countries with so many problems, rule of law,
security, you know, if you put aside whether or not al Qaeda is
in there trying to recruit, you know, just the basic governance
issues. So how would we organize it both structurally, getting
back to the State Department versus, you know, Chief of Mission
issue, and then how would you prioritize when you are looking
across one remarkably messed-up globe.
Dr. Schirch. Absolutely. The challenge of addressing failed
states, which many authors have been dealing with lately, has
not taken into account something that Dr. Kilcullen noted; that
the capacity for doing this is largely local in these
countries, and it is strengthening and partnering from the U.S.
to civil society, often, to build the capacity of their own
state.
Mr. Smith. Millennium Challenge Corporation, by the way, is
outstanding, another change of the Bush Administration, that
feeds into that local approach.
Dr. Schirch. If I could just give an example, particularly
on the strategic communication point as well that ties in with
this one. I was in Iraq in 2005 working with Iraqi NGOs, and I
took a lot of taxis. I talked with a lot of people.
Overwhelmingly at that point, Iraqis felt that the U.S. was in
Iraq for oil and to build permanent military bases. So, in
terms of communicating what the U.S. interest was, there was a
vast disconnect with what State Department people were saying
here and what Iraqis on the ground felt. There was a large gap.
And largely that was Iraqis in civil society looking at what
was being done in their country and saying, a lot of civilians
are dying, it doesn't feel like it is about this population-
centered security.
At that point, I was working with Iraqi NGOs to integrate
reconciliation activities into their development. So when they
are giving microcredit loans, they had a precondition for a
Sunni-Shia business plan. They were doing very small-scale
reconciliation, building security from the ground up and being
very effective at it, going from village to village. And they
were a mixed NGO group of Arab, Kurdish, Sunni, Shia people,
all working together, going into different communities,
unarmed, spoke the local language, operated on security based
on their relationships with people, and they were doing
fantastic work all over Iraq.
United States Institute of Peace, just in the last couple
of years, has started to empower and build the capacity of
local Iraqi NGOs and civil society to run the reconciliation
workshops that are now happening across the country in Iraq.
Mr. Smith. I am going to have to ask you to wrap up because
I want to give my colleagues another chance. We have a 15-
minute vote. We have another 10 minutes before we have to
leave, but just give me another quick 10, 15 seconds.
Dr. Schirch. Just in terms of the country teams, I think
looking at the United States Institute of Peace and the NGO
community as the resources for some of these challenges.
Mr. Smith. Okay. Jim, did you have anything more? I think
everybody else is leaving.
Mr. Marshall. Yeah, I do actually.
Dr. Kagan, I thought maybe I was seeing a reprise or sequel
to ``No Good Way'' as you were describing what needs to happen
with the Afghan Army. And frankly, it is hard for me to see how
we are going to have an effective enduring Afghan institutional
army without having an Afghan government that is in much better
shape than the current Afghan Government is. And I don't see
how the Afghan Government is going to get into a much better
position right now. Just the corruption and other challenges
that they have got are enormous.
But I am fascinated and would really like to explore your
thoughts about this sort of divide between the appropriate
responsibility given State historically, more than just pushing
paper, and what we now recognize should be done, you know, in
part because of repeated comments from folks like Dr. Lund and
Dr. Schirch. I mean we all know this, that an ounce of
prevention can really avoid a pound of cure; and that pound of
cure comes with huge costs in terms of lives and limbs for
Americans and others.
And I don't necessarily agree with the Chairman's sort of
summary, that it has to all be controlled or that the driving
force, the guiding light, has to be the country team, unless
country teams wind up getting redefined--which seems to me.
And I would really like you to talk a little bit more about
if you already had some thoughts concerning how we might
reorganize. You have heard me say--I have said this many
times--I am absolutely convinced we won't fund it as long as it
stays in State and it is described as the historic diplomacy
mission. We are just not going to do that. It is unrealistic to
think we will. Political history is completely against the
notion that we will. So what is your alternative to get the
appropriate funding to have the ounce of prevention?
Dr. Kagan. Let me start by clarifying the remark that I
know is going to come out of this meeting. Full disclosure: My
sister-in-law is a former ambassador, and I am very familiar
with what ambassadors do, and I did not--I actually wasn't
trying to denigrate the State Department at all, but simply to
say there are things that they are designed to do and things
they are not designed to do.
And the issue isn't so much with the ambassador actually,
and I want to make this point and I will give you the full
disclosure. Ambassadors can--especially professional Foreign
Service Officer ambassadors can be, and many of them are
capable of thinking about these things and trying to do the
right thing. What they rarely have is the right kind of staff
to do the planning, you know, intelligence gathering,
intelligence assessment, planning and so forth----
Mr. Smith. Beyond their capability--sorry to interrupt
here. I take Mr. Marshall's point. Beyond their capability,
their responsibility within our flowchart, if we want to change
that flowchart we can change it; but if the whole thing is by,
through and with, okay, you work with the local population,
whether it is on development or counterinsurgency. The
ambassador is our representative in that country. If anything
goes on in that country done by the United States of America
that he doesn't know about, he or she is rightfully pissed off
and completely undermined in their ability to do their job, the
job that we have assigned that person to do. That is my only
point. But go ahead.
Dr. Kagan. So I think one of the questions is how are the
missions staffed, and missions need to be staffed differently
in different places. One of the things that sent shivers up my
spine more than anything else are the discussions that you hear
in the corridors of the new embassy complex in Baghdad about
the need for the embassy to return to normalcy, by which is
meant a normal diplomatic representation with some sort of
foreign assistance. That is insane. It is not a normal
situation, and the Ambassador in Iraq is going to continue to
have to do things beyond the norm. But there is an
institutional bias within State that drives against creating
the structures that are necessary to do this.
How do we fix it? Look, in the short term, the reason this
is going into the military is because the military is the only
organization that is capable of doing this, for two reasons.
One, and the most important, is because the military does have
the capability to put together planning staffs to develop
intelligence analysis, plan, conduct and execute operations on
this scale, and we don't have country teams on the whole that
can do that, with a handful of exceptions, and that is probably
going to persist for some time. So, in the short term, I doubt
that there is an alternative to putting this kind of resource
through the military in areas where we have troops present, in
countries where we have a very active military assistance
program and so forth.
In the long term, I can't tell you what the structure
should be. I can tell you what it shouldn't be. It shouldn't be
what we have, nor is there going to be a simple fix like making
USAID a Cabinet post or something, or pulling it out of the
flowchart. Because what we have to do--look, we do want USAID
to be a part of our public diplomacy. We do give foreign
assistance for that reason. We do want to alleviate poverty. We
do give assistance. We don't want to stop doing that. But we
also can't have USAID as a national security tool beholden to
those principles, as it is right now.
So I suspect that the long-term fix for this is going to
require two separate organizational structures, either within
one USAID organization--although I am skeptical of that--or in
two separate organizations. And I would say I don't see that it
matters whether this is housed at DOD or State or somewhere
else. And I think that we need to get over the allergy to
making this a DOD function. There are lots of things that are
DOD functions that could be done elsewhere.
I agree with you that if you want to be funded--but I would
say even more importantly, if you want this to be integrated
well into our national security strategy and executed well as
part of that, integrating it into DOD is probably the best
long-term solution. But this is something that I think really
merits very, very serious study and much more serious study
than it has received. I am sorry I can't offer you more
specific than that.
Mr. Smith. I think the bottom line is it is an interagency
approach. It has to be an interagency approach. No one agency
is going to be in charge. The key is, how do they cross over.
Dr. Lund. There are definitely exceptions to how the
country teams relate to these issues. It has been enough years
so I can sort of say this.
In Zimbabwe, USAID was keeping its own sort of early
warning grid for some years and not letting the ambassador know
they were doing it because they felt that maybe, you know, he
would want to take it over, he wouldn't do it right and so on,
but this is seven, eight years ago, before the crisis really
grew, and adjusting their programs as much as they could to
these drivers of conflict.
In Mindanao, we have got the ambassador and U.S.
administrator, just like this in the southern Philippines. A
lot of programs pushed into Mindanao over the last seven, eight
years, quite integrated, quite strategically targeted and so
on. They need a little tweaking here and there, but linked up
with the military aid to the Philippine marines, and in local
areas, working in Basilan, for example, working in tandem with
each other more or less.
So it really is where the leadership can be carried out. So
I think maybe the security rubric is really important overall,
but the fact that you can save money, I mean, doesn't that have
some marketability these days?
Mr. Marshall. We have always known that. I am sorry. I
mean, this is not new news. We have known this for generations,
and we still have a problem politically sustaining it. So from
a strategic perspective, that is all I am offering here, is
sort of oversight; somebody needs to think through how this is
sustainable, because this problem is not going away for the
foreseeable future as weapons become more sophisticated and
available retail.
Mr. Smith. Dr. Kilcullen.
Dr. Kilcullen. I just wanted to answer your question.
One of the things that we did towards the end of the Bush
Administration--which was actually signed off on by the
Secretaries of State, Defense, and the Administrator of USAID
just before the inauguration, and I believe has received
support from the Obama Administration as well--was we produced
an interagency counterinsurgency handbook designed for
policymakers at the higher level in the legislative and
executive branch.
And in that we talked about something called a mission
augmentation team, which is a small team that goes into an
embassy that has one of these situations of a developing
insurgency or conflict prevention, and it is specifically
tailored to support that country team in exercising the
responsibilities that you are talking about. So we have
approved a structure to actually do that. I don't know if the
current State Department leadership plans to go ahead and
develop that fully, but it is there, it is approved, and it is
something that we may want to look at to build this capacity
that you are talking about.
In writing that handbook, we went into a lot of detail on
prevention, and we also now have interagency agreement on some
of the prevention issues that are required. So a lot of the
intellectual foundation is there.
The problem I would go back to is, State is the size of an
Army brigade, you know, it is 6- to 8,000 people, and it is
just not big enough to do a lot of this stuff. It needs to be
bigger and better resourced. And I know Fred was being a little
flippant, but you know, the reason that we managed to get the
CIA into Afghanistan 27 days after 9/11 was the State
Department, basing, overflight, fuel supply, diplomatic
clearance, preventing the Russians and the Iranians from
interfering. That was all State Department. State Department
work, diplomacy is like air support. You don't walk down the
street in Baghdad and look to your left and see an airman
providing air superiority and to the right and see a diplomat.
But you can't operate without those two guys.
Mr. Smith. We have got to run, could talk about this for a
great deal of time. You have all been very, very helpful. I
think this is critical. I didn't even get into the questions
about the budget, how we go forward on this and how we plan for
implementing the strategy, but obviously, this has come out
from our conversation here, and it is not just the DOD budget,
it is the whole budget. And I like the idea of a sort of
holistic security approach across agency lines in terms of how
we put together the budget, and I think there are some good
ideas there. And of course there are tough choices involved,
and everyone is always very good in government at telling you
where we should spend the money. It is getting the people to
say this is where we shouldn't spend it that is always, always
the challenge.
But thank you, and certainly this committee wants to stay
in touch with all of you. I think you have very important
knowledge and insights on this critical subject. So thank you
for your testimony, and we are adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 11:35 a.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
=======================================================================
A P P E N D I X
May 7, 2009
=======================================================================
PREPARED STATEMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD
May 7, 2009
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[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILBLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
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