Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Same source, different aid numbers

Visitors to the site occasionally ask us why the aid numbers presented here - sometimes including old numbers from past years - change from time to time. The changes are usually not drastic, a few million dollars here or there, but can be frustrating for people seeking to cite definitive numbers, for instance for publications.

The answer is simple, though frustrating. The "Just the Facts" website cites only official written sources, but the sources themselves are often inconsistent. This is especially true for the Defense Department's reporting of its own aid programs. Whether because of poor record-keeping or because of confusion about which expenditures constitute "aid" instead of "operational costs," two documents from the same government department can report different amounts of assistance to the same country, in the same program, in the same year.

When this happens, we cite the more recent of the two documents, which we consider to have superseded the first one. However, if the older document describes activities that are not mentioned in the newer document, we include those activities in our new aid estimates as well.

The most recent example is in a report we obtained last week: the Defense Department's first-ever country-by-country report on all of its overseas military assistance. The report (PDF) was required by Section 1209 of the 2008 National Defense Authorization Act. It is a major step forward for transparency over several military aid programs for which it was very difficult to obtain country-by-country data before.

One of those hard-to-track Defense Department programs is the Pentagon's authority to provide counter-drug assistance, known by the user-unfriendly name "Section 1004" after the provision in the 1991 Defense Authorization law that first created it. "Section 1004" is the second-largest source of military and police aid funding for Latin America and the Caribbean, but it has been consistently difficult for us to obtain an annual accounting of aid through this program.

This year, however, is different. We have information about "Section 1004" aid in 2007 from two different Defense Department sources:

(1) an April 2008 response to a Freedom of Information Act request from a U.S. non-governemntal organization, the Fellowship of Reconciliation (this document is not posted to our website); and

(2) The "Section 1209" report (PDF), which was required by Congress in July 2008, dated August 2008, and obtained by us in December 2008.

The two documents' accounting of "Section 1004" aid is very similar. Aid categories are almost identical, though many are cryptic and require a Google search to decipher. (Example: "CNIES" = "Cooperating Nations Information Exchange System.") But the two sources' aid numbers rarely match, and a few categories appear in one but not the other.

Consider this comparison of both sources' accounting of "Section 1004" aid to Colombia in 2007, which is typical:

 
4/08 FOIA Response
8/08 Section 1209 Report
Difference
Bilateral Maritime Collection/Reporting $35,000 -100%
CN Command Management System $3,267,000 $3,267,000 0%
CN Intelligence Programs $11,204,000 $11,907,000 +6%
CNIES $599,000 $599,000 0%
CNT Technology $1,000,000 $450,000 -55%
Colombia Airborne Surveillance $10,623,000 $10,623,000 0%
Detection and Monitoring Domain Awareness $3,300,000 $2,500,000 -24%
Host Nation Rider $3,150,000
(+infinity)
Information Operations $2,987,000
(+infinity)
Joint Inter-Agency Task Force South $399,000 $466,000 +17%
ONI Maritime Intelligence Support $35,000 -100%
SOF CN Support $9,924,000 $10,493,000 +6%
SOUTHAF Support - Southcom $601,000 $669,000 +11%
SouthCom CN Joint Planning Action Teams $2,240,000 $1,815,000 -19%
SouthCom CN Operational Support $46,178,000 $42,878,000 -7%
SouthCom Command Support $177,000 $215,000 +21%
SouthCom Section 1033 Support $12,437,000 $13,976,000 +12%
Tactical Analysis Teams $1,169,000 $1,690,000 +45%
USARSO Support - SouthCom $2,140,000 $2,287,000 +7%
USMC CN Training Support $2,004,000 -100%
Total $107,332,000 $109,972,000 +2%

In the end, the August source yields a total for Colombia that is $2.6 million higher (2 percent) than the April source. If we include aid categories that appear in April but not August in our final estimate, as we do on our page for Section 1004 aid to Colombia in 2007, we get a total of $112,046,000, or $4.7 million higher (4 percent).

Similar discrepancies appear in both reports' estimates of aid to the majority of countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

This is a common issue. Because it happens frequently, we recommend checking "Just the Facts" when citing aid numbers to ensure that you are using the latest official estimates. And we recommend that the Department of Defense and the congressional oversight committees place a higher priority on reporting. As things stand now, reports give the distinct impression that the federal government does not know quite how much it is spending on overseas military and police aid.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

The military's growing foreign aid role: a bibliography

Over the past few years, Congress has acceded to several Defense Department requests to use its own budget to provide military assistance, something that it was not legally able to do on its own after 1961, when the Foreign Assistance Act became law.

The result has been a profusion of Pentagon-budget programs that provide military aid very similar to what is already provided through the foreign aid budget. The difference is that these new Defense Department programs have less (or sometimes no) involvement from the State Department; little or no oversight from the congressional foreign relations and foreign-aid committees; fewer legal restrictions on their use, including human rights restrictions; and greater obstacles to obtaining information about their use, due to lighter public reporting requirements.

Examples of such Defense Department programs on the "Just the Facts" website include "Section 1004" Counter-Drug Assistance (begun in 1991, the second-largest source of military and police aid to the region this year), the Regional Defense Counter-Terrorism Fellowship Program (begun in 2003, the fourth-largest trainer of personnel from the region), and the "Section 1206" Train and Equip Authority (begun in 2006, the fourth-largest source of aid this year). (See a full list.)

The Defense Department has made clear its desire to increase these programs' scope and to make them permanent. The result in the past two years has been an increasing debate about the Pentagon's greater role in foreign assistance, and about the military's growing foreign policy role in general.

Here is a bibliography of links to some of the key documents in what is still a very new debate.

Congress:

  • July 31, 2008: Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on "Defining the Military's Role Towards Foreign Policy"

    • Rough hearing transcript (voice-recognition, from CSPAN)
    • Audio [MP3] and Video [streaming]
    • [PDF] Statement of Committee Chairman Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Delaware)
    • [PDF] Statement of Committee Ranking Minority Member Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Indiana)
    • [PDF] Testimony of Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte
    • [PDF] Testimony of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman
    • [PDF] Testimony of George Rupp, CEO and President,
      International Rescue Committee
    • [PDF] Testimony of Reuben E. Brigety II,
      Director of the Sustainable Security
      Program, Center for American Progress
    • [PDF] Testimony of Mary Locke,
      Former Senior Professional Staff,
      Committee on Foreign Relations
    • [PDF] Testimony of Robert M. Perito,
      Senior Program Officer,
      Center for Post-Conflict Peace
      and Stability Operations,
      United States Institute of Peace
  • April 15, 2008: House Armed Services Committee hearing on "Building Partnership Capacity and Development of the Interagency Process"

    • Audio [MP3] Part 1, Part 2
    • Statement of Committee Chairman Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Missouri)
    • [PDF] Testimony of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
    • [PDF] Testimony of Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates

Defense Department:

State Department:

Other U.S. Government:

Non-Governmental Organizations and Think-Tanks:

Press:

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

2007 Defense Department counter-drug aid

We have obtained and posted a report, required by this year's Defense Authorization law and released in March, detailing some of the Defense Department's counter-drug aid to Latin America and the rest of the world. The report [5.4 megabyte PDF download] covers aid provided in 2007.
The law (Section 1024 of the 2007 National Defense Authorization Act) requires the Defense Department to provide Congress with a country-by-country accounting of all counter-drug military and police assistance it provides overseas. This would mean all aid authorized by the "Section 1004" counter-drug assistance program and the related "Section 1033" program - two authorities that were created on a temporary basis in the 1990s and continue to be renewed regularly. 
What was submitted to Congress, however, is far from an accounting of all Defense Department aid. This report, like the 2005 report available here [PDF], only covers Defense Department aid for construction projects. While this is certainly interesting, construction aid is only a fraction of what the Defense Department offers Latin American and Caribbean militaries and police forces for counter-drug purposes. 
The Defense Department may use its budget to provide the following kinds of military and police aid:

1. Maintenance, repair and upgrading of loaned Defense Department equipment;
2. Maintenance, repair and upgrading of other equipment;
3. Transportation of personnel, supplies and equipment within or outside the United States;
4. Establishment and operation of bases of operation or training facilities within or outside the United States;
5. Training of law enforcement personnel, both foreign and domestic;
6. Detection and monitoring of narcotics related traffic coming into the United States;
7. Construction of roads and fences and installation of lighting to block drug smuggling across U.S. borders;
8. Establishment of command, control, communication and computer networks for improved integration of law enforcement, active military, and National Guard activities;
9. Linguistics and intelligence; and
10. Aerial and ground reconnaissance.

The newly acquired report only captures aid authorized by numbers 4 and 7 above. As a result, it lists only $4.855 million in Defense Department aid to Colombia in 2007, via seven construction projects. Yet a different document, acquired via a FOIA request issued by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, shows Colombia receiving Defense Department assistance totaling $107.332 million in 2007.

The report, while incomplete, nonetheless provides an interesting picture of U.S.-funded military construction projects in the region, including at the three Forward Operating Locations (Manta, Ecuador; Comalapa, El Salvador; and Aruba and Curacao, Netherlands Antilles.) Excerpted below is the section of the report detailing aid to Latin America and the Caribbean.

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