Tuesday, January 26, 2010

The Pentagon's military aid role grows

Since we began the "Just the Facts" project in the 1990s, a constant theme has been the Defense Department's steadily growing role in assigning military aid. First for the "war on drugs," later for the "war on terror," the Pentagon has accrued ever greater authorities to use part of its $664 billion annual budget to aid foreign military forces.

This is undesirable for several reasons.

  • It weakens the State Department's role in determining which militaries get how much aid. Because is designed to consider and protect all U.S. interests in a country — not just security but development, diplomatic relations, democracy, human rights, environmental protection and others — the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act placed the State Department in charge of foreign aid, including security assistance. Routing such aid through the Defense budget reduces the State Department's authority.
  • It weakens congressional oversight, including human rights protections. The congressional committees that authorize and fund State Department-managed military assistance oversee a $50 billion annual budget that gets significant scrutiny, since foreign aid is not politically popular in the United States. Aid that goes through the regular foreign aid budget channel is subject to conditions — including important human rights protections — and must be reported to Congress and the public. This website's database depends heavily on these reports. By contrast, aid that goes through the enormous defense budget is an almost invisible fraction of the total, and receives little scrutiny from the relevant committees.
  • It gives the Pentagon a greater diplomatic role. Giving the Defense Department significant autonomy over aid to foreign militaries can bring about situations in which military-to-military ties with a country are stronger than diplomatic ties.

The biggest leap forward in Defense budget military aid came in 2006, when Section 1206 of that year's National Defense Authorization Act created a new program authorizing the Pentagon to use $200 million of its budget to "train and equip" foreign militaries and police. This program, known simply as "Section 1206," closely resembled the State Department-run Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program, and was supposed to expire at the end of 2007. It was extended through 2008 and raised to $300 million, then extended again through 2011 and raised to $350 million. The 2011 Defense budget request will reportedly include a proposal to increase the 1206 program budget to $500 million in 2011. Between 2006 and 2008 — the years for which we currently have data — Section 1206 was the fifth-largest source of U.S. military assistance to Latin America and the Caribbean.

Now, as the Obama administration prepares to send Congress its 2011 budget request, the future of the Section 1206 program, which would expire at the end of that year, is a topic of much internal debate. 

This is evidenced by a letter (PDF) Defense Secretary Robert Gates sent to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on December 15. The letter proposes that the two departments pool their funds for military and police aid — but also economic development assistance — in three areas: security capacity-building, stabilization and conflict prevention. These pools, which Gates calls "Shared Responsibility, Pooled Resources" or SRPR, would require "dual-key" approval for expenditure of funds. (The analogy refers to a door or vehicle that requires two people to turn keys in order to unlock or start it.)

Each pool would operate with joint formulation requirements in the field and dual-key concurrence in Washington, DC. Legislation would endow these funds with inherent authority to achieve their purposes. Each department would be able to add funds to the pool to meet a departmental imperative, although the use of these funds would be subject to the dual-key approval requirements.

A "dual key" process is preferable to the Pentagon having autonomy to carry out its own security assistance policy. However, if made permanent this proposal would be a defeat for the State Department, which until recently was the only "keyholder." Since at least the 1990s, though, the State Department has not been assigned the resources needed to do the job on its own, while the Defense Department has. This proposal would make that reality permanent, irreversibly solidifying the Defense Department's foreign assistance role.

The Bush administration's secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, consistently yielded to the Defense Department on the Section 1206 jurisdiction issue. Secretary Clinton's department, on the other hand, has sought to re-take some of the lost turf. However, a January 20 post to Foreign Policy magazine's diplomacy blog, "The Cable," indicates that the State Department already gave in to the Defense Department's request to increase the Section 1206 budget to $500 million in 2011.

"That literally is the result of vigorous arm wrestling within the administration," one source familiar with the discussions said. The battle had been waged primarily between the shops of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy and Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Andrew Shapiro, but finally Deputy Secretary of State Jack Lew got involved.

"Eventually State backed off," the source said. "They're not sure they have the capacity to actually run the 1206 programs." …

Insiders working on the issue also suggested that State didn't match up bureaucratically inside the fight. The Pentagon just has so many more people and resources to bring to bear, and besides, the State Department's strategy review, the QDDR, isn't complete.

Meanwhile, "The Cable" says, the Gates proposal for a jointly administered SRPR pool does not, for now, appear to be going anywhere.

[Capitol] Hill staffers, who would be the ones appropriating the money, said there was no follow-through. Many saw the memo as a decoy and not really operative in any sense.

The security-assistance turf battle is heating up in ways that will affect future assistance to Latin America and the Caribbean. And it is taking place while the congressional foreign affairs committees consider a rewrite of the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act that could change the picture still further. We can expect more flare-ups over the coming year. But given the Defense Department's larger budget, political capital and bargaining power, it will be difficult - not impossible, but difficult - to forestall an outcome that doesn't involve a greater U.S. military role in foreign aid.

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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