An edited version of this appeared on Forbes earlier this week

A War Lesson to Learn, Still

By Mitchell Shivers

Back in November of 2007, then Secretary of Defense, Robert M. Gates, delivered a landmark speech on national defense at Kansas State University.  At the time, the Secretary’s Landon Lecture was noteworthy for his call to more adequately fund our State Department’s so-called “soft power” capabilities.  During the current debate over the future of America’s national security budget, it’s worth noting his call once more.

Traditionally, Defense and State, sometimes called “Mars” and “Venus” by Washington foreign policy insiders, have been rivals for congressional funding.   Gates knew that that wouldn’t do in today’s more complex world.  He made the case that both agencies would need adequate resources to deal with national security challenges emanating from failed and failing states around the globe.  Dealing with asymmetric wars on two fronts in Iraq and Afghanistan, Secretary Gates understood the need to use both guns and butter.

 One of the most important lessons of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is that military success is not sufficient to win: economic development, institution-building and the rule of law, promoting internal reconciliation, good governance, providing basic services to the people, training and equipping indigenous military and police forces, strategic communications, and more – these, along with security, are essential ingredients for long-term success.

Landon Lecture, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, November 26, 2007.

 Well, has Secretary Gates’ clarion call been heeded?  No.

The projection of America’s abundant soft power is still wholly inadequate.  Tally the scorecard in Afghanistan – you’ll see the consequence of our inadequacy in misspent treasure and tragic human sacrifice.  When we fail with our soft power, we rely more heavily on hard power to achieve our goals, placing an undue, and unfair, burden on our armed forces men and women.

As a nation, we dare not face our global national security challenges without the latest hi-tech armaments – and we’ll readily commit to making multi-hundred-billion dollar, multi-year commitments to ensure our safety.  We know such weapons expenditures help to deter war, and that they also ensure our success when we go to war.

But why is it, when the stakes are so high, that we still can’t tap into our vast, abundant reservoirs of national soft power resources?  Where’s our sense of urgency on this?

Our private sector’s prowess is the envy of the world.  But relatively little was done to harness that power to our benefit in Iraq and Afghanistan – and certainly not on a scale that might have made a decisive difference.  Our soft power possibilities have been mired in government red-tape, bound by well-intentioned but counter-productive congressional mandates and limited by plenty of  protected self-interests.

The little we’ve done to address our soft power weaknesses is timid and ever-protective of bureaucratic sensitivities.  Reforms, so far, have been incidental – lacking the heft needed to totally re-cast the delivery of this crucial ingredient to prevailing in asymmetric warfare.

Now, with greater federal budget constraints, the prospect for significant reform is even more remote.  But, reform we must.

Dr. Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart of the Institute for State Effectiveness, a think-tank dealing with how to remediate broken nations, estimate that there are some 50-60 failed or failing states around the world.  These tottering nations, hosts to large ungoverned spaces within their borders, provide fertile fields for exploitation by extremists of varying threats.

Afghanistan, and this legion of other troubled nations, will continue to brew threats so long as they remain unable to perform the minimum tasks of governing.  Our collective weariness with the ten year plus Afghan war will not lessen those threats.  Proactive interventions will be needed from time-to-time.  Whenever possible, our first tool of choice should be diplomacy and, ideally, our diplomacy will need to be paired with solid soft power.

Effective use of soft power can shorten or even deter wars.  Currently our attempt at soft power is often just money tossed down the drain.  We’re still using a centrally planned methodology to apply our foreign aid and our State Department aid overseers are no more effective at pulling this off than yesterday’s repudiated Soviet commissars.  No, a centrally planned model is just not any good at quickly mobilizing a failed or failing state’s economy.

For now, though, it’s the only model we have.  No one has dared to think outside the box about our foreign aid.  How might we achieve success in standing up a once failed state?  When called upon, how might we mobilize the full potential of our nation – all the elements of soft power and just the needed inputs of hard power – to achieve our national objectives?

I’m not suggesting we intervene all around the world to fix everyone else’s problems.  We should have limits on our willingness to help other countries.  But, when its in our self-interest to help another nation, we should be able to do just that – help.  Not squander our riches on well-intentioned, but hapless, aid programs that actually do little to move the ball down the field.

As a start, our government must expand its circle of soft power reformers.  Engage and exploit the best of our private sector to help develop new soft power methodologies.    Unleash its brain power and love of country.  If need be, damn the bureaucracy – this, after all, is about prevailing in war.

It’s time to re-think development risk taking in a chaotic wartime environment – no doubt some clever hedge fund managers might be able to shed some welcome light on treating conflict, and immediate post-conflict, aid like a diversified portfolio of investments with uncorrelated risks – all aimed at lessening the disruption to overall progress caused by the chaos of war.  Diversification, and decentralization of decision making, both the antithesis of central planning, hold great promise in improving aid outcomes during war.  Our current, centrally planned method of aid dispersal, concentrates risk – that’s foolish in war.

Secretary Gates was right.  We need to seriously invest in correcting this critical shortfall in our national security capabilities.  Soft power needs to become a whole-of-nation effort.  This is a skill set we’ll surely need for the rest of this century.

Mitchell Shivers is a former senior policy official at the Department of Defense in the George W. Bush Administration and the former senior advisor for economics and finance to US ambassadors Zalmay Khalilzad and Ronald Neumann at the US Embassy in Kabul.  He is currently an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the American Security Project in Washington, DC.

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