Joe Gould and Aaron Mehta
WASHINGTON — The US government’s military foreign-assistance programs are facing a quiet but consequential overhaul that has State Department officials privately balking at proposed changes to the division of labor between Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon.
The complex system of policies involved in propping up foreign forces — allies to some, enemies to others — is often derided as an impediment to national security. So when the Senate Armed Services Committee decided to reform the system in this year’s defense policy bill, the 2017 National Authorization Act, its attempts to consolidate authorities, create a flexible funding pool and boost congressional oversight should have cruised by with little pushback.
But the effort to fix the Pentagon’s security-cooperation bureaucracy, which has ballooned since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, is prompting panic at the State Department. Diplomats there believe that the bill will let DoD muscle State out of the military aid business permanently.
“The new NDAA is the end of State Department security assistance,” one US government official said bluntly, using shorthand for the pending bill. “The writing is on the wall.” That stance has in turn prompted frustration and pushback from Senate Armed Services Committee staff, whose version of the legislation passed the full Senate with the reform language intact. Committee spokesman Dustin Walker said the goal is not to pick a side in the long-simmering turf battle, but to get the two departments to stop talking past each other.
“The Senate NDAA is designed to make DoD’s current role in security cooperation more efficient, more effective and more responsive to emerging national-security requirements,” Walker said. “An important part of that effort is formalizing and strengthening coordination between DoD and the State Department. The NDAA would require more integration of DoD and State security cooperation efforts, not less.”
Be that as it may, officials at Foggy Bottom are on high alert over the language, and they are trying desperately to stop, or at least change, what the Senate wants to do.
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