I just wrote this memo on personnel spending and the military.  Here’s the gist:

It’s not surprising that weapons systems draw all the attention when defense spending reform comes up. They translate into jobs that defense contractors spread cunningly across the nation’s states and congressional districts. But the “guns versus butter” debates between liberals and conservatives miss a key point. It’s not just weapons that drive defense spending through the roof — it’s the people, too.

According to its official budget, the Defense Department will spend $533.8 billion in 2010 in the following categories:

• Personnel: $136 billion
• Operations & Maintenance: $185.7 billion
• Weapons Procurement: $107.4 billion
• Research & Development for Weapons and Technology: $78.6 billion
• Other: $26.1 billion

The personnel figure, however, doesn’t come close to capturing what America is really spending on defense personnel. According to PPI’s calculations, the real price tag is much bigger: $301.1 billion each year, 121 percent higher than the Pentagon’s figure. In other words, if you want major savings in defense spending, cutting weapons systems and the ever-elusive “waste, fraud and abuse” won’t take you far enough.

Eugene Robinson is a wonderful writer with whom I quite often agree.

But if such a talented, astute observer of the American political landscape hasn’t deciphered why we’re in Afghanistan, and that those costs are worth bearing, then the White House better prepare for an all-out charm offensive once the strategy and troop-level decisions have been made.

In Robinson’s most recent column, he laments:

Sending more troops will mean more coffins arriving at Dover, more funerals at Arlington, more stress and hardship for military families. It would be wrong to demand such sacrifice in the absence of military goals that are clear, achievable and worthwhile.

And what goals in Afghanistan remotely satisfy those criteria?

…

As long as our goals in Afghanistan remain as elusive as they are now, Obama shouldn’t be sending troops. He should be bringing them out.

As I’ve argued countless times, though 2009’s America has grown long-tired by the seemingly endless wars, there is - and will continue to be - compelling national security reasons to remain in Afghanistan and adopt much of General Stanley McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy.

However, that’s not the point of my post.  Rather, it’s that I expect the White House to soon announce another deployment of some 30,000+ troops to Afghanistan, and President Obama must be prepared to explain American security interests as he sends more Americans into harm’s way.  Distracted, I imagine, by the endless health care debate, the president must soon do a better job of selling the public on his administration’s latest controversial decision.

It looks like the White House is circling in on a new strategy in Afghanistan that focuses on protecting major population centers like Kabul, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz, Herat, Jalalabad, and a few other large villages.

If endorsed, it would adopt the major elements of General McChrystal’s proposed counterinsurgency strategy, albeit it on a more limited scale that perhaps acknowledges  40,000 additional troops aren’t enough to effectively pacify the entire country.  Or, as the NYT put it:

At the heart of this strategy is the conclusion that the United States cannot completely eradicate the insurgency in a nation where the Taliban is an indigenous force — nor does it need to in order to protect American national security. Instead, the focus would be on preventing Al Qaeda from returning in force while containing and weakening the Taliban long enough to build Afghan security forces that would eventually take over the mission.

This strategy would certainly prevent the Taliban from regaining control of the country, thereby denying Al Qaeda the petri dish it needs to reconstitute an ability to attack the United States.

Furthermore, this is a realistic approach about what we can achieve, even with increased - but finite - resources.  It may simply not be a sensible use of resources to deploy tens of thousands of American forces to Helmand, a massive southern province that has 20 percent of the land, but only three percent of the population.

However, the fundamental question for me is would this strategy effectively cede control over large swaths of the country to the Taliban where al Qaeda elements could re-enter and rebuild its abilities.  One senior administration addressed that point, saying, “We are not talking about surrendering the rest of the country to the Taliban.”

But under this scenario in Helmand, field commanders would compensate for the lack of a full-time troop presence by keeping pressure on insurgents with drone strike, aided  intelligence from local populations about pockets of Taliban.  But by ceding control to the Taliban, we could be alienating the local population — the eyes and ears necessary to target the drones.

And finally, a potential side-effect of protecting select urban areas is that as the only stable regions, they might be flooded by rural villagers that don’t want to live under the Taliban.  Would this increase the burden on troops to the point that their presence has diminishing returns as the cities swell with refugees?

Consider me cautiously optimistic, but nervous.

The State Department is involved in a massive project - the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review - that is designed to address a serious “funding imbalance” between the civilian and military institutions involved in American national security.

Says Anne-Marie Slaughter, Director of Policy and Planning at the State Department and in charge of the review,

This is not an abstract planning exercise that goes into a report and sits on a shelf,” she said. “It’s a planning exercise that does connect to the budget, that’s very important, but the implications go far beyond the budget. The budget is the tool to implement what we’re going to come up with. This is really what I think secretaries of state should be doing, which is a kind of farsighted look into how the United States is going to implement its foreign policy agenda in the 21st century.”

It is designed to roughly model the Pentagon’s Quadrenial Defense Review, which similarly connects threats to strategies to resources to budgets.

What’s more, it’s exactly what the State Department needs - with a budget hovering around $40billion, or well less than 10 percent of the Pentagon’s, it’s quite fair to say that in 2009, Foggy Bottom is responsible for well more than 10 percent of the national security of the United States.  Now it just needs the bureaucratic proof to justify that need to Congress.  Et voila - the QDDR!

Will Marshall and I have a piece up over at RealClear Politics on Dems and Afghanistan.

Here’s the upshot (read the whole enchillada here):

President Obama faces tough decisions on Afghanistan, but his party is on the hot seat too. Afghanistan is the first real test since Vietnam of Democrats’ collective ability to manage a major armed conflict. Just how to do that is the subject of an intense internal debate. Whatever the strategy, his party must avoid a convulsive split that would cast doubt on its ability to secure the country. Last March, Obama said his goal is to prevent al Qaeda from launching attacks on America. His handpicked commander, General McChrystal, is asking for up to 40,000 additional troops for a counterinsurgency campaign to achieve the president’s goal.

…

Let’s be clear: We’re not arguing that Obama should make his decision based on a desire to “look tough” on national security. We’re saying Democrats ought to think long and hard before forsaking a war that Obama has defined, both during the campaign and as president, as necessary to Americans’ security.

Obama and his party have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to consolidate a new progressive governing majority. But to do that, they must govern effectively. That means offering coherent and credible strategies for American safety, and the stamina to stick with them. For his party no less than for President Obama, Afghanistan will be the acid test.

Though Iranian negotiators accepted a nuclear deal this week in Vienna, even the most naive optimists should contain their excitement until the mullahs back in Tehran approve of it, and then the thing is actually executed.

Here are the logistics:

Iran is running low on uranium-derived fuel used in medical facilities (for MRIs, among other things).  The country has enough uranium, but it’s not in the right form for medical uses and will run out before Tehran can enrich enough.  Therefore, Iran had to look to the international community.

The U.S., France, and Russia proposed that Iran export the bulk of its uranium stock to Russia for enriching to the required medium-grade level (ie, lower than weapons-grade).  Russia then sends it on to France, who fashions it into fuel-plates.

On paper, the deal is a win-win:  Iran gets its fuel but gives up most of its uranium.  It will be almost another twelve months before it rebuilds its uranium stock to be able to attempt enriching it to weapons-grade (highly enriched).  Or, as Joe Cirincione of the Ploughshares Fund says,

If Iran ships the uranium out of the country, we’ve lengthened the fuse.”

Note that big “if”.  There is the distinct possibility that Tehran is playing for time by negotiating this draft plan to decrease tensions in the short term by stringing along the U.S., France, and Russia.  It’s always good to remember that actions speak louder than words.

However, Russia’s involvement in this process is critical - the Kremlin had appear divided on whether to support sanctions against Iran.  Now that Moscow has partial ownership of this deal, non-compliance by Tehran should anger Medvedev and Putin, who might be more disposed towards pressure.

Anne Applebaum theorizes in the Washington Post that NATO is essentially useless:

There is almost no sense anywhere that the war in Afghanistan is an international operation, or that the stakes and goals are international, or that the soldiers on the ground represent anything other than their own national flags and national armed forces. …

The fact is that the idea of “the West” has been fading for a long time on both sides of the Atlantic, as countless “whither-the-Alliance” seminars have been ritually observing for the past decade. But the consequences are now with us: NATO, though fighting its first war since its foundation, inspires nobody. The members of NATO feel no allegiance to the alliance, or to one another.

Questions surrounding NATO’s relevance have swirled since any semblance of progress had stalled in Afghanistan.  The alliance’s inability to keep members focused and actively engaged in the hard- and soft- power components of the mission is due to a variety of factors, not the least of which is the Bush administration’s neglectful resourcing of the conflict in favor of Operation Iraqi Freedom (a non-NATO mission, it should be noted).  And this is something of a tragedy, given NATO’s invocation of Article V (stating an attack on one member is an attack on all members) in the wake of September 11, 2001.

However, it is also true that NATO was not conceived to conduct an Afghan-type mission, particularly one lasting nine years.  NATO was born, of course, as a security pact to face down the Soviet Union–a known quantity whose strength drew from its traditional military capabilities.  The potential threat coming from Afghanistan’s hinterland is a far cry from the Cuban missile crisis.

While Applebaum bemoans the “countless ‘whither-the-Alliance’ seminars”, I’d suggest that such discussions are necessary, if ill-timed.  Instead, NATO’s Secretary General, ex-Norwegian Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, should squeeze out every possible commitment NATO countries are willing to devote to the Afghan mission in the short term, reminding them that attacks in the United Kingdom and Spain highlight the necessity to take the Obama administration’s refocused efforts there seriously.

When the Afghanistan mission is wrapped up in several years, NATO must sit down and decide when it is appropriate to fight, and what sort of resources its members are willing to commit.