Ron Nessen, a journalist in residence at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, reported on what he calls a “rare event” in Washington. His article, titled “A Defense Secretary Says Something Nice About a Secretary of State,” relates the remaks Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made at a recent Brookings Board of Trustees meeting.
“Verbal battles, turf fights, and policy arguments between Secretaries of State and Secretaries of Defense are commonplace in American history. Think: Don Rumsfeld vs. Colin Powell earlier in the George W. Bush administration….
…That's why it was such a rare occasion when the current Defense Secretary, Robert Gateshad this to say about his respect for and working relationship with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice:
"The fact that our respective bureaucracies know that Condi Rice and I get along goes a long way towards making sure that serious attempts are made to reconcile differences and coordinate policy."
Gates acknowledged that such friendship and mutual respect between the heads of the two Cabinet departments have not always been the case in the past few decades.
"Not even the most enlightened or well-crafted interagency structure will work," Gates declared to the Brookings audience, "if the Secretaries of State and Defense can't stand each other and won't work together, as too often has been the case during the seven presidencies in which I have served.”
Nessen continues:
“The Defense chief, who might have been expected to devote a large portion of his talk to the need for increasing the Pentagon budget to meet modern international challenges, instead devoted a large portion of his speech to the need for increasing Condi Rice's State Department budget to meet modern international challenges.
"America's civilian instruments of power, in particular the State Department, have suffered from chronic under funding for decades, and were virtually gutted in the 1990's," Gates declared. "Today, the entire Foreign Service , 6600 men and women , would not be enough to crew one aircraft carrier strike group."
When Defense can publicly recognize the State Department's financial deficiencies, you know the conditions are dire.
Nessen goes on: “The Pentagon secretary told his audience that there is "strong support" in the military services to build up the State Department's capacity. He noted that at another Brookings event last year, then-Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Mullen said he'd be willing to give part of the Navy's budget to the State Department, if it was spent properly.”
Wow, that's quite generous of Admiral Mullen! It's too bad that there's such a Congressional stigma attached to the idea of “stealing” from our national security infrastructure to “feed” our diplomacy infrastructure.
A note on Nessen: he served as Press Secretary to President Ford. Here's a 2006 Washington Post article in which he relates a bit about the character of Ford's presidency.
