As an overt and almost always unapologetic partisan, I spend
most of my time angry with Republicans—ask the people who sit next to me at
work. Yet anyone who has spoken with me for more than a few minutes about
domestic politics knows that, deep down, there is only one thing I hate more
than fools I disagree with most of the time, and that’s fools I agree with most
of the time.
The recent kerfuffle regarding the National Defense
Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY2016 is case in point regarding what drives me
mad about my own party. The situation is a Democratic perfect storm: a nasty
combination of fear, misinformation, and failure to get in line on messaging
and votes will leave the party open to rhetorical cheap shots on one side and
the country open to bad, Republican-driven policies on the other.
Let’s discuss.
The NDAA is a yearly bill that funds the Department of
Defense, and there are two parallel versions making their way through the legislative
branch right now. The House passed its version on 15 May (269-151), and the
Senate began considering its own iteration on 03 June after moving it out of
SASC (22-4) fairly recently. Before I go any further, let’s acknowledge a basic
truth: the NDAA is a must-pass bill. We obviously need to fund our national
security, and any party or person suggesting that other parties or persons
aren’t on that same page is being incredibly disingenuous. (Spoiler alert: John
Boehner is doing that.)
The primary problem with both versions of the NDAA as they
stand in the House and Senate, however, is that they overstep the president’s
defense budget by about $38 billion each. This massive chunk of money is being
poured into the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account, often called the
Pentagon’s “slush fund.” Originally conceived as an accounting shortcut for
quick reallocation of funding needed for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the
OCO has devolved into an ad hoc account for any number of operations and partnerships
abroad, none of which include homeland security measures, base repair and
maintenance, or veterans care. The stock far-left fear—that OCO is just a
massive accumulation of defense monies with no supervision or clear end goal—is
not entirely correct, but the account does raise many questions worth
considering.
From a legislative perspective, the tricky thing about the
OCO is that it is a workaround of the limitations put in place by the Budget
Control Act of 2011—better known to the lay voter as the sequester. Dumping
money into the OCO is now a effective way for Republican hawks to overfund not just
national defense but in fact the specific kind of national defense that they
like: kinetic operations in and around the Middle East, primarily geared
towards counterterrorism efforts. This sets up a problematic messaging frame
for Democrats to counter, but we’ll tackle that in a moment.
Far more important than these political considerations,
though, is the fact that the OCO is bad for defense policymaking in and of
itself. Put simply, funding should follow strategic planning rather than vice
versa. The precise reason that the DoD has (and follows) a budget is so that
policymakers can make smart choices about where to invest in defense both at
home and abroad. A failure to invest in military and military-tangent
infrastructure (the abovementioned homeland security, base improvements, and
veterans care) risks the creation of a hollow force with dangerous shortfalls;
undue monies and attention diverted to intractable Middle Eastern conflicts
leaves us unprepared in regions that deserve our long-term attention like the
Asia-Pacific.
Moreover, prioritizing the OCO is the wrong move for
American foreign policy today because all of the tools of national
power—defense, diplomacy, development, and democracy promotion—are essential
for engaging the world in a productive way. Not every problem in the world is a
nail simply because Republicans only want to fund the development of our
(albeit mighty) hammer. Specifically in the counterterrorism department, a
surge of money for hard defense without the appropriate supplementary funds to
the Department of State risks diluting efforts to get what military leaders
call “left of boom.” America’s frontline civilians do an incredible amount of
critical work in public diplomacy, humanitarian work, and general stabilization
of fragile states; how can we not fund this with equal urgency?
And finally, defense in the 21st century is fundamentally
bigger than answering kinetic threats with bombs and rockets. Stopping the next
pandemic disease requires investment in the CDC and NIH. Combatting the second
and third order effects of climate change means more research money in
meteorological studies, adaptive measures, and alternative fuels. And computer
viruses or data thefts can only be countered by infrastructure investments and advanced
cybersecurity measures. None of these new challenges can be answered by
ludicrous amounts of OCO money, and a failure to invest in solutions to them as
well as the conventional threats is shortsighted.
All this to say, it isn’t incredibly difficult to see why
Republicans like the OCO-centric approach. It allows the sequester-supporting
nihilists within the party a modicum of political cover (“Well, we had to provide for the common defense!”)
that will protect them from all but the most frothing at the mouth of primary
voters. And for the less ideologically rigid, it is an easy win to claim some
action in the ongoing fight against ISIL—one can easily imagine campaign adds heralding
“$40 billion dollars to stop the march of radical Islam” among other dubiously
framed achievements. The bottom line is that OCO spending fits with the very
narrow, conventional conflict-obsessed worldview held near and dear by many
hawks and even moderates.
Meanwhile, faced with a conundrum that relates to messaging
as much as it does to defense policy, Democrats have reacted predictably with
disarray and confusion. The White House has threatened
to veto the bill, and House leadership including Pelosi and Hoyer opposed its
passage; the Senate, however, seems less inclined to put up a fight. The
reason, per usual, is political cowardice; Democrats are afraid to vote down anything
with the word “defense” in the title, and John Boehner’s office is leading a
messaging campaign that paints
them as more eager to fund the EPA and the IRS than the troops (and blames
President Obama for the sequester too because, eh, why the hell not). This is a
cheap shot given that Boehner himself voted
against the NDAA in 2009 and 2010, ostensibly proving that people can disagree
about budgeting priorities without hating America.
And I get why this is a scary and difficult thing for
Democrats to counter! There is already a disastrous security
gap between the parties—it trounced us in 2004 and is poised to do so again
in 2016 (more on that in later posts). On top of that, no lawmaker wants to go
on record as ‘voting against the troops.’ But allowing the Republicans to set
that narrative is a huge part of what causes the security gap in the first
place! Conventional wisdom of “if you’re explainin’, you’re losin’” aside, it
is incumbent upon the Democratic Party to stand up and back their president’s
budget for a smarter national defense that leaves the nation more secure in the
long run.
Just to prove that the Democrats could, if they had the
political will and substantive knowledge, pull my admittedly convoluted list of
complaints about the NDAA/OCO alphabet soup into an effective messaging frame,
I’ll do it for them: the United States military is the most powerful fighting
force the world has ever seen, and maintaining that supremacy requires better
support from the civilian government than cheap funding gimmicks. Voting
against a piecemeal, ill-conceived budget is the opposite of unpatriotic—it’s
the only responsible course of action.
I’m not trying to be overly cute and suggest that the fight
to fix the NDAA would be that easy.
But budget battles over the big issues—and is there an issue bigger than
national security?—should, perhaps, not always be easy. Our defense apparatus has always been superior precisely
because it has always looked forward to new challenges, and our nation has been
at its best when we engage with the world not just by the threat of force, but
with a comprehensive, whole-of-government approach. It’s time for one party to
stand up and make that case to the American people.
Until the Democrats can organize to do so, however, I’ll be
muttering grumpily in the corner and watching the NDAA drama unfold.
