Editor’s Note: The following is a transcript of CNN’s Global Public Square program with Fareed Zakaria on March 5.
Here is a key excerpt from host Fareed Zakaria:
ZAKARIA: And now, here’s my take. The first time I met General David Petraeus, he said something that surprised me. It was the early days of the Iraq War and I asked him whether he wished he had more troops. Petraeus was too politically savvy to criticize the Bush administration’s Light Footprint Strategy. So he deflected the question answering it in a different way.
“I wish we had more Foreign Service officers, aid professionals and other kinds of non-military specialists,” he said. The heart of the problem the United States was facing in Iraq, he noted presciently, was a deep sectarian divide between the Shiites and the Sunnis, Arabs and Kurds. “We need help on those issues. Otherwise, we’re relying on 22-year-old sergeants to handle them. Now, they are great kids, but they really don’t know the history, the language, the politics.”
President Trump is a proposing a $54 billion increase for the Defense Department, which would be offset by large cuts in the State Department, foreign aid and other civilian agencies. Trump says he wants to do this so that “nobody will dare question our military might again.” But no one does. The U.S. military remains in a league of its own. The American defense budget in 2015 was nine times the size of Russia’s and three times that of China’s.
None of the difficulties the U.S. has had over the past 25 years have been any way been because its military was too small or weak. As then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates noted in a 2007 lecture, “One of the most important lessons of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is that military success is not sufficient to win.” To achieve “long-term success,” he explained, requires “economic development, institution- building and good governance.” Therefore, he called for “a dramatic increase in spending on the civilian instruments of national security,” including diplomacy and foreign assistance.
Trump says, “We must do a lot more with less.” But the obvious target for this effort should be the Pentagon, which is the poster child for waste in government. The Pentagon is now the world’s largest bureaucracy, running a cradle-to-grave quasi-socialist system of employment, housing, health care and pensions for its 3 million employees. A recent report from its defense business board concluded that it could easily save $125 billion over five years by removing operational inefficiencies. Senior officials, of course, quickly buried the report. Those savings alone would fund the entire State Department plus all foreign aid programs for two and a half years. Gates used to note, “We have more people in military bands than we have Foreign Service officers.”
Trump railed in his address to Congress, as he has in the past, about the $6 trillion that the U.S. has spent in the Middle East. That figure is exaggerated, but he’s right. When the Pentagon goes to war, costs go through the stratosphere. In just one example, ProPublica tallied up the audits of the special inspector general for Afghanistan and found that the military had wasted at least $17 billion on a variety of projects.
Rosa Brooks, who served as a civilian adviser at the Pentagon under President Obama, has written a fascinating book. “How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything.” It describes how U.S. policy has been contorted by a military that keeps expanding while all other agencies wither.
[10:05:05] One of the blurbs on the back of the book says, “One of the most thought provoking books I have ever read. It’s as if we have been sleepwalking into this new world and Rosa has turned on a flashlight.” The commendation comes from it Jim Mattis, now the Secretary of Defense. Perhaps he should give the book to his boss. For more, go to cnn.com/Fareed and read my “Washington Post” column this week and let’s get started.