The period immediately following the announcement of the DCI in December of 1993 is widely seen as a period of immediate decline for the new initiative. Strong challenges to the mandate from both inside and outside the DOD forced a retreat from public view that led many to assume the DCI was dead on arrival, a casualty of threatened parochial interests and bureaucratic turf wars. While it is true that counterproliferation shrank quickly from the public spotlight, it is during these years of supposed hibernation that counterproliferation policy was quietly institutionalized and transformed into a potent military approach to the problems of proliferation. A reformulated budgetary mandate, effective embedding of functional counterproliferation planning in regional combat commands, and a continuing evolution of assumptions about the nature of the
proliferation threat combined to quietly transform the initiative into a central pillar of the DOD response to proliferation. It was through this transformation that CP began to constitute a fundamental challenge to the traditional policy and doctrinal approaches of nonproliferation and deterrence.
The evolution of counterproliferation within the DOD during this period is both widely misunderstood by outside observers, and poorly explained by bureaucratic politics models. An organizational theory approach rectifies many of the sources of
misunderstanding by situating both the initial resistance to the DCI and the broad institutionalization that followed, within the context of the organizational structure, interests and learning processes of the DOD. Without an adequate account of the quiet process of CP institutionalization within the DOD, and the resultant impact on policy, little sense can be made of the particular forms of doctrinal assumptions underlying the supposedly revolutionary preemptive strategy articulated by the Bush Administration in the 2002 NSS.
This chapter argues that the institutionalization of CP policy within the functional units of the DOD resulted in a transformation of the organizational conception of the threat posed by proliferation, and a transformation of the offensive capacity to meet identified threats. Though this evolution did not in itself guarantee any specific resultant military actions, the institutionalization of a more offensively oriented CP significantly altered the options available to future policymakers, and shifted the central emphasis of CP policy. No longer limited to modest defensive measures intended to protect US forces, CP steadily progressed towards a comprehensive set of operational capabilities intended to allow policymakers to decisively alter the strategic threat posed by unconventional weapons proliferation. By ostensibly offering policymakers the potential to unilaterally prevent or roll back existing proliferation with military force, CP now represented a decisive break from traditional NP norms and deterrent practices, further opening the door for the preventative or preemptive application of such force.
The chapter begins with an examination of the period of strong organizational and intra- bureaucratic resistance to the DCI, and explains the sources of resistance and clarifying the confusion over this period in CP evolution that has led some scholars to conclude that bureaucratic politics explains the supposed “demise” of CP at this time. Although the DCI was met with strong initial resistance within the DOD, such resistance was largely over the organizationally inappropriate attempts by DOD civilian appointees such as Secretary Aspin to attempt a top-down institutionalization of the initiative, rather than resistance to the substance of the initiative itself.
The chapter continues with an examination of the efforts at embedding CP into the regional warfighting commands by Aspin’s successors. The effects of independent budgeting and mission reorientation resulting from this institutionalization are examined through the offensive capabilities funded and fielded during this time. Coupled with a paradoxical reconceptualization of unconventional weapons proliferation as necessitated by America’s growing military might, CP began to emerge as a far more offensively oriented policy than assumed by many observers at the time of the DCI. The doctrinal outcome of CP institutionalization was a comprehensive set of organizational
capabilities, practices and conceptions that placed far more offensive bias on possible responses to proliferation than had been originally envisioned by the DCI mandate, or supposedly imposed by bureaucratic bargaining.
Early resistance to the Defense Counterproliferation Initiative
The previous two chapters examined how new conceptions of the problem posed by proliferation gained consensus within the DOD after the Gulf War, and were eventually translated into policy through the DCI. However, an important puzzle encountered by analysts of CP policy is the immediate and strong resistance encountered from within the ranks of the DOD to implementation of the DCI. This strong and substantive resistance to the initiative from within, coupled with debilitating bureaucratic resistance from outside the organization led a number of scholars to discount CP as a “dead initiative.”1
In these analyses, CP did not evolve, but was merely revived in an offensive form by the second Bush Administration in the wake of 9/11 as central to its doctrine of preemption. This accounting of CP failure leaves a number of puzzles to be addressed in this chapter. First is why the initiative encountered such strong resistance, especially from within the DOD itself, when it appeared largely representative of the emerging consensus on the nature of proliferation threats and appropriate responses. Second, how to account for the significant institutionalization that occurred quietly within the DOD shortly after Aspin’s early departure from the position of Secretary of Defense? What explains both the resistance to the DCI and its later adoption and evolution?
This section argues that it was not simply external bureaucratic resistance to the scope of the initiative and internal resistance to the perceived budgetary threat of the initiative that caused the new initiative to flounder. More significantly, top-down implementation efforts failed to take into account the organizational design, cultural biases and political environment in which the US military operated. This failure wasn’t merely attempting to include too much within the initiative, threatening bureaucratic turf, or failing to provide
1 Jason D. Ellis and Geoffrey D. Kiefer, Combating Proliferation: Strategic Intelligence and Security Policy, (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), p. 14; Interview with Henry Sokolski
independent funding, but more importantly, a failure to account for how the military itself viewed its own mission boundaries and a failure to include the functional units of the organization in the decisionmaking process. By examining both the reasons why CP initially failed to become embedded throughout the functional units of the organization, and the reasons for the successful institutionalization that was to soon follow, it will be easier to explain how this processes escaped the notice of many external observers.
Budgetary challenges and organizational response
Secretary Aspin’s strong advocacy of the DCI represented the consensus of the DOD on appropriate responses to post-Cold War proliferation that would give it a more prominent role in denying and devaluing unconventional weapons in the hands of potential
adversaries. However, functional implementation of the core mission objectives would prove to be far more difficult than simple announcement of the intentions of the initiative. The first major stumbling block encountered by the DCI was the failure to provide
adequate funding for the mission areas identified as priorities in the first year. While the DCI was announced with a first year budget of $400 million, none of this budget was independently appropriated through the Legislature or provided by the Executive Order covering CP efforts within the DOD. Keeping with overall Administration efforts at reducing the Defense budget, funding to cover the $400 million price tag for the DCI was to be created by the services themselves by identifying areas where cutbacks on other expenditures could be realized.
Unsurprisingly, there was strong internal resistance by the individual services to the DCI on the issue of funding. The central issue being that services already facing potentially serious budget cuts were highly critical of an initiative that placed additional, vaguely articulated responsibilities on their shoulders, while simultaneously expecting them to bear the budgetary burden for implementation of the DCI at a time when very hard choices about future spending were already being made.2
Influential members of the
2 Michael R. Gordon, with Stephen Engelberg, ‘Military to Draft Plan for a 6% Cut in 1992-94 Spending’, New York Times, November 18, 1989, sec 1, p. 1; David E. Rosenbaum, ‘Sizing Up Cuts to the Military
military went so far as to successfully argue before Congressional appropriations committees for paring the first year’s DOD counterproliferation budget from the $400 million originally requested, to a far more modest $70 million.3
That the DCI was announced with such fanfare by a fresh group of civilian appointees without substantive consultation with the functional units of the organization did little to further a sense of organizational cohesion or mission within the individual services.4 Many professional members of the military viewed the DCI as an ill-defined, poorly managed, and inadequately funded initiative imposed on them from above without special funding prerogative. Thus the services saw it as a threat to existing missions and programs in a time of declining defense budgets, and subsequently resisted substantive implementation through direct or indirect forms of bureaucratic resistance.5
The immediate organizational response to these budgetary issues was widespread re- labeling or re-justifying of existing programs in the early period following the
announcement of the DCI. This phenomenon of organizational sub-units responding superficially to new mission mandates imposed from above in a climate of budgetary constraint, was described by a former assistant to Secretary Aspin:
With any organization, anytime there’s a new initiative, they just re-describe what they were already doing as fitting the new requirements. So you take existing things and just ‘re-label’ them or ‘re-justify’ them under the new requirement, and it’s very hard to figure out how much of that constitutes any actual change, or new program, or new activity, and how much is just re-labeling… So the challenge was that you want to have an embedded program, but you want to have one that is
Budget’, New York Times, January 1, 1990, Sec. 1, p. 12; also Patrick E. Tyler, ‘U.S. Could Cut Defense Spending By More Than 33%, Report Says’, New York Times, September 24, 1991, Sec. A, p. 29 3
Chris Williams, ‘DOD’s Counterproliferation Initiative: A Critical Assessment’, in Henry Sokolski (ed.), Fighting Proliferation: New Concerns for the Nineties, (Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama: Air University Press, 1996), http://www.fas.org/irp/threat/fp/b19ch14.htm (Accessed - 10 June, 2003), see also
Counterproliferation Program Review Committee, ‘Report on Activities and Programs for Countering Proliferation’, May 1995, p. 18, DOD OFOISR 00018-CDR-1/766.PDF
4 Interview with Larry Seaquest
5 This resistance to civilian CP initiatives based on funding concerns by the services is documented in Ashton B. Carter and William J. Perry, Preventative Defense: A New Security Strategy for America, (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1999)
meaningful – one that constitutes some genuine change in your posture or capability, but you’ve got this renaming, re-justifying going on. 6
Re-labeling of mission responsibilities and capabilities reflected fears of political uncertainty within the functional units of the organization and provided a pathway for resisting change and innovation. The phenomena of re-labeling did nothing to improve military readiness, further undermining confidence that the DCI would do anything to address the environmental uncertainty posed by post-Cold War proliferation. Resistant to the possibility that mandated spending would potentially threaten existing programs, the services retreated to an ineffective but predictable position of claiming compliance with the loosely articulated initiative without making any substantive force posture or
capabilities changes. If this were not enough to pose a quagmire for the nascent initiative, counterproliferation also faced an extremely hostile response from within the DOD and rival organizations such the State Department, which saw the DCI as one of a host of overly ambitious defense initiatives to emerging from the Office of Secretary of Defense.
“Mission overreach”: cultural and bureaucratic resistance to the DCI
Secretary Aspin believed that proactive DOD involvement in a wider range of foreign policy areas was crucial to shaping the emerging security environment. He felt it was the only organization with the material resources at its disposal to provide meaningful
physical involvement in areas of potential instability that had traditionally been dealt with through diplomatic pressure, economic incentives or disincentives, or active participation of multilateral institutions.7 The Bush Administration’s civilian Pentagon leadership vision for the future of the US military, and Secretary of Defense Aspin’s particular vision of the core missions of the US military in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, was in essence a vision of the US military playing a central role in a wide range of activities intended to promote a peaceful post-Cold War security environment. While the
6 Interview with Rebecca Hersman, July 21, 2005. This assessment of the early response by the military services to the DCI is also supported by former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for
Nonproliferation, Henry Sokolski (interview, June 20, 2005).
7 Interview with Rebecca Hersman; Hon. Les Aspin, Chairman, Committee on Armed Services, United States House Armed Services Committee, Letter to President George Bush, April 30, 1991, Congressional Record, February 7, 1992, p. E238
vast military capabilities of the Soviet Union were no longer the focus of US military planning, the post-Cold War still presented threats as well as opportunities for the US military to play a central role in shaping the emerging security environment, partly by redefining the role and mandate of US military forces. This was articulated in the 1993 Bottom-Up Review of US Military Forces, a major DOD planning document guided by Aspin and intended to lay out a broad doctrine for US military forces in the post-Cold War:
This new world we are living in is distinctive because of the new opportunities it presents for us to advance our interests – by preventing or defusing dangers before they arise. Accordingly, we have focused a lot of attention on finding ways to work pro-actively in this new environment to take advantage of such
opportunities. Chief among these initiatives are:
o Cooperative Threat Reduction
o Counterproliferation
o FSU Defense/Military Partnership
o Promotion of Democracy through Military-to-Military Contacts
o Peacekeeping
o Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster/Famine Relief8
All of these wide-ranging initiatives and policy announcements converged into what was described by senior Defense officials involved at the time as a “huge overreach” in terms of what constituted new military missions for the DOD. Counterproliferation was
perceived as one more of a number of such overreaches that contributed to a climate of suspicion within the individual military services and severe hostility from the State Department concerned that counterproliferation was intended to undermine their traditional nonproliferation policy mandate.9 Such overreach in organizational missions led to a significant bureaucratic infighting between the State Department and Department of Defense. It was reportedly so severe that then Secretary of State Warren Christopher met with President Clinton and threatened to resign if the scope of the DOD initiatives was not curtailed.10
As former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Counterproliferation,
8 Department of Defense, ‘1993 Bottom Up Review – Talking Points’, October 1993, NS Archives CH01621, p. 18
9 Interviews with John P. Caves and Henry Sokolski. The peacekeeping initiative was another area of intense bureaucratic conflict between the State Department and DOD; see Hersman, Friends and Foes, pp. 39, 40
John P. Caves, commented on this period of bureaucratic turf wars, “You can’t
understand the hostility about the CP initiative without understanding all of these other things that created a profoundly hostile climate, and that everything was being perceived in the most hostile terms possible.”11
Resistance to meaningful implementation of the DCI from within the DOD wasn’t simply a response to budgetary threats, but also reflected a more fundamentally perceived
challenge to the documented civil-military divide over the appropriate nature of military missions.12
Expansion of the military mission beyond the traditional focus on direct national security threats into areas such as peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance drew criticism of the DCI as failing to address weaknesses in substantive military capabilities. Despite the argued “consensus” within the DOD on the lessons of the Gulf War in terms of preparedness for conflicts that involved unconventional weapons usage by adversaries, the individual military services argued that counterproliferation, as presented in the DCI, was not in fact a distinct mission from what they were already responsible for. Though the Gulf War had exposed certain weaknesses in mission areas like force protection, some said it was difficult to argue that the US military was
completely unprepared to operate in a unconventional weapons environment after more than 40 years of preparations to fight the Soviet Union, which possessed well-known stockpiles of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Though contradicting many of the arguments forwarded after the Gulf War, such resistance should be placed within a framework of widespread perceptions of external meddling with the missions and budgets of the military services, rather than a substantive backtracking on the consensus about proliferation threats.
Limiting CP by definition: The Poneman Memo
In was in this climate of internal resistance and bureaucratic infighting that the scope of the counterproliferation mandate and mission was ‘resolved’ by the National Security
11 Interview with John P. Caves, July 21, 2005 12 Feaver and Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles, p. 25
Council in a set of official definitions of counterproliferation and nonproliferation, known informally as the Poneman Memo. Aggravated by the policy deadlock resulting from the increasingly public battles over counterproliferation and nonproliferation “missions”, Assistant Secretary for Political-Military Affairs, Robert Gallucci, informally requested that the National Security Council exercise its policy coordination role by providing a set of working definitions for proliferation, nonproliferation and counterproliferation. This was ostensibly to harmonize proliferation policy between the State Department and DOD.13
At this point it is worth quoting the Poneman memo at length:
We have agreed to the following definitions and will ask our staff to be consistent in their usage.
Proliferation is the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical capabilities and the missiles to deliver them.
Nonproliferation is the use of the full range of political, economic and military tools to prevent proliferation, reverse it diplomatically or protect our interests against an opponent armed with weapons of mass destruction or missiles, should that prove necessary. Nonproliferation tools include: intelligence, global
nonproliferation norms and agreements, diplomacy, export controls, security assurances, defenses and the application of military force.