The “smart power” military-industrial complex takes off

What do Lockheed Martin Corp, Northrop Grumman Corp, and L-3 Communications Inc. have in common? Yes, all are top 10 Pentagon contractors. But they are also increasingly winning lucrative government contracts to implement “smart power” or “nation-building” programs—like educating peacekeeping troops in human-rights law, sending anthropologists to Afghanistan to understand local culture, mentoring Liberian prosecutors to combat corruption and crime, and rebuilding airports and government ministries.

Hillary Clinton and others in the administration have helped pave the way for this shift by calling for a “smart power” approach in which the 3Ds—defense, diplomacy and development—are mutually reinforcing (which we respectfully acknowledged by giving the 3Ds idea our Grand Prize for Worst in Aid).

From yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required):

Defense firms are eager to oblige. "The definition of global security is changing," says Lockheed's Chairman and Chief Executive Robert Stevens. He wants the maker of the Air Force's most advanced fighters to become a central player in the U.S. campaign to use economic and political means to align countries with American strategic interests

Last year, Lockheed had two of its highest profile programs, the F-22 Raptor fighter and a fleet of presidential helicopters, ended by the Obama administration. Now, Lockheed is one of several defense firms expected to bid for a new State Department contract to support "criminal justice sector development programs world-wide," that could be worth up to $30 billion over five years.

Africa won’t be overlooked:

Africa—where few U.S. troops are stationed—is a major focus. Many countries on this continent already are, or risk becoming, failed states. While they previously hadn't been considered a threat to the U.S., that view is changing. Somalia's nexus of terrorism and piracy is one example of how destabilized countries can become a redoubt for al Qaeda or other terrorist groups.

The U.S. military is already overstretched between Iraq and Afghanistan. So the Pentagon is eager to send defense firms to fill the gaps, in the hope that investing millions in training or advisory programs today may stave off a regional calamity that could cost billions in the future.

"Africa certainly is an area of interest to our U.S. government customers, and what's important to our customers is important to us," said Lockheed's Mr. Stevens.

UPDATE: Vijaya Ramachandran reminded us on Twitter that she had a related post "Blurring the Line Between Defense and Development" on the CGD Blog:

In a little-noticed move in January, private military contractor DynCorp bought 100% of the shares of international development contractor Casals & Associates ....The .. merger suggests a blurring of the line between development and defense in the private sector, as well.

...what happens when unarmed development project managers and heavily armed private security providers work under the same company brand? How will local people respond to a company employed by both USAID and the U.S. military?

On the other hand, there are some clear advantages to the new approach....

Worst in Aid: The Grand Prize

Hillary Clinton recently declared: “We are working to elevate development and integrate it more closely with defense and diplomacy in the field…The three Ds must be mutually reinforcing.” Clinton says that the 3D approach will elevate development to the level of diplomacy and defense. Unfortunately, it could instead lower development further to an instrument employed to achieve military or political priorities. Clinton foresaw these objections: “There is a concern that integrating development means diluting it or politicizing it – giving up our long-term development goals to achieve short-term objectives.” She said reassuringly, “[t]hat is not what we mean, nor what we will do.”

But it’s too late. Sacrificing long term development aims for short term military and diplomatic objectives is what the US already does, and the 3Ds is making it worse. That’s why the Grand Prize for the Worst in Aid goes to…the 3D approach, nominated by an anonymous reader.

References to the "3D approach,"… have become so pervasive in foreign policy, development, and national security circles that they have taken on the status of self-evident, common wisdom. - J. Brian Atwood, former USAID administrator, February 2010

The frequent contradiction between defense and development is the most obvious instance of 3D dissonance. A coalition of eight NGOs in Afghanistan lamented that “[d]evelopment projects implemented with military money or through military-dominated structres aim to achieve fast results but are often poorly executed, inappropriate, and do not have sufficient community involvement to make them sustainable.” Nonetheless, increasing amounts of aid get channeled through the military, “while efforts to address the underlying causes of poverty and repair the destruction wrought by three decades of conflict and disorder are being sidelined.”

An Oxfam case study on programs to reform the security sector in “frontline” states like Iraq illustrated another way in which narrow military goals (to train and equip soldiers and police) are not entirely compatible with development goals. The report found that an increasing reliance on military contractors rather than civilians “has strongly reinforced the focus on operational capacity over accountability to civilian authority and respect for human rights.”

In the battle of the Ds, enervated development loses to pumped-up defense, and not just in Afghanistan and Iraq. The trend goes two ways: USAID is compelled to spend more and more of its budget on states that are strategically and militarily important (The 2011 foreign aid budget allocates 20 percent of State and USAID money for “securing frontline states.”) A development priority like India (with a huge chunk of the world’s poor) loses out. At the same time, a growing proportion of what the US calls Official Development Assistance flows through the Pentagon rather than USAID.

Frequent readers of the blog will already be familiar with our final example. On Christmas Eve in Madagascar, President Obama bowed to the exigencies of diplomacy when he punished the nondemocratic government of Madagascar by taking away trade access to U.S. markets. But this same action was disastrous for development.  Already, tens of thousands of jobs created textile exports to the United States under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) have been lost. Factories are closing, increased competition among street workers is pushing down wages, and the effects are spilling over into neighboring countries that made inputs to Madagascar’s factories. Any claim that the Madagascar AGOA delisting was part of a high-return Diplomatic initiative to promote Democracy became a wee bit more tenuous when we saw Angola, Cameroon, and Ethiopia named on Christmas Eve as still eligible for AGOA.

[We could go on -- This week brought another collision of development and defense/diplomatic goals in Somalia.]

The lie that underlies the 3D framework is that development, diplomacy, and defense are complementary (or totally “mutually reinforcing”); that there are no difficult choices to be made. Alas, politicians are fond of denying the existence of tradeoffs (we are not trying to pick on Hillary in particular; many politicians are guilty of this).

The only 3D strategy that makes sense for development is one that acknowledges the frequent conflicts between these three very different goals as natural outcomes of their different agendas.  Then we can hold our politicians accountable when they sacrifice Development big-time to achieve small-time (or sometimes illusory) Diplomatic or Defense goals.

New UN report says Somali food aid failing to reach the poor (NYT)

Rather than reaching the needy, up to half of Somalia’s food aid ends up in the pockets of radical militants, corrupt bureaucrats and local businessmen, and local UN staff, according to an article in yesterday's New York Times on the findings of a new UN report.

The report, which has not yet been made public but was shown to The New York Times by diplomats, outlines a host of problems so grave that it recommends that Secretary General Ban Ki-moon open an independent investigation into the World Food Program’s Somalia operations. It suggests that the program rebuild the food distribution system — which serves at least 2.5 million people and whose aid was worth about $485 million in 2009 — from scratch to break what it describes as a corrupt cartel of Somali distributors.

In addition to the diversion of food aid, regional Somali authorities are collaborating with pirates who hijack ships along the lawless coast, the report says, and Somali government ministers have auctioned off diplomatic visas for trips to Europe to the highest bidders, some of whom may have been pirates or insurgents.

The report will be presented to the Security Council on Tuesday. Early analysis from the UN Dispatch uses the findings to discuss the tension between development and diplomacy objectives (What Happens When Political and Humanitarian Goals Collide?).

UPDATE: The WFP has now declared that it will no longer channel food aid through the three Somali businessmen who have until now been receiving 80 percent ($200 million dollars worth) of WFP transportation contracts, and who are suspected of ties to Islamist insurgents.

For background on US policy in Somalia and recent tensions between the US and the UN there: See the War and Peace blog which argued last month that there is no way to aid Somalia without some part of the assistance flowing to Islamist groups, and asks why the US buys out radical groups in Iraq and Afghanistan but wants to cut them out in Somalia.  A new CFR report argues that the US should step back politically while continuing to channel humanitarian relief and development aid through local authorities, despite the risk of that aid being diverted.

Live Tweeting from Our "Best and Worst of Aid" Conference

1. indabamf Excitedly listening to opening session, Development Research Institute, NYU: Aid & Development Today
2. indabamf @bill_easterly notes that lack of transparency & specialization are 2 factors that have made AID less effective than it could be
3. indabamf There has been a upward trend to providing AID to corrupt countries
4. altmandaniel @bill_easterly gives award for Worst of Aid to Defense/Diplomacy/Development approach of US, UK, Canada
5. indabamf Worst of AID Oscar goes to the 3Ds approach in development: integrating development w defense and diplomacy.
6. indabamf "Rather than face the trade-offs, deny they exist, & so disguise that developmnt is being traded off 4 defense & diplomacy" -
7. indabamf @bill_easterly gives kudos to mobile-based tech: M-PESA @Ushahidi @FrontlineSMS in his presentation
8. indabamf The AID Oscar for Best of AID: the Giving Well movement
9. hotdamnation http://twitpic.com/16qwsg - Development conference w @bill_easterly ... No one wants your old shoes!
10. kristentitus Best of Aid Award goes to... the new movement to give well rather than to just give.
11. indabamf Thanks @bill_easterly & Development Research Inst, NYU for a great conference 2day. Varied perspectives. Brain sufficiently overstimulated!

Live T only from opening session, except for last. Conference (see agenda here)  finished at 2pm. Further news coming on this blog from material presented at conference by speakers Yaw Nyarko, Bill Easterly, Clare Lockhart, Isabel Guerrero, Andrew Mwenda, and Lant Pritchett.

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