The Washington Post’s Mary Beth Sheridan and Greg Jaffe reports that Defense Sec. Robert Gates wants to merge together the Pentagon and State Departments responsibilities for nation-building in failing states like Somalia and Yemen:

The proposal would concentrate existing and new money in three long-term funds totaling as much as $2 billion. They would be dedicated to training security forces, preventing conflicts and stabilizing violence-torn societies around the world. The funds would exist separately from the war budgets, and allow for quicker and better-coordinated response to looming or actual conflicts, officials said.

In a memo to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Gates noted that the huge increase in Pentagon funding for stabilization efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan has prompted complaints about the militarization of U.S. foreign policy.

The proposal “sets forth a new approach that could transcend these debates. It argues for a new model of shared responsibility and pooled resources for cross-cutting security challenges,” Gates wrote in the unclassified Dec. 15 memo, which was obtained by The Washington Post.

It is hard to see, though, how a $2 billion program can transcend any national security debate. Gates proposes to use less than 1/300th of the Pentagon’s next fiscal-year budget. It is about 1/65th of the money set aside for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars next year.  Incredibly, national security experts the Post interviews think the proposal is too expensive! Another roadblock is that its not clear what Senate committee would oversee a Pentagon-State implementation. That seems like a silly concern — but the U.S. Senate is a silly deliberative body.

I don’t know whether Gates proposal is helpful or not. But attacking the program for being too ambitious and expensive as the U.S. shells out billions for the Afghanistan War, Iraq War and Cold War-era weapons systems shows Washington’s depressingly entrenched and muddled approach to national security. Only in such a climate can a bureaucratic veteran like Gates emerge as a nimble visionary.

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