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Partnership for a Secure America’s Congressional Fellowship Program is now accepting applications for the Spring 2011 session. This highly selective program is for Congressional staff interested in generating dialogue and developing the skills and relationships required to advance bipartisanship on national security and foreign policy issues. Through training, networking, and exclusive activities, this unique program aims to build a “next generation” of foreign policy and security experts equipped to respect differences, build common ground and achieve US national interests. The deadline to apply is March 11, 2011. For further information about the program, and to apply, click here.

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Kay King, Vice President of Washington Initiatives at the Council on Foreign Relations, recently released a report entitled Congress and National Security arguing Congress’s increasing inability to effectively address major domestic and international challenges has severe ramifications for U.S. national security.

King points to contributing factors which have led to a decline in Congressional effectiveness, including amplified partisanship, abuse of rules and procedures, outdated committee structures, decreased expertise, and competition with domestic programs. She specifically addresses how the toxic partisan atmosphere has contributed significantly to Congress’s mixed performance on its national security responsibilities:

…the nation’s political landscape has been realigning since the 1970’s, ushering in deep partisanship, severe polarization, a combative 24/7 media, and diminished civility. Over time, this environment has given lawmakers greater incentive to advance personal and partisan agendas by any means, including the manipulation of congressional rules and procedures. It has politicized the national security arena that, while never immune to partisanship, more often than not used to bring out the “country first” instincts in lawmakers. It has also driven foreign policy and defense matters, short of crises, off the national agenda, marginalizing important issues like trade. Combining this increasingly toxic political climate with an institutional stalemate in the face of mounting global challenges and it is not surprising that Congress has struggled for years to play a consistent and constructive role as a partner to as well as check and balance on the executive branch on international issues.

King then goes on to recommend reform in five critical areas: prompt and inclusive action on budgets and legislation, timely and knowledgeable advice and consent on treaties and nominees, realistic and effective oversight, closing the expertise gap, and bolstering the congressional-executive branch partnership on national security policy.

The entire report can be found here.

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The Fellows come to the Congressional Fellowship Program from diverse educational and professional backgrounds including military, political campaigns, think tanks, journalism, the legal practice and international service organizations. To view the full list of Fellows, click here.

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1. National Institute for Civil Discourse founded at University of Arizona

We’re now 9 months into the Obama administration and, on a number of fronts, I think our country is more secure. Most of all, Obama has set a new tone in our relations with the world. But I continue to see our greatest source of our insecurity — our economy — as suffering from a failure of governmental leadership.

By now, everyone knows the story that got us into the current economic crisis. Primed by cheap capital and lax regulation, Wall Street took out huge sums of debt and gambled on everything from stocks to subprime mortgages. This bubble economy proved incredibly profitable for Wall Street and its executives took home tens of billions of dollars in bonuses. Then, the bubble burst. But instead of having Wall Street bear the brunt of this cost, a decision was made that its banks were “too big too fail” and so the government bailed them out.

As I wrote back in March of 2008, I’m not necessarily against the original bailout, but it should have been accompanied by a “new contract with Wall Street” where banks were regulated so they could never again be “to big too fail.” My point was that if the government’s thesis was right, that some banks were too big to fail, then we had a terrible set of market incentives. Banks would come to realize that they were immune from bankruptcy because the government would be there to bail them out. This would lead to a dangerous market system where banks got all the profits from gambling and society absorbed all the losses.

I hoped that the Obama administration would clean up this growing moral hazard on Wall Street, but we are unfortunately seeing more of the same. Obama’s central plan has been to make capital incredibly cheap for large banks so that they get credit flowing again. While the credit markets have admittedly improved, this cheap capital has also added to the risk-taking and the bigness of these banks. In other words, we’ve made the moral hazard worse. The recent profits by Goldman show that it has returned to its high-risk business. No one can fault Goldman for taking risk and making money–that’s capitalism. The problem is that they’re taking this risk with the government’s highly subsidized capital and implicit guarantee in the case of failure.

Obama’s economic team appears to believe that what’s good for Goldman, JP Morgan, and Citi is good for America. And recent reports show that our Treasury Secretary is spending much of his time with leaders of these banks. But the problem is that injecting more cheap capital makes these banks bigger and more likely to take catastrophic risks. That’s the formula that created our insecurity in the first place.

Even more importantly, the current approach goes against Obama’s core principles. He sold his candidacy as a way to “fire the whole trickle-down, on-your-own, look-the-other way crowd in Washington who has led us down this disastrous path.” But the current strategy is “trickle-down… look-the-other way” economics. We pump billions of cheap capital into banks and then look the other way as they put it into risky stocks and derivatives trading rather than into small businesses on main street. Stimulus funding that goes directly into main street’s pockets seems like a much smarter investment.

For America to be more secure, Wall Street needs a regulator, not a cheerleader. I still have hope that Obama can be the change that he promised. But it’s going to mean bringing the same determinism to changing Wall Street that he is currently bringing to the health care debate.

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In keeping with the PSA’s charter, we’re seeing bipartisan consensus emerging around U.S. policy in Afghanistan. The bad news? There are actually two bipartisan consensuses.

Technically, that is impossible. Consensus means “general agreement” or “a view reached by a group as a whole” so there can’t really be more than one.

And that is the problem. So long as the right is fighting the right, and others on the left are fighting the left, policymakers will be inclined to focus on other policy issues, content to let Afghan policy drift, and hope for a miraculous turnaround (e.g. Karzai becomes less corrupt and more competent; the Afghan economy begins to produce something other than opium; the Pashtuns decide to make common cause with the Tajiks, Turkmen and Hazara; Afghan men decide that Afghan women should have rights, etc). Our men and women in uniform, engaged increasingly in armed social work are caught in the middle while the pointy-heads pull on their respective chins.

Certain leading voices on the right agree with others on the left that we must redefine our ends in Afghanistan, and begin exploring ways to draw down the military presence there. My colleagues Malou Innocent and Ted Galen Carpenter have just completed a comprehensive study making this case (you can get a preview here), and will present it for the first time at Cato on Monday, September 14th.

A familiar group of hawks and neocons dismiss such sentiments as defeatist bordering on treasonous. Others suggest that talk of withdrawal is simply premature.

The debate got a jolt this week when George Will’s Tuesday column in the Washington Post declared that it was “Time to Get Out of Afghanistan.”

News of the Will column broke late Monday night. Bill Kristol — tipped off, no doubt, by the Post‘s editors who agree with him — had his response ready by 9 am.

The salient question: Would the GOP follow Will or Bill? By 4 pm, we had our answer when Michael Steele and the RNC weighed in…on Kristol’s side.

There is a debate on the left as well. George Will’s position echoes a stance adopted by Sen. Russ Feingold last month, and repeated this morning on NPR (with Rep. Jim McGovern). But scholars at the left-leaning Center for New American Security and the Brookings Institution have joined forces with those from AEI and CSIS in recent weeks to make the case for increasing the commitment to Afghanistan, and explicitly discouraging any talk of withdrawal any time soon. (See, for example, this account by The Nation‘s Bob Dreyfuss.)

The public favors withdrawal. A CBS News poll found that 41 percent of Americans want “troops to start coming home, up from 33 percent in April and just 24 percent in February. Support for increasing the number of troops dropped from 39 percent in April to just 25 percent now.” A Washington Post/ABC News poll taken last month found that for the first time since they began asking the question, a majority of Americans no longer think the war in Afghanistan has been worth the costs.

As noted, however, a vociferous — and bipartisan — group dismisses public sentiment, or else blames Obama for not expending sufficient political capital to rally public support. This faction says our objectives in Afghanistan are, if anything, insufficiently bold, and that we need more resources, and much more time, in order to achieve them.

The most outspoken of these is Max Boot, who weighed in on the pages of the Wall Street Journal on Thursday. After repeating a litany of claims that victory is within our grasp, and threats of dire consequences were we to narrow our objectives, Boot concludes:

Until now international forces and their Afghan partners have lacked the will and resources to implement a classic counterinsurgency plan designed to secure the populace. But that is precisely what Gen. Stanley McChrystal will undertake—assuming he gets the resources he needs from Washington.

In the end, the debate over what the public will support is based on unknowable factors. Polls are a snap-shot, and public opinion changes, sometimes quite dramatically.

Boot believes that the public will rally to the cause in Afghanistan, a mission to create a functioning democracy in a land trapped somewhere between the 12th and 14th century, if the message is delivered by a credible leader, and supported by a wise and far-sighted bipartisan coalition in Congress (think McCain-Lieberman).

I am skeptical.

There is only one way to know who is right.

The president should go before the American people and honestly explain: the likely costs of our current strategy; the likelihood of victory; and the likely consequences that would ensue if we were to adopt alternative strategies, including the small footprint advocated by George Will on Tuesday.

But President Obama must be honest. The costs of our current strategy will be very high. More troops, more money, more casualties. The likelihood of victory is 50-50, at best (most nation-building missions fail, so I’m being charitable here). We will have to be there for many years; honest analysts admit that the commitment would likely extend for decades. We might like allies to help us, but they aren’t much interested.

I’m hungry for this debate. The policy in Afghanistan might ultimately prove the decisive factor in rectifying the gap between what the public wants and what the policymakers are giving them. As noted at the outset, my only regret is that our men and women in uniform are paying the price in the meantime, while the policymakers and pundits dither.

But we cannot postpone this debate any longer. To pursue a chronically under-resourced strategy is worse than counterproductive — it is immoral. To pursue such a strategy because the leaders fear that they cannot be honest with the American people is repugnant.

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The more things change the more they stay the same; as in the military-industrial congressional pork barrel. As evidence one need only look at the current debate over Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ decision to stop producing the F-22 fighter. Gates and President Obama have threatened to veto Congress’ entire 2010 defense spending bill if it contains a single F-22 over the 187 now authorized.

This should not be a hard decision. After all, how often does the Pentagon actually try to kill a program it does not need? Keeping unnecessary weapons in the military budget is usually par for the course, thanks to the influence of weapons manufacturers and senators and congressmen who receive credit in their home states and districts for managing to save some jobs for constituents. Usually the Pentagon goes along because it is more trouble to fight it than it is worth.

But on the rare occasion that the Pentagon does not want weapons that it did not ask for it is clear that something stinks to the high heavens; higher even than the F-22 can fly.

Gates’ decision was in response to votes by the House and Senate armed services committees last month to spend $369 million to $1.75 billion more to keep the F-22 production line open were propelled by mixed messages from the Air Force; including a quiet campaign for the plane that includes snazzy new Lockheed videos for key lawmakers and intense political support from states where the F-22′s components are made. The full House ratified the vote on June 25.

But, contrary to the claims made by the various legislators on the Lockheed Martin payroll there are many excellent reasons to kill it. As the Washington Post reported earlier this month, the F-22 -22, has recently required more than 30 hours of maintenance for every hour in the skies, pushing its hourly cost of flying to more than $44,000, a far higher figure than for the warplane it replaces, confidential Pentagon test results show. The aircraft’s radar-absorbing metallic skin is the principal cause of its maintenance While most aircraft fleets become easier and less costly to repair as they mature, key maintenance trends for the F-22 have been negative in recent years, and on average from October last year to this May, just 55 percent of the deployed F-22 fleet has been available to fulfill missions guarding U.S. airspace, the Defense Department acknowledged.

The F-22 was created for a world that no longer exists. It was designed during the early 1980s to ensure long-term American military dominance of the skies andconceived to win dogfights with advanced Soviet fighters that Russia is still trying to develop. Its troubles have been detailed in dozens of Government Accountability Office reports and Pentagon audits. But Pierre Sprey, a key designer in the 1970s and 1980s of the F-16 and A-10 warplanes, said that from the beginning, the Air Force designed it to be “too big to fail, that is, to be cancellation-proof.” In classic pork barrel tradition Lockheed farmed out more than 1,000 subcontracts to vendors in more than 40 states. Sprey, now a prominent critic of the plane, said that by the time skeptics “could point out the failed tests, the combat flaws, and the exploding costs, most congressmen were already defending their subcontractors’ ” revenues.

Labor groups, including the United Steelworkers and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, recently sent letters to lawmakers urging continued support for the F-22. They cited the 25,000 high-wage, high-skill manufacturing jobs that could be lost across 44 states.

The F-22 is such a glaring piece of pork that Sen. John McCain has joined with the Obama administration in seeking to remove the 1.75 billion recently inserted into the proposed 2010 defense budget for seven more F-22s. McCain, along with Sen. Carl Levin, offers an amendment to restore the $1.250 billion in readiness-related spending that Lockheed, Senator Chambliss, and 12 other SASC senators thought should be raided from the Military Personnel and Operation and Maintenance accounts to pay for the seven F-22s. It also undoes a “management savings” of $500 million to pay for the rest of the F-22 cost — a savings that both Levin and McCain properly found unjustified; “bogus” would be a better word.

It is more than a little ironic that legislators who call themselves pro-defense would vote for more F-22s when doing so consumes money that would be far spent better elsewhere, like giving the troops now fighting in Afghanistan the equipment they need to detect and neutralize the improvised explosive devices that are killing American troops in Afghanistan.

President Obama got it exactly right when he wrote in a letter to Mr. McCain and Mr. Levin on Monday. “To continue to procure additional F-22s would be to waste valuable resources that should be more usefully employed to provide our troops with weapons that they actually do need.”

Some reasons being offered in support of the F-22 border on the bizarre. Army Maj. Gen. Bob Lee, the head of the Army and Air National Guard in Hawaii, said “The No. 1 priority is homeland defense, and to meet that mission, more F-22s are needed.” One can only wonder what he thinks will happen. Will Al-Qaeda develop its own advanced fighter fleet?

Is there a single reason to buy even one more F-22? Consider this excerpt from recent commentary by Pierre Sprey and Winslow Wheeler.

Instead of being such a close call, further production of F-22s ought to be laughed out of court. The F-22 is outrageously expensive. The 187 are costing just over $65 billion, about $350 million each.

Not a single F-22 has flown in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would be foolish to deploy them since there is no enemy air force to fight against. To send F-22s as a bomber – at three times the operating cost of F-16s that are already bombing over there – would be just another drag on the war effort.

Even more important is the question of whether the F-22 is a good fighter. The truth is that the F-22s weaken US air power. Study after study show that pilot skill dominates all other factors in winning or losing air battles. The F-22′s maintenance costs have the Air Force to slash in-air pilot training. In the 1970s, fighter pilots were getting 20 to 30 hours a month of air combat training. Today, F-22 pilots get 10 to 12 hours. High tech theorists claim flying can be replaced by ground simulators. Experience teaches that simulators can be used for cockpit procedures training but, by misrepresenting in-air reality, they reinforce tactics that could get pilots killed in real combat.

If the F22s are kept in the budget it will be one more sad sign that it is business as usual for the military industrial congressional welfare queens.

As veteran military correspondent George Wilson recently wrote, “persuading the pols to kill F-22 jobs Lockheed Martin has spread around most of the 50 states will be a big test of how strong Obama can be when pitted against the military-industrial complex President Dwight Eisenhower warned the nation about as he left office in 1961.”

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Here at PSA we’ve been working hard to create a program for Congressional staff that adds value in the oftentimes crowded programmatic environment of Washington, D.C. The PSA Congressional Fellowship Program aims to bring together House and Senate staffers from both parties to socialize, debate, and learn together with the goal of enhancing bipartisanship in their daily jobs. The most recent event with the Summer 2009 Fellows was a dinner with 9/11 Commission Chairman and former New Jersey Governor Tom Kean, and Politico sent a reporter to cover the event. The resulting article, “Bipartisanship, in three courses”, published this morning, highlights many of the most important aspects of what we do at PSA.

“Whereas members of Congress at least have the opportunity to work together if they choose to do so,” the reporter writes, “staffers are rarely forced to remove their partisan blinders. Until now.” She quotes PSA Fellows Pablo Duran of Sen. Tom Udall’s (D-NM) office and Brandon Andrews of Sen. James Inhofe’s (R-OK) office lamenting the rarity of meeting staff from across the aisle. “‘I don’t know that anyone makes a concerted effort to not do it,’ Andrews said. ‘I just think it doesn’t happen, because people travel in different circles.’”

We will be visiting the White House to meet with President Obama’s chief national security speechwriter, Ben Rhodes, this week and going on a weekend Retreat after that. It’s been an exciting summer so far, and we appreciate Politico’s interest in the work we do here at PSA.

For those who are interested in applying to be a Fellow in the Fall 2009 session, information can be found on our website here.

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They bring impressive backgrounds to the Program, including active duty military service, legal practice, scientific research, political campaigns, community service, think tanks, and media. Building on these diverse backgrounds, Fellows will participate in critical analysis of U.S. foreign policy guided by former senior foreign policy officials. Following the completion of a series of five events geared toward enhancing effective bipartisan dialogue, Fellows will complete a Final Project aimed at resolving real world challenges on Capitol Hill. The full list of Fellows can be found on the PSA website.

The Congressional Fellowship Program will fill a crucial need on Capitol Hill for the promotion of bipartisanship in a long-term context. Too often, contacts between Members and staff from opposite parties are temporary, made on an issue-by-issue basis. We believe that relationships formed in the earlier stages of a career can help forge a more bipartisan atmosphere and process in Congress across the range of foreign policy challenges faced every session. No one party has a monopoly on wisdom, and by bringing together these Fellows now, they will be able to get to know each other and share ideas and experiences that will pay dividends in future policy debates. We look forward to working with the Fellows and to a great summer.

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At a meeting Tuesday with former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA), and former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, President Obama summed up the group’s deliberations on the goal of achieving a world without nuclear weapons:

“This is a reminder of the long tradition of bipartisan foreign policy that has been the hallmark of America at moments of greatest need, and that’s the kind of spirit that we hope will be reflected in our administration.”

It’s great to hear this from the President who also made “bipartisanship and openness” an official plank in his campaign platform, and now identifies it as a key to effective US national security and foreign policy for his Administration.

You might think Obama’s commitment to bipartisan consultation and cooperation on national security would win nothing but plaudits from a group of former leaders obviously assembled not just for their substantive expertise, but for their bipartisan credibility. So then what are we to make of George Shultz’s reply, in the role of spokesman for the elder statesmen? Not once, but twice, the former Reagan administration official remarked that President Obama was wrong about nuclear disarmament being a “bipartisan issue,” because:

“It’s really nonpartisan. This is a subject that ought to somehow get up above trying to get a partisan advantage. And it’s of such importance that we need to take it on its own merits. And that’s the way we’ve proceeded. And that’s the way, at least it seems to us, you’ve proceeded.”

I suppose Mr. Shultz has earned the right to disagree with the President on national television, but really, isn’t this a distinction without a difference? Why harp on nomenclature when the point is the same? The purpose of the meeting and the public statements afterward was to demonstrate that working toward a world without nuclear weapons is a goal on which current and former leaders from across the political spectrum can find consensus. It just doesn’t matter what you call that sort of agreement. What matters is getting it.

On the other hand, I think Secretary Shultz was pointing toward at least one legitimate objection to the term “bipartisan.” Over the past few months, as the President has fought to win Republican support for his major economic recovery initiatives, the media appropriated “bipartisanship” for a much more superficial purpose. Whether a policy action or legislative proposal was “bipartisan” became just a question of whether Republicans joined the Democratic majority in voting for it. Shultz is right when he says that our country’s commitment to nuclear disarmament needs to be bigger than politics.

My advice to the big shots at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue? Please don’t waste time and taxpayer dollars arguing over syntax. Pakistan is building more nuclear weapons even while tottering on the brink of state failure, North Korea has tested a bomb already, and Iran claims to have a nuclear-capable rocket with terrifying range and accuracy. These threats won’t wait while we hash out precisely the right definition for good national security policy. As long as you get the job done in a way that puts results ahead of politics, you will have the support of the American people.

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