Bush Looks to Cut State Dept. Arms Control Offices

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — While Congress is on vacation, the Bush administration is planning to quietly eliminate most State Department arms control offices, phasing out senior positions and merging personnel and functions with nonproliferation and other units, according to a notification document sent to Congress and obtained by Global Security Newswire (see GSN, March 10).

The changes, many of which could begin in less than two weeks, appear to reflect a determined shift by the administration away from decades of U.S. focus on promoting international arms control agreements toward ad hoc, less universal efforts to prevent the spread of restricted weapons to terrorists and certain regimes.

“We were able to prevail in the Cold War because our government was structured to meet the challenges of the day, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in a statement Friday announcing the plan.

“Today, protecting America from weapons of mass destruction requires more than deterrence and arms control treaties,” she said. 

Offices would be “reconfigured to better focus the department’s efforts to prevent the spread of WMD, including through the Proliferation Security Initiative, counterproliferation, interdiction, and by increasing the focus on WMD/terrorism and threat reduction programs,” the notification says.

The changed structure would help “best address the security threats to our nation in the post-9/11 world,” it says.

Independent arms control experts criticized the plan.

“It dismisses arms control, fragments it, and essentially makes it disappear,” said John Holum, who served as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security during the Clinton administration.

Rice “has been sold a bill of goods. She thinks that [the State Department] will be more effective, but they’ll be less important in these fields,” he said.

“What this reorganization attempts to do is to institutionalize the Bush administration’s negative attitude towards nuclear arms reductions and conventional arms control,” said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association.

“You can’t precisely say that they are taking the arms control out of the State Department, but it comes close to that,” he said.

“All of the functions are going to continue, they are just going to be realigned for efficiency,” said department Arms Control Bureau spokeswoman Leann Bullin.

Rice said Friday that the department would be “working with the committees on Capitol Hill to implement these reforms.”

However, the department could begin implementing the changes weeks before Congress returns, Bullin said.

The State Department officially notified Congress on July 29, its last work day before recessing until Sept. 6. 

“In 15 days, hopefully there will be something to say after Congress has reviewed it,” Bullin said in a phone interview yesterday. “That’s the congressional requirement for review.”

While the State Department publicly announced the plan Friday with a press release and comments by Rice, it gave relatively little detail on what would happen.

The plan includes eliminating the department’s arms control and nonproliferation bureaus and creating in their place a single “Bureau for International Security and Nonproliferation” with offices that largely combine staff and functions.

The arms control bureau’s senior positions of deputy assistant secretary for strategic affairs and deputy assistant secretary for multilateral and conventional arms control would be eliminated. Each is responsible for three offices that would be disbanded or moved.

The nonproliferation bureau positions of deputy assistant secretary for nonproliferation controls and deputy assistant secretary for nuclear nonproliferation also would be cancelled. Each control five offices that would be merged, broken up, or remain intact under the plan.

All of those officials would be replaced by three new deputy assistant secretaries, for threat reduction, export controls and negotiations, for counterproliferation, and for nuclear nonproliferation policy and negotiation.

The plan would cancel the position of special negotiator for chemical and biological weapons, now held by Ambassador Donald Mahley, who was the senior official responsible for negotiating an inspections mechanism to the Biological Weapons Convention before the administration scuttled the negotiations in 2002.

A “WMD/Terrorism” office would be created to “pursue the nexus between WMD and terrorism,” the document says. The office would be “exclusively focused on thwarting terrorist groups seeking to obtain weapons of mass destruction — today’s greatest threat to national security,” according to the State Department statement also released Friday.

Kimball singled out two particular changes for criticism.

The plan, he noted, would combine the arms control bureau’s Office of Strategic and Theater Defenses, which promotes missile defense, with the nonproliferation bureau’s missile technology control elements of its Office of Chemical, Biological and Missile Affairs.

“There is a potential for a very real conflict within that office,” he said. The move could “deprive the State Department of independent thinking and advice on these two potentially competing priorities,” he said.

The reorganization also would relocate the arms control bureau’s offices for Strategic Negotiations and Implementation and for implementing the Moscow Treaty on deployed strategic nuclear weapons to an expanded Bureau of Verification, Compliance, and Implementation.

Kimball argued that the first office still is needed to conduct negotiations, which would not appear to be under the purview of the new bureau.

The Office of Strategic Negotiations and Implementation’s work “is more than simply verification and implementation tasks because there are a variety of negotiations to be conducted, that are being conducted, on agreements that have yet to be concluded,” he said.

John Isaacs, president of the Council for a Livable World, an arms control organization, said he does not believe the changes are great cause for concern, as they should not change the administration’s approach to arms control and nonproliferation for better or worse.

“I don’t know that it makes that much difference. Whether the administration is good or bad on arms control or proliferation doesn’t depend on how they organize the State Department but how the top leaders are thinking and what they plan to do,” he said.

Kimball, on the other hand, argued that “form does affect substance” and said the administration is arguing that point when it says the reorganization is intended to meet new challenges.

“If you have an office that’s focused on one set of things to the exclusion of others, you are going to be losing human expertise, and knowledge, and awareness of what’s going on in other areas that may be useful to U.S. security in the long run,” he said.

Former official Holum said the changes could weaken advocacy of arms control and nonproliferation perspectives during interagency policy debates.

“The highest ranking person in the State Department whose responsibility will be for nonproliferation will be a deputy assistant secretary. As it is now, the highest ranking person is an assistant secretary,” he said.

“You’re going to have people in the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, Commerce, all of the other agencies that are players in this area, at a higher level.   So the State Department will be less of a player,” he said.

Combining arms control and nonproliferation expertise, he added, would not necessarily add value, because “arms control and nonproliferation are different disciplines and different functions.”

“They are basically saying we care about nonproliferation but we don’t care much about the kinds of international negotiations and structures that make nonproliferation effective,” he said.

The document sent to Congress says that by grouping together specialists of various types, the reorganization would “streamline and refocus [arms control and nonproliferation] offices for the future, make them operationally more effective, and save personnel resources.”

The plan also would “reduce top-heavy management and improve the personnel structure to better address future challenges and eliminate overlap,” it says.

Some personnel would be relocated to work in other national security bureaus of the State Department. Authority to offer early retirement also would be sought “to address the headroom problem in some AC and NP offices,” it says.

The notification gives no specifics on how many people would be targeted for early retirement, relocation or inclusion into newly created offices.

Kimball said the new Bureau for International Security and Nonproliferation would have about one-third more offices than the current nonproliferation bureau.

“If there were problems with management before, those managerial problems can only be made more difficult because that assistant secretary will be responsible for overseeing more people with a wider range of capabilities,” he said.

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