Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. State Department has revamped its arms control bureau in a bid to improve the Obama administration's efforts against threats posed by conventional forces and weapons of mass destruction (see GSN, March 17).

The reorganization, approved by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, would see the existing Verification, Compliance and Implementation Bureau become the Arms Control, Verification and Compliance Bureau, according to a department press release issued Friday.

The previous agency provided policy oversight and resources for all matters relating to certification of other nations' compliance with international arms control, nonproliferation and disarmament agreements. The division had been led by Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller, head U.S. negotiator for the new U.S.-Russian nuclear arms control deal being considered on Capitol Hill.

Gottemoeller would oversee the newly minted bureau, leading Foggy Bottom's work on arms control, verification and compliance, including any associated policy decisions, talks and implementation. It would also manage multistate arms control and disarmament policy, such as issues considered by the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva and the U.N. General Assembly, the press release states.

In addition, the bureau would head the department's efforts on missile defense and other security matters.

Meanwhile, the existing International Security and Nonproliferation Bureau, headed by acting Assistant Secretary of State Vann Van Diepen, would remain responsible for all international efforts to halt the proliferation and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction, including their delivery systems, materials and equipment, and technology. It would seek to reign in other "destabilizing conventional military capabilities," according to the release.

Those offices, along with the Political-Military Affairs Bureau, which was left unchanged by the new process, make up the State Department's Arms Control and Internal Security Bureau, and are commonly referred to as the "T" bureaus or family.

The agencies are overseen by Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Ellen Tauscher. They encompass roughly 600 employees.

"Verification and compliance must be an organic part of our arms control policy, from the conceptualization of new agreements through their negotiation to their implementation," the department's press release said.

By overtly bringing arms control, verification and compliance together under one bureau and a single assistant secretary, Foggy Bottom would ensure that those missions are built into future arms control agreements from the start and that compliance with such pacts are effectively verified, the release says.

Further details about the restructuring were not immediately available.

There was intense competition between the verification and nonproliferation bureaus over which would have the lead for handling U.S. activities for international pacts prohibiting biological and chemical weapons, according to issue expert Jonathan Tucker. That led Undersecretary Tauscher to make a "Solomonic" decision to split oversight for the two accords; the International Security and Nonproliferation Bureau ended up with the Biological Weapons Convention while Arms Control, Verification and Compliance took the Chemical Weapons Convention.

"Although other countries will probably try to read some greater significance into this action -- such as a perceived decision by the Obama administration to reclassify the BWC as a nonproliferation measure rather than a true arms control treaty -- the reorganization was driven by bureaucratic politics rather than by any change in U.S. policy," Tucker said.

The bureaus were reshuffled in 2005 after a review by the department's inspector general determined the existing organizational structure should be streamlined to refocus the bureaus on new proliferation threats, including actions by nonstate actors, rather than the potential for nuclear confrontation with the former Soviet Union.

The review also concluded that the three bureaus had unclear lines of authority and uneven workloads as well as too many managers, resulting in poor promotion prospects for staffers and an inability to attract Foreign Service officers.

That reorganization combined the previously distinct Arms Control and Nonproliferation bureaus as the new International Security and Nonproliferation Bureau and expanded the functions of the existing Verification and Compliance Bureau, renaming it the Verification, Compliance and Implementation Bureau.

Yet a 2009 Government Accountability Office report concluded that Foggy Bottom never fully demonstrated that the alterations produced any benefits. The analysis also found the reorganization appeared to have been conducted in an "unsystematic fashion," with little involvement from staff or established strategic goals.

Initial reports of the new shake-up prompted Senate Foreign Relations Committee ranking member Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) to send Clinton a March 1 letter voicing his concerns, including that there should be a "clear wall of separation" between negotiators and verifiers to ensure the credibility of treaties and agreements presented to the Senate.

A spokesman for the Indiana lawmaker did not respond by deadline to requests for comment submitted Friday and today.

The announcement of the new organization was greeted with mixed reaction by those familiar with Foggy Bottom's arms control bureaus.

The "reintroduction of the term, 'arms control,' into State is most appropriate, given its removal years ago with the untimely demise of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency," according to Paul Walker, security and sustainability chief for the environmental organization Global Green USA. "This reorganization acknowledges the high priority given by President Obama to the need to abolish nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons globally, including bilateral and multilateral verification regimes."

The reshuffle is an important step toward making deeper cuts in nuclear weapons and in strengthening the Chemical and Biological Weapons conventions, he said this weekend in an e-mail.

"Since arms control negotiation and verification were, in practice, already co-located during the second term of the George W. Bush administration -- and since the old VCI bureau also had the missile defense and national security space policy office for a while -- one might suspect that this reorganization is largely about political theater: returning the words 'Arms Control' to somebody's letterhead," Christopher Ford, director for the Center for Technology and Global Security at the Hudson Institute, said last week by e-mail.

"That said, however, the plan seems reasonable. I'm not sure how necessary it was to put T-family staffs through the uncertainty and distractions of yet another reorganization, but I wish the new AVC well in this effort and a rapid return to its work after the bureaucratic dust settles," according to Ford, who served as a principal deputy assistant secretary of state during the Bush administration and helped oversee the 2005 reorganization.