Big Business

Compared with just a few years ago, traditional soft-power disciplines -- like stabilization operations and everything associated with nation-building -- now are big business at the Pentagon. Adding the sums involved in programs like Section 1206, for example, and the Commander's Emergency Response Program quickly leads to amounts upward of one billion -- and that's not counting the money specifically intended for Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In these spheres, $50 million might almost go unnoticed. That's the amount by which the Defense Department's "building partnership capacity" request differed from the time Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced the major budget moves in early April until defense officials formally unveiled the fiscal year 2010 budget request a month later.

During his April 6 press conference on the budget, Gates said this:

"To boost global partnership capacity efforts, we will increase funding by $500 million. These initiatives include training and equipping foreign militaries to undertake counterterrorism and stability operations."

DOD's May 7 statement on the official defense budget request roll-out said this:

"To boost global partnership capacity, the department will spend $550 million for training and equipping foreign militaries (in addition to those in Iraq and Afghanistan) to undertake counterterrorism and stability operations and to conduct security and stabilization activities."

We asked DOD spokesman Cmdr. Darryn James how the difference came to be. "When the SecDef spoke on 6 April, he was presenting his best estimate at the time, and between April 6 and delivery of the budget one month later, we finalized the details and determined we needed $550 million," James wrote in an e-mail today.