DOD-State Cooperation

Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Andrew Shapiro said today that cooperation between his department and the Pentagon has never been better.

In a speech this morning at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Shapiro noted that despite the increased cooperation, there is still room for improvement:

Going forward, we will need to lock in the progress we have made and constantly work to develop and institutionalize our cooperation. While the State Department's involvement in planning has significantly expanded, there is still room to grow and regularize our involvement. In the years ahead, we will also need to work to preserve and maintain State Department authority over security assistance, which is a critical foreign policy tool.

Additionally, responding to new transnational challenges will require us to work closer than ever before. We are seeing this in the multi-agency response to Somali piracy and through the Merida Initiative to support Mexico's efforts to combat narco-trafficking. Our responses to new transnational threats will need to become less ad hoc and more regularized, as these are all security threats that lack pure military solutions.

One of the biggest challenges for State-DoD collaboration is the sheer difference in size and resources between our two respective departments. It can be as obvious as when we host a simple meeting and find ourselves vastly outnumbered by our DoD colleagues. This asymmetry in the relationship can even become counterproductive when our respective activities in the field fall out of proportion -- which is part of the reason that the QDDR stressed the importance of Chief of Mission authority. Our ambassadors in the field -- the Chiefs of the U.S. mission -- are responsible for overseeing U.S. activities and personnel in a given country and ensuring that all of the elements of national power are working in sync. After all, we're all on the same team, working hard to advance our economic prosperity and our national security.

Unfortunately, there remains a lingering misperception out there that funding for the State Department isn't as essential to strengthening our country's national security. Of course, our defense colleagues know better, just ask Secretary Panetta or General Dempsey. They understand that investments in development and diplomacy today will make it less likely that we ask our troops to deploy tomorrow. It’s important that elected officials, too, understand that the State Department and USAID -- with just one percent of the federal budget -- make an outsized contribution to keeping America safe. And it's important that we fund them accordingly -- it will save us both blood and treasure.

In this era of complex and integrated challenges, it is more important than ever that we continue to improve State-DoD relations. I believe that the tangible progress we have made under Secretaries Clinton, Gates, and Panetta, is durable and will have a lasting impact. But ultimately strengthening the State-Defense relationship is just like strengthening any relationship -- it requires constant tending and constant effort.

View the full text of the speech.