The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released a report titled "Weapons of Mass Destruction: Actions Needed to Track Budget Execution for Counterproliferation Programs and Better Align Resources with Combating WMD Strategy." First of all, someone needs to tell the GAO that they don't have to include all of their recommendations in the title of their reports. It's really unwieldy to have such a long title. Second, the GAO manages to avoid the real issue of how the government develops and designates its CWMD capabilities, while crafting recommendations that really don't help address the central criticism - that the US government really doesn't manage its CWMD capabilities very well.
There is a Counterproliferation Program Review Committee (CPRC) that was established back in 1994 to report on how the DOD, Dept of Energy, and intelligence community worked with each other to develop counterproliferation activities. It was supposed to ensure that there was minimal duplication of effort and that the US government was covering all the gaps. It never really had any authority to do anything more than writing a report, so it became a list of stuff with minimal explanation as to what it all meant. In 1997, Congress expanded the report to address efforts to counter CBRN terrorism, which it did even a more poor job addressing.
In 2008, some genius decided that the CPRC ought to include all relevant "CWMD" projects within the Departments of Homeland Security and State. This made the BOGSAT bigger and dumbed down the DHS programs to force them into the eight "mission areas" that DOD uses. Really not a helpful thing. The State Dept basically ignored the committee. And then the CPRC decided to add the costs of the DOD chemical demilitarization and NNSA's nuclear stockpile activities, which mean fuck-all to "combating" WMD. It's a really horrible, bureaucratic report that badly needs to be killed.
But the GAO didn't notice any of that. What its investigators did note is that the CPRC has a bad time trying to determine what is and is not a CWMD capability, both because some passive defense capabilities are double-listed as consequence management capabilities, and because there are a lot of military capabilities used for warfighting that are also used for "combating WMD" that aren't counted (bombers and special forces do "offensive operations" against WMD sites and Navy ships do WMD interdiction, for instance, but aren't billed as CWMD assets). Also, the CPRC report doesn't really address the cost of "non-material" activities such as personnel, WMD-related conferences, WMD-related training, and so on.
What the GAO did not do is to speculate whether the US government is spending enough on nonproliferation or counterproliferation or consequence management. All it can tell you is that we're spending a hell of a lot for missile defense and passive defense, but not whether it's adequate or well-spent. So all the figures and graphs really don't amount to a warm bucket of spit.
The GAO also noted that there are agencies developing priority lists, but there's no indication that anyone uses the priority lists to drive the allocation of CWMD funds. To which I have to say, no shit. This is not a unique behavoir to CWMD efforts. The four services and a number of defense agencies have the authority to obligate and execute funds. So when the Joint Staff and OSD says, hey, the combatant commands say that they could really use some funds in areas X, Y, or Z, the services and defense agencies all say "thank you for your interest in national security, now sod off." And life goes on.
So the GAO's brilliant observation is, hey, it's too hard to figure out exactly how the US government spends money on CWMD capabilities, so let's not do anything there. Let's instead task an OSD staff office to try to track the annual obligation and execution of all funding of CWMD projects that we said were too hard to identify. And let's also match the 85 prioritized DOD capability gaps against the annual funding, just to show how DOD isn't putting money against the most critical capability gaps. Really sharp work, these GAO investigators.
What the GAO should have recommended is this:
- Congress should eliminate the CPRC, because its (once annual, now biennial) report doesn't provide any guidance that anyone follows and fails to adequately educate anyone on this topic - no one would miss it for a minute
- DOD should focus on accounting for those military capabilities for countering state WMD programs and forget about the CBRN terrorism R&D activities - it's not like they really have any distinct CBRN terrorism projects
- The four services and the Joint Staff (J34) ought to report on how they are integrating CBRN defense into force protection efforts, right after Congress changes the public law to allow the services to do their own R&D for protecting against/responding to CBRN terrorism activities
- DOD should develop a strategic investment plan that shows what it considers to be the acquisition goals for nonproliferation, counterproliferation, and consequence management - e.g., what constitutes 100% success, where DOD is today, and where it will be at the end of the five-year defense budget
- OSD Policy and the State Dept should work out the their nonproliferation issues and funding strategy separate from the acquisition-heavy counterproliferation activities - it's like comparing apples and pumpkins
- Instead of trying to force DHS, DOE, and the intel community into reporting along the DOD's eight mission areas, the four agencies ought to instead have annual meetings to discuss research and development efforts and to foster interagency cooperation
It's not that the GAO needs help in doing its business. Well, okay, that's not true, it does need help in the CBRN defense area, at least. No one's going to do anything positive in this area, but it's good to vent.
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