Report: Militarization of U.S. Embassies Arouses Suspicion
The growing military presence at U.S. embassies abroad is arousing suspicion among some foreign officials and producing friction between civilian foreign service officers and military personnel, according to a new staff report from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“There is evidence that some host countries are questioning the increasingly military component of America’s profile overseas,” the report found. “Some foreign officials question what appears to them as a new emphasis by the United States on military approaches to problems that are not seen as lending themselves to military solutions.”
“For the most part, ambassadors welcome the additional resources that the military brings and they see strong military-to-military ties as an important ingredient in a strong bilateral relationship. Nonetheless, State and USAID personnel often question the purposes, quantity, and quality of the expanded military activities in-country.”
“One ambassador lamented that his effectiveness in representing the United States to foreign officials was beginning to wane, as more resources are directed to special operations forces and intelligence. Foreign officials are ‘following the money’ in terms of determining which relationships to emphasize, he reported.”
“Left unclear, blurred lines of authority between the State Department and the Defense Department could lead to interagency turf wars that undermine the effectiveness of the overall U.S. effort against terrorism. It is in the embassies rather than in Washington where interagency differences on strategies, tactics and divisions of labor are increasingly adjudicated.”
See “Embassies as Command Posts in the Anti-Terror Campaign,” Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff report, December 15, 2006.
Update: Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times reported on the Committee report on December 20, and it was discussed the same day in WhirledView.
In anticipation of future known and unknown health security threats, including new pandemics, biothreats, and climate-related health emergencies, our answers need to be much faster, cheaper, and less disruptive to other operations.
To unlock the full potential of artificial intelligence within the Department of Health and Human Services, an AI Corps should be established, embedding specialized AI experts within each of the department’s 10 agencies.
Investing in interventions behind the walls is not just a matter of improving conditions for incarcerated individuals—it is a public safety and economic imperative. By reducing recidivism through education and family contact, we can improve reentry outcomes and save billions in taxpayer dollars.
The U.S. government should establish a public-private National Exposome Project (NEP) to generate benchmark human exposure levels for the ~80,000 chemicals to which Americans are regularly exposed.