WASHINGTON — Defeating terrorism will require the use of more “soft power,” with civilians contributing more in nonmilitary areas like communication, economic assistance and political development, Pentagon chief Robert Gates said Monday.
Gates called for the creation of government organizations, including a permanent group of civilian experts with a wide range of expertise, to be sent on short notice as a supplement to U.S. military efforts. And he urged more involvement by university and other private experts.
“We must focus our energies beyond the guns and steel of the military, beyond just our brave soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen,” he said in a speech at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kan. “We must also focus our energies on the other elements of national power that will be so crucial in the coming years.”
He said the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as U.S. military involvement in the 1990s in the Balkans and Somalia, have shown that long-term success requires more than U.S. military power.
“Based on my experience serving seven presidents, as a former director of CIA and now as secretary of defense, I am here to make the case for strengthening our capacity to use ‘soft’ power and for better integrating it with ‘hard’ power,” Gates said.
Many have argued that the Bush administration missed opportunities early in the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns to head off insurgent resistance by failing to focus on economic development, promotion of internal reconciliation, training of police forces and communication of U.S. goals.
The lesson, Gates said, is that nontraditional conflict — against insurgents, guerrillas and terrorists — will be the mainstay of battlefields for years to come, requiring more than military power.
“Success will be less a matter of imposing one’s will and more a function of shaping behavior — of friends, adversaries and, most importantly, the people in between,” Gates told his audience of students, faculty and local leaders.
He spoke as part of Kansas State’s Landon lecture series, named for former Kansas Gov. Alfred Landon. Last November, the lecture was delivered by the man Gates replaced at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld, who made a similar argument in favor of strengthening the role of the State Department and other federal agencies and linking their efforts more closely with those of the Pentagon.
Among shortcomings in the nonmilitary area, Gates singled out U.S. strategic communications. He said the U.S. government is “miserable” at communicating its goals and policies to foreign audiences.
“It is just plain embarrassing that al-Qaeda is better at communicating its message on the Internet than America,” he said. “Speed, agility and cultural relevance are not terms that come readily to mind when discussing U.S. strategic communications.”
He decried the “gutting” in the 1990s of the U.S. government’s ability to communicate effectively.
He also sought more funds for the State Department, whose foreign-affairs spending, he said, is less than one-tenth what the Pentagon spends in a year, not counting the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I am well aware that having a sitting defense secretary travel halfway across the country to make a pitch to increase the budget of other agencies might fit into the category of ‘man bites dog’ — or, for some back in the Pentagon, ‘blasphemy,’ ” Gates said.
Still, he said senior military officers often stress to him the importance of civilian roles in Iraq and Afghanistan.
