“Now, President Bush got a lot of grief from a lot of different angles for the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War,” Paul said. “But you know what? In both instances, he came to Congress and Congress at least voted on it before we went.”

President Obama sets a terrible precedent with committing to military involvement in Libya, Paul said, and went on to assert the President cares more about the United Nations than Congress.

Even though Congress did vote on military action, many people remain critical of Bush for not asking for a formal Congressional declaration of war. One of the most critical voices of Bush’s handling of the wars in the Middle East has been Sen. Paul’s father, U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). In January, at the beginning of the current session of Congress, Congressman Paul entered evidence of alleged war crimes Bush was responsible for into Congressional Record via a speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Ron Paul’s supporters heckled Vice-President Dick Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference, calling them “war criminals.”

Bush had to defend himself against Congressman Paul’s consistent criticism of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, as Paul called for a non-interventionist approach. Paul was one of six Republicans to vote against the Iraq Resolution and consistently said both wars were illegal partly because Congress never declared war.

Sen. Paul was speaking at the Iowa GOP‘s “Night of the Rising Stars” event Saturday. The Senator said the most important vote Congress ever takes is whether or not to send armed forces to war, and pledged to fight against it in the coming weeks.

He also told a story about the former owner of his congressional desk, Henry Clay, who was known as the “Great Compromiser.” Paul said there were some deeply held beliefs Congressmen should never compromise on, such as slavery, on which Clay did broker compromises.

“Now some would say the issues we deal with today have no moral equivalency today as slavery,” Paul said. “But I would say that when we think about things, there are questions we should ask. Can a civilization long endure that doesn’t respect life? Will we be judged at some point in time on whether we stood up and said that the law and the land should respect the unborn?”

That remark earned Paul’s most extended round of applause of the night.

He said the country was facing fast approaching a “day of reckoning,” to reach the point when the U.S. can no longer pay its bills and destroy its currency as a result of the deficit and the debt owed to other countries.

Paul pledged deep cuts in the federal budget. He said while Congress debates cuts near $32 billion, people in his home district tell him cutting $500 billion would be “a good start.”

U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) introduced Paul and said he’d like to see spending levels back to 2008 numbers, although the federal deficit grew under Bush.

Paul also took a shot at U.S. Sen Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) as he opened his speech, describing a debate he had on the floor of the Senate with him.

He said he told Harkin there could be more investment in infrastructure and education if people didn’t have to pay “Chicago union scale wages” in Iowa or Kentucky, to which he said Harkin told him, “You can’t have any kind of quality products made unless they’re made by union workers.” The crowd groaned, and Paul said you would have to throw out 95 percent of the products you consume if Harkin’s statement was true.

Paul didn’t make any references to his own speculation of a White House run, but said Iowans needed to find the right Republican to run in 2012. Senator Paul will return in the summer for a Faith & Freedom Coalition event, alongside other potential 2012 candidates.

The software would allow military personnel to “control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world,” each with “a convincing background, history and supporting details,” reports The Guardian.

Guardian reporters explain how the program would work:

“Centcom spokesman Commander Bill Speaks said: “The technology supports classified blogging activities on foreign-language websites to enable Centcom to counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the US.”

He said none of the interventions would be in English, as it would be unlawful to “address US audiences” with such technology, and any English-language use of social media by Centcom was always clearly attributed. The languages in which the interventions are conducted include Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Pashto.

Once developed, the software could allow US service personnel, working around the clock in one location, to respond to emerging online conversations with any number of co-ordinated Facebook messages, blogposts, tweets, retweets, chatroom posts and other interventions. Details of the contract suggest this location would be MacDill air force base near Tampa, Florida, home of US Special Operations Command.”

The story includes a link to the actual text of the contract between Centcom and Ntrepid, available online via the Freedom of Information Act. It unambiguously details how the software would generate fake personas and conceal their actual origins.

The new program is part of Centcom’s ongoing Operation Earnest Voice (OEV), a $200 million operation aimed at countering the online presence of extremist groups like Al Qaeda. General David Petraeus, who once headed up Centcom, made a statement to the Senate Armed Forces Committee a year ago yesterday in which he argued that OEV ensured that the U.S. armed forces would always be “first with the truth.”

Most of the juicy bits seem to be about these personality clashes, and in that context, it’s worth digging up this old gem from Joan Didion’s 1996 review of Woodward’s work:

…Mr. Woodward describes his role, “to sit with many of the candidates and key players and ask about the questions of the day as the campaign unfolded.” What seems most remarkable in this new Woodward book is exactly what seemed remarkable in the previous Woodward books, each of which was presented as the insiders’ inside story and each of which went on to become a number-one bestseller: these are books in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent. The author himself disclaims “the perspective of history.” His preferred approach has been one in which “issues could be examined before the possible outcome or meaning was at all clear or the possible consequences were weighed.”

Woodward, of course, does care about writing about issues that in his judgment will one day have historical import. As he told Charlie Rose in 2009:

The first nine months of the Bush administration I spent working on Bush’s tax cut, thinking that would be the center of gravity. Of course, I was dead wrong, and I still have boxes of interviews and notes if you run into anyone who wants to write a book about the Bush tax cut. It’s there. I worked for months on it thinking it was important. Of course, it’s important but compared to 9/11, which still defines our times, and the problems Obama has, the Bush tax cuts is probably not going to go in the history books.

Actually, with the “the perspective of history” (and the current debate on extending those tax cuts), those boxes of notes might be interesting. Any takers?

Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) (Brooks Smothers/ZUMA Press)

Two things distinguished Sen. Arlen Specter and Rep. Joe Sestak in their campaign for the Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nomination. The first is Specter’s decades of protean Capitol Hill experience, which Sestak effectively turned into a liability. The second is Specter’s opposition to President Obama’s escalation of the Afghanistan war — the only issue in the primary in which Specter could plausibly claim to be on Sestak’s left. In the end, the characterological issue mattered and the war issue didn’t.

[Security1]It wasn’t that voters actively decided that Sestak’s position on the war resonated. It was that the war was decidedly an afterthought in the race. “It has not been an issue, even though they differ on it,” said Terry Madonna, the director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Pennsylvania’s Franklin & Mary College.

That was perhaps the only substantive issue that actually separated the two candidates. “They divide evenly among liberal and moderate voters,” Madonna observed shortly before the balloting. Among the relevant demographics for the race — union members, urban and suburban residents — the even match persisted. But what struck a chord for Madonna is that despite Sestak’s “reasonably liberal” voting record, he said “MoveOn and the liberals have not been in the state working hard for him.”

MoveOn’s endorsement was the result of the groups’ Pennsylvania membership strongly preferring the more-progressive Sestak, said Ilyse Hogue, the group’s director of political advocacy and communications. “We acknowledge that we had different positions on the Afghanistan surge, but MoveOn members are typically pragmatic progressives. There’s no purity test,” Hogue said in an instant message. “Our members felt that the Congressman would represent them better and would be more willing to shake up the establishment culture.”

The opposing argument, made by Rahm Emanuel, is a political one. (And apparently not shared by David Axelrod.) It’s that the trial is a political headache and the cost of closing Guantanamo Bay, another administration priority, is the vote of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) — and the cost of Graham’s vote is to try KSM in a military commission. Graham showed his utility to the administration yesterday, going to bat for Obama’s right to try at least some terrorism detainees in civilian court after his close political allies, Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), released a bill providing for indefinite detention without trial for terrorism suspects.

Adam Kokesh at an antiwar rally in September 2007 (Flickr: ragessos)

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) had barely begun to give his acceptance speech at the 2008 Republican National Convention when a clamor went up in the upper levels of St. Paul’s XCel Center. Adam Kokesh, a marine who had become a leader of Iraq Veterans Against the War, stood up and unfurled a banner with two sides. On the first side: “YOU CAN’T WIN AN OCCUPATION.” On the other side: “MCCAIN VOTES AGAINST VETS.”

[GOP1] Security guards went into action and dealt with Kokesh’s banner; an irritated crowd of Republicans chanted “USA” until the banner was removed. McCain moved right on, but Kokesh hadn’t finished yet.

“I’m grateful to the president of the United States for leading us in these dark days following the worst attack in American history,” said McCain.

“Ask McCain why he votes against veterans!” shouted Kokesh.

He didn’t get another chance to rain on McCain’s parade, but Kokesh remained proud of what he did. A video that cut together the interruption with jokes, subtitles, and a pounding soundtrack went up on Kokesh’s YouTube account. It’s still there, even though Kokesh’s relationship to the Republican Party is very different now. He’s a candidate for Congress in New Mexico’s 3rd district, looking like the Republican front-runner just one short year after he crashed the convention. Over the course of a year, he’s made the move from confrontation-seeking anti-war activist to clean-cut politician in the mold of the man he supported in 2008, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas).

“The ground has really shifted away from the neocon agenda,” Kokesh told TWI during a break in his campaign schedule. “There was no influx of young people getting into the Republican Party to support John McCain. By contrast, Ron Paul brought a huge number of young people into the Republican Party. It’s really exciting to see that happening again with my campaign.”

Kokesh’s move into electoral politics–he is 27 years old, and this is his first stab at campaigning–unifies two trends that have made the GOP that will fight the midterm elections dramatically different than the one Kokesh used to protest. The first is the rise of Ron Paul’s libertarianism. After years of obscurity, Paul came out of the 2008 elections with a national fundraising base and new respect for his ideas about war and economics among Republican activists and voters. The second trend is the Tea Party movement. After feeling ignored by George W. Bush’s Republicans, the conservative base has come together to demand commitment to the Constitution, commitment to small government values, and guarantees of national and state sovereignty.

“He never had an official role in the campaign, but we could count on him to energize people,” said Jesse Benton, Paul’s spokesman. Kokesh was a late addition to Paul’s 2008 “Rally for the Republic,” an event meant to “bring the Republican Party back to its roots” held in Minneapolis before McCain’s address to the RNC in 2008.

“I’d like to think that this symbolizes some good old-fashioned traditional conservatism making a comeback in the GOP,” said Benton. “Republicans have seen that running as the ‘war party’ is a loser for them.”

Today, Kokesh argues that the efforts of Paul supporters look more or less successful. Bush-era “neocons” are out of the political mainstream, replaced by people like him. “Our nation is drifting dangerously from freedom to fascism,” Kokesh said at a July 2008 rally for Paul in Washington, D.C.; at a 2007 Senate hearing, he was photographed holding up a tally of how many times then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had said “I don’t recall.” But rhetoric that sounded out of the mainstream that year sounds perfectly in line with the comments of Republicans like Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) or Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), and criticism of the GOP or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are no longer controversial in the party’s grassroots.

“If you want to compare to Washington, yes, I’m a radical extremist,” Kokesh told TWI. “If you want to compare me to normal American values, I’m right in the middle of the road. I’m finding out that the grassroots of both parties are so grossly misrepresented by their representatives in Washington that we have more in common with each other.”

Depending on who’s analyzing the race, New Mexico’s third district is either an ideal or a poorly chosen battlefield for a candidate like Kokesh. It’s the most Democratic-leaning district in the state, having given 61 percent of the vote to the Obama-Biden ticket in 2008. Rep. Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.), the freshman that Kokesh wants to challenge, won his election by 27 points, spending $1.5 million to fend off a Republican who spent only $190,000. One Democratic insider labeled Kokesh as an interesting candidate with an interesting strategy and no chance to win.

“There is almost zero chance this seat will change hands,” said David Wasserman, House race editor of the Cook Political Report, which ranks NM-3 the 133rd bluest seat in America. “It is just too Democratic.”

Still, Democrats and Republicans in the district, with the election 11 months away, expressed some respect for a first-time campaigner (Kokesh is 27 years old) who cleaned up for politics in a hurry. His connections to Ron Paul’s movement have allowed him to raise near $150,000 in a few months since entering the campaign in August.

“He’s an interesting candidate,” said Richard Ellenberg, chairman of the Santa Fe County Democratic Party. “There are some people who surprise me with–I almost want to call it their ‘star-struck’ approach to this campaign. They were star-struck by Obama and they’re star-struck by Kokesh.”

A spokeswoman for the New Mexico Republican Party told TWI that the presence of another candidate in the Republican primary–Tom Mullins, another first-time politician–prevents the party from saying anything more than how its members are “excited to have strong candidates in this district.” But John Otter, a founder of the Green Party of the United States who is the party’s treasurer in Santa Fe, said that Kokesh had a shot at winning over anti-war liberals.

“Personally, I’d vote for him,” said Otter. “I’d be be attracted to someone with a position against the war. Lujan was elected with liberal votes, and he’s just gone with the flow.”

Kokesh’s appeal has a lot to do with the hard-edged activism that launched his career. He has traded in military fatigues for suits and plaid shirts. “I think people have told him that the one-fisted Black Panther salute might not sell anymore,” said Jesse Benton. His message, however, is the same anti-war libertarian populism that used to get him kicked out of buildings.

“You can’t just start chanting ‘End the Fed’ at a GOP county meeting,” said Kokesh. “You have to take a step back and explain this perspective on monetary policy. But what’s so exciting now, in terms of the opportunity presented by this horrible economic situation is that you can start teaching these Austrian economic principles, and all of a sudden they don’t seem so abstract because you can connect them to what’s happening in real life.”

Mullins, who entered the race in October and is running a more traditional Republican campaign, has not chosen to make an issue out of Kokesh’s anti-war activism or argue that his opponent is out of the party mainstream. “I disagree with his characterization of our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan as ‘occupations,’” said Mullins. “I think the president made the right decision, and we should finish the job, but to be honest the war doesn’t come up much right now.”

Kokesh agreed with Mullins, after smiling at how his opponent had tried to publicize his own libertarian credentials. (“He’s holding a copy of The Road to Serfdom on his website,” said Kokesh. “Of course, he’s also holding up a copy of Going Rogue.”) Anti-war activists are key to the Kokesh campaign. He received an attention-getting endorsement from former Sen. Mike Gravel, and he’s publicized his support from Tina Richards, a “marine mom” who gained notoriety after a heated 2007 confrontation with Rep. Dave Obey (D-Wisc.) over why Democrats refused to cut off funding for the Iraq War. But the issue that got him to confront John McCain isn’t motivating voters in New Mexico.

“Most of them don’t care, and that’s really sad,” said Kokesh. “It’s not just Republicans, but all voters. The Obama administration is keeping up the Bush policy of keeping Americans isolated from the war.”

But Democrats, even as they write off his chances at a win, say Kokesh’s transition from the anti-war movement to anti-Fed, libertarian populism is coming at a perfect time.

“I think he’s trying to pick up a national mantle, as a national personality in the Ron Paul mode,” said Ellenberg. “I think he’s been successful so far.”

Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal (defenselink.mil)

If President Obama orders an additional 30,000 to 40,000 troops to Afghanistan, he will be deploying practically every available U.S. Army brigade to war, leaving few units in reserve in case of an unforeseen emergency and further stressing a force that has seen repeated combat deployments since 2002.

According to information compiled by the U.S. Army for The Washington Independent about the deployment status of active-duty and National Guard Army brigades, as of December 2009, there will be about 50,600 active-duty soldiers, serving in 14 combat brigades, and as many as 24,000 National Guard soldiers available for deployment. All other soldiers and National Guardsmen will either be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan already or ineligible to deploy while they rest from a previous deployment.

[Security1]Obama is expected to announce a decision on an escalation of troop levels for Afghanistan shortly after returning from his trip to Asia on Friday, which would be the second such escalation of his young presidency. That decision follows a request issued in September from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, in which McChrystal delivered the Obama administration with a palette of different troop-level options to turn around a faltering war effort. While White House officials have cautioned reporters that Obama has made no final choice on the size of a troop increase, a widely re-reported McClatchy story claimed that the administration was likely to send 34,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, which would raise U.S. troop levels in the eight-year war to an all-time high of 102,000. It is likely that Obama would include members of the other military services, especially the Marines, in any troop increase, but the vast majority of any new troop complement will come from the Army.

The shortage of available combat brigades means that an escalation of between 30,000 and 40,000 troops is “not realistic,” said Lawrence Korb, a former senior Pentagon official in the Reagan administration who now studies defense issues for the liberal Center for American Progress. To send practically all available soldiers into one of the two wars would leave the U.S. with “no reserve in case you had a problem in Korea.”

Click to Enlarge: Army National Guard combat brigade deployment data. (Source: U.S. Army)

Obama would have something of a cushion, but not much, in the early months of 2010. An additional five brigades will finish their 12 months of so-called “dwell time” at home between deployments by April 2010, providing an additional 22,600 troops, but by that time, about 10,200 troops will be scheduled to leave Afghanistan, leaving available a net gain of 12,400. More brigades become available in the summer and fall, although others currently in Afghanistan will be ending their scheduled deployments then as well. Under current Pentagon policy, dwell time for the National Guard varies, but can be no shorter than two years, and so it is possible but not certain that two National Guard brigades composed of 6,800 National Guard soldiers might be available for deployment by March 2010 as well, beyond the 24,000 theoretically available now. Pentagon leaders had hoped to extend dwell time this year, but that was before McChrystal’s request for additional troops.

Click to Enlarge: U.S. Army combat brigade deployment information. (Source: U.S. Army)

Furthermore, not all brigades are the same. Some are built around heavy equipment like tanks, while others are primarily light, mobile infantrymen. According to a September report by the Institute for the Study of War, a pro-escalation think-tank in Washington, no so-called “heavy” brigades have been sent to Afghanistan to date, a condition likely owing to Afghanistan’s lack of paved roads, high elevations and uneven rural terrain, all of which are inhospitable to tanks and other heavy vehicles. But of the 14 brigades available as of December 2009, five of them are heavy brigades, according to the information provided by the Army to TWI, accounting for 19,000 of the available 50,600 active-duty soldiers. There is precedent in Iraq for re-tasking heavy brigades as light brigades by deploying them without their heavy vehicles, as the Institute for the Study of War’s report points out. But there is no precedent for such a thing in Afghanistan. If the Obama administration decides not to re-task heavy brigades as light brigades, the pool of active-duty soldiers immediately available for Afghanistan shrinks to 31,600 soldiers.

Andrew Krepinevich, the president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense think-tank in Washington, told TWI that an escalation of between 30,000 and 40,000 troops required an inescapable calculation of risk. “The worst thing in the world is to have these people over there getting shot at, not being able to make progress, and the situation [in Afghanistan] just sort of gradually eroding, so it’s that versus the risk of breaking the force, [or] the risk that you’re not prepared for another contingency,” said Krepinevich. “So how do you weigh those risks? There is no formula or algorithm that’s going to give you the answer. It’s going to have to be a judgment call.”

McChrystal wrote in a late August assessment that the U.S. faces a “decisive” moment in Afghanistan. “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible,” McChrystal wrote nearly three months ago. While deployment times vary, no brigade can be deployed to Afghanistan overnight, raising questions about how much time remains to turn the war around even if McChrystal gets the 40,000 troops that various news accounts have stated — without official confirmation — that the general wants.

Krepinevich testified on Tuesday before a House Armed Services subcommittee in favor of McChrystal’s proposed counterinsurgency strategy, and appeared to lend support to a troop increase of roughly 40,000. He said that recent steps taken by both the Bush and Obama administrations to increase the total size of the Army and Marine Corps would mitigate against prolonged deployments. “Even if Gen. McChrystal’s request is honored by the president, the combined total of our forces in Afghanistan and Iraq would still be significantly below the levels reached during the Surge,” he told the panel.

But the 2007 troop surge in Iraq was a one-time increase of five combat brigades that ended with those brigades’ tours. By contrast, a troop increase to implement McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy is more likely to be a sustained escalation lasting beyond the tours of the initially deployed brigades. And the brigades themselves called upon to implement the troop increase will have already served numerous deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of the 14 active-duty brigades that will be available for deployment in December, five have already served three tours abroad since 2002 and four have already served two. If either the 3rd brigade of the 101st Airborne Division or the 1st brigade of the 10th Mountain Division are asked to deploy to Afghanistan, it will be their fifth tour since 2002.*

Krepinevich said the stress on soldiers called upon to serve repeated tours was a problem for a troop escalation. “You really have to start worrying about greater incidents of post-traumatic stress disorder, [and] that we’re already seeing in terms of the the NCO corps,” he said, referring to non-commissioned officers like sergeants who play crucial leadership roles in enforcing soldier discipline and standards. “Yes, they’re experienced but they’re just so worn out. And that has to be a concern.”

That concern was echoed by Bing West, a Reagan-era senior Pentagon official who traveled to Afghanistan in October. “There is near-unanimous agreement that deployments on the lines over eight months are too long,” West reported for the blog Small Wars Journal on Nov. 1, citing interviews with “dozens” of soldiers and Marines. “Aggressive patrolling decreases as the length of tour increases. The troops wear down.”

Korb — who, like Krepinevich, supports the Afghanistan war — said a more realistic troop increase for Afghanistan would be 10,000 soldiers until the drawdown of troops from Iraq “begins in earnest.” There are currently 120,000 U.S. troops remaining in Iraq, almost twice the total in Afghanistan, though Gen. Raymond Odierno, the commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, told Congress in September that he plans to reduce that total to around 50,000 by August 30, 2010. Alternatively, Korb said, Obama could speed up the pace of redeployment out of Iraq in order to relieve the stress on the force, a point echoed by Krepinevich in an interview with TWI. But under current Pentagon policy, soldiers would still need to receive at least 12 months of recuperation time back in the U.S. before potential assignment in Afghanistan.

The chief of staff of the Army, Gen. George Casey, whose institutional role includes protecting the health of the force, endorsed a troop escalation earlier this month. “I believe that we need to put additional forces into Afghanistan to give Gen. McChrystal the ability to both dampen the successes of the Taliban while we train the Afghan civilian forces,” he told NBC’s “Meet The Press” on Nov. 8. The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, also has responsibilities for balancing the needs of the Afghanistan war with those of the overall military and threats to the U.S. worldwide. He told Congress in September that more troops were “probably” needed in Afghanistan as well.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a key swing vote in the Afghanistan debate, has told Congress earlier this year that he would seek to lengthen dwell time for the Army in the coming years. In January, he testified that he and Army chiefs wanted to extend dwell time to 15 months at home for every 12 months deployed by October 2010, but in July, he revised that plan and indicated that the Army might be able to shift to 15-month dwell times by summer 2010. But Gates reiterated in July a commitment to ultimately giving soldiers at least two years of dwell time by 2011. The Army public-affairs officer who released this information to TWI clarified that no unit was available unless it had ended a previous deployment by at least November 2008, indicating a continued 12-month dwell time policy.

That proposal was devised before McChrystal’s request for additional forces, and it is unclear how the fulfillment of that request will impact the dwell-time policy, if at all. Spokesmen for both Gen. McChrystal and Sec. Gates did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

*Update, 4:35 p.m., Nov. 19: Maj. Stephen Platt, public affairs officer for the 3rd brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, writes to inform me that the brigade has indeed been scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan in “early 2010″ for what will be its fifth combat tour since 2002. I missed a press release from the Pentagon in July announcing the deployment, and word of the upcoming tour was not included in the information provided to me by the U.S. Army. I appreciate Maj. Platt’s clarification.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton (WDCpix)

Over the last several days, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has quietly begun institutionalizing the Obama administration’s pledge to rebalance civilian and military elements of national security. Her speech to the Council on Foreign Relations Wednesday afternoon is her most visible attempt yet to make a case for transforming the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development’s place in the national-security pantheon in order to suit U.S. foreign policy goals.

Clinton’s speech, delivered to an audience of foreign-policy elites, didn’t announce any new policy or change of course. She made a case for administration priorities like multilateral reductions in nuclear arms and proliferation, engagement with adversarial nations like Iran, midwifing a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and promoting global human rights. Like most post-Cold War secretaries of state, she called America’s global leadership an enduring fact of the geopolitical landscape, and cast responsible U.S. foreign policy as shepherding a “global architecture” whereby states have “clear incentives to cooperate and live up to their responsibilities, as well as strong disincentives to sit on the sidelines or sow discord and division.”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

But the speech itself was less a policy address than a platform to explain how changes that Clinton has recently initiated to prepare the State Department and USAID to shoulder more of a national security burden match the administration’s objectives. On Friday and again on Monday, Clinton held townhall meetings with foreign-service officers and development workers to unveil a new project, called the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review. Modeled on one of the Pentagon’s most prominent reports, Clinton’s announced effort is designed to match the department’s missions with its resources and identify shortfalls in capacity, and will presumably recommend necessary institutional changes.

The study, led by Deputy Secretary Jack Lew and Policy Planning Director Anne-Marie Slaughter, will also address internal reform issues on core department and USAID tasks. It will “explore how to effectively design, fund, and implement development and foreign assistance as part of a broader foreign policy,” Clinton said, chiding U.S. foreign-aid money for insufficiently “contribut[ing] to genuine and lasting progress.”

For years, the State Department has lacked even the basis for understanding how underresourced it is. In October, a report by the American Academy of Diplomacy, a diplomatic advocacy group, assessed that the Secretary of State “lacks the tools — people, competencies, authorities, programs and funding — to execute the President’s foreign policies.” State did not even compile documents or reports designed to link resources to foreign-policy missions. The result was “the ‘militarization of diplomacy’ is noticeably expanding,” the study found.

The QDDR is “an intelligent measure” to begin reversing the trend, said retired Amb. Ronald Neumann. Clinton’s “focus on resources is important and has been too often neglected by secretariess of state who focused only on policy,” said Neumann, a former ambassador to Algeria, Bahrain and Afghanistan. “She understood she’s not going to manage effectively with a busted institution.”

One of the Obama administration’s earliest steps to bolster State Department capacity was to increase the State Department’s operating budget by $2 billion, mandating the hiring of over 700 new Foreign Service staff to meet worldwide shortages of diplomats, and to increase the foreign aid budget by nearly 10 percent to $51.7 billion. In an rare move, Defense Secretary Robert Gates lobbied Congress in favor of giving the State Department more money, on the grounds that an under-resourced department created a burden on the military to fill gaps in diplomatic positions. Similarly, prominent military leaders like Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. troops in the Middle East and South Asia, have frequently advocated a “whole-of-government approach” to complex security problems like the Afghanistan war and related instability in Pakistan, urging robust diplomatic and development resources to be used to supplement military measures. Clinton used the phrase twice in her speech.

A core goal for Clinton will be “to ensure that our civilian and military efforts operate in a coordinated and complementary fashion where we are engaged in conflict,” she said. In places like Afghanistan, the department has pledged to bolster its civilian diplomatic and developments, but few diplomats have made the journey so far to dangerous regions like Helmand Province, where 4000 Marines are battling the Taliban to provide security and governance for Afghan civilians.

The QDDR will require the State Department and USAID “to think hard about whatever we want to achieve” and to “demonstrate results,” Clinton said. That process will position the civilian elements of foreign affairs to more effectively manage and reform global institutions. “We’ll use our power to convene, our ability to connect countries around the world, and sound foreign policy strategies to create partnerships aimed at solving problems,” Clinton vowed in her speech, saying that the U.S. needed to “create opportunities for non-state actors and individuals to contribute to solutions.”

Clinton’s focus on institutional reform is a welcome change, Neumann said, contributing to her emergence as a strong secretary of state. “Overall, it’s very hard to say she’s put a foot wrong anywhere in any significant way,” he said.