Texas Republican Rep. Ted Poe has proposed a bill that would take away Pakistan’s status as a major non-NATO ally, or MNNA. The move comes amid multiple reports the Trump administration will press Islamabad to crack down on Pakistan-based militants like the Haqqani network, which launched attacks in Afghanistan.

“Pakistan must be held accountable for the American blood on its hands,” Poe said while introducing the bill on Thursday. “For years, Pakistan has acted as a Benedict Arnold ally of the United States. From harboring Osama bin Laden to backing the Taliban, Pakistan has stubbornly refused to go after, in any meaningful way, terrorists that actively seek to harm opposing ideologies.”

Poe said the U.S. must make a clean break with Pakistan or at least stop providing it with sophisticated weaponry and treating it like a close ally.

Poe chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade Subcommittee, and he has offered similar legislation several times over several years. This bill, co-sponsored with Rep. Rick Nolan, D-Minn., is more likely to make a statement than to become reality, and it faces a long legislative road if the administration doesn’t beat it to the punch.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has hinted the U.S. strategy review for Afghanistan due in mid-July will include a shift on Pakistan. He told Congress last week the strategy would be included in “a regional approach.”

But Pakistan’s embassy in Washington warned against “scapegoating” to explain the stalemate in Afghanistan, pointing instead to Afghanistan’s own troubled internal dynamics.

“Singling out Pakistan and pinning the entire blame on Pakistan for the situation in Afghanistan is neither fair nor accurate, nor is it borne out by the ground realities,” said Abid Saeed, press minister at the embassy, told Reuters. 

In 2004, President George W. Bush granted Pakistan MNNA status in an effort to get Pakistan to help the United States fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

That status makes it eligible for priority delivery of defense material, an expedited arms sale process and a U.S. loan guarantee program that backs up loans issued by private banks to finance arms exports. It can also stockpile U.S. military hardware, participate in defense research and development programs and be sold more sophisticated weaponry.

Pakistan has since become one of the leading recipients of U.S. foreign assistance, as Congress appropriated more than $18 billion in aid between 2002 and 2015, including $7.6 billion in security-related aid.

According to data compiled by the Center for International Policy, Congress was notified in 2014 of more than $600 million in major arms sales to Pakistan, including $200 million in Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles and GRC43M cutters worth $350 million. In 2015, there was nearly $1 billion in U.S. sales to Pakistan, including Viper attack helicopters and Hellfire missiles. The U.S. subsidized some of this under foreign military financing funds.

The powerful chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., was instrumental in blocking U.S. subsidies for the $700 million sale of eight F-16 Block 52 fighter jets to Pakistan in 2016. He also fended off efforts to scuttle the sale completely.

Corker, on Wednesday, declined to comment on the idea of changing Pakistan’s status but said he hoped the Trump administration would take a tougher stand toward Pakistan over its alleged support of the Haqqani network.

“We have spent billion and billions and billions of tax-payer dollars toward their country, and I’m certainly unsatisfied,” Corker said. “The No. 1 threat to American soldiers is the Haqqani network, and Pakistan allows it to have safe haven in their country.” 

Email:   jgould@defensenews.com         
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White House officials say they plan to increase the base defense budget by $54 billion to $603 billion by slashing domestic spending and foreign aid. That netted a swift rebuke from House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, and his Senate counterpart, Chairman Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who have each proposed a $640 billion base budget and argue this is a meager $18 billion more than President Obama had planned.

McCain, in a statement, said the figure was, “a mere 3 percent above President Obama’s defense budget, which has left our military underfunded, undersized, and unready to confront threats to our national security… With a world on fire, America cannot secure peace through strength with just 3 percent more than President Obama’s budget. We can and must do better.”

The comments came as White House budget director Mick Mulvaney told reporters Monday the budget blueprint represents President Trump’s priorities, including the military, the nuclear arsenal and border security  –  without adding to the 2018 deficit. The non-defense side of the budget will be $462 billion, Mulvaney said. 

“We are taking his words and turning them into policies and dollars,” he said. “It reduces money to other nations, eliminates duplicative programs and eliminates programs that just don’t work.”

Asked how the defense top-line would carry forward Trump’s pledge to rebuild the military, Mulvaney said it was too soon to say. The Defense Department would over the next two weeks craft its budget to the top-line provided by the White House. The White House will issue a fuller budget proposal in early May.

Big questions about the plan remain, including whether that defense money would be just for the Pentagon or for broader defense programs such as the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration; whether foreign aid and security assistance programs from the Department of State could be shifted over to DoD; or whether the money will flow into the Pentagon’s base budget or the Overseas Contingency Operations fund.

The biggest question of all — how a proposal that guts the non-defense budget would survive on Capitol Hill — suggests the White House has offered an opening negotiation position rather than a viable number. It’s a proposal sure to net a violent reaction from Senate Democrats, who have in recent years asked that defense increases be matched dollar-for-dollar on the non-defense side.

Democrats quickly signaled Monday they would oppose the plan. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a statement, “This budget proposal is a reflection of exactly who this president is and what today’s Republican Party believes in: helping the wealthy and special interests while putting further burdens on the middle class and those struggling to get there.”

Squeezing Trump and Mulvaney from the opposite side of the aisle, in the lower chamber, Thornberry said, “we can and should do more” for defense.

“While we cannot repair all of the damage done by those cuts in a single year, we can and should do more than this level of funding will allow,” Thornberry said in a statement. “The administration will have to make clear which problems facing our military they are choosing not to fix. We cannot make repairing and rebuilding our military conditional on fixing our budget problems or on cutting other spending.”

Katherine Blakeley, a defense budget expert with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, says a number of questions need to be addressed before the real details of the budget plan can be assessed. But one thing is clear, she said – that this plan is designed to be “politically untenable for the Democrats while trying to be as favorable as possible for the Republicans.”

Or as Benjamin Friedman of the CATO Institute put it, “This plan won’t happen because Democrats will block it.”

Since the imposition of the budget caps, Democrats have fought to maintain a one-for-one trade between defense spending and domestic spending. That was easier when they had top cover from President Barack Obama, but could prove more challenging with the Trump White House hammering Democrats for holding down on defense levels.

Congress would not only need to pass a 2018 budget resolution, which could pass with Republican alone, but a new law to raise the caps to allow the White House’s proposal. That would require Democratic votes.

“Republicans need 60 Senate votes to overturn the BCA cap for next year,” Friedman said. “I believe Schumer can keep enough of Democrats in line around the idea that an increase in defense must be matched by an increase in non-defense discretionary to stop this.”

Instead, he predicts the two parties will settle on a raising of the budget caps for both defense and non-defense spending, with an influx of cash into OCO.

Blakeley also notes that, by putting its marker for fiscal 2018 down now, the administration is setting up the still-unsettled fiscal 2017 appropriations discussion as a proxy war. The government is currently operating under a continuing resolution to fund the federal government, which expires at the end of April. 

Mackenzie Eaglen, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said of Democrats, “This will really irk them and there’s no reason for them not to go all in on this political battle. Cutting programs like Head Start and National Endowment for the Arts are not even popular among many Republicans.”

Because the plans pays for defense increases through the non-defense side and not deficit spending, the proposal is a nod at fiscal conservatives in Congress. Mulvaney was one of them before he left Congress to join the White House.

“Nobody wants to increase overall spending, and the only way you can do that without huge earth-shaking debates is by reducing other discretionary spending,” said James Jay Carafano, a national security expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “There is a rational limit to how much you can do that.”

It is also a nod toward defense hawks. Carafano described the White House’s number Monday as a “down payment” on the defense build-up Trump has repeatedly promised.

“The important thing to me is this is a clear statement of recognition that we are heading towards a hollow force,” Carafano said. “There’s not just a readiness crisis, there’s enormous modernization challenges, and you have trouble maintaining [operational] tempo. That’s the text book definition of a force that’s heading to hollow.”

The Pentagon is looking to plus up several initiatives to support that vision in the fiscal year 2018 budget request, although that funding request will be modified by the incoming Trump administration before it is submitted to Congress.

Michael Auslin, an analyst with the American Enterprise Institute and author of the upcoming book ” The End of the Asian Century,” agrees that a Pacific NATO equivalent is “unsuited” for the region.

“The US Government and Pacific Command have it right, in terms of building multilateral partnerships, and taking advantage of others, like ASEAN,” Auslin said. “Where we can do more, besides ensuring that we don’t get left behind in regional trade agreements, is first, in partnering more effectively with our allies, especially Japan, in their efforts to build communities of interests; and second, in better linking our efforts throughout the region, so that we don’t treat the East China Sea as separate from the South China Sea or Indian Ocean. It is all one interconnected strategic operating space, Asia’s ‘Mediterranean,’ so to speak.”

The complicated relationship between US allies in the Pacific and China was underlined earlier in at the forum event here, when Singaporean defense minister Ng Eng Hen offered his take on the region.

Ng warned that the US cannot simply focus on trying to contain China militarily, as it was “neither possible nor strategically necessary to contain China’s rise.” Instead, the minister said, the US needs to focus on growing relationships on the trade side – which is where the apparent death of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement is so disappointing for Singapore.

The Obama administration, including Carter, has supported TPP as a vital tool for increasing US influence in Asia, but members of Congress – and president-elect Donald Trump – have opposed the agreement.

“The US presence in the Asia-Pacific region, based predominantly on security, is unidimensional and structurally brittle,” Ng said. “The Trans-Pacific Partnership would have been a concrete, tangible commitment, and to continue to be a dominant force the US needs a multifaceted relationship with countries in Asia. And China is pursuing that multifaceted relationship with many countries.”

The minister rattled off a series of statistics underlining that situation, noting that China is the largest or second largest trading partner with “nearly every country” in Asia, and highlighting the economic ties that exist between the US and China already.

“China is now an integral leader in the global systems of trade, finance and security,” Ng concluded.

Auslin, however, predicts that China’s economy will start to stagnate in coming years, which will create its own set of challenges.

“It is likely that America and its partners will face questions about how to handle a stagnating or weakening China, as much as we have been worried about a growing China,” he said. “So, worrying about a united response to China may not fit the strategic necessity of ensuring that China’s slowdown does not cause instability in the region.”

Updated 12/7/2016 at 3:43 PM Eastern with comment from Auslin

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SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — Some Republican lawmakers are signaling they would like a speedy confirmation of President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, retired Marine Corps Gen. Jim Mattis. 

But the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee is saying not so fast.

Echoing concerns a required waiver for the retired four-star might erode civilian control of the military, Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., warned that Democrats — in spite of widespread admiration for Mattis — may fight his confirmation if the GOP skips a substantive debate.

Though the Senate, not the House, has the constitutional responsibility of confirming Cabinet nominees, the process for Mattis’ waiver should include his testimony before the House Armed Services Committee and be backed up by stand-alone legislation, Smith said in a phone interview on Saturday.

“We need to have a conversation about why the civilian control of the military is so important, and both the House and the Senate need to do their due diligence, asking Gen. Mattis those questions — and have that debate, not just to rubber-stamp it,” Smith said.

For his part, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, both backs Mattis with high praise and has said the matter of the waiver would receive “a full discussion,” before Mattis can be granted a waiver and confirmed.

“We’re not going to try to ram it through, we’re going to fully talk to the experts, the legal scholars and others, and do it in due course,” Thornberry told Defense News on Saturday.

Civilian control of the military dates to the nation’s earliest days and reflects the balance of powers outlined in the Constitution. The National Security Act of 1947, amended in 2008, bars active-duty officials from serving in the Pentagon’s top job for seven years after leaving service. Mattis only retired as the four-star chief of US Central Command in 2013.

“Let’s have a serious hearing and a serious discussion about this,” Smith said. “I’m not saying I oppose Gen. Mattis, but I want it to get discussed, and I want Gen. Mattis to give assurances that he understands the difference between being a commanding general and the secretary of defense.”

Republicans and Democrats have praised Mattis as a warrior-scholar who could counterbalance Trump’s lack of experience in foreign affairs and national security.

Democratic aides privately concede that Mattis’ confirmation is practically a foregone conclusion, particularly as Republican majorities control both chambers. Still, they argue there is a foundational principle of democracy in play that deserves of careful handling—and that trampling it could severely taint Mattis as defense secretary.

“It would be poisonous to him,” one Democratic aide said.

Because Trump tapped Mattis for defense secretary, appointed retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as his national security adviser and is considering retired Gen. David Petraeus for secretary of state, one worry is Trump will miss out on non-military answers to his foreign policy challenges.

“Having dealt with Gen. Mattis, he has a more balanced understanding of the military, diplomacy, aid, partnerships and all that,” Smith said. “In terms of a policy outlook I’m much more in agreement with Gen. Mattis than any of the other people President-elect Trump has picked thus far.”

One scenario has GOP leaders in Congress starting the year with a confirmation process in parallel with moving legislation for the exception. On Inauguration Day, the president could be sworn in, nominate Mattis, the Senate could confirm Mattis, and Trump could receive and sign the exception, enabling the new secretary to begin his work.

Congress is teeing up confirmation hearings soon after Jan. 1 with a heavy schedule that includes working each weekday in January and votes scheduled on Inauguration Day Jan. 20, according to Kansas Republican Sen. Jerry Moran.

Moran, who sits on the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, told the Reagan National Security Forum here Saturday he expects the Senate to give Mattis a confirmation vote as early as Inauguration Day— complicated by the waiver legislation’s vulnerability to a filibuster, which would take 60 votes to override.

“It seems to me in a bipartisan way, there is an interest in accomplishing that,” Moran said. “Although the new Minority Leader [Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.] has indicated every nomination will be taken very seriously, and there is some expectation that no confirmation will go through easily.”

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., opposes the waiver for Mattis and plans to require the 60 vote supermajority to advance waiver legislation in the Senate. She would not grant an exception to such a fundamental principle of American democracy, she said, though she respects Mattis’ service.

Republicans control both chambers and could find a path to quickly confirm Mattis, so Smith said he sought and received assurances from Thornberry.

“I’ve had a good conversation with Mac Thornberry, who should be the guy Republicans listen to, and he has respect for the notion that this is something we should at least examine,” Smith said. “The details, that hasn’t been agreed to.”

Thornberry told Defense News on Saturday that before the Senate confirms Mattis for the position, both the House and the Senate would have to pass a law to allow him to serve. That gives the House “a role we don’t usually have, and I think the issues are serious. Civilian control of the military is a serious issue.”

Congress last passed a waiver in 1950, for Gen. George C. Marshall, who Thornberry compared with Mattis.

“I think Mattis is exceptional, I think we live in very perilous times, and I think it is appropriate to have a full discussion and to say Gen. Mattis can serve — without changing the underlying rule that says you have to be out seven years before you can serve as the secretary of defense.”

Senate Armed Services Committee Chair John McCain, R-Ariz., has expressed support for Mattis’ confirmation. His Democratic counterpart, Ranking Member Jack Reed, D-R.I., voiced support for a Congressional debate on the principle in play.

“It is clear that General Mattis is a respected Marine and strategic thinker who served with honor and distinction,” Reed said in a statement last month. “What is less clear is how Congress would go about changing the law to allow him or any recently retired senior officer to serve as the head of the Pentagon. That would require ‎a debate about our constitutional principle of civilian control of the military and passing a new bill.”

It’s as yet unclear whether House Democrats will rally to the cause, particularly those outside the HASC. Last week House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer hailed the Mattis nomination without qualification, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi issued a statement that was silent on the waiver but jabbed Trump’s “impulsive, ill-informed and dangerous ideas on America’s military and national security strategy.”

Email:  jgould@defensenews.com

Twitter:  @reporterjoe

The board, a DoD advisory committee comprised of private-sector executives, says the role should focus more on reining in overhead and less on substituting for the defense secretary. The board made the recommendation in a recent, 112-page report on the presidential transition, which comes as Congress and the Pentagon are pursuing their own agendas for DoD reform.

“In the past, it has been quite normal for the Deputy to spend significant time away from the Pentagon, either ‘filling in’ for the Secretary or on matters requiring coordination with other agencies, international partners, or the White House,” DBB chair Michael Bayer said in a letter accompanying the report. “The adverse consequence of this has been an insufficient attention to the important primary function of managing the Department. The management challenges of this, the largest institution on the planet, require the full-time attention of a Chief Management Officer.”

The Defense Department is the nation’s largest enterprise, and if its expenditures were gross national product it would be the seventeenth largest nation, the report notes. It is the nation’s largest employer, with more than 1.3 million people on active duty, more than 700,000 civilian personnel and roughly 600,000 contractors. Another 1.1 million serve in the National Guard and Reserve forces, and about 2 million military retirees and their family members receive earned benefits.

The current deputy defense secretary, Bob Work, has championed a vision for a Defense Department that is more technologically agile and globally engaged, and spearheaded its so-called “Third Offset Strategy.” Work also has called for cost cutting, and, pointing to estimates that the department has 22 percent more in installations and real estate than it needs, urged lawmakers to consider a new round of the politically unpopular base-closure process.

As envisioned by the advisory board, the deputy defense secretary would take bold action to tame the costs associated with overhead, personnel, benefits and unnecessary work, all of which Bayer considers necessary for DoD to “swiftly and shrewdly adapt to maintain its superiority over determined adversaries.”

“Without major surgery, our overhead and personnel costs will continue to eat away at our modernization and readiness,” Bayer’s letter reads. “This is not about policy; it is about running the Department like a modern business.”

The report argues DoD must look closely at off-limits budget areas like intelligence, classified programs and their overhead, the combatant commands and the armed services, and bring in specialized expertise to lead a re-structuring review of the Pentagon. This would ultimately cut entire organizations, activities and contracts, as opposed to picking around the edges of the budget.

Email:  jgould@defensenews.com 

Twitter:  @ReporterJoe