Slate - How worried should we be about the military’s takeover of American foreign policy?

Isaac Chotiner at Slate ("a daily magazine on the web") interviewed a military scholar.

Money quote(s):

"The sort of substantive throughline is that we barely have a foreign policy. This gets closer to my book’s themes. We essentially have a military policy. The military policy is being carried out with reasonable consistency and coherence in a sort of technocratic sense.

But we don’t have much other than military policy because the State Department under Trump and Secretary Tillerson is all but paralyzed by a combination of hiring freezes, threatened budget cuts, lack of personnel in key positions, and the fact that the White House fairly consistently shuts them out of anything important. Much of the sort of traditional U.S. diplomacy is either on hold or has sort of pulled back."

This is certainly what one would understand from major media reporting; from the inside it's not quite so drastic although there is at least partial truths for each of these listed factors.

"I think there’s a really strong sense in the Defense Department that, in an ideal world, the State Department is a vital counterpart to the military. I think there’s an equally strong sense in the military at the moment that there is nobody home in the State Department, and that’s been to some extent true for the last decade or more but now dramatically exacerbated in the Trump–Tillerson era.

I think you will continue to hear people like Jim Mattis and the service chiefs say very strongly that diplomacy is important. Development is important. Our job, you know, we can’t do our job without those things. I think you’ll continue to hear that, but there’s only a limited degree to which the actors at the Pentagon have any ability to create that out of thin air or to get Donald Trump to create it."

The "nobody home in the State Department" seems more true nowadays due to the number of "acting" officials throughout the Department, but the interviewee conflates this lower-level rudderlessness with the previous Administrations focus on international irrelevancies.

"The oft-cited line that there are more members in the military marching bands than there are foreign service officers is in fact true, even though I always thought it had to be apocryphal. This was a huge issue in Afghanistan during the Obama years, that the constant promises of a civilian surge just never materialized because the personnel just weren’t there."

There simply is not and has never been deployment-ready diplomatic brigade sitting on a stateside base awaiting orders to go nation-build somewhere.  Sec. Powell tried to bake some surge-capacity into the cake with the Diplomatic Readiness Initiative (DRI) but increases in worldwide workload have eaten away at that for years.  And with the continuing hiring-freeze, hollowing-out, and possible 30 percent downsizing, it only gets worse going forward.

"It’s also important to remember that Mattis and Kelly have retired. They are civilians now. They are not active. McMaster is the exception. He is obviously still active-duty military, but I don’t quite get the fixation on oh my God the military has taken over."

Slate - The Blob Ate Donald Trump

Joshua Keating at Slate ("a daily magazine on the web") reassured the unsettled.

Money quote(s):

"Rex Tillerson’s ongoing reorganization of the State Department, seemingly purposely designed to sideline and scale back the work of career diplomats, is definitely a concerning shift that could have lasting impacts on U.S. diplomacy around the world. But in the absence of leadership, it appears American foreign policy can just kind of run itself for a while. I don’t know how long that can continue before it slips off the rails."