The Ghost of Dimitri

This chapter is set during the September 22, 1993, Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing to review General John Shalikashvili’s nomination to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It first explores the development of a controversy that breaks out after General John Shalikashvili’s nomination when a Defense Daily report and a Simon Weisenthal Center press release, based on a reading of Dimitri Shalikashvili’s own memoirs housed at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, announce that Dimitri served under the Waffen-SS during World War II. This is followed by a flashback, from Dimitri’s point of view, of how and why he joined the German war cause and what he did while serving for them. The chapter ends with an overview of the Senate confirmation hearing where Shalikashvili denies knowledge of his father’s SS association and the committee okays Shalikashvili’s confirmation, subject to a suitable replacement being found to take over his current position as SACEUR.

Briefing Congress

Set at the September 4, 1991, congressional hearing at the Rayburn Office Building, Washington, D.C., the chapter uses Lieutenant General John Shalikashvili’s testimony to a House Armed Services Committee defense panel on military operations other than war (MOOTW) to thumbnail how Operation Provide Comfort was successfully concluded. It also describes how the success of the mission led to Shalikashvili’s current position as Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell. It also flashes back to Shalikashvili’s tour as a major in the Vietnam War, when he served as a senior district advisor for Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV). In that posting he was heavily involved in pacification efforts (increasing rice production, building roads, constructing hospitals, etc.) as well Operation Fisher, another significant refugee resettlement program. Shalikashvili’s Vietnam experience would be a major developmental step leading him to being more open to the use of force than Colin Powell.

Guarding the Guardians through Oversight

This chapter reviews previous scholarship about congressional scrutiny of the executive branch and about general patterns of legislative influence on foreign policy decisions. In the spring of 2004, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee proposed public hearings regarding the conduct and objectives of the Iraq War. A month later, Senator John Warner, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, scheduled two days of hearings to investigate abuse of detainees at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib Prison. The chapter examines the hearing activity of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees from 1947 to 2008 to assess the overall trends in oversight and identify similarities and differences in their behavior. It also considers what scholars know about congressional involvement in U.S. foreign policy, what they have concluded about oversight of national security more generally, and why these perspectives do not appear to fit together.

Committee Goals and Oversight Strategies

This chapter examines how the distinctive goals of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees led to strategic choices about how much attention to devote to oversight of national security, particularly in comparison to budget activity. It explains why divided government was not a consistent motivator for national security oversight and how indicators of long-term committee goals influenced both committees' stance toward the executive branch. It argues that the Armed Services Committee muted partisan conflict and deemphasized oversight in order to attend to funding the Defense Department, whereas the Foreign Relations Committee was a more active overseer of foreign affairs during periods of divided government. The differences between the two committees reveal how selection biases built into the committee assignment process affected the rule of law in national security and shed light on the inconsistent findings in the scholarly literature with respect to divided government.

Committee Motivations for Oversight

This chapter examines the conditions that motivate legislators to ask questions regarding the country's foreign policy. The Vietnam War represents the nadir of congressional influence over foreign policy in the eyes of many political observers. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee became the locus of congressional pressure for winding down the war, while the Senate Armed Services Committee provided a platform for hawks seeking to ramp up the use of force. The chapter develops theoretical expectations, which address three different committee phenomena relevant to oversight of national security: sources of change in the total frequency of public hearings, biases within committees regarding the frequency and venues of oversight hearings as a result of external stimuli, and influences on the content of routine and event-driven review.