One more thing about yesterday’s story about Gen. Petraeus seeking greater involvement in Israel-Palestine. You can fairly ask: Well, the U.S. already contributes to the training of Palestinian security forces. Why should the conflict receive greater attention from the U.S. military? You know what I’m going to say, don’t you? It’s A Structural Problem!

Way back in the early 00s, Dana Priest wrote a wonderful book called The Mission, which highlighted how the military’s regional commanders — those responsible for planning operations and managing security relations in vast swaths of the world — were increasingly the faces of U.S. foreign policy. High-level officials in allied countries often preferred to deal with the combatant commanders (then called CINCs) than with U.S. ambassadors, both because the commanders ranked higher in the government and because, well, they could get stuff done much easier and much faster. They also tended to understand the interplay between politics and security in a way that ambassadors rarely do, and that appeals, particularly, to either strongmen or aspirant strongmen. When Pervez Musharraf seized control of Pakistan in 1999, one of the first phone calls he made was to Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, one of Petraeus’ predecessors as combatant commander of U.S. Central Command. Musharraf called him “Tony.” “Tony” called him “Pervez.”

So it’s become a structural flaw of how militarized foreign policy is that a situation can scramble, diplomatically, when a man with four stars on either arm clears his throat. Petraeus, ironically, is one of those high-level officials who wants to see diplomacy and development receive a greater degree of structural emphasis across administrations. Usually the military views the relative lack of capacity within the State Department and USAID as a burden that ultimately the military will be tasked with shouldering — except in the cases where that relative lack of capacity becomes an opportunity for an ambitious and well-intentioned officer.

Also, not to step on the toes of a forthcoming Washington Independent piece, but Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave a speech earlier this month that went quite a great deal further than the typical admonishment about the need to rebalance civilian and military aspects of national security. There’s a line in Mullen’s speech about how the combatant commanders have actually gotten too powerful. You can be cynical and say, Well, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, being outside of the chain of command, is necessarily in tension with the combatant commanders, so that’s to be expected. But Mullen is said to have quite a good relationship with the commanders, and so perhaps he was gently pointing out some of the wages of this structural deficiency. More tomorrow morning!