ARTICLE: "Pentagon now can help foreign militaries: Up to $200 million in spending not limited by foreign-aid rules raises worries," by Bradley Graham, Washington Post, 29 January 2006, pulled from web.

State is supposed to determine foreign aid, but Don Rumsfeld snuck in a tiny bit of transformative change in this year's defense budget just signed: operational response funds not previously tied to any one intervention--in effect, a contingency fund of the sort that Congress simply does not grant DoD and even rarely grants State's U.S. Agency for International Development (whose own budget is weighed down with earmark after earmark).

This is pure SysAdmin money, used to build capacity as required by interventions as they occur, and Rumsfeld got Rice to agree with that.

Call this a major lesson learned from Iraq, where the Coalition Provisional Authority's civilians initially ran the retraining of Iraqi security forces--right into the ground until the military took over in the spring of 2004 and newly minted Lt. Gen. David Petraeus stepped to the fore.

DoD and Rummy asked for $750 million, and Congress shortchanged them down to $200 million, giving the concept a two-year lease on life, just so all the Hill members who don't even own a passport can second-guess the military's combatant commanders 24 months down the road of this Global War on Terrorism.

Score one for Rummy, though. When the Pentagon starts openly looting the foreign aid budget, then the SysAdmin's clearly on the rise...