Below is the prepared testimony that Assistant Secretary Ford delivered to the Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific, and Nonproliferation of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives on September 26, 2019. 

Good afternoon, Chairman Sherman, Ranking Minority Member Yoho, and Representatives. Thank you for giving me the chance to appear before you today to outline our vision and priorities at the State Department’s Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation (ISN).

As reflected on our  website , ISN’s primary mission is to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction, delivery systems, and destabilizing advanced conventional weapons capabilities, as well as to help roll back such proliferation where it has already taken root. This is a critical U.S. national security objective – one emphasized in both the  2017 National Security Strategy and the  2018 National Defense Strategy – and we in the ISN Bureau are proud of our contributions to this mission.

Precisely how we live out our roles and responsibilities in support of U.S. national security and foreign policy priorities, however, is (and must always be) a work in progress, tailored on an ongoing basis to the nature and severity of the threats facing our nation in light of the policy priorities of the administration. I am pleased to take this opportunity to set forth how we are presently working to leverage the Bureau’s talented personnel, diverse skills, resources, and experience to protect and advance U.S. interests in today’s very challenging security environment.

I hope that insight into our vision for this work will be of use to you as you evaluate our bureau and its resourcing. To be as helpful as I can about answering your questions, I will truncate my initial remarks in the interest of brevity – but I respectfully request that the full version of my prepared comments be entered into the record.

For longtime observers of U.S. nonproliferation policy, much of what we are doing is unsurprising. Fortunately, nonproliferation has tended to enjoy strong bipartisan support in Washington, and many of our key priorities and objectives have remained fundamentally unchanged for many years. There is also much in the approach being taken by today’s ISN, however, that is quite new and innovative. I am pleased to have the chance to highlight to you both what remains important and what is new.

I. Our Enduring Agenda

In the past, ISN generally conceived its mission as being principally about “nonproliferation” in a narrow sense – that is, about preventing the flow of sensitive technology and materials to rogue regimes or terrorists and supporting nonproliferation-related multilateral regimes.  All this we still do, Mr. Chairman, and I daresay we do it well. I have my capable predecessors, as well as a longstanding tradition of strong support in the U.S. Congress, to thank for having such a capable team at ISN, and such a strong record of accomplishment for us to build upon in these regards.

All of this work, Mr. Chairman, is devoted to making sure that it is as difficult, costly, expensive, and painful as possible for rogue regimes and terrorists to acquire WMD, delivery systems, or advanced conventional weapons. This is our “traditional nonproliferation” mission, and it is exceedingly important work. Nevertheless, this is not all we do.

II. Reforming and Improving

We are also hard at work to ensure that we do all of this as efficiently and effectively as possible. As an example, we are undertaking a broad reform of our programming efforts to ensure that ISN is as responsible and effective as possible as a steward of the funds that Congress and the U.S. taxpayer have entrusted us to manage in support of international security and nonproliferation equities.

We are, for instance, building new evaluative mechanisms into our programming to ensure that we target spending as directly as possible against concrete security threats and the highest priority challenges facing U.S. foreign and national security policy, that we re-evaluate programming decisions on an ongoing basis in order to maximize their responsiveness to evolving circumstances, and that we “graduate” recipients of our assistance as their national or institutional capacities improve so as always to be devoting our capacity-building resources to the most pressing security needs. To this end, Mr. Chairman, we have also been migrating our programming funds from rigid, country-specific efforts into more flexible regional or global accounts that will permit us to maintain appropriately threat-prioritized allocations in a rapidly changing environment. We are grateful for the support we have received both from the Department and from Congress in these reform efforts, and for continued funding for our nonproliferation programming, which faces an ever growing list of threats to address as part of our mission to prevent the spread of WMD, delivery systems, and advanced conventional weapons capabilities – and rolling back such proliferation where it has already taken root.

In line with these reform efforts, in the past two of the President’s budgets, the Department requested that the Congress grant full notwithstanding authority for three ISN programs to counter WMD proliferation threats that emerge from state sponsors of terrorism and gross violators of human rights. This would provide these ISN nonproliferation programs a similar notwithstanding authority as other State programs, such as those of the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, and ensure that all necessary tools are available to hold regimes such as North Korea and Iran accountable. This would enable us to implement programs to address proliferation threats in countries where we lack this authority. This request is not intended to use foreign assistance dollars to build the capabilities of states that violate United Nations Security Council Resolutions and break international commitments, but to identify and help prevent proliferation activities anywhere they may occur.

Internally, moreover, ISN has greatly improved mutual situational awareness and coordination between our “policy” and “programming” offices, to maximize their effectiveness as collaborative team members. Indeed, we have been working to replicate this approach on a multilateral basis, by encouraging analogous moves by our diplomatic partners and in fora such as our Global Partnership and Nonproliferation Directors Group engagements.

Nor have we restricted our innovations to the U.S. interagency and our work with diplomatic counterparts. We have also placed a very high priority upon public outreach and engagement, to explain what we have been doing on all fronts, to outline the thinking behind it, and – frankly – to evangelize for sound nonproliferation and international security policies across the entire range of Bureau mission areas. We are proud, Mr. Chairman, not just of the work we are doing, but of the robust public record we are building about that work – hopefully, not merely as another bureaucratic participant but also as an example and an inspiration to others both at home and abroad.

III. Evolving New Missions

But these days we do even more than this, Mr. Chairman. ISN now also uses our nonproliferation-derived tools and expertise to support U.S. national security and geopolitical strategy more broadly. Most of all, in this respect, we are building new lines of effort in support of our nation’s competitive strategy. This undertaking is appropriate for an era in which high-level U.S. national security documents such as the National Security Strategy and the National Defense Strategy place special priority upon meeting the challenges presented by the revisionist powers of China and Russia – as well as the threats that Iran and North Korea present.

As the U.S. government as a whole is in the process of reorienting itself increasingly toward broader strategic challenges, Mr. Chairman – including to the exigencies of counterstrategy, especially vis-à-vis revisionist China – we are making such work an increasingly important part of the ISN Bureau’s activity. All ISN offices are exploring how they can contribute better to these strategic goals, and we are reorienting parts of the Bureau to facilitate this.

We certainly haven’t abandoned the traditional priorities, which often provide a vital foundation for our new and emerging missions, and we still work at them faithfully, diligently, and effectively. But we are also mindful that state-on-state challenges never went away over the last quarter century, and that certain other powers have been hard at work on their own strategies against us while we were preoccupied with other matters. It is now a key part of our mission to contribute to U.S. competitive strategy in response to these challenges – on top of all of the other vital things our bureau does.

IV. Conclusion

We are proud of all we are doing in support of these U.S. national security and foreign policy priorities, Mr. Chairman. It remains an immense honor and a great pleasure to lead this superbly talented team of Civil Service, Foreign Service, and contract experts devoted to protecting and advancing the interests of our great Republic in a challenging and dangerous world and helping make that challenging world a less dangerous place.

As I hope I’ve made clear, we are working enormously hard on a great many fronts in our efforts to make the American people safer and more prosperous in the face of a broadly deteriorating global security environment. Doing all of this is hardly easy, and our staff has basically been engaged in a sort of “marathon sprint” for the last couple of years. We are enormously grateful for the support we’ve received from Congress, and we look forward to continuing to work with you and your colleagues on these great collective challenges in the months and years ahead.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I look forward to your questions.

-- Christopher Ford