Our guest blogger is Brian Katulis, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

As indicated by a Washington Post story earlier in the week on the U.S. military’s clandestine involvement in operations in Yemen and the news that more special forces are headed there, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) has been playing an increasingly central role in U.S. national security in many corners of the globe.

The clandestine nature of JSOC’s activities mean public information on its work is scant. But if you carefully look into press accounts from the world’s conflict zones — Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia — you will find JSOC there, among other places.

Conservatives who prattle on about President Obama’s being weak on terrorist groups fail to recognize that the Obama administration has used JSOC forces with increasing frequency around the world. The Obama administration may no longer use the phrase “global war on terror,” but one year into office, it’s clear that it hasn’t let up on aggressively pursuing terrorist networks around the world. Whether these efforts are making America safer in the overall is simply unknown — more than eight years after the 9/11 attacks, America still lacks empirical metrics to determine whether any of our global efforts are reducing these threats.

JSOC falls under the umbrella of the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), which has about 60,000 personnel. A Congressional Research Service report from last year offers a few useful facts about USSOCOM. The 2004 Unified Command Plan gave USSOCOM responsibility for synchronizing Pentagon plans against global terror networks and conducting global operations. It plays an important role in countering terrorist finance. In 2008, USSOCOM was assigned the role of synchronizing the Pentagon’s security force assistance programs around the world, and this is what David Ignatius was referring to in his column earlier this week. These security force assistance programs are a central national security policy tool, though one with real downsides if not managed properly. As my colleague Peter Juul noted in this post on Pakistan, if America’s bilateral military relationship is not handled properly, it could cancel out efforts to change the “transactional” nature of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship.

Relatively little public information is available on USSOCOM, but two recent speeches — one by Admiral Eric T. Olson, the USSOCOM’s top military commander last year and another in 2008 by Michael Vickers, assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict — present an informative picture of just how wide-ranging the activities of USSOCOM are, including things that fall into categories that civilian agencies are charged with, too.

JSOC is just one component of the Special Operations Command efforts. Given its increasingly central role, however, it deserves more oversight from Congress and more attention in our national security discussions.

Vice President Biden has an important op-ed today in the Wall Street Journal. In it, Biden firmly addresses one of the main arguments used by conservatives to oppose arms-control efforts, namely that the US nuclear stockpile is too unreliable to make further reductions. In response, Biden says the Administration is committed to reverse the previous decade of funding shortfalls in nuclear stockpile maintenance and will dramatically increase the budget for these programs:

Among the many challenges our administration inherited was the slow but steady decline in support for our nuclear stockpile and infrastructure, and for our highly trained nuclear work force. … For almost a decade, our laboratories and facilities have been underfunded and undervalued. … The budget we will submit to Congress on Monday both reverses this decline and enables us to implement the president’s nuclear-security agenda. To achieve these goals, our budget devotes $7 billion for maintaining our nuclear-weapons stockpile and complex, and for related efforts. This commitment is $600 million more than Congress approved last year. And over the next five years we intend to boost funding for these important activities by more than $5 billion.

This should address the stated concerns of conservative GOP Senators who wrote a letter last month worrying about the state of the nuclear stockpile in the face of future cuts in the nuclear arsenal. In other words, conservatives argue, reasonably enough, that if you have fewer nukes then we have to be sure that the remaining nuclear weapons are good to go. The problem however, is that instead of focusing on expanding resources to programs that maintain the reliability of our remaining nuclear weapons, prominent conservatives in the Senate stamp their feet demanding that we start building new nuclear weapons. This is like instead of taking your perfectly fine car to get a tune-up, you just decide to buy an entirely new one. It’s wasteful and unnecessary.

Numerous studies have pointed out that there is no need to build a new nuclear warhead or test nuclear weapons as long as there is adequate funding to maintain the nuclear stockpile. Biden’s increase in funding will ensure that, as the Arms Control Association notes, “the United States can continue maintain a reliable arsenal without resuming nuclear testing or building newly-designed nuclear warheads.”

Yet many conservatives prefer just to pretend these studies don’t exist. Senators like Jon Kyl (R-AZ), want to build new nuclear weapons and want to conduct new nuclear tests and pledge to fight tooth and nail against ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Many are predicting that because of this opposition, CTBT will go nowhere in the Senate, as it needs 67 votes. But with still 59 Democrats, and with Republican non-proliferation advocates like Senator Dick Lugar, not to mention the Senators from Utah and Nevada that have a strong opposition to ever testing nukes again, there is a fighting chance that this treaty could get passed. Importantly, Biden didn’t walk away from it and included CTBT ratification as part of the Administration’s core nuclear security agenda in his op-ed:

Our budget request is just one of several closely related and equally important initiatives giving life to the president’s Prague agenda. Others include…and pursuing ratification and entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Instead of shirking from the fight, the Administration should plow forward and push the CTBT, because as former Republican Senator from Utah, Jake Garn, wrote today in the Deseret News, “Ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty will make our country safer.”

Last night the U.S. Senate showed that, as opposed to the gridlock that prevents the passing of needed reforms that would actually benefit the American people, when it comes to ill-conceived, poorly designed measures that provide legislators an easy way feel like they’re “getting tough” on something or other, it can move with a quickness.

In a voice vote, the Senate passed a new sanctions passage targeting “gasoline imports in a bid to force Tehran to bow to global pressure to freeze its suspect nuclear program.”

The sweeping measure, which passed by voice vote, must now be blended with a similar bill in the House of Representatives to forge a compromise measure for both sides to approve and send to President Barack Obama.

The Senate bill aims to punish non-Iranian firms that do business in Iran’s energy sector or help the Islamic republic produce or import refined petroleum products like gasoline by blocking them from doing business in the US market.

Indicating that they intend to keep up the pressure on the administration to immediately adopt these sanctions once passed, on Wednesday a group of senators — Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IL), Ben Cardin (D-MD), Johnny Isakson (R-GA), David Vitter (R-LA), John McCain (R-AZ), Sen. Robert Casey (D-PA), and Sen, Chuck Schumer (D-NY) — sent President Obama a letter “urging” him “to make full use of them.” This despite clear past signals from the administration that the indiscriminate sanctions in the bill actually works against the goal of targeted sanctions and tightening pre-existing sanctions. (Gregg Carlstrom notes that administration figures have recently stepped up their talk of sanctions, but I don’t think qualifies as an “endorsement” of this package as much as an acceptance that it was going through, and of the need to work with Congress over its implementation.)

As I have noted in previous posts, there’s not a single analyst in Washington — or anywhere — who has credibly described how these particular sanctions stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon — let alone advance “the human rights and peaceful aspirations of the Iranian people,” as the senators’ letter claims.

Recently, two leading Iran experts, Patrick Clawson of the conservative-leaning Washington Institute for Near East Policy and Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations, came out against new sanctions. Speaking at an event at the Washington Institute, Takeyh called sanctions “a fallback policy for the United States often when the situation becomes complicated,” and that he was “not comfortable with the idea of sanctions as a solution to the Iran problem, whether it’s the domestic problem, or the nuclear problem.”

Clawson reminded the audience that there are a number of sanctions on the books that have effectively slowed Iran’s nuclear program, and said that he was interested in “more vigorous enforcement of tough dual-use sanctions than I am necessarily about extending the list of sanctions.”

The United Nations sanctions are often dismissed as being “token.” That seems to me to be a profound misreading. It is very important to have dual-use sanctions, it is very important to have sanctions targeted at the nuclear and missile programs, because anything we can do to slow down their programs helps us. There are two clocks ticking — that’s an old cliche, but it’s true, the democracy clock seems to be ticking a lot faster than it used to be at the moment. So anything we can do to slow down the nuclear clock is, therefore, in fact, an accomplishment. Iran has been at this nuclear business for twenty years. Twenty years and they’re still not there, and the reason is, in no small part, because we have forced them to reinvent the wheel repeatedly. And recently some of the things they’ve been able to acquire from abroad don’t seem to work quite as designed, and malfunction on a remarkably consistent basis. That is good, and there’s much more that we can do.

On the specific question of gasoline sanctions such as those contained in the package just passed, Clawson warned “There are a lot of implementation challenges to gasoline sanctions, and I don’t like adopting a sanction which, in fact, we’re not prepared to implement.”

So I would not adopt a sanction on gasoline imports into Iran unless we are prepared to sink Venezuelan ships carrying that gasoline. Now, if we are prepared to do that, then let’s talk. But if you’re not prepared to sink those Venezuelan ships carrying that gasoline to Iran, don’t adopt the measures just to make you feel good, because it’s going to make you look impotent.

This gets at the inherently escalatory nature of sanctions. When the first round doesn’t work well enough, there’s the impulse to add more and more, and eventually you need to do dumb things like sink oil tankers to show you “mean business.” Casting a vote for more Iran sanctions may give legislators a warm feeling, but they will do little to solve the problem of the Iranian nuclear program, and make the U.S. look impotent in the process.

Yesterday, ThinkProgress joined a handful of journalists for a wide-ranging discussion with David Axelrod, Senior Adviser to President Obama. In his State of the Union address on Wednesday night, Obama announced a discretionary spending freeze that excluded the massive budgets of the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security.

“Can you tell the American people that there aren’t any savings to be found in the Defense and Homeland Security budgets?” ThinkProgress asked Axelrod. The President’s Senior Adviser acknowledged, no, “I can’t tell you that” there aren’t savings which can be found there.

Axelrod highlighted prior efforts by the administration to rein in defense spending and insisted that further cuts could still be made. Yet the Pentagon budget — which is expected to exceed $700 billion when Obama unveils his budget on Feb. 1st — remains inexplicably exempt from the spending freeze.

“We live in a dangerous world,” Axelrod said in trying to justify the special exclusion for the defense budget. “What we can’t do at a time when we’re in two wars and we have a very determined enemy in Al Qaeda, we can’t stand down,” he added in an interview with Fox News. Yet, rather than carve out an exclusion to fund troops in the field, the administration opted for a more expansive exclusion. And while cuts might indeed be made to certain programs, the overall Pentagon budget will be allowed to increase without having to face the difficult tradeoffs that other departments will.

Asked whether politics played any part in the decision to carve out a special exclusion for national security-related budgets, Axelrod denied that it did. “There weren’t any meetings that I was in where that was talked about,” he told us.

As Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Lawrence Korb has argued, “If President Obama is serious about controlling spending, he can’t exempt the Pentagon.” And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) concurs, telling reporters yesterday that the entire defense budget “should not be exempted” from the freeze.

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