As the head of a major State Department office that oversees some $40 billion annually in global arms transfers, the crises in Ukraine and Israel have Mira Resnick up to her knees in work.
The days may be long, but Resnick, deputy assistant secretary for the Regional Security Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, knows how important the job is for the country and to help manage the dual conflicts.
“We are going to handle both because we will have to handle both,” she told The Hill in a recent interview. “And the secretary has said before that we have to walk and chew gum at the same time … so that is what we will do. Our partners rely on us, and we will be there for them.”
Resnick oversees the bureau’s Office of Regional Security and Arms Transfers, making her the person on the State Department side behind all the defense equipment and weapons headed to embattled countries, such as Ukraine. She works closely with other officials in the federal government, including the Pentagon, in a key partnership that ensures the transfers get to where they need to go.
Resnick is also managing peacetime security aid to countries, including Egypt, and is overseeing critical work ensuring nations have military grant assistance and the financing to purchase U.S. equipment.
It’s a big task: Resnick usually travels twice per month, has daily intelligence readings, frequent meetings with leadership and even calls her work partners on the way home and before bed.
“We are in constant motion here,” she said.
“I’ve been interested in foreign policy for as long as I can remember,” says Resnick, who grew up in California. “The U.S.-Israel relationship was a private focus in my household because of my Jewish background, but also because we were just a politically aware family.”
She studied political science at Columbia University, where she graduated in 2005, and later earned a master’s degree in security studies from the Pentagon-funded National Defense University.
She jumped into foreign policy work with Congress not long after leaving the school, working for multiple Democratic lawmakers, including Rep. Bill Keating (Mass.) and former Reps. Henry Waxman (Calif.), Ron Klein (Fla.) and Steve Israel (N.Y.).
This lengthy experience on Capitol Hill has proved invaluable, says Resnick, who works closely with Congress to make sure everyone is “on the same page.”
Resnick’s first foray in the State Department was from 2011 to 2013, when she worked as a congressional liaison in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs.
But she transitioned back to work for the House Foreign Affairs Committee before assuming her current position in January 2021, when President Biden came into office.
Resnick says she rejoined the State Department out of interest in advancing peace and security, primarily in the Middle East, and restoring ties with alliance members.
This month’s conflict in Israel with the Palestinian militant group Hamas has shocked her deeply.
“I think it’s been hard for everyone on a human level,” Resnick says.
She has helped speed up emergency air defense munitions to Israel in the wake of the war, working with the Israeli government to allow private citizens to donate equipment, such as body armor, and is also pushing an effort to potentially get Israel more assistance through foreign military financing.
The frenzy in responding to Israel’s needs reminds Resnick of the first days of the war in Ukraine in February 2022.
“The early days were full of urgent requirements, making sure that our partners were communicating with us, and that we were communicating with our partners as they sought to send U.S. origin equipment to Ukraine,” she says.
Congress quickly passed legislation that awarded billions of dollars to Ukraine, which led to an immediate and ongoing effort to ensure weapons and equipment are being used properly.
“We knew [it was] going to be a tremendous challenge to keep track of,” Resnick says. “We knew that there was going to be a lot of oversight, and there should be a lot of oversight on this money, and so we took that opportunity to develop standard operating procedures to develop training for our Ukrainian colleagues and to work with them to really press on the importance of making sure that they are using the equipment and that they are not diverting it to other sources.”
The U.S. has provided $43.9 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Russia first invaded.
Washington gets military equipment to Ukraine through presidential drawdown authority, which takes from existing military stocks; third-party transfers, which involve working with allied nations to move U.S. defense articles; and purchasing from the defense industry directly.
Resnick’s office works “very closely” with the Pentagon, she says, but State has the authority on third-party transfers.
She also emphasizes a key part of her job is “to work on ways that we can help partners diversify away from Russia” by meeting their security needs instead.
And it’s not just Ukraine and Israel. Countries around the globe are relying on Resnick and the U.S., including the independent island nation of Taiwan, which is increasingly being threatened by China.
There has been a major backlog of weapons to Taiwan, but Resnick said the U.S. is drawing lessons from the challenges, particularly in cooperating with the defense industry.
“We want to make sure items are getting on an island quickly, we want industry to take that very seriously,” she says, noting it can take up to four years to build an F-16. “We all need to do better.”
But the most important work for Resnick is actually something much simpler and core to the function of government: protecting human rights.
She was a major force behind the Biden administration overhauling its guidelines on conventional weapons transfers earlier this year.
The revised code requires a stricter review of whether any arms transfer is likely to violate human rights or international war laws.
Resnick says the Biden administration “set a new standard for when we would not conduct a transfer.”
“This was my goal in the beginning of my administration,” she says. “To make sure that we could have a conventional arms transfer policy that reflected this administration’s commitment to putting human rights at the center of our foreign policy.”