The new American way of war, says Defense Secretary Robert Gates, will be to prevent costly and controversial military interventions. That will be achieved not by being isolationist, but by helping governments in weak nations root out terrorists.
“Let’s be honest with ourselves,” Gates said in a speech to the National Defense University. “The most likely catastrophic threats to our homeland — for example, an American city poisoned or reduced to rubble by a terrorist attack — are more likely to emanate from failing states than from aggressor states.”
It is not yet clear, however, exactly how the Defense Department will execute this form of preventive warfare. If the U.S. military will be in the business of helping to strengthen weak states and in the process root out terrorists, how will the military organize, train and equip forces for these missions?
The inauguration of a new Africa Command last month was put forth as proof that the Pentagon is serious about applying “soft power” in areas of the world considered to be safe havens for terrorist groups. A new 208-page stability operations field manual published last month by the U.S. Army is yet another indicator that the military will effectively be in charge of nation-building efforts that in the past had been regarded as the purview of the State Department.
The manual, known as FM 3.07, was intended to provide guidance to both military and civilian agencies, said Army Gen. William Wallace, head of the Training and Doctrine Command. He said the manual was co-authored with “interagency partners,” primarily the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the State Department.
“It’s our expectation that that manual will become a handbook for both uniformed personnel and non-uniformed personnel that are operating in one of these contemporary operational environment situations,” Wallace told reporters. “We developed the manual specifically to bridge the gap between the acronyms and lexicon of the interagency and the acronyms and lexicon of the military so that instead of talking past each other we’re talking with each other.”
Gates noted that the United States is not likely to repeat the “forced regime change followed by nation-building under fire” of Iraq and Afghanistan, but it may encounter “similar challenges” elsewhere. He suggested that only by understanding the dangers that could arise from insurgencies and failed states can the United States avoid being blindsided in the future.
In addition to nation-building and reconstruction, a major component of stability operations will be the training of foreign troops in remote areas of the world. So far most of the training duties have been the responsibility of special operations forces such as Army Green Berets. Gates is now calling for the “institutionalization” of stability operations throughout the military. But it remains to be seen how this goal will be accomplished.
“It’s not only a question of whether the Defense Department is serious about it but how this is going to be funded and implemented over the next several years,” said Nathan Hughes, military analyst for Stratfor, a private intelligence firm. “How much of a priority can it be realistically, with this need to consolidate the gains we have in Iraq and make the situation stable there?”
Any number of issues could force the United States to relegate overseas security cooperation to the back burner, he said.
“We’ve got a switch in the White House. We’ve got a budget crisis and a very limited amount of resources,” Hughes said. “It’s not a matter of ‘we don’t have enough troops to go around,’ but ‘we don’t have enough money to go around.’”
Emergency supplemental funds will decline, Hughes said. “We’ve done a lot of supplemental spending as a crutch to fund everything.”
Any emergency funds will go to Iraq and Afghanistan, he said. “You can’t do all these things in our current budget, something’s going to have to give,” he said.
Defense contractors are watching these issues closely as they try to gauge future business opportunities. Firms such as Lockheed Martin Corp., which traditionally have focused on big-ticket military hardware, see a growing market for companies that can support stability operations because the military is stretched thin and needs outside help — particularly in civilian-oriented jobs such as reconstruction and infrastructure development.
Mike Dignam, president of Lockheed Martin’s readiness and stability operations, said he believes the United States is serious about stability operations.
This mission has “pretty broad bipartisan support,” he said in an interview.
Lockheed Martin already is seeing a growing workload in Africa. The company is building four “super camps” for U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur, and is training and equipping peacekeeping troops. In the last several years, Lockheed has built more than 30 camps in the north Darfur region in anticipation of U.N. plans to ramp up its mission there. In September, Lockheed received a $60 million contract from the State Department to provide transportation for four Rwandan infantry battalions and their equipment in that region.
In a different part of Africa, the State Department has contracted Lockheed to train Liberian forces as the country rebuilds its military after a devastating war. The company is also schooling local forces in international human rights norms.
Africa Command is expected to take a broader view of the needs in that area, said spokesman Vince Crawley. In Africa, conflict often tends to spill across borders. One unstable nation could cause another to topple, as seen in Liberia’s conflict, which led to the war in Sierra Leone.
“One of the things we’re trying to do is to take a more regional, continental wide perspective,” he said. “The U.S. military has been working in Africa for decades, but it’s been on a bilateral basis.”
In 2006, for example, Botswana helped rotate Rwandan peacekeepers to Darfur with the help of three C-130 aircraft, which the United States had donated.
A U.S. Air Force team in Botswana recently showed local forces how to load aircraft for tactical missions. “They’ve been wanting to do more of those types of engagements,” said Mike Casciaro, deputy chief of the security cooperation programs division at Africa Command.
Casciaro said that Liberia has been receiving military aid from the United States for the last couple of years. It is currently using $4 million of those funds to work with Africa Command in building a coast guard.
U.S. forces have embedded mentors in Liberia’s military to ensure that personnel are properly trained. The program is coupled with international military education and training, or IMET, a State Department program, which prepares students for basic military courses in the United States.
Africa Command also is helping educate militaries in HIV/AIDS awareness, and is involved in HIV test programs, said Army Col. Donald Zimmer, the command’s chief of security cooperation programs.
Soldiers in South Africa’s army are twice as likely to carry the virus, Crawley said.
In Djibouti, Africa Command will continue to train the country’s coast guard to use small boats. Its naval forces were provided 25-meter, defender class boats and are being trained to patrol coastal waters, Zimmer said. Djibouti is located next to Somalia, which is home to criminal organizations that engage in terrorism and piracy.
The U.S. military is engaging in a small number of humanitarian projects. The number is miniscule compared to what USAID does, Crawley said. Africa Command plans to increase its role in humanitarian work, he noted. The goal is to influence host nations’ militaries so they get out of their barracks and assist locals. “It promotes the idea of a military being there as servants of the people, not just as a guarantor of the government’s security,” Crawley said.
Sometimes security cooperation can be suspended, as was the case after a coup in Mauritania.
While military-civilian work has been growing, two Government Accountability Office reports last year highlighted the lack of coordination between the Defense Department and other agencies. The GAO recommended that Congress require the Pentagon to develop an action plan on how it will address these issues.
Still, the military has had some success working with civilian agencies, both inside and outside of Africa. A U.S. team has been working in Mindanao, an autonomous Muslim region in the southern Philippines where there is an ongoing insurgency. The team is made up of a military advisory group, a USAID mission and representatives from the U.S. Commerce and Treasury departments. This is all done under the auspices of the Filipino government, said Thomas Baltazar, director of the office of military affairs at USAID.
U.S. military personnel train Filipino troops in counterinsurgency tactics. The Filipino army clears the area and hands it over to another Filipino unit. USAID then assists locals in rebuilding their infrastructure, “which includes education and health and all of those sectors that we take for granted,” Baltazar said. The agency works through the governor to provide technical and vocational training and helps establish micro-lending offices.
“If you can provide an alternative livelihood, the people who have been fighting are less likely to go back into the bush and continue to fight,” Baltazar said.
There has been similar partnership in Colombia. U.S. forces provide military training and USAID tackles the civilian end, helping to turn rebels back into productive members of society. USAID has helped to provide job training, counseling and education.
There are times when civilian-military cooperation makes sense and other times when it is inappropriate, Baltazar said. The military should never be involved in banking or setting up government bureaucracies. Those are civilian responsibilities, Baltazar said.
“In most of the developing world, governments are very wary of their respective militaries’ dominance in the government structure,” Baltazar said.
Mark Schroeder, Sub-Saharan Africa analyst at Stratfor, said there are many security cooperation success stories, such as Liberia.
“[Security cooperation] has stabilized the country to the effect that no insurgency is going on and the government is not threatened,” he said.
Diplomats have praised Gates’ attempts to highlight the importance of nation-building as a means to prevent full-scale wars, but they remain skeptical that the civilian agencies will have the clout to help achieve these goals considering that the the ratio between military and non-military national security spending is now 17 to 1.
A study released last month by the Rand Corp. and the American Academy of Diplomacy suggested that the United States needs to “shift substantial resources” to the State Department and USAID.
The primary author of the report was Robert Hunter, former U.S. ambassador to NATO. He said the report’s recommendations are in line with Gates’ idea that the United States should have “robust civilian capabilities available [that] could make it less likely that military force will have to be used in the first place.”