Breaking things is easy. Putting them back together is much harder.
The ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have proven that stability operations, or “winning the peace,” after major combat has ended can take years and require skills in areas where the military doesn’t have a great deal of expertise.
To solve this, the U.S. government has demanded that other departments add their personnel and knowledge to these nation-building efforts.
The U.S. Agency for International Development can lend a hand with poverty alleviation projects, the Department of Justice can help build legal institutions, the Department of Treasury can assist in jumpstarting broken economies, and so on.
But civilian agencies and the military don’t always “play well together.”
This interagency friction was laid bare by recent comments by Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, who served two tours of duty in Iraq.
He spoke of having to “force the State Department” to bend to the military’s will.
“You do have to sometimes be heavy handed and say, ‘This is what you’re going to do or we’re going to stop the convoy support for you. What do you say about that, Mr. Ambassador?’” he said at the Association of the U.S. Army annual meeting.
“Those are the sorts of things that military guys have to do,” he added.
The “whole government” approach to rebuilding war-torn nations is nevertheless moving forward. USAID is in the process of building a Civilian Response Corps, which will comprise nonmilitary personnel from nine agencies who can deploy to areas in need of assistance with only a few day’s notice (see related story). And after years of declining budgets and personnel losses, the State Department and USAID are being given more funds to rebuild their staffs.
While there is consensus that the rest of the federal government needs to lend a helping hand, and that the military can’t be expected to bear all the burdens of nation building, there are plenty of skeptics and many unanswered questions.
“What’s missing? How do we pull it together? How do we have an integrated structure? How will we communicate and interact with each other?” asked retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni at a National Defense Industrial Association stability, security, transition and reconstruction operations conference.
“We’re very good at building defensive alliances, military alliances. Have we ever really truly built an alliance that dealt with development? That dealt with collective diplomacy? That dealt with all the issues that now come part and parcel to the conflict that go beyond just the application of military force?” he asked.
Part of the problem stems from a lack of planning, he said. Commanders are renowned for creating detailed plans for military operations. There are probably 11 such war scenarios for conflict on the Korean peninsula, he said.
“Do you think there is a plan for reconstruction equal in scope? It’s not the case,” he said.
William Schneider, former chairman of the Defense Science Board, said in the aftermath of World War II, there were detailed plans for the reconstruction of war-torn nations. But by the time Vietnam came around, he observed that battlefield victories were not followed by effective stability operations and reconstruction efforts.
The Defense Science Board under his tenure wrote three reports on stability operations and interagency coordination. Stabilization and reconstruction capabilities need “to be a core competency of the government,” he said at the NDIA conference.
“There is a very substantial capacity to promote economic and political reform within U.S. government agencies, but they are poorly coordinated due to a lack of planning mechanisms,” he said.
The Defense Department has the most effective planning processes, but the State Department is poorly resourced and staffed, he added.
Zinni proposed that the Defense Department set up a civil affairs command “and put it on steroids.” Efforts at nation building so far have been “little Band-Aid approaches’’— ad hoc solutions where military and civilian agency personnel first encounter each other in the aftermath of battles even though nation building “is the heart and soul of our national security strategy going forward and what we need to do,” said Zinni.
The military in Zinni’s proposed civil affairs command would not attempt to tackle economic, political and social issues. This would be left for the civilian agencies. However the Defense Department could “provide the glue” — the administration, logistics, transportation and security — for which the military has unique capabilities.
Meanwhile, “we’re all showing up on the field at the same time and we haven’t really built an integration system for this.”
Zinni admitted that his proposal has not been greeted with enthusiasm from State Department or USAID personnel.
Susan Reichle, deputy assistant administrator at USAID’s bureau for democracy, conflict and humanitarian assistance, said instead of a new military-led command, her agency and the State Department should be allowed to rebuild the capacity to take on this kind of work. Civil affairs experts are highly skilled and highly trained, she added.
“It is not as easy as just training people to switch between different functions during the day,” she said. “The answer is partnerships.”
A Rand Corp. study written for the Army in 2008 and recently released to the public, “Integrating Civilian Agencies in Stability Operations,” addressed some of these staffing issues. It identified USAID and the State Department as the two key partner agencies the Army will have to work with.
“While civilian agencies clearly have many of the capabilities required in [stabilization, security, transition and reconstruction] operations, they lack the capacity,” the report said. The two agencies are “relatively small organizations with limited surge capacity to support large-scale, complex … operations.” The Army’s civil affairs organizations “dwarf” those of USAID and State, it said.
The report broke down the three major problems the Army will encounter when working with interagency partners: a lack of civilian agency financial resources and constraints as to how these resources are used; shortage of personnel who can deploy to foreign locales; and approaches to planning that are not compatible with the military.
The constraint on resources is largely an issue with Congress, said Schneider.
The appropriations subcommittees include strict language in their bills as to how these agencies can spend their funds. It puts them in constrained “lanes of which bureaucracies cannot break away from and gives little leeway,” he said.
“The executive branch needs to come up with some coherent coordination mechanism so the appropriators are confident that the money that the State Department spends in support of DoD missions will be well spent in appropriation terms,” Schneider said. “I think that’s an achievable aspiration, but an aspiration that will require root canal work on the appropriation process.”
USAID and the State Department are in the process of doubling their foreign service numbers.
Reichle, who has attended the National Defense University and worked closely with the U.S. military in a program to pacify an area in Colombia, acknowledged that she has colleagues who are wary of working with the military.
“It sort of prompts people to say, ‘Why is USAID there?’ We need to make that ‘No. Why is USAID not there?’”
There is now an office of military affairs in USAID, a development that she calls “revolutionary.”
While USAID personnel are experienced in working in developing nations under less than ideal conditions, they are not accustomed to working in war zones, she added.
“This is changing the mentality of the foreign service. We have to be responsive. We have to be the pointy edge of the sword.”
As far as resources are concerned, she said, “We don’t want to be the step-children. We want to be included in the resourcing requirements that are needed in order to achieve our national security objectives.”
Civilian agency personnel such as Reichle who want to move interagency cooperation forward are the exception rather than the rule, suggested the Rand report. Policy direction has flowed from the top down in the form of two documents put forth in 2005. National Security Presidential Directive-44 gives broad outlines as to how the interagency process should approach stability operations. The Department of Defense Directive 3000.05 revamped the way the armed services should approach the problem.
“High-level exhortations and directives for organizational action that are not aligned with the basic mission of an organization do not have much chance for success,” the Rand report said.
High level political support “tends to be fleeting.” Reshuffling resources requires flexibility, which is something the civil agencies do not possess.
Schneider said appropriations subcommittees will continue to constrain the activities of the State Department, and that will be reinforced by cultural issues.
“This kind of interagency work is not as highly rewarded in terms of career path as activities that are more traditionally associated with diplomatic functions,” he said.
One critic of the military’s growing role in stability operations is Adrian R. Lewis, a professor of history, retired Army major and director of the office of professional military graduate education at the University of Kansas.
“We have to do this nation building, I understand that, but the armed forces are too small to do everything they’re being asked to do right now and it is causing us problems in various parts of the world,” he told National Defense.
It’s true that the nation did a good job of stability operations after World War II, but it had some 8.8 million enlisted personnel in 1945 to carry out these tasks, said Lewis, who authored the book, “The American Culture of War: A History of American Military Force from World War II to Operation Iraqi Freedom.”
With only 500,000 to 600,000 soldiers in the Army’s active force, multiple tours, and few strategic reserves available, the Army is stretched too thin, he said.
“There are still conventional threats out there. But where is the Army? Spread out all over the world doing this stuff,” Lewis said.
And yet, the only organization capable of doing large-scale stability operations is the Army, he said. Other agencies can lend a helping hand, but aren’t capable of taking over the job, he added.
There is an emerging model of how the interagency process can work, said Air Force Maj. Clifton D. Reed in an Air Command and Staff College research paper. The relatively new U.S. Africa Command “hopes to create a new organization where the DoD and other interagency [partners] meld together into the same organization and work side by side” to exploit each other’s capabilities.
While still in its infancy, Africom is intended to blend staff members from various agencies throughout the command’s directorates to work “hand in hand with DoD personnel to bring new depth and breadth to the organization,” Reed wrote in the paper, titled, “The Battle Within: DoD and Interagency Coordination for Regional Conflicts — Africom and the Interagency Management System as Models.” A four-star general leads the command, with a deputy commander for civil-military activities filled by a State Department ambassador. Other civilians serve as senior leaders.
“The vision is once their tour of duty is complete, the interagency personnel can take their knowledge gained from working with the Defense Department and other agencies and improve their respective agency’s future dealings with” the military, Reed said.
Another of Zinni’s proposals is to co-locate the State Department’s regional bureaus, which are currently in Washington, with the Pentagon’s corresponding regional commands.
“Why do you have to be at Foggy Bottom?” he asked.