Armed Humanitarians (47 page)

Even as counterinsurgency came into fashion, some generals were beginning to fret about the military's readiness for high-end warfare. In January 2007, General William Wallace, head of Army Training and Doctrine Command, aired concerns about the Army's readiness for high-end warfare, suggesting that some combat skills may have atrophied because of the overemphasis on counterinsurgency. As an example, Wallace noted that a significant number of captains in an advanced armor course—10 to 15 percent—had never fired a tank gun. “It's not a huge number,” he said, “but it's enough to cause us to think about whether there are some things institutionally we ought to do to maintain a hedge against the potential for high-intensity, combined-arms operations.”

A renewed focus on conventional military power does not, however, mean discarding the costly lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan. Whatever strategic threats the United States might face in the future, the military will still be involved in internal wars, humanitarian crises, and stability operations. Training and equipping for those missions will continue to be an important task for the military, but it must not be the primary goal.

Building effective states can take decades, and requires a class of people who are committed to it. It's not a task that can be accomplished primarily by the military. But as experience in Iraq and Afghanistan showed, civilian agencies simply lack the personnel—and the expeditionary capability—to handle nation building in the world's most violent neighborhoods.

This is more than an issue of manpower and money. Again, it's a question of balance. The military has been asked to do double duty as armed humanitarians. We need to begin a national conversation about returning this mission to its rightful place within the civilian agencies of government. If this is going to be a long-term mission for the U.S. government, it needs to be on an affordable scale, because the American public has limited patience for supporting expensive military operations involving the deployment of tens or hundreds of thousands of troops.

But we are still a long way from developing a real cadre of people who can handle this job. With the Marshall Plan, the State Department had the lead, but the contemporary U.S. diplomatic corps lacks the manpower—and the organizational culture—for this new era of armed development work. If we hope to succeed at this mission, the government needs to have real nation builders on call with real-world skills, not an army of contractors. And Congress needs to fund them.

In practice, that means fully funding a civilian nation-building reserve, not just creating a standby group of federal bureaucrats who provide the civilian window-dressing for military operations. It would give Americans outside of government the chance to volunteer for humanitarian relief missions or stability operations not as contractors, but as temporary government hires, available on short notice to go overseas. At the end of his term, George W. Bush requested $248.6 million to begin funding a reserve (i.e., non-government civilian) component of the Civilian Response Corps for fiscal year 2009, but that request was not funded by Congress. And that was tragically shortsighted: While that amount is significant, it is only a fraction of what the U.S. taxpayer spends each year on contractors to support nation-building missions. It would cost less than buying a pair of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters.

During the 2008 election, in fact, the Obama-Biden campaign expanded upon Bush's concept of a civilian nation-building reserve, calling for the creation of a twenty-five-thousand-strong Civilian Assistance Corps, something described in a campaign fact sheet as a “corps of civilian volunteers with special skill sets (doctors, lawyers, engineers, city planners, agriculture specialists, police, etc.) … organized to provide each federal agency with a pool of volunteer experts willing to deploy in times of need at home and abroad.” The document suggests how deeply the ideas of nation building had taken hold in Washington, but it also showed how efforts to create a proper civilian nation-building force have fallen short in practice. Within the State Department's Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS), efforts to stand up the Civilian Response Corps with an active, standby and reserve component have moved ahead only haltingly. Two years after Bush called for the creation of a civilian reserve in early 2007, the active (i.e., full-time) component of the corps had only ten full-time employees. As of mid-2009, some money was supposed to be available to begin hiring the first of around 250 federal employees who would help staff the active component of the Civilian Response Corps more fully, and the Foreign Service Institute was preparing a four-week-long training curriculum for standby (federal reserve) members of the CRC. Funding for the real civilian reserve pool—which would draw on social workers, police officers, lawyers, doctors and engineers—had not materialized.

Not surprisingly, institutional resistance to the nation-building mission is strong. Within some segments of the Foreign Service, hope persisted that the business of nation building and the unending cycle of war-zone assignment would go away once Bush left office. They viewed the war in Iraq as a one-time foreign policy adventure, an experiment that would not be repeated. The Iraq mission had required the State Department to staff the most massive embassy in the world and establish outposts throughout Iraq's provinces. Leaving Iraq might obviate the need for a permanent cadre of professional nation builders. After all, Barack Obama, the victor in the 2008 election, campaigned on a promise to end the war there.

At Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's first “town hall” meeting with State Department employees on February 4, 2009, Steve Kashkett, who represented the American Foreign Service Association, the Foreign Service's union, asked if diplomats could expect a return to the status quo ante. “As you know, over the past six years, thousands of our colleagues have volunteered to serve in the two war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan—Iraq in particular, where we've created the largest U.S. diplomatic mission in history,” he said. “But the cost of doing this has been to take people away from all of our other diplomatic missions around the world, which have been left understaffed and with staffing gaps.”

Kashkett then asked, “Have you had any discussions yet about reducing the size of our diplomatic mission in Iraq down to that of a normal diplomatic mission?” Clinton evaded giving a direct answer. But the diplomats who hoped for a drawdown should have given the Obama campaign platform a closer read. The new Democratic administration embraced the nation-building mission as well, and there would be no return to “normal” diplomatic affairs. This mission is not going away for the foreseeable future.

For the United States to succeed at this, however, we need more than just manpower. We need a different mindset. For starters, we need a serious rethink of diplomatic security, which has been the Achilles' heel of the nation-building mission. The world can be a dangerous place, and U.S. embassies and diplomatic installations are a terrorist target. But the relentless focus on protecting U.S. diplomats and officials had created a situation that seemed to make diplomacy and development work impossible. Restoring some balance to the mission means there must be some acceptance of risk.

Contracted security has been a disaster both in terms of oversight and effectiveness. In February 2009, in a belated attempt at reform, the State Department began a recruiting drive to find people to supervise their protective details in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other dangerous places. The idea was to boost oversight of its contracted guard force, whose deployment had proven a public-relations disaster for the U.S. government and angered so many Iraqis and Afghans. As part of the plan, the department created a new position, Security Protective Specialists, or SPSs, who would serve on renewable one-year contracts with the Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security. This crop of new hires would augment its fifteen-hundred-strong force of Diplomatic Security agents, who had been stretched thin by the requirements for post-9/11 security and the push for more muddy-boots diplomacy. The SPSs were supposed to provide an important new layer of accountability. Security Protective Specialists would essentially work as shift supervisors for contract security guards. The new position was deliberately designed to lure private security contractors away from firms like DynCorp, Blackwater, and Triple Canopy.

So how many stepped forward for the job? According to government auditors, exactly four. Diplomatic Security officials reported having difficulty filling the positions because they compete with private security contractors for new hires and, at the end of September 2009, only ten positions had been filled. The proposed base pay for a Security Protective Specialist was $52,221 per year. Even when factoring in overseas allowances and danger pay, that salary would be a pittance compared to the six-figure pay a U.S. operator for a private firm would expect to earn working on contract for the State Department. Outsourcing had once again confounded oversight.

But rather than focusing on improved oversight of its contracted guard force, the U.S. government needs to part with the Fortress America mindset. The United States does require a cadre of dedicated nation builders who are prepared to work in dangerous and difficult places, and they need the training and the mind-set to be responsible for their own security. The military has taken hesitant first steps toward shedding the “force protection” mind-set that once kept troops sequestered inside large forward-operating bases, commuting to the war. The State Department needs to shift its focus from staffing giant fortified compounds in conflict zones. Paying lip service to being “population centric” is no substitute for living outside the wire, sharing the same risks and standards of living as the populations we are supposed to defend. When diplomatic personnel are sequestered inside costly fortresses, they can't succeed at the tasks of traditional diplomacy or conflict prevention. They need to be trained, and prepared, to work in dangerous places without the military or an army of hired guns.

We are still a long way from getting the scale and the balance right in nation building. The rise of the armed humanitarians was in part a rebellion by rank-and-file members of the government and the military who felt the institutions they belonged to were ill equipped for the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The failures of postwar planning spurred a grassroots movement to reform the military and the national security establishment from within, a phenomenon enabled by the tools of social networking and online communication. Crucially, this movement had the backing of senior leaders such as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who believed that the Defense Department needed to shift in a “different strategic direction,” toward fighting and winning irregular war. His decision to stay on in the Obama administration helped ensure that those concepts would take root within the national-security establishment.

Iraq and Afghanistan offered the United States a laboratory for something new and remarkable: a sort of enlightened militarism. But although the U.S. military has in some respects begun to master “soft power,” this approach is still the wrong instrument for nation building. Development and diplomatic agencies are the proper tools for nation building, but so long as agencies like USAID and the Foreign Service lack the personnel or the in-house expertise to run ambitious development programs, and the ability to work independently in conflict zones, much of the actual work will be outsourced to the Beltway bandits, private-sector and not-for-profit aid contractors. In the end, diplomacy and development is supposed to be a job for public servants, not for the private sector, much as national defense is the job of the uniformed military, not contractors.

When nation building becomes an attractive line of business for contractors, it's more likely to become a permanent feature of foreign policy, thanks to the revolving door between government service and private-sector contracting. Companies like Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, which made their names building ships and fighter aircraft, opened business lines dedicated to supporting “soft power” missions around the globe, such as training foreign security forces and logistics and technical support. Thomas Barnett, the Pentagon theorist who was one of the earliest people to recognize this shift, capitalized on the move himself: He left government and joined a corporate and government consulting firm called Enterra Solutions, which offered “strategic advisory services” like “nation-state building” and “development-in-a-box.”

One tempting solution seems to be “insourcing”—taking jobs that have been contracted out to the private sector and returning them to their “rightful place” in the federal bureaucracy. After a two-decade experiment in outsourcing, a reassertion of essential government functions would resolve some problems of accountability. But the idea that we will become more effective nation builders by creating more jobs within dysfunctional, risk-averse bureaucracies is magical thinking, and the idea that the complex problems of Afghanistan can be solved by applying a bureaucratic fix—“harmonizing the interagency,” “breaking down stovepipes,” “bridging the civil-military divide,” and so on—is an illusion. And it ignores the fact that nation-building missions such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan have become so large, and so unwieldy, that they begin to undermine our intentions.

As of this writing, several initiatives are under way to better reorganize and realign the agencies of defense, diplomacy, and development for the tasks of nation building. In November 2009, Stuart Bowen, the U.S. special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, floated a detailed proposal for a “U.S. Office for Contingency Operations” that would be charged with leading the federal government's armed nation-building efforts. The concept would be to create a hybrid civil-military organization within the federal government that reports to both the State Department and the Pentagon. Bowen likened it to a sort of “international FEMA” that would create a “permanent, fully accountable, empowered interagency management office” with “full responsibility for managing the relief and reconstruction component” of future military contingencies.
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Such proposals, while well-intentioned, are merely bureaucratic fine-tuning. They ignore the real cost and consequences of these kinds of interventions.