Last week, the Army unveiled its new manual for stabilizing and rebuilding countries. Field Manual 3-07 is supposed to provide the blueprint for piecing back together failed states, and it states the obvious: nation-building requires a lot of "soft power" -- and the full participation of the civilian agencies of government -- if it is to succeed. That means the Foreign Service, USAID and other federal departments must be prepared to deploy to war zones alongside the military. The question is: are they equipped to handle this mission?
According to a report that will be released tomorrow by the American Academy of
Diplomacy and The Stimson Center: Hell, no.
The conclusions here are pretty stark. “Today, significant portions of the nation’s foreign affairs business simply are not accomplished,” the paper says. “The work migrates by default to the military that does have the necessary people and funding but neither significant experience nor knowledge. The ‘militarization’
of diplomacy exists and is accelerating.”
That’s a fair claim. The military has the manpower, the training base and the planning capabilities for dealing with everything from disaster relief to post-conflict reconstruction. And then there’s the simple question of resources available to the State Department (2009
budget request: around $11.5 billion) versus the Department of Defense
(half a trillion, not including "supplemental" war funds).
In a blogger’s roundtable last week,
Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, commander of the Combined Arms Center at
Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, recognized the obvious shortfall when it comes to stability ops. The rest of government, he said, “does not have the capability. They have the desire. They have the understanding of why it's important. But they do not have the capability to engage and be a part of it like, you know, we would like them. Their capacity just doesn't exist. It's woefully inadequate, both in terms of people and monetary resources."
Thus far, the administration has taken a few tentative steps toward creating a deployable civilian reserve. The American Academy of
Diplomacy report takes things further, recommending a significant boost in State
Department/USAID staffing. But it will still be a very long time before the Foreign Service or USAID can be close to an equal partner of the military. As Clinton Ancker, the director of the Army's Combined Arms
Doctrine Directorate, put it last week: "There's a very clear message in the manual: that the Army should not be the lead on most of this, but a recognition that in many cases we will be when the operation kicks off."
[Photo: State Department]
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