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A Manual for the SysAdmin Force

In a recent post [Attention Turns Again to Afghanistan], I noted that the U.S. military was paying a lot more attention to the mission of "nation building." To underscore that point, the Army just released a new operations manual on the subject ["New Weight in Army Manual on Stabilization," by Michael R. Gordon, New York Times, 8 February 2008].

"The Army has drafted a new operations manual that elevates the mission of stabilizing war-torn nations, making it equal in importance to defeating adversaries on the battlefield. Military officials described the new document, the first new edition of the Army's comprehensive doctrine since 2001, as a major development that draws on the hard-learned lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, where initial military successes gave way to long, grueling struggles to establish control. It is also an illustration of how far the Pentagon has moved beyond the Bush administration's initial reluctance to use the military to support 'nation-building' efforts when it came into office."

There was more than a little "initial reluctance" to "nation-building" when the term and potential mission first emerged. In fact, it was considered "mission creep" and was anathema to many military leaders. It was not just the Bush administration that had it doubts. Clinton Secretary of Defense William Perry remarked, "Generally the military is not the right tool to meet humanitarian concerns. We field an army, not a Salvation Army." Philosophically, Perry was correct. Mixing military operations and humanitarian efforts has always been problematic. As I noted in my last post on Afghanistan, that was the state of things when my partner, Tom Barnett, introduced his notion of a System Administration Force, whose primary purpose was securing the peace (i.e., nation-building). Despite the military's apparent change of heart, questions remain as to whether the force structure is properly aligned with the new doctrine.

"Some influential officers are already arguing that the Army still needs to put actions behind its new words, and they have raised searching questions about whether the Army's military structure, personnel policies and weapons programs are consistent with its doctrine. The manual describes the United States as facing an era of 'persistent conflict' in which the American military will often operate among civilians in countries where local institutions are fragile and efforts to win over a wary population are vital. [In an interview], Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the commander of the Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, ... called it a 'blueprint to operate over the next 10 to 15 years.' 'Army doctrine now equally weights tasks dealing with the population — stability or civil support — with those related to offensive and defensive operations,' the manual states. 'Winning battles and engagements is important but alone is not sufficient. Shaping the civil situation is just as important to success.' In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the military is enmeshed in rebuilding local institutions, helping to restore essential services and safeguarding a vulnerable population. The new manual is an attempt to put these endeavors — along with counterinsurgency warfare — at the core of military training, planning and operations. That would require some important changes. 'There is going to be some resistance,' General Caldwell said. 'There will be people who will hear and understand what we are saying, but it is going to take some time to inculcate that into our culture.' Even as they welcomed it, other Army officers said there were inconsistencies between the newly minted doctrine on how to wage war and current practice. Army brigades in Iraq have too few combat engineers to support civil programs, they said. Also, they added, the Army does not promote officers who advise the Iraqi and Afghan security forces as readily as battalion staff officers and needs to improve their training."

Tom believes that the fighting and System Administration forces should be separate. One reason is that the roles and missions of the SysAdmin force require much more participation by non-military groups and much less warfighting capability. Another cultural challenge, as Gordon points out, is that officers involved in stabilization operations don't enjoy the same reputation and promotion rates as those involved in warfighting.

"Even as they welcomed it, other Army officers said there were inconsistencies between the newly minted doctrine on how to wage war and current practice. Army brigades in Iraq have too few combat engineers to support civil programs, they said. Also, they added, the Army does not promote officers who advise the Iraqi and Afghan security forces as readily as battalion staff officers and needs to improve their training. Some Army officers have also questioned whether the development of the Army’s Future Combat System, a multibillion-dollar program in which air and unmanned ground sensors will be networked with armored vehicles so that soldiers can attack targets from a safe distance, is consistent with this new vision of war."

Tom Barnett likes sports analogies. He compares intervention operations to game with two halves. The first half is the kinetic military operation that "wins the war." The second half is the nation-building operation that "secures the peace." Tom's point that the U.S. is great at conducting first half operations but unprepared to conduct second half operations was unfortunately demonstrated in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

"The American military's difficulty in securing Iraq has led to much soul-searching within the armed forces on how to prepare for future conflicts. Col. H. R. McMaster of the Army, who commanded the successful effort in 2005 to secure the northern Iraqi town of Tal Afar, asserts in a new article that an exaggerated faith in military technology and a corresponding undervaluation of political and military measures to secure the peace undermined American efforts in Iraq. 'Self-delusion about the character of future conflict weakened U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq,' he wrote in Survival, a journal published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Colonel McMaster added in the article that the Army 'is finding it difficult to cut completely loose from years of wrongheaded thinking,' noting that assumptions that high-technology systems will provide the American military with 'dominant knowledge' of the battlefield has formed much of the justification for the Army program to build the Future Combat System."

I am, of course, interested in this new direction for the military because it goes hand-in-hand with Enterra Solutions' Development-in-a-Box™ approach for helping post-conflict nations rebuild. As I repeatedly stress, development and security must be pursued simultaneously. The new doctrine should help bring greater understanding to this connection.

"General Caldwell said the manual would influence Army education and training by stressing the sort of skills that are needed to bring stability to conflict-ridden states with weak governments. 'There will be people who naturally will say, "If I can do high-end offense and defense, I can do any lesser kind of operations,"' he said. 'What we have found through seven years is that is not the case.'"

This comes as no surprise to Bradd Hayes, Enterra Solutions' Senior Director for Communications and Research. In 1997, he and a colleague, Jeffrey Sands, while professors at the Naval War College, wrote a book [Doing WIndows: Non-traditional Military Responses to Complex Emergencies] they predicted that nation-building would become an important military mission. They wrote:

"Since the end of the Cold War, many in the defense community have decried the military's increasing role in [military interventions], claiming that such participation diverts the military's focus from warfighting and lead to decreased unit readiness. We have learned, however, that when one lives in a glass house, one eventually ends up 'doing windows' (i.e., the dirty, labor-intensive jobs that must be done but no one wants to perform). ... Like waves on the ocean, complex emergencies continue to appear on the horizon, threatening to slam against the cliffs of international stability. ... [Hence], the military is likely to continue its involvement in such operations."

They went on to detail many of the roles that have now become doctrine in the new manual a decade later; but better late than never. Gordon concludes:

"Some steps to improve the Army's abilities in these areas are already under way, [General Caldwell] asserted. By way of example, changes are being made in the way combat engineers are assigned, to give commanders more flexibility. Some of the Army's up-and-coming officers, however, say much more needs to be done, including attracting more officers to disciplines that the manual says are so necessary, like advising foreign security forces and assisting with civil affairs. 'The parts of the Army closest to the battlefield have adapted, including tactics and doctrine,' said Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, who wrote a widely circulated article criticizing how the generals fought the Iraq war. 'However, the institutional Army, to include our organizational designs and our personnel system, is essentially the same as before 9/11.' He added: 'The most important tasks we are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan are building host-nation institutions, including security forces and governance. We need to attract the very best officers into these specialties to be successful at these tasks.'"

I agree that capacity building is critical for getting post-conflict nations back on their feet and headed in the right relation. There is still much to be worked out in how the military deals with "first half" and "second half" operations, but the new manual is a good start.

Pretty reasonable piece, but it argues against a strawman that time will reveal and repudiate.

Nobody argues that, all things being equal, it's smarter and more efficient to have authoritarians run your market economy than have a democracy process demands for proper governance from a market economy. The data is clear on that.

The basic "sequentialist" argument is about timing. Was Russia doing well with that mess of a political system in the 1990s? No. Is it more settled now? Yes. Does that help Russia get back on it's feet? Yes. Would that alone have done it? No, the price rise on energy and commodities enabled that. Looking ahead, will Russia keep growing if it calcifies in authoritarianism? Probably not. But if it keeps growing, we'll likely see more pressure for pluralism.

Putinism, if successful, is a phase--at best a recovery model, not a long-term economic model. The key will be: Will Putin accept the inevitable waning of his personal power (already begun by naming his successor)?

I think he'll have no choice and in a dozen years we'll be venerating him like Lee Kuan Yew, but hardly pretending like he found some new model that threatens the legitimacy of liberal democracies. Ditto with the Chinese.

Why must we constantly get so wobbly all the time over any success that does not mirror our current state? Especially when our own journey to this mature point wasn't pretty and featured all sorts of bad stuff that we condemn others for today?

As always, a little more belief in ourselves would be nice.

If all Putinism aspires to is raw materials authoritarianism, then that's all it will achieve. That doesn't scare me and it shouldn't scare you.

The A game model in globalization is a market economy plus liberal democracy. If you want risk-taking and innovation and competitive drive, then you have to accommodate it in all its demands. Authoritarianism, well-funded, can buy you the team, but it can't make it win over the long haul. Success simply makes people too uppity and demanding

March 2, 2008, 9:35 pm
Why McCain Would Vote For Obama
TAGS: BARACK OBAMA, HILLARY CLINTON, JOHN MCCAIN
If it is McCain vs. Obama in the general election, look for something to happen that was unthinkable only a short time ago. The Iraq War will become a Republican plus.

The reason is that McCain’s position on the war, as on so many other issues, looks in (at least) two directions.

On the one hand, he voted to authorize the invasion. On the other, he consistently disagreed with the administration’s prosecution of the war in general and with the judgment of defense Secretary Rumsfeld in particular. And on the third hand, he advocated for a course of action that was at last implemented in the so-called “surge,” and with some success.

So, at any moment, he would be able to present himself as a strong patriot, and at another moment as a critic of the hard-line hawks, and at still another as a hard-line hawk with more experience and military knowledge than the others. And, depending on which position he was occupying, he could deny that he was an uncritical supporter of the war or that he was inattentive to the needs of the troops, or that he had nothing positive to offer.

Meanwhile, as McCain was nimbly moving around, Obama would be standing still, stuck in the one-note posture he has assumed from the beginning of the campaign. In the democratic primaries and caucuses, Obama’s strong suit – the club he used to beat up Hillary Clinton – has been the absolute consistency of his position on the war: he would have voted against it had he been in the senate at the time; he has spoken out against it repeatedly since becoming a senator; and he has promised to end it and bring the troops home within a short time.

But once McCain, and not Clinton, is his opponent, that position becomes a liability, because it can be attacked as being inflexible and without nuance. McCain can ask, Don’t you see that the situation has changed in recent months, and shouldn’t a responsible leader adjust his or her stance according to the facts on the ground? And he can add, I too had my doubts about the conduct of the war, but now a policy I long advocated has been put in place with good results. Moreover, by saying something like that he would be reminding the electorate that he knows how to think tactically about military strategies, while his opponent’s only experience in combat has been trying to figure out how to beat Alan Keyes in the Illinois senate race, something anyone with the letter D (for Democrat) after his name would have been able to do easily.

Up till now, Obama has had a free ride on the Iraq War issue because Senator Clinton has been on the defensive since the campaign began. In her desire to avoid copping to a failure of judgment and apologizing for it (as John Edwards did), she came up with an explanation – I voted to authorize the use of force, but I wasn’t voting for it be actually used – that raised new questions about her credibility and made her vulnerable to the charge that her subsequent anti-war position had been adopted more out of political expediency than conviction.

Like McCain, Clinton tells a complex story about her relationship to the war, but unlike McCain. she tells a story whose parts pull against one another, and she has been caught in a cul-de-sac between them.

The parts of McCain’s story, even with one or two twists and turns, fit nicely into a coherent narrative that brings credit to him in every chapter. I was resolute in the beginning, I demurred for a while but for good reasons, and now I am resolute again, and you can trust me because, in this area especially, I know what I’m doing. He can rehearse this narrative without apologizing for anything and then turn around to Obama and (borrowing from Clinton’s attacks on him), declare: You, on the other hand, don’t know what you’re doing, as everything you say, not only about the war, but about the conduct of foreign policy, proves. (He and President Bush are already pushing this line in anticipation of Obama’s nomination.)

Indeed, every criticism Clinton has made of Obama – he lacks experience, he is all flourish and no substance, he gives shoot-from-the-hip answers to serious questions – falls into McCain’s lap, ready for instant use in the general election.

But, unfortunately for Obama, the reverse is not true. The criticisms of McCain made by his primary opponents – he twice voted against Bush’s tax cuts, he cooperated with Ted Kennedy on immigration reform and with Russ Feingold on campaign-finance reform, he said that waterboarding was torture and should not be used, he scorned fundamentalist Christian leaders, he supported stem cell research, he opposed a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage, he expressed doubts about Samuel Alito – cannot be appropriated by Obama because these are his positions, too.

With the Iraq War either neutralized or migrating to McCain’s side, and with the sharp distinction on social issues blurred by McCain’s heterodoxy (called apostasy by his critics from the right), Obama is left with health care (he would probably get the better of that one) and with the economy where there is in fact a genuine opposition between a firm free-trader and tax-cutter on the one hand, and a critic of Nafta whose economic policies might have the effect of raising taxes on the other. But that is a contrast that might not play too well in a general election campaign that lasts less than two months.

And Obama will not even be able to saddle McCain with the legacy of an unpopular administration, given that more often than not he has been viewed as a Bush opponent, except on the war, and on that issue his loyalty to the president’s policy will do him harm only with those hard-core liberals who would never vote for a Republican anyway.

With Obama as his opponent, McCain has the advantage every which way. He continues to get mileage out of the straight-talk express, and at the same time he also has the political flexibility that comes along with having taken a few detours along the way, and talked out of several sides of his mouth.

Of course, things could change. Obama may not get the nomination, in which case McCain’s advantage with respect to the war would evaporate as he faced an opponent whose flexibility matched his own. (Clinton’s refusal to apologize for her vote to authorize flips instantly and becomes a shield against a McCain attack, where before it was the target of an Obama attack.) Rumors about McCain’s relationship with a female lobbyist might possibly be substantiated by new evidence. The fact of his age could work against him were he to be standing at a podium next to a younger, telegenic opponent. Obama fever may spread, not only to Clinton supporters but to independents and Republicans who become caught up in the gospel of hope and change. The youth vote might actually turn out for once.

Still , I would bet that if McCain were pulling a lever in the Democratic primaries in Texas and Ohio, his vote would go into the Obama column.

Civilian Response Corps Gains Ground
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 15, 2008; A19

Are you a road engineer who speaks Urdu? A city planner fluent in Arabic? Maybe a former judge who happens to know Pashto and seeks foreign adventure?

There's a job for you at the Civilian Response Corps, the State Department unit designed to deploy with or shortly after U.S. troops in world hot spots. The corps is designed to be a kind of international Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. officials said, an agency that would take charge of entities including local police, courts, the banking system and airports after states collapse or governments are defeated. President Bush's fiscal 2009 budget proposal allocates funds to expand what until now has been little more than a pilot project.

Its goal is to avoid repeating the disastrous U.S. experience in managing Iraq during the early days of the Coalition Provisional Authority, officials said. "This requires a major, perhaps even a revolutionary, change in the way the U.S. government approaches and resources conflict response," John E. Herbst, coordinator for reconstruction and stabilization at the State Department, said in congressional testimony last month.

In a twist to the usual State Department-Pentagon rivalry, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has become the program's most outspoken advocate.

"We must focus our energies beyond the guns and steel of the military," Gates said in a November speech. "Based on my experience serving seven presidents, as a former director of CIA and now as secretary of defense, I am here to make the case for strengthening our capacity to use 'soft power' and for better integrating it with 'hard power.' "

Gates acknowledged that arguing for more funds for another agency is considered "blasphemy" at the Pentagon. "It is certainly not an easy sell politically," he said.

As failed and unstable states become a leading security challenge for the United States, the administration is scrambling to draft three corps of more than 4,000 specialists to rebuild and help manage states, Herbst said in an interview. In an era of belt-tightening, the Civilian Response Corps is one of the few staff increases called for in the State Department budget.

The 2009 budget calls for $248 million for the program, up from $7.2 million in the 2007, he said.

The idea of an emergency civilian corps has had mixed congressional reception since State's Office of the Coordinator of Reconstruction and Stabilization (CRS) was created in 2004. Herbst so far has fewer than 90 people who have been deployed in small teams to Afghanistan, Chad, Haiti, Iraq, Kosovo, Lebanon, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Sudan.

Under the new budget proposal, the CRS nucleus would grow to a 250-person Active Response Corps pulled from U.S. agencies, including Agriculture, Commerce, Justice and Treasury. It would include city planners, economists, port operators and correction officials, Herbst said. They would undergo months of training. Their mission would be to deploy within the first 72 hours of a U.S. military landing. As much as 80 percent of the team would be dispatched for as much as one year.

"We are proposing shifts across our civilian agencies that will bring all elements of national power to bear in the defense of America's vital interests," Herbst told Congress.

The second group would be a roughly 2,000-strong Standby Response Corps, again pulled from all branches of government and having the same diverse skills. They would train for two or three weeks a year and would be the second group to deploy in a crisis. Between 200 and 500 would deploy within 45 to 60 days of a crisis onset, Herbst said in an interview.

The third group is the Civilian Reserve Corps of about 2,000 that would be pulled from the private sector and state or local governments, much like the military reserve. Its members would sign up for a four-year commitment, which would include training for several weeks a year and an obligation to deploy for as much as one of the four years, Herbst said.

The first two groups now have small teams, while the Reserve Corps awaits congressional authorization.

The United States is late in the development of a civilian corps, Herbst said. Several European governments have the capability, but the most developed is in Canada, where such a program has a budget of more than $260 million.

View all comments that have been posted about this article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/opinion/03cohen.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

March 3, 2008
OP-ED COLUMNIST
African Genocide Averted

By ROGER COHEN
NAIROBI, Kenya

For Kofi Annan, the Kenyan peace negotiations began in a Geneva hospital.

The former UN secretary general was on his way to the airport on Jan. 15 when a fever obliged him to turn around. Doctors wanted him hospitalized for 10 days, ''so negotiations for my release after five days began right there.'' He used the time to place calls to U.S., European and African leaders.

His message, he told me, was clear: ''I said we have to make sure there's just one mediation process. Otherwise you have the protagonists trying to bottom shop, looking elsewhere if they don't like what you're offering. You get diplomatic tourism and that's no good.''

Kenya was burning. Kenya, the stable East African country from which international officials had fanned out to confront crises in Somalia, Rwanda and Darfur. Kenya, impossible mosaic of some 40 tribes that somehow held. That Kenya, 45 years after independence, was fissuring.

Annan, arriving on Jan 22, had one obsession: ''We can't let this happen to Kenya.'' Not after the one million dead between Rwanda and Darfur. Not after his UN tenure produced agreement at the world summit of 2005 on ''R2P'' the global ''responsibility to protect'' citizens in states whose own governments prove unable to do so.

''Kenya had been the safe haven in a tumultuous region and suddenly Kenya itself was going,'' Annan said. ''And when you have ethnic violence, if you don't mediate quickly, you get a hopeless situation.''

Yes, ethnic killing erupts like milk boiling up. Within weeks of the disputed Dec. 27 election, several hundred dead had pushed several hundred thousand people into flight. A single tribal murder is a huge dispersal multiplier: one dead, one thousand on the move. The math of national decomposition is implacable.

Luos killing Kikuyus. Kikuyus murdering in revenge. Kalenjins getting in the mix. Everywhere, ethnic lines being drawn in blood and ashes.

We've seen this movie once too often since the Cold War ended.

My colleague Jeffrey Gettleman, who has chronicled the Kenyan crisis with immense authority, speaks of ''Annan Zen.'' Annan needed that imperturbability. The atmosphere between the Kenyan president, Mwai Kibaki, who had been declared the narrow winner of a demonstrably rigged election, and Raila Odinga, the opposition leader who felt robbed, was ''very icy,'' Annan said.

A little over a month later, the remarkable power-sharing outcome can, I believe, serve as a model: Call it the Nairobi paradigm or Annan's R2P marker.

A regional organization, in this case the African Union, takes the lead in providing a mandate for swift preventive action. The UN Security Council issues a supportive statement. American power is used, not in sledgehammer mode, but with well-timed discretion. Intervention is choreographed by a single authoritative figure prepared to stay five weeks for peace.

Five weeks! Shades of Kissinger in the Middle East. I see Annan's persistence as a reminder of how shallow Bush administration peace pursuits have been, with the exception of Christopher Hill's North Korean labors.

Annan focused first on halting the killing because ''nobody could say I am not for stopping violence.'' He listened to calls for ''reruns, recounts,'' but knew ''bad decisions get people killed.'' He endured harangues from Martha Karua, the justice minister, who said she was ''breathless'' at how Annan was ''encouraging violence and lack of respect for the rule of law'' by demanding power sharing with Odinga.

Kibaki's team kept saying, ''We won it fair and square,'' as Odinga's countered, ''You stole it fair and square.'' Kibaki, a Kikuyu, talked of ''accommodating'' the opposition; Odinga, a Luo, bridled. If pushed, he would form ''an alternative government.''

''It took a while to convince them that there was no way either side could run the country without the other, that it was a perfect political gridlock,'' Annan told me.

He got a German official to explain grand coalitions. He got Jakaya Kikwete, the Tanzanian leader, to talk about how presidents and prime ministers work together. He was helped by President George W. Bush declaring during his recent African visit that ''there ought to be a power sharing agreement.''

Kibaki's foreign minister retorted that Kenya would not be ''given conditions by foreign states'' the old anti-imperialist thing. But this was international intervention of another kind. The pressure cornered Kibaki. He ceded, empowering Odinga as a prime minister with authority anchored by constitutional change.

''When we talk of intervention, people think of the military,'' Annan said. ''But under R2P, force is a last resort. Political and diplomatic intervention is the first mechanism. And I think we've seen a successful example of its application.''

Some will quibble over technicalities, but Kenya kindled the somnolent spirit of R2P. We've also seen American might in subtler guise: listening better, applying soft power. That's another reason what happened in Nairobi matters so much.

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