The President Stole My Idea…

…Well, sort of.
Last night in the State of the Union address, the Commander-​​in-​​Chief pro­posed this:

A sec­ond task we can take on together is to design and estab­lish a vol­un­teer Civilian Reserve Corps. Such a corps would func­tion much like our mil­i­tary reserve. It would ease the bur­den on the Armed Forces by allow­ing us to hire civil­ians with crit­i­cal skills to serve on mis­sions abroad when America needs them. And it would give peo­ple across America who do not wear the uni­form a chance to serve in the defin­ing strug­gle of our time.

Last sum­mer, I pre­sented a brief­ing at the US Army Combined Arms Center Combat Studies Institutes annual sym­po­sium. (full tran­script of the con­fer­ence) I also blogged about it here and here. In atten­dance at the con­fer­ence, were such illus­tri­ous types as General David Petraeus, Dr. Lewis Sorely, Dr. Andrew F. Krepinevich, and many oth­ers. Granted I was the dim bulb in a room full of klieg lights, but it was inter­est­ing expe­ri­ence.
In my brief­ing, I pro­posed some­thing very much like the pres­i­dent artic­u­lated last night. The crux of the prob­lem is that about 97% of our stand­ing national capac­ity to per­form nation build­ing oper­a­tions in envi­ron­ments such as Iraq and Afghanistan resides within the mil­i­tary reserves. Most of these units are Army Reserve Civil Affairs units. There are about 7,000 civil affairs bil­lets in the reserves. So a nation of 300 mil­lion relies on 7,000 mil­i­tary reservists whom we hope have all the skills we need to per­form the stability-​​and-​​support, Phase IV oper­a­tions. Four years into Iraq and the elec­tri­cal grid is still in sham­bles. As a nation, we can do bet­ter.
Clearly our national approach to nation build­ing isnt work­ing. We dont have time to build this capac­ity after the shoot­ing stops or the enemy regime tum­bles. Iraq has demon­strated that our recon­struc­tion capa­bil­ity needs to be in place quickly to pacify the civil­ian pop­u­la­tion. We have great orga­ni­za­tions like USAID per­form­ing some of this role, but the American gov­ern­ment is not con­fig­ured to be expe­di­tionary in nature. We need to change.
The mil­i­tary has tried some solu­tions to this prob­lem like requir­ing that all reservists reg­is­ter their civil­ian skills with the mil­i­tary. This is a good idea, but a band-​​aid at best. In effect, we are rely­ing on a crap­shoot to deter­mine if we have the skilled pro­fes­sion­als we need in the mil­i­tary to rebuild war-​​shattered nations. We are hop­ing that the offi­cers and enlisted men who joined the Army in the 80s and 90s have matured into the fire and police chiefs that we brag about hav­ing today.
I pro­posed that we cre­ate a stand­ing force of skilled civil­ians as an aug­men­ta­tion to the mil­i­tary reserves. The same legal pro­tec­tions that apply to mil­i­tary reservists would be extended to these civil­ians. They would train like reservists and be avail­able for deploy­ment like reservists. They would join with the under­stand­ing that they could be put in harms way. Many in the blo­gos­phere scoffed at the idea that we would be able to recruit peo­ple for this mis­sion, but I believe that in the post 9–11 world many Americans are look­ing for a way to get in the fight besides going to the mall.
Having this stand­ing capa­bil­ity might also ease our reliance on con­trac­tors or the ad-​​hoc nature that char­ac­ter­ized the estab­lish­ment of the CPA in Iraq. If we are truly engaged in a gen­er­a­tional strug­gle, then we need to con­fig­ure our gov­ern­ment for it. We wished away nation build­ing with polit­i­cal rhetoric in the 2000 elec­tion, and now it is time to face real­ity and enhance our capac­ity to do it right.
– Kris Alexander
UPDATE 1:55 PM: “I’ve worked on this issue for many years on and off the Hill,” says The White House Project’s Lorelei Kelly. The ori­gins can be found (with all due respect, Kris) “in the Clinton era, with the Office of Transition Initiatives.”

The Clinton folks wrote the roadmap for com­plex con­tin­gency oper­a­tions through a set of four pres­i­den­tial direc­tives. Sadly, the new National Security Council threw them all out upon com­ing to office and so lost some of the most impor­tant insti­tu­tional mem­ory they could have had for sub­se­quent pol­icy crises.
This is an impor­tant inno­va­tion in gov­ern­ment because it oper­a­tionally begins to re allo­cate the divi­sion of labor away from the mil­i­tary and to civil­ians, as it should be. The mil­i­tary should not be doing many of the tasks that have accrued to it…but it is a prob­lem solv­ing and man­power heavy orga­ni­za­tion that does not say “no.” Also, I wel­come the addi­tion of more civil­ians work­ing as inter­na­tional pub­lic ser­vants. These are jobs that belong in a long over­due dis­cus­sion about the essen­tial role of gov­ern­ment in today’s world.…the rea­son the Blackwaters and other pri­vate mil­i­tary com­pa­nies have thrived so dur­ing the past decade is not a ques­tion of whither mer­ce­nar­ies, its a fat and lazy elected lead­er­ship that REFUSES to have this con­ver­sa­tion because the eas­i­est bud­get box to check is to fund the defense bud­get at any out­ra­geous level…
If we don’t talk about the roles and mis­sions of our agen­cies post 9/​11 there will be no end to the spend­ing, and we’ll have both the Cold War hang­over and legacy bud­get with an inef­fec­tual grab bag of per­son­nel and tools…all over mil­i­ta­rized, and all to our own detriment. 

Tom Barnett can prob­a­bly cry “stolen,” too.

January 24th, 2007 | Strategery | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.