Civilian SSTR Planning: NSC or Private Sector Lead

There's a huge need for a civilian planning capacity related to SSTR and post-conflict situations (I have written about this before). This need may be the single most important element in the organizational transformation need to prepare ourselves for the next time around.

This blog often takes an American perspective - or looks primarily at American developments. This is because US leadership is paramount. Whatever happens elsewhere is likely to be to small to be consequential or effective. But this doesn't mean that other countries - notably the UK or e.g. Denmark - could not in theory either develop interesting concepts or organizational innovations which might either be of use or inspiration to the US institutions (as in e.g. the PCRU).

Establishing better integrated military-civilian planning is the only way to construct a strategically realistic "total cost of life" approach to future interventions. Such an approach should make clear e.g. the need for civilian (local or external) police forces. Of course, the Dobbins Handbook gives hints but we need more concrete planning.

Evidently, the Pentagon is not going to open their warplanning to civilians - not even the NSC. But it would be helpful if the civilian side could at least know that the Pentagon planning process had or will be reformed in accordance with the DoD Directive 3000.05 (the problem is here that the NSPD 44 formally gives State the lead, and the S/CRS does not have resources even remotely comparable to OSD, Pentagon itself or even JFCOM.

Of course, some of this planning stuff could be produced or at least introduced in generic form by the private and international public sector - here preferably the non-profit side - like e.g. a combination of UN people (from the UNDP plus the Peace-building Commission) and relevant think-tankers like the Dobbins people, and maybe concerted or hosted by the ICG. But in purely US terms, the NSC could play such a role.

The NSC seems to be the only place where funds can be found for this kind of exercise (given substantive executive interest, i.e. will not happen until the next administration). But this means that now would be a good time to spread such and idea in order for it to be somewhere on the upcoming administrations' agendas. Richard Clarke's great "Against All Enemies" explains and exemplifies how an adept operator can help create leeway for interagency policy development inside the NSC. In fact, as he mentions explicitly, he was part of the process for creating POL-MIL plans starting with Haiti. So the nuts and bolts and precedence are there. As always it is more a matter of political will and focus than anything else.

GAO Report Confirms Civil Planning Need

New GAO report out on US Stability Operations capability and reform (link here is to pdf). From the exec summary:

DOD has taken several steps to improve planning for stability operations, but faces challenges in developing capabilities and measures of effectiveness, integrating the contributions of non-DOD agencies into military contingency plans, and incorporating lessons learned into future plans. These challenges may hinder DOD’s ability to develop sound plans. Since November 2005, the department issued a new policy, expanded its military planning guidance, and defined a joint operating concept to help guide DOD planning for the next 15–20 years. These steps reflect a fundamental shift in DOD’s policy because they elevate stability operations as a core mission comparable to combat operations and emphasize that military and civilian efforts must be integrated. However, DOD has yet to identify and prioritize the full range of capabilities needed for stability operations because DOD has not provided clear guidance on how and when to accomplish this task. As a result, the services are pursuing initiatives to address capability shortfalls that may not reflect the comprehensive set of capabilities that will be needed by combatant commanders to effectively accomplish stability operations in the future. Similarly, DOD has made limited progress in developing measures of effectiveness because of weaknesses in DOD’s guidance.

DOD is taking steps to develop more comprehensive military plans related to stability operations, but it has not established adequate mechanisms to facilitate and encourage interagency participation in its planning efforts. At the combatant commands, DOD has established working groups with representatives from several key organizations, but these groups and other outreach efforts by the commanders have had limited effect. Three factors cause this limited and inconsistent interagency participation in DOD’s planning process: (1) DOD has not provided specific guidance to commanders on how to integrate planning with non-DOD organizations, (2) DOD practices inhibit sharing of planning information, and (3) DOD and non-DOD organizations lack a full understanding of each other's planning processes, and non-DOD organizations have had a limited capacity to participate in DOD's full range of planning activities.

Although DOD collects lessons learned from past operations, planners are not consistently using this information as they develop future contingency plans. At all levels within the department, GAO found that information from current and past operations are being captured and incorporated into various databases. However, planners are not consistently using this information because (1) DOD’s guidance for incorporating lessons into its plans is outdated and does not specifically require planners to take this step, (2) accessing lessons-learned databases is cumbersome, and (3) the review process does not evaluate the extent to which lessons learned are incorporated into specific plans.

The report then confirms what I have said before (in "The Most Unsexy Headline Ever: Planning Capabilities in the Inter-Agency Process"): We need civil planning - or at least: planning for the civilian side of contingency plans. And nobody - including internationally - has the knowhow and the resources to do it but Pentagon.

Bensahel/Survival: Useful Nationbuilding Reform Overview

Whether, how and how far to reform for nationbuilding operations has become the central strategic question in the OECD/NATO camp. We all now we have to contribute to and take the lead in administrating the state system, but how and especially how far do we want to go? Will preparing well mean creating an offer that begets a demand? Will it weaken our resolve in terms of "real war"? Or has modern war been finally rendered clausewitzian -- to be always about political endstates, and does this mean we have to take an institutional leap? The new issue of Survival contains an overview over recent bureaucratic efforts in the US, UK, Canada, Germany, EU and G8 -- prepared by Nora Bensahel from the RAND Corp.

Recent years have seen numerous initiatives to build organisational capacity for nation-building operations in both national govern­ments and international organisations. These initiatives have made some progress, but they share a number of common problems, including bureaucratic turf wars, interagency and intergovernmental coordination challenges, limited financial resources, and shortages of qualified personnel. If left unchecked, these problems may prevent these initiatives from addressing the capacity challenges they were designed to solve.

Tic Tacs #6

Miami Herald: "Iran aid to Taliban hints at policy shift. U.S. officials suspect that Iranian weapons shipments to the Taliban may be retaliation for U.S. foreign policy."

Secrecy News: National Intelligence Council Sponsors Wiki on Global Disease. Students at Mercyhurst College created a wiki-based resource on global disease to support the National Intelligence Council, while demonstrating the utility of the wiki approach for intelligence analysis. "The fundamental question had to do with the impact of chronic and infectious diseases on US national interests over the next 10-15 years," said Prof. Kristan J. Wheaton, whose class produced the wiki.

Counterterrorism Blog: "A few days ago, I spoke with a U.S. official working for one of the new embedded provisional reconstruction teams (EPRTs) in Iraq. (...) The EPRTs are different. Rather than operating separately from and parallel to the military, they are embedded within the military structure. Six EPRTs operate in Baghdad, three in Anbar, and one in Babil. Their structure is similar to that of the PRTs (run by a foreign service officer, featuring a U.S. Army deputy, a USAID member, a bicultural advisor, and other staffers) but rather than functioning in the top-down manner of the PRTs, the EPRTs are designed to make more of a difference at what the official called the "granular" level. That is, the EPRTs are integrated into the military's tactical operations, and are designed to advance reconstruction efforts on a street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood basis.

Thomas P.M. Barnett: "The talks are cordial, but go nowhere. ARTICLE: "U.S. and Iranian Officials Meet in Baghdad, but Talks Yield No Breakthroughs," by Kirk Semple, New York Times, 29 May 2007, p. A8. Why should they? We hold talks to see what Iran can do to save our asses in Iraq but refuse to use that venue to discuss any quid pro quo Tehran might desire. These talks aren't designed to work. They're designed to check a box. That's my weekend column. "

Tic Tacs #3: Long War By Petraeus, Harrison and the Air Force

Introductory portrait of General Petraeus, the American Commander in Iraq, in the Washington Post. Very interesting -- my European readers should read this, not least because it seems that the self-evident truth for any US government watcher that administrative and doctrinal turf wars matter and make the Goliath seem less monolithic than it is is often overlooked -- wilfully? -- by those who criticize it easily. Never explain by malevolence that which can be explained by incompetence -- or a learning curve.

Oh, and if you haven't seen it, this great piece by Harrison, which came out before Christmas, on the role of culture in nation-building. Of course this was always for the long haul: we are in the business of shrinking the Gap, and the agenda is exactly about formatting minds with each new generation. 200 years more until the End of History.

The generational aspect pops up here in this old December intro to the Long War through Air Force (!) Brig. Gen. Schissler who's deputy director for the GWOT in Joint Staff (do they actually still call it that?).

Then a clearly disturbed story from the LA Times about the surge plan being aprt of renewed neocon cabale. Come on: they cannot both be responsible for screwing up the post-conflict part and for wanting and having wanted more troops all the time. But maybe now is the time to listen -- not necessarily for the neocon rationales, but to the extent that they concord with military sagesse. Either way, yelling at the neocons is exactly what we don't need when important decisions are being presented to the public (cf. the note on seeing a monolith only above).

Some things are moving already on the new Iraqi strategy: dealing with unemployment should have been focus area very early on ... instead of adding to it. According to the AP some projects have already been launched, making a total of 11.000 jobs supposedly supporting almost 150.000 Iraqis.

Finally, more details are emerging on the new African Command -- it will exclude Egypt while CJTF in the Horn of Africa will stay with Centcom for another 18 months. All from the Christian Science Monitor.

And, as usual, do go read MountainRunner, this time for his 11 Steps To Success in Iraq.

A Conservative/Left-Wing Convergence on State-Building

In an oped piece in the Washington Post Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart reiterates the points from their september LICUS-report: nation-building - i.e. the construction of efficient and legitimate states - must be the central development task concerning the weakest and poorest of states. Nation-building - or, as it should be properly: state-building - thus steps in as an alternative to the choice between project-based development in peaceful states and the purer military logic of interventions. Interestingly, the oped takes it point of departure in a general reflection looking very much like the Fukuyama-End-of-History cum Kaplan-Coming-Anarchy perspective found in Tom Barnett's grand strategic analysis:

In 1945 the future of capitalism as the organizational form of the economy and democracy as the organizational form of the polity was far from certain in the advanced industrialized world. Today there is a remarkable consensus on both the preferred economic and political forms. With globalization of the media, the benefits of membership in the wealthy democratic club are beamed daily to the homes of billions of people who in turn aspire to the economic opportunities and political freedoms that the market economies and democratic societies have delivered to their citizens.

Yet the daily experience of so many people in poor countries is confrontation with the realities of failing or fragile states, criminalized and informal economies, and the denial of basic freedoms. It is not resentment of the West but exclusion from the right to make decisions in their own countries that feeds the resentment of the poor. At the same time, the networks of violence that have declared war on the security and order of ordinary people in the developed world are making use of the territory of failed states to expand their bases of destruction.

The path to security is not just investment in the institutions of security. The price tag for security in a fragile state can quickly run into billions of dollars a year. A sustained analysis by NATO of the best means of achieving security in Afghanistan showed that credible institutions and public finance would contribute more to security than would the deployment of troops. Nor is the answer money alone; in these countries, money cannot be translated to capital, because such things as the rule of law, transparency and predictability are lacking. The state is the most effective, economical way of organizing the security and well-being of a population, just as the company is the most effective approach in a competitive economy.

Thus the need for functioning states has become one of the critical issues of our times.

The argument about the centrality of failed states in a security politics perspective has been stated repeatedly over the last years as in the report by the Commission on Failed States and US National Security - and of course, most importantly, in the National Security Strategy of 2002.

What is interesting about Ghani's, Lockhart's and Carnahan's original background report is both the UN/development origins of the perspective and the fairly hands-on analysis of what is required of a functioning, legitimate state-as-always-unfinished-process:

In the interdependent world of today, states must perform a constellation of interrelated functions that range from provision of citizenship rights to promotion of the enabling environment for the private sector, in marked contrast to the one-dimensional function of ensuring security which they performed in the 19^th century. This section outlines ten core functions that we propose a state must perform in the modern world.

These functions are: (1) legitimate monopoly on the means of violence; (2) administrative control; (3) management of public finances; (4) investment in human capital; (5) delineation of citizenship rights and duties; (6) provision of infrastructure services; (7) formation of the market; (8) management of the state’s assets (including the environment, natural resources, and cultural assets); (9) international relations (including entering into international contracts and public borrowing); (10) rule of law. Other functions may be required to be performed at particular moments, such as the repatriation and integration of refugees and those displaced, and transitional justice.

When the state performs these functions in an integrated fashion, a virtuous circle is created in which state decisions in the different domains bolster overall enfranchisement and opportunity for the citizenry. By contrast, failure to perform one or many of these functions leads to the creation and acceleration of a vicious circle.

Thus, the development perspective shows a way out, where the security perspective is better suited at pointing out problems to focus on - because the latter tends to be locked into problems of power balances rather than power management. One thing that has changed since the mid-90s Human Security project started picking up speed within the UN circuit is that this recipe for creating welfare has changed as the underlying problem - the weak and failed states - shifted from being a humanitarian to a security problem in the eyes of the West.

The change is discrete but profound: from proposing that the human condition of others was as vital as security politics without bridging the necessity gap gap between the two - including the problem of self-sustainable economic development and as such be perhaps morally well founded yet more utopian than realistic - it has gone on to incorporate the underpinnings of capitalist democracy.

Another interesting point here, is the alignment between moderate conservatives (as Francis Fukuyama: State-Building) and the left wing: the traditional pro-state and pro-structure paternalism of both camps fits handlily together in the search for better functioning states, to better care for their citizens as a means to stability - and the other way around.