hearing on the implications for interagency reform derive from the specific example of the establishment and operation of provincial reconstruction teams we are part of the armed services committee and yet we have spent the bulk of our time the last six months looking at the interaction between the civilian side of our government with the military side and what it means for our national security and i would ask you know it's been said that my written statement i made a part of the record the same with mr aiken if he has a  worthwhile perhaps it's the first formal way that this congress has really look at this issue of interagency reform other than the buzz has been going on in town here for some time it was brought  it was brought home probably most forcefully to meet with one of my constituents who is currently in iraq and works on the civilian side and in an e mail that she sent several months ago which i have shared with subcommittee before she stated that in her experience that it sometimes seems to her like the conflicts between her agency and other u s government silly agencies is more severe than between her agency and the iraqis and that's what you all and i'm perhaps more academic and concrete where talking about here this morning i was also struck i forget which one it was maybe it was you miss florida that was talking about in your first page of your statement that while we have had some spectacular military and national security successes we have had some failures and the failures may be ones that we can lay at the feet not in our military but at the failure of u and all of us i include us here to mobilize all aspects of our national security strengths so we can have the kind of successes we want and of course we are all familiar with the i thought the excellent speech that secretary of defense robert gates gave november twenty sixth of last year at kansas state and i'm going to ask mr reagan that this six big eight speech be made part of our record today too and in which here's a secretary of defense at a time when they really would like to have additional funding for resetting the force in all kinds of things and this raid one of his goals what is clear to me is that there is a need for a dramatic increase in spending on civilian instruments of national security diplomacy strategic communications foreign assistan civic action economic reconstruction and development but secretary gates our secretary of defense talking about this and then a very specifically mr wilkerson last week we did this topic of inner agency process as came up as a subcommittee led by mr de was a miss davis and others this topic comes up quite frequently hearing that mr wilkerson former close associate a secretary of state powell stated he thought that while we can look at this broad issue of interagency stuff across the spectrum a civilian government that if the department of state and the department of defense if they can come you know either because of imposition from the congress or the president but if that if those relationships get worked out that the rest would fall in line fairly readily which i thought was a an interesting point so we come here today to hear from you all following this the evaluation we've had over the last s witnesses for joining us here this morning after studying the prevention reconstruction teams in the subject of interagency stability operations for over four months the subcommittee is nearing the close of that investigation today's hearing offers an opportunity to hear from experts and what lessons we should learn from the p r t program and processes for planning and executing stability operations one of the challenges a subcommittee faces as we close our work in the and interagency stability operations is to try to figure out how if at all the congress can move legislation that will ensure that the agencies like the department of defense and state will work seamlessly and apply the tools of national power much of what needs to be done are matters that are within the constitutional prerogatives of the executive branch other initiatives that the congress could appropriately address would still face hurdles because much of what needs to be done can only emerge outside the various committee congressional committee system i thought the concrete proposals you've recommended in your prepared testimony are helpful and consistent with the subcommittee has learned over the course of this investigation as we discuss your suggestions that i would like our witnesses to delineate which proposals could be done in the short term and how congress can advance such an initiative but also ought to just mention that some years ago there was a harvard m b a programs came out with a thing a case study approach one of the things that they always ask witnesses would be if you just had only one thing you could do what is the most important change that you would make so if in your testimonies you could address that and say if there were just one thing to change this is what it would be mr chairman thank you and look forward to the testimony diplomat in residence of the woodrow wilson school of public and international affairs prison university and a former foreign service officer with over thirty years of experience concentrated in arabian peninsula in the greater persian gulf including as ms michele flournoy president of the center for new american security formerly of c s i s did work on the beyond goldwater nichols project and before that the principal principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy  threat reduction and deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and ms nora benz of hell senior political scientist the rand corporation and author of numerous studies on post conflict reconstruction and the related policy challenges  we will begin with you we will put on this five minute clock with its very attractive green light that seems to rapidly turn to read it as a signal to you that five minutes is up but you feel free to ignore it if you have things you want  testimony for the record michael follow closer if you will i very much want to commend the committee for the focus that it's giving on the integration of civilian and military capacity to support our national security one of the things that i have learned in working with our military is that in today as world the military will tell you that kinetic force is not enough to achieve our national security objectives and chairman snyder you've stated that very well these comments are based on the work that we did in setting up the office of reconstruction and stabilization meetings with virtually every combatant command meetings with the joint staff on joint planning exercises that we undertook with them as well experiences experience that i had different times in my career working on the national security council staff usa id and the state department so i have at least had the benefit of some experiences that allow us let me to bring together some of these different perspectives from different agencies in some i hope useful ways for you let me just  underscore a couple of key findings from the work that we've learned done and things that we've learned from stabilization and reconstruction first is that it takes at least five to ten years until it's possible to get local partners to really take the lead in the stabilization and reconstruction effort to imagine that you can build capacity and help them build capacity anything and faster is a fantasy and it just simply hasn't been done look at small states like bosnia and kosovo and the easiest part is up front in the most destabilized period because the international community's actually coming in and doing something to a country the hardest part becomes as you start to build that capacity over time and it slows down that process of transition and we haven't understood that  in fact in a place like iraq two thousand and three two thousand and four those were the easy years the other thing that we have to understand is that we need multilateral engagement to succeed in order to have the depth and the range and the time commitment that is necessary to undertake these missions afghanistan is a good example where we have the u n and nato in the united states and thirty nations and here we are still struggling to succeed to imagine that we can do this alone is just simply a fantasy if we even look at tiny kosovo in the that it's taken multilaterally we have to remember that the capacity that we build as the united states to be successful has to be leveraged with multilateral engagement and finally i would underscore that security is a prerequisite there's a certain irony here that on one hand you need security as an enabling environment if you don't get progress on stabilization and reconstruction and begin to normalize life you can't actually sustain that security but we shouldn't fool ourselves that unless and until there is some basic environment of security it is very hard to have a sustainable stabilization and reconstruction effort in order to address some of these issues i've tried to underscor the testimony that there are three levels of capacity that we have to look at building and let me try to draw since is that this is the house armed services committee an analogy with the military the first is the functional equivalent of a joint staff and this is what the office of the coordinator for reconstruction and stabilization as c r s was intended to do the joint staff in the military tries to create a common strategy in a given theater where there is inner operability across the forces it does not mean that you don't need the army the navy the air force marines and the coast guard that means that they actually understand how to work together toward a common goal and similarly the office of s c r s was to play that function of creating a joint staff capacity across civilian agencies and between civilian agencies in the military that process has started it has been given some foundation and s p d forty four but it is a very very fragile foundation that has been created thus far the second capacity that you need is the ability to establish an operational headquarters on the ground in a theater of action in the military you have this with the combatant commands actually establishing a field headquarters you have tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of individuals who constantly work together train together and together and are able to deploy together in the civilian parts of our government we essentially send a cable around the world and ask for volunteers who might be able to come to establish that headquarters not surprisingly it takes months to find her jewels they've never worked together on these kinds of vigils and issues they usually don't know anything about the country that they are going to and so not surprisingly we're not most terribly effective in the deployment of those individuals and establishing the headquarters the p r t's are one form of establishing that nature of the headquarters and one of the things that we have learned is that if you don't have the staff capabilities to put on the ground quickly the p r t is a theoretical exercise and finally the third level of capacity that we need are the foot soldiers if in the second level we have a headquarters where we have the individuals who are developing designing and managing our programs on the ground you need those who can actually deliver them the police the police trainers the rule of law experts and so forth and here we have a centrally depended on contractors in the past i would think that if the u s military were being asked to be  to we're asked to be deployed with comparable resources and training they would tell us that it would be irresponsible and yet at the same time we continue to deploy civilian missions which fundamentally affect the success of military missions without the necessary type of planning capabilities and implementation capabilities let me come back then to bring forward a few recommendations and congressman akin on your question of what that one specific intervention would be in i would ask you a question first and that question would be what do you want do you want a better planning agency in washington or do you want the capacity to deploy on the ground if you want the capacity to deploy on the ground and you do it without planning then you're going to have a haphazard proud yes so i'm going to take a mild deviation on on your question and say that you actually need two things  affectively and the capacity to deploy effectively and in that in order to be able to do that there are a few things that i think are critical the first is the stablish ment of a budget authority that creates an account for stabilization and reconstruction so may seem an arcane recommendation but if you look at the foreign affairs budget there are at least twenty different accounts the experience that i went through when we were developing a strategic plan on sudan for example was to get individual agencies offices and bureaus that manage those accounts of fifty as fiefdoms to direct them to a particular goal in one case when i asked an individual what is the u s government goal that you're trying to achieve and how do you contribute to it the response i got was i've done this job for ten years and nobody has ever asked me that why should i begin to do that now unless there is a way to break across those accounts structures and be able to identify for example one hundred million dollars two hundred million dollars that are necessary for a particular initiative and then ask the question how do we use those resources to most effectively achieve the u s government's objectives on the ground you can't come to an effective strategic plan the environment that we have right now and i've been in it in the field is that you look across these twenty accounts and you ask the question how can i get money from any of these accounts to bring those resources here to the problem that i have in the field and so you end up making choices that are not always the most strategic you don't get resources for nests for the things that are necessary necessarily the most important on the ground and a way to deal with this would be to allow the president to make a determination on the creation of a stabilization and reconstruction account for a particular country when the circumstances warrant it to reach agreement on that with the congress and within that account to allow transfers from anywhere else in the foreign affairs budget so that it goes into a common account where you can basically say that the resources there can be used for any purpose in the foreign affairs budget this is not terribly complicated to do it doesn't cost additional money it's been written up in the lugar biden bill since two thousand and four and it is gone absolutely nowhere and it's the kind of action that can be done immediately at very little cost the second recommendation is on the creation of what the state department has called an active response cor it's two hundred fifty people and the state department and other civilian agencies the purpose of this is to have individuals who take is there assignment the capacity to train for fast deployments on the ground the individuals who work together so that when you have a situation where you need to establish that headquarters on the ground you are not going worldwide trying to find who are the individuals that are available but you have two hundred fifty people who are immediately identified and if those people go into a standby corps you can imagine that over years you can build a codger way of seven hundred fifty people or so who have gone through this training and are your immediate pool for that kind of response capacity this is a relatively low cost way in order to be able to move quickly and establishing our capabilities on the ground and to be able to draw the personnel that are necessary for deployments to prevention reconstruction team third recommendation would be the creation of a civilian reserve corps i would propose a civilian reserve about of about three thousand people i would recommend that it focus initially on police police trainers and rule of law experts because this generally has been the long pole in the tent and being able to establish stability on the ground and to transfer functions from the military to indigenous police right now we have contract there is that we draw from all over the united states with no common dropped and deploy them on the ground in a place like afghanistan it was actually two years before we actually even began to put together a strategy that effectively started to address issues related to the rule of law and we still don't have the capacity to implemented on the ground in the two thousand and seven supplemental a fifty million dollars appropriation was provided in order to begin to establish the civilian reserve it is absolutely frozen because there is no authorization h r one o eight fo sponsored by congressman far is available moving that forward and getting that passed is the first way to create that civilian reserve capability fourth recommendation is the creation of a conflict response fund with about two hundred million dollars we know that this will not fully fund any major mission but what it can do is begin to create the capability of getting your teams on the ground for the first two to three months of implementation because what we do know is if you have to wait for reprogramming of funds or supplemental appropriation it will be months before that money is available if you can get your teams on the ground in that dynamic moment where you can influence the course of change it can have an impact that can influence the overall success of the mission and finally i would just underscore the importance of the subcommittee's support for section twelve zero seven of the defense authorization bill that allows for a transfer authority from the defense department to sta because even with a conflict response fund that is a tiny downpayment on the requirements necessary for quick deployments in the field i would just conclude by underscoring that creating these capabilities i think is truly a bargain in effect the total cost of the active response corps dassin s c r s conflict response fund is about three hundred fifty million dollars the defense authorization capability and section twelve zero seven creates an authorization against existing appropriated funds it's a relatively small cost when we look at how much we're spending on the defense side but look at it from this perspective by creating this capacity we would create or would have created the capacity to withdraw one division from iraq one month early we would have saved one point two billion dollars not to mention the lives that would have been involved and so i just underscore again the importance of the work that this committee is doing and the way that you are reaching across defense and civilian lines because the only way that we can really address these issues if we is if we think about a national security budget and not a defense budget and a foreign affairs budget until we integrate these to understand what is necessary for the national security needs of the united states we will not succeed in our objective with the subcommittee today and i'm very grateful that this subcommittee is taking for its interest in the time that it's taking to you to explore very thoroughly very critically and very constructively what can be done by the inner agency with the full support and oversight of congress to encourage and repair and rebuild the inner agency in this process and player so that we can much more effectively and consistently support and defend the interests of this country a couple of weeks ago i was i met with about twenty cadets from west point and i started my meeting with them by asking them what the difference was between national security policy and foreign policy and then i watched them spend about fifteen minutes getting themselves twisted into pretzels and finally broke it by saying that there really isn't a difference national security policy and foreign policy are the same and they have to be address jointly constructively and it has to be done with all the tools i also asked them since these were west point cadets would you have an army that was made up entirely of armor well obviously not there were two midshipman among the group and i said well would you have an armed services that was solely army well no you wouldn't do that either well then why should we be trying to do national security strategy and policy foreign policy with really almost one one element one tool and that has to be a civilian military effort as much as it has to be joint services and as much as the services have to have a range of tools in the twenty first century  the greatest threats that we're going to be facing are not going to be from standing armies from strong competitor states like the soviet union but they're going to come from instability within the very weakest states  it's not going to come from powerful adversaries but from failed and failing states who are you are able to talk over that i'm not failed and failing states that are that are imploding from a perverse lack of legitimacy their inability or their unwillingness to provide services and structures and from a lack of a basic social compact with their own citizens and this is going to spawn domestic violence and humanitarian misery that is going to be an acceptable to both of us in the international community this is also going to create a vacuum where trends that transnational players will be able to come in and exploit this day they're spread violence within these imploding countries or to spread the threat outwards we're going to be facing civil wars secessions secessionist movements  insurgencies and yes even terrorism and this is not a prediction for the future but this is an assessment of what the current reality is we don't have a consensus yet on when and exactly how to intervene with these imploding states but i think that we do we can recognize that these reflect political and economic and social dislocations and that we have to have all of the tools available to respond to the two corollaries of this new threat is it first of all th continuum between threat and actual violence intrastate is going to be much longer and far more ambiguous than it was with conventional threats and conventional interstate violence and it's going to be greater opportunities for crisis prevention and mitigation and the second is going to be that the concept of a clear post conflict break the shift from the military the civilian is going to be equally ambiguous and what for too long the military considered unconventional warfare is simply going to become the new conventional warfare i think the army and the marines have recognized the shift with their new counterinsurgency manual and yet despite the acknowledgement within that manual the primacy of the political and the need for a civilian agency partner the net conclusion remains one of the military leader now this is natural and appropriate for one thing the army the marine corps can't write the doctrine for the civilian agencies but i think the it also reflected a feeling that the civilian agencies either could not or would not be full partners it reflected the imbalance in the resourcing and it was a need on their part for some prudent planning if you were going to accept that those two imbalances were going to maintain has been a fundamental structural change but i don't believe that the system itself is broken or antiquated but proactive corrective action is needed the inner agency process and how you make it work has as long been a debate between the legislative in the executive branches and it goes back to the one nine hundred forty seven creation of the odeon cia in the first place and the n s c and it's very curious if you look at the original legislation on the c which was to coordinate and collaborate one of its goals was to provide a level playing field so that the new agency d o d could have a voice up against the far more established and very prestigious department of state we may have overcorrected on that a little the tensions that you that we have within the inner agency are not in the know of themselves necessarily bad they present the president the inner agency congress with a range of views a range of options brings in a whole range of skill skill sets and this is not necessarily bad so long as it is done within as an understanding of a process and i would say in a sense of mutual respect i spent well over three years of my spent my entire adult life in the foreign service and almost all of it was working in or agency and almost all of that was working with the department of defense in the uniformed military and i won't go through my history but what i found in working on these issues be they arm sales or counterterrorism or what do we do in east africa is that there was always a fundamental understanding of shared goals and objectives and we might very much disagree on how to get there but we did understand where we were trying to get to and we worked within at least understood parameters on how to do it and as we said with  respect there were times when i might very well doubt the water's edge of some of the people i was dealing with but i never ever doubted their loyalty or their commitment to the national security  was it ever ideal no never was and i do remember in the mid ninety's that michelle and i worked on a project on complex contingency planning along with tony zinni following the intervention in somalia the fact that we're here over ten years later talking about the same thing is perhaps a little depressing but i do think that some movement has taken place but whatever happened interagency there was great debate and at the end of the day you w decision was made you salute smartly and you you did it you carried it out what i was not prepared for when i came back to washington in two thousand and three was how badly the the the process had become in fact it was virtually dysfunctional or almost a functional a wall had been put up between the military and the civilians on working on both the planning for iraq prior to as d d twenty four and after twenty four a colonel friend of mine was told that if he when he suggested it was time to do a political military plan that if you brought it up again he would be fired efforts by the department of state to bring the uniformed military  o the future of iraq project was met by a directive from d o d to the uniformed military that they could not participate in this and this was simply not the way that we had functioned for over fifty years at that point so the it was not so much one that we had a system that was antiquated or incapable of handling interagency call on collaboration we had one way that there was actually walls put up and made that we could not do this and i think what there is a wonderful quote in david rothkopf book called running the world where he quotes a former senior administration official and looking at the decision making process in two thousand to two thousand and three two thousand and four and so that he had never seen more high level insubordination within the u s government within thirty years the point my pointing our county and some of this history and in my statement is is to make the point that we don't have a systemic failure of an antiquated mechanism but we do have a system that was undermined in some cases consciously that cascaded down and rippled out and this is what we're now trying to fix it's a very important distinction between what is the system broken or was a system subverted as the nature of the threat has shifted from the most powerful to the weakest and the root causes shifted to political economic and  social with this complex continuum continuum of civilian and non kinetic tools we've also had this counterintuitive reorientation of our foreign policy to it or to lead with with force and other national security tools have become subordinated or absorbed to put this in military parlance the military has become the supported command and the civilian agencies have become the supporting command the reorientation of of our foreign policy has been compounded by this crippling and chronic imbalance in resourcing and to borrow a phrase that i heard from someone at a at a conference we now have one agency on steroids and the rest of the national security apparatus on life support it is now gotten to the point where that what we have our missions are following resources rather than resources fall doing missions and i think if there is one critical area the congress can and should be looking at is how do we write this balance so that we sit down and we just really critically look at what are the missions and which agencies are best able to fulfill those missions and have the resources following them we need to just turn this over  the military will take on the roles in the missions of the civilian partners if they're unable to do so and they often end up both reinventing wheels that have been already up and running and often not as well and then as we have as as my colleague pointed out this instead of them actually being able to take them on and then ends up being outsourced to contractors and the contractors you you have a problem of stand up you have a problem of accountability as we have seen in this not is not just with the security contractors and so we privatized a number of the non warfighting functions we then add to the military a whole host of non kinetic functions and we end up with having to contract this out in the simply does to me does not make any sense if you're trying to have what the military likes to call it a unity of command or a whole government approach the provincial reconstruction teams i think are a very creative very useful still imperfect and evolving response to these kinds of problems and they present a good laboratory they do raise a number of questions at this point should the centric and against should they be in the service of the of the military mission or not are we looking for quick fixes to further security or are we looking for longer term solutions to build stability and security and stability are not the same to what degree can and should we be looking to bring in local stakeholders n g o s and multilateral partners and international organizations and does the primary mission and who your leadership how does that affect our ability to bring in these other partners and the answer on that is that it has an enormous impact and then most finally finally can there be any kind of affective inner agency coordination or collaboration in the field if you don't have something comparable back here at home drawing from the lessons of the p r t they are very good transitional mechanism they should be in support of calling operations but they shouldn't be an extension of them it has to have a political strategy and they should be focused on sustainable development one problem that we have to look at is that we don't leave deal  stakeholders by doing things too much ourselves and i saw this as ambassador in yemen where the military would come in and do things for as opposed to with us and while it was very good to come in and vaccinate every single guy out in yemen and all the little two legged kids as well as the four legged kids it did nothing to build any kind of capacity for the local government and in some ways of done incorrectly underscores to the local population that actually the local government is not able to do this so we have to think about just what we're doing but how are doing it this is not a recommendation that there be a strict division between security but there has to be a better balance of missions the counterinsurgency manual is revolutionary and radical but it draws very heavily on the lessons of the past and it goes back to basics but then it tries to get them right for the twenty first century and i think this is what we need to do on the inner agency process is go back to basic and then try to make it right what do we need to do very quickly the basic decision making and policy making process needs to be reaffirmed there needs to be clarity on who are the supported in the supporting agencies i would say there needs to be a reaffirmation of the authority of the chief of mission the national security council needs to serve the president by serving the inner edge and c and also supporting effective congressional oversight to echo what my colleagues says there has to be formalized civilian military coordination in anticipation of crises not just in response to them and this would include a mandating and i think this is something congress can do quickly and easily is to support the biden lugar and formalize what is contained in and is t d forty four and the structure of s c r s very importantly there has to be sufficient regular and predictable funding parity with the military is not the goal but equity is we have to have the funds the staff the resources commensurate with the challenges and the threats that we're facing we need the staff and the resources in the state department particularly and i would certainly agree with secretary gates we need the what what the military calls a training cushion so that we can train to languages to area studies to the new skill sets and expertise that we need the state department does not have a training cushion at all in fact we're short we need to have enough of a training cushion so that we can send our people for advanced education opportunities i've now taught at four different universities i have been very much impressed by the number of captains and majors and sometimes lieutenant colonels who are at harvard mit and princeton and us and you see getting one your m p a's study and these issues and it's been very sad to see that there is almost never an f s a among these this group  we need the training cushion and the resources to take advantage of these opportunities the foreign service institute i was doing there for a while needs to be an institution that is capable to fulfill these kinds of missions these training missions areas studies language also to be the center for this inner agency training that has to take place if we're going to do it i think that this is the place that should be done but it cannot be done without the proper support there does need to be a long term in are agents the training we need to know who we are who the other person is i had the opportunity to do the one year senior seminar at the state department which was half state half other agencies and what we learn from each other being on a bus for almost a year driving around the country was probably more important than what we actually learned when we got to wherever the bus was going we need to be able to staff our embassies fully and completely am again i'm who came out to yemen following the call was appalled to find out that the country the size of the of france i had one political officer one economic officer and one that was it we need to staff embassies we need to reopen consulates and we need the money for a public diplomacy program that is real we need the staff so that we can respond to crises without stripping our embassies i had a colonel once asked me why the state department simply didn't send everybody to iraq even if we sent everybody to iraq there's only seven thousand of us i don't think that would make a big difference but it would also mean that we had no one in our embassies to work with  coalition partners we would have no one in our embassies to work with those who do not support our efforts we would have no ability to do any of the other work that we need to do we can't manage crises by stripping peter to pay paul it doesn't work we need the people we need as staff and the resources to go with that to do research outreach to other agencies we once had people in almost every agency all over town we need more pohlad we need to staff to do this and then again as c r s needs to be given the staffing and the funding to do its job as a as a joint office if the administration either republican or a democrat does not request a vision funding congress does have within its prerogative to set levels and i do think that this is something that congress needs to take a look at inner agency coordination and collaboration is not an alien concept within the inner agency we do know how to play nicely together  but we need to be given the ability to do that it would help to have the mandate to do that and the resources it's prudent and wise to ask the question whether we have the structure the process and the people do we to respond quickly effectively and well do we want to anticipate respond early and wisely and that's a different kind of structure i've seen the tremendous good that comes when this is done in spirit i've seen the damage in the frustration and anger when it's done poorly and i certainly do commend and support this committee's efforts to try to help the civilian agencies and the inner agency to get back to where they were so that we can serve this country properly your focus on this issue of improving u s government performance and inner age see operations because since the end of the cold war from whether from somalia through the one nine hundred ninety s to present day iraq we've experienced repeated operational failures at the inner agency level and i think there's no more important area for you to focus when you have americans of all stripes military civilian on the ground putting themselves in harm's way trying to reach our strategic strategic objectives as a nation and yet being supported because of some of these inner agency problem so i really want to commend you and thank you for focusing on this effort and i hope that the committee's efforts in this regard will actually produce some important results i want to take a moment to describe what i think the problem is the various failures that we've of certainly stemmed from misguided policy or judgment but many have stemmed from just poor execution the u s government time and time again has had trouble bringing to bear all of the elements of its national power in a cohesive and effective way and i think that the problem stems from some several sources and carlos and and barbara of also touched on this that we lack a standard approach interagency doctrine if you will for planning and preparing and conducting these operations so we tend to go into each operation reinventing the wheel and this ad hoc approach has kept us from learning as a nation and kept keeps us from learning lessons from past mistakes and then improving the performance next time we also lack adequate interagency mechanisms to coordinate and integrate  efforts at all levels strategic in washington operational of the sort of planning within regions and then going on the field and then finally we lack passy particularly on the civilian side and coming from a d o d background what i observe is this has very there's not only bad for mission success has very detrimental effects on the uniformed military because what lack of civilian capacity means in their experience is number one make huge mission creep so they get stuck holding the bag doing all kinds of tasks for which they really weren't trained or designed and they do it and they do it well you know in most cases they do it very well but it's not no way to run a railroad  second is more even more disturbing with that inability to bring the capacity to bear to meet our objectives in the field means we don't meet milestones which means we don't have a viable exit strategy and we get stuck and the longer we're stuck the more vulnerable we are to increase costs not only financial costs but also most importantly human costs so this again i just wan underscore applaud your efforts of trying to wrestle with us i said more about the problem in my written statement i want to just jump to highlighting some of the most trying to answer mr aiken squash and one of the most important things that can be done and what can be done near term  the first sort of things i want to highlight or say are changes that a new administration or this administration but i think it's unlikely in the final year but any any administration any president could could change and get very near term results from the first is is is is using the national security council as a means of providing clear presidential guidance commander's intent for what a president wants to achieve in an operation before we ever go ahead and to create some capacity in the n s c a senior director in a small office that's really expert in doing strategic level planning for operations and not talking about an operational n s c or running operations out of the n s c i'll the north we don't want to do that what i am talking about is an n s c that's able to identify clear objectives agency roles and responsibilities who's lead who support in a particular area red lines not to cross policy guidance that planners can then take and translate into viable plans coupled with this the second piece is investing in the planning capacity treasury at commerce at justice that is an investment that congress and the executive need to make it's not a whole lot of people but it's a core planning capacity in each of those agencies which is critical the last piece  administration they came up with a p t that was never signed and a speedy x x which was excellent it was action improvement on pretty fifty six was never implemented and a speedy forty four came along we've got other approaches they're all don't use it again and again refine it train people to it and stick to it as opposed to reinventing the wheel every time we have a new administration or every time we have a new operation at the operational level create rapidly deployable interagency crisis planning teams military does this exact thing they basically the flag goes up we want to have a warning order for an operation put together a team start planning for it given the nature of these complex operations they're not military operations alone they are whole of government operations you need to have an interagency reproach to that campaign planning again not that resource intensive but something that i think the kinds of initiatives that carlos was talking about funding at c r s would populate some of these planning teams and make that very easy to achieve in the near term and then at the field level i think we need to look at how we organize right now we have two parallel structure structures for example in iraq we have a very robust country team an embassy and we have a move towards a model where we have an integrated interagency task force where you've got the ambassador and the military commander working hand in glove at the top but their staffs are completely integrated so there isn't a civil military j want a civil military to a civil military a j three and on down the line and you can translate that into civilian terms of you know admin operations intelligence and such but that's really what we have to do for the future you know turning to what can congress do and what are the most important things for congress i think the real role of congress and the most important thing you can do is invest in the capacity on the civilian side this is something a president cannot do it requires leadership and legislation to create the civilian capacity not to match the military person for person but to part no with the military in effective ways i'll give you an example  the opening days of somalia you had one diplomat ambassador bob oakley paired with an entire military force and that one diplomat negotiated the permissive entry of tens of thousands of american marines without a shot fired one experienced diplomat made a huge difference so again it is the right people in the right place of the right time can make an enormous contribution i think the first step in creating that deployable civilian capacity is to fully fund the c r s initiatives that embassador pasqual described i think longer term we need to also be building that capacity in other places like id and other departments longer term we have to determine whether we need to establish a separate field operating agency it's still an open question in my mind whether you can build highly operational deployable qadri is inside agencies who have a fundamental fundamentally non operational culture i'm willing to give it a chance but i think if you know if if the experiment  of of what we're trying to do with c r s does not make it i think at that point you move to creating a new field operating agency with a more operate were  operators are recruited civilian operators are recruited promoted trained and rewarded for being operators very important to go with this is the personnel flow that i'm bastard but in highlighted five to ten percent of this committee there's routinely grants the military ten percent fifteen percent personnel float to do professional military education training interagency joint experience because you expect the highest professionalism from your military and that's what enables that we don't do that on the civilian side if i'm a manager in the state department and i want to say you're asking me to send my best and brightest to training i have to be down my best and brightest  lose that person with no backfill for a year or two very hard decision and the incentive structure is exactly wrong third aspect of investing in capacity and i think we could take some inspiration from the goldwater nichols legislation that really has become the foundation for joining us on the military side the most one of the most important elements of that legislation was changing the incentive structure so joint joint service went from being sort of something that people didn't like to do because it took them away from the service that was their home and where they would get promoted etc to being joint service then became something that you have to punch the ticket if you're going to make general officer if you're going to make flag officers completely change the incentive structure hundred eighty degrees i would submit that if we made a promotion to s t s senior executive service on the civilian side among key policy jobs in the various national security agencies we made that promotion contingent on inner agency education and experience rotations and other agencies you would fundamentally change that culture and you would have the best and brightest running to the door to get that experience and over time as we see in the military over twenty year over generation you would have a fundamentally more joint capacity interagency joint capacity because you'd have people with experience after experience of working cross agency living in other agency cultures etc and the last piece of this i think is also endorsing something that's come up which is creating a center of excellence for training people who are going to be inner agency planners who are deploying to participate in p r ts who are going to go staff the planning team staff the task forces etc who play a training center where you can i and other appropriate training centers not a lot of money huge potential impact so i would just again highlight i think there's a lot that the executive branch can do to better use the instruments it already has to get more integrated approaches but there are areas where it's imperative that congress make some additional investment to build the capacity to do better in these operations over time and again i would just say that the payoffs really cannot be overstated both in terms of achieving our strategic objectives but in doing so at far less cost in terms of both blood and treasure thank you thank you mr chairman for inviting me here today you asked me to talk about the ways in which other countries have reformed their interagency process sees to improve capacity for stability operations in order to perhaps identify some lessons that the united states could apply unfortunately there are very few good lessons to be learned the problems of interagency coordination are not limited to the united states none of these international reform efforts have been successful enough to date to achieve their mandates anywhere in the world most of them continue to suffer from the same problems of bureaucratic competition and lack of capacity that the united states does in my written testimony i describe the specific reforms that have been undertaken in the united states with the formation of the coordinator for reconstruction and stabilization the united kingdom with the formation of  stabilization unit canada the formation of the stabilization and reconstruction task force germany with efforts to improve civilian crisis prevention and the european union which is struggling to determine which of its institutions should take the lead  management and stability operations i'd be happy to discuss the details of any of these efforts during the question period if you're interested these efforts have improved capacity in some areas so the story is not entirely bleak but this quite significant differences in both their substance their national contexts they all suffer from the following four problems first bureaucratic turf wars the united states the united kingdom canada and germany all created new offices that are supposed to either lead or coordinate interagency coordination all of these offices have not surprisingly face very stiff resistance from the agencies whose efforts they are supposed to coordinate the greater their mandate the more likely they are to provoke resistance from agencies that view them as the true thing on their turf and interfering with their mission second poor organizational placement these offices tend to be too low in their government hierarchies to compel other agencies to work with them third lack of financial resources most lack the budgets they need to achieve their missions this contributes to the problem of turf wars since money and bureaucratic power are often linked fourth lack of qualified personnel these offices often rely heavily on said comments from other agencies to include needed expertise and to augment their small staff other agencies are often reluctant to provide people for these comments and often prevent their best people from serving in them why is interagency reform so difficult not just in the united states but in other countries as well simply put our governments aren't structured for it our political systems are very decentralized that is a deliberate political choice and one that isn't going to change but what that means is that there's always going to be some amount of stovepiping turf wars and competition for resources that said there are some ways to minimize the negative effects of interagency come petition and to increase u s capacity for stability operations the first is to create incentives for interagency sic convents this is a step short of what michele suggested about a field operational agency but i think  something that could be done in the short term and is an important step to enable civilian personnel who want to operate in the field on deployments in order to get them there right now there are several strong disincentive to prevent even willing agencies from cooperating particularly in these personnel areas congress should establish mechanisms to reimburse home agencies for the costs involved it's a condon personnel for these operations including salary costs and temporary hires to compensate for their absence second increase the capacity of usa id usa ideas the government repository of knowledge on promoting stability and development in post conflict situations but it is hindered by its small size and its lack of resources while this committee does not have jurisdiction over the u id budget it does oversee issues that are directly affected by its lack of capacity since u s military forces are regularly required to fill its gap to take but one example from iraq military forces are actively involved in setting up city councils no one thinks that military forces are best suited to be establishing local governance structures especially not the military personnel who are on the ground doing it but they often have no choice because usa id and other civilian agencies simply lack the capacity to get into the field and to do everything that needs to be done in these important operations the military forces are stuck filling that gap third establish flexible funding mechanisms those of us on the panel here seem to be in violent agreement on this point about the need to establish flexible funding mechanisms and to adequately resource these types of operations stability operations require funds to be quickly allocated in order to respond to rapidly changing environments particularly at the outset of an operation in particular congress and consistently fail to fund the administration's request for the conflict response fund which was mentioned earlier there are legit concerns which is present prevented it from being funded including those about the role of congressional oversight but those legitimate concerns can be addressed through some sort of reporting requirement once funds have been disbursed but requiring the state department to specify in advance the ways in which that fund would be used to feed the entire purpose of the contingency fund force and finally there is no substitute for an involved president and an involved congress only the president has a political power to break through the bureaucratic conflicts that inevitably arise as part of the interagency process and i would suggest that in the cases where the interagency has worked well which investor but didn't mention very often one of the key reasons was that the president has been involved and made sure that this is one of his top priorities and only congress has the power to provide the funds necessary to improve the country's ability to effectively conduct stabilization and reconstruction operations thank you very much thank you d thank you mr chairman and thank you to all of you for being here i think it is one of the first times maybe that we've even suggested that it's you know it is systemic but it also depends on the kind of vision that people have about how this can be accomplished and so we've been able to lay that out and i appreciate it i want to just just get on one area there are many questions and and congress member davis and i davis and davis team here we're trying to work with this as her many of the other members and that's why especially appreciate it if we think about this response corps we have so many individuals who have been involved already have been involved in the p most of them from the military bringing their skills whether it's engineering whatever that might be i wonder if that is a way to try and capture them and to have them in some ways is where it's appropriate  ly by their decision to be you know to come down the line to be part of the response corps may be kind of premature in terms of where we are with this discussion but i'm just wondering how you might  talking about this in a way that you developing a career ladder out of all these incredible people who have done this job who didn't anticipate doing it that wasn't what they signed up for but that's what they ended up doing and i think one of the things that  really impressed us in speaking to them especially the men and women who serve in the military you've been part of this it's the most important thing they ever did how can we do that is that appropriate do you see a mechanism for doing that and how would it get within the discussion that we're having is it too far down the line to even try and get out there with it or is that something worth we're facing right now i'm happy to start on this the response corps capabilities or some of the things we've been debating for some time there are two types of responses to consider one is the u s government capacity to actually get the teams on the ground that lead and direct our efforts and i think that that is absolutely necessary now and it's absolutely appropriate to think about how these individuals who have had these experiences can be integrated into the government functions in those capacities and then there's a separate risk on score capability of how you get the actual systems providers the police the police try honors the humanitarians and so forth which requires a separate kind of mechanism of drawing individuals from civil society more broadly as the military draws in individuals with civil affairs one point i would just note in work that we've done with the civil affairs groups they have underscored that their role right now is like applying a turnip they can they can avoid somebody dying but they don't have the capacity to apply the sort of strategic skills to actually save a life in the way that you want it to and so that's what we're trying to create is the individuals within the government who have the strategic planning capacity over all the individuals who can be brought in that provide the skills that are necessary running across a very broad range of areas and complementing that still with a very extensive capability and military civil affairs which addresses an immediate humanitarian  and i think what i would add to that is there is there the military has done a very good job of trying to capture lessons learned from from an ongoing conflict and rewriting doctrine in the middle of the of a war as is is quite a quite an undertaking when the civilian agencies don't have the numbers of people coming back but i was it last week talking to the area studies  class it was it was about one hundred people and i asked how many in the room had either served in afghanistan iraq the artes or we're going out to them and it was easily two thirds of the  class and so one of the things that the military did that was right good and proper was they started trying to capture what the captains and the majors and lieutenant colonels were learning on the ground place to do it but it isn't funded it would be to sit down and try to do a comparable process on the civilian side and it would mean bringing in the military who have been part of the p r ts but also bringing in the civilians who have been been part of the p r ts the n g o s who have worked on it and in a sense almost trying to write a companion volume to the to the c i manual and as i said i don't think that we should limit ourselves to just cia operations but it should be pretty and probably what would it take to do that first money second i think a mandate this is something that perhaps congress could mandate is you know c r s is hereby mandated to organize this and i think that would be the one thing you could do mandate unfunded and give it to  would just add a couple of other ideas one is to make sure that we capture in a database a description of who's had what experience and and then the second piece is to create some incentive structures for those people as they go into the next step in their careers to consider further operational experiences down the line whether it's higher pay better retirement points from earlier promotion opportunities but sort of capture who we've got out there with that's had the six capture the experience base and then incentivize it to offer  offer that experience again and then the third thing as barbara said as i think the greater mechanism for capturing lessons learned from this experience that's been that's been i agree with all of that i would just add that the military has great difficulty doing this even on its own even though it has a formidable personnel system identifying people who have been participating in these kinds of civil military operations and so i certainly think that the need is there to attract the civilian expertise and line up incentives to continue snyder has done and continue to bring this effort to light that we've got a little triumvirate going here to try to force the dialogue many times in congress might surprise you it's sometimes difficult to get things done i think we're working in the epitome of the founders vision of the last few years here but the one analogy that comes to mind for me on this whole issue was making pinewood derby cars with my cub scout children with the boys i went through the equivalent of with our military experience for the last few years  making the car last year with a coping saw knife a block of wood and a piece of sandpaper and was ready for physical therapy when that was over and a little counseling finally broke down and bought myself one of these fancy grinding and cutting tools with literally dozens of different attachments which was great fun for all of us and we didn't destroy any furniture this time either which was somewhat pleasing to my wife but in that in that vein one of the things i look at is having a process consultant for years  is having the ability to have a real strategy which i think we're lacking and have lacked for many many years but with the end of the cold war but having the inherent planning capacity i think is so important to the agencies have this  recipe for disconnect that you've got many many dedicated people in all of these agencies who are in effect having to work around the system funding i think is certainly an issue one of my friends predicted the president would when they announced the additional folks for p r t affectively the state department would say yes publicly and quietly say no and it would become a military mission which it did in many ways with many officers from the air force and navy having to come in back fill literally empty billets because of capacity issues not a lack of resolve on the part of foreign service professionals to do that i guess my feeling there is i'd almost like to see it go to a tool box where we certainly increase the capacity of the other agencies were necessary of expeditionary capability  funding more along the lines of a block grant so you can allocate that practically by the team that comes together around that organizationally a toolbox sometimes it might be better to leave with an engine with people who don't have the same more from an organizational committee structure i guess all those things out on the table would like your comments on any one of those pieces and specifically perhaps if when he might comment on the end of that role of congress is our structure committee wise an impediment to  again on the tool box one of the things that has been created and is not given is not really extensively recognizes that there is actually an agreed interagency planning framework that was developed  serious led the process it was done together with joint forces command it was actually circulated to all of the combatant commands it was tested for over a year it's been tested on the civilian agency side on countries like sudan and haiti and it works fairly well and it's not fully recognized that it even exists actually in fact elevating that would be a starting point a second tool set of tools that exists is an essential task matrix which basically goes through and identifies and five critical areas the best lessons from the inner agency about the kinds of actions that need to be taken in mediately what needs to be done to build local capacity what needs to be done to build sustainability over time it's not a cookbook but it's a pretty good checklist of questions that you need to ask if we had simply gone through that checklist before the operation in iraq we would not have deployed because the answer to most of the initial questions would have been i don't know who i think that's my point of fact  qualify and preventing deployment is an issue in this in this case as well because many voices i know quite well with extensive middle east experience from my other wife or not a lot of the table fact that i just see the structure being a real problem but getting those other perspectives are right and let me just say one thing on that on the structure i think that if there is a way to deal with setting budget resolutions on these issues of national security that cut across the cuts across the foreign affairs and the defense budget that that's absolutely critical to do twelve seven versus c r s conflict response fund side by side allocation as a proxy for getting at that but the reality is that you're talking about questions of budget resolutions where those who are dealing with the one five zero account are looking at the constraints that they face and they're saying we can accommodate them and so in effect these these these kinds of capabilities just aren't going to get funded in the foreign affairs budget just to make a couple comments i think that there's there's there's two elements but the most important one from your point of view is i think you bring up a very interesting point on congressional structure and and and and the doctor mentioned the issue that the turf wars when you try to do these in other places has been a problem and with funding being an element  this is you know the fact that you all are looking at this issue and grappling with it is seriously as you are is great but where the house foreign affairs committee where's the intel and there's intil there is some coordination and collaboration if you like on the congressional side we end up getting stuck in turf wars here there's a lot of things that we've talked about in terms of staffing in funding and incentives that don't necessarily come out of this committee and so you know some way of building some of those bridges on the congressional side so that we can get to a single funding mechanism so that we can we can really get the the you know economies of effort from this side as well and i think to the extent that the you could get some of that on at this end of pennsylvania avenue it would again help drive when we're talking about for example legislating and as b d forty four and as c r s and all the other initiatives that we've brought up if even those kinds of things were coming out of congress as the joint armed services foreign affairs an issue did to make it very clear that this is what you all wanted i think that would send a powerful signal the issue of president will will and what comes from the top you don't have a lot of control over that but that is very important what kind of signals are being sent as to you know should we be who should have the lead who should be playing well together what is the n s c role as as a planning and chaffee mechanism those things have to be done and that's where you get at the tool box but that i think congress can help guide that some of it's going to be probably reflected in whoever comes in the new administration two quick comments or on the funding issue i think that the block grant idea is very interesting something that gives more flexibility and more responsive funding time urgent funding flexibility to the people in the field the good news here is there are so there is some precedent erma for example small account emergency refugee migration assistance has all the ri authorities it's a great example where congress realize that if you wait until people come ask you in the midst of a refugee crisis for the money they need and and go through that process it's going to be too late by the time it shows up so there was an agreement to give a little bit in terms of you know give a lot more flexibility and then impose some pretty substantial reporting requirements i think that is a great model for the sort of conflict response fund and is urgently needed on the committee question i think you know there are two ways to go at this one is sort of a higher level of regular cooperation between the armed services and foreign affairs committee but i think you could also consider a standing committee for oversight of inner agency operations and i think given that we're going to be doing these things not necessarily on the scale of iraq but a lot of preventive things a lot of you know a lot of complex operations of various colors and  types over the coming years this these issues come up again and again and again and so some kind of structure that would bring together the leadership are selected members from the key committees to regularly engage and iron out these issues i think would be extremely helpful and very important too to success by the way this was a recommendation our first go up beyond all our nickels report and i think it was the one that was received with the most detrimental aspects of being able to fund these kinds of operations across the civil military gap the way that they need and while it really is a pleasure to see this committee take such interest in civil military cooperation i would have been happier for one if this invitation had come from the foreign affairs committee because i think they're the ones that have the job of appropriating the funds for these types of things as well and so increase coordination to the extent possible between this committee in the foreign affairs committee to make sure that the budgets for these kinds of operations can be increased i think is extraordinarily important i once had a canadian colleague ask me in complete confusion why we didn't just transfer ten billion dollars or so from the defense budget to the state department budget and wouldn't that solve all of our problems  and in a parliamentary system you can do that and in a system that we have in this country you can't do that so easily but we need to get closer to that in terms of being able to allocate funds rapidly and effectively where they need to be  if you're not going to leave then you know what your turn scene the role they should play would you discuss forth we talk about congressional oversight and the job that this body the congress should play in making sure that we're achieving the national security objectives through the systems that we set up the more that we put in the n s c the less congressional oversight there will be but that's the nature of it and the seed folks don't come up here and testify they won't come testify they may become if we say please oh please for a together the n s c plays a crucial role in interagency coordination for these and frankly much of that is is best done at the n s a despite the fact i want to get the rest of that may be true but how do i know that how is congress going to vie the kind of oversight we were failures come out here several times you look back at the past in the interagency stuff how do we provide the kind of oversight because of putting things in the n s c the presidential advisors well i think part of the way that you do that is through the usual mechanisms of oversight with the various agencies themselves directly even though you can't get oversight into what is going on the n s c you can find out a great deal from those who the n s a is supposed to coordinate the extent to which they're doing that and how that process is unfolding but ultimately i think that despite the fact that it is not easily accessible to congressional oversight the n s c plays a very critical role in setting up some of the planning parameters and issuing some of the policy guidance that is essential for this process to work properly if it is doing its job right you should be able to see that manifesting itself throughout the rest of the government process and likewise if it is not doing its job well i think when you are talking about planning and integrating effort you really can't expect agencies to direct one another i think the n s c plays a critical role but i understand your concern and i think one of the ways you can work around that is in some cases to have a dual chair and i know that ambassador pasqual this is part of what came out of an a speedy forty four in some cases where you have an n s c and departmental co chair of for example a planning process of a particular inner agency team and so you know the president maintains the prerogative to have his staff serving him without high you know i i underscore the point that nor made which is i think one of the problems we've run into recently is that this is the administration among others in our history has chosen a lead agency model where you put duty in charge of iraq and they're going to run the show and bring everybody else the table well that typically doesn't work very well in our system because agencies don't take direction particularly with regard to resource lee but if there is an agency that has a lead role or a predominant role you can make that agency co chair with the n s c to try to to sort of bridge the bridge the gap i want take a slightly different position we've been as you said a green so furiously i agree that if too much is vested scuse me too much as it is vested in the n s c you win the risk of not just the oversight issue that that you brought up but the n s c morphing into an operational organization and the few times that the n s c has gotten into operational issues they have generally not it's not been a good thing and it's in part of that is because not only do the congress not have oversight over the n s c but to some extent even sometimes the agencies don't necessarily know what they're doing so i would i would be hesitant to put too much of this into the n s c formally the n s c is role is to coordinate to collaborate to be the honest broker but i was involved in  office of counterterrorism for about four years and in we had a coach here at least we did have a co chair for a while and it was clear that state had the lead role as the coordinator and that was the name that was used and that the other agencies were expected to provide staff and resources and it and for a while it works dream well and i think this is what s e r s can do other agencies don't like to give other money give money to one to someone else but i think again if we're talking about a mandate if we're talking about for the day to day coordination of that that should not really be at the n s c i think you do need supporting supported agency and then supporting agencies we've had times when that has worked and it's worked very well and i would i would suggest that model let me go back and try to draw on the analogy that i created tween s c r s and the joint staff of the military and i think everybody here would recognize that the joint staff in the military is absolutely necessary should be in the pentagon i think everyone would recognize that there is a necessity for a directorate for defense and in the n s c and they have a relationship with one another which is also linked to the relationship to the office of secretary of defense as well as to the civilian agencies on stabilization and reconstruction issues if indeed this model of a c r s as a joint staff on on issues related to conflict is the one that we want to pursue their link back to the n s c is one director who is within the directorate that is responsible for humanitarian affairs that reports the deputy national security adviser who is responsible for the g eight process and trade issues who then passes on information to the principal deputy national security advisor who then reports to the principal national security advisor now the words there is no active linkage here the individuals who are involved in the n s c are tremendously dedicated or the individual but there is no structure here and the reason that we come back to the importance of an n f c function and role is that let's say you had a reshaped inner agency committee that would that would be brought together on let's pick lebanon not to put it in the context of iraq or afghanistan and there was a particular issue that needed white house attention and resolution and you wanted to bring it back to the deputies process and the principals process there is no immediate an obvious link back to the n process the individual who is responsible for stabilization and reconstruction is constantly struggling for a voice internally within the n s c and other regional bureaus you don't get the same thing on defense issues you don't get the same thing on intelligence issues because there's an established office there that has greater weight what we're talking about here is a senior director and maybe three directors not a huge structure you know this is a was for five minutes i think more of a comment i am really interested dr and what you were saying about the fact that there are there really aren't any good examples to look at any good models of many of our friends elsewhere and i was struck when we happened to visit the royal college of the fan studies and they were talking about how they pull in the military people internationally to to be part of that effort and i asked what about the diplomatic cor anybody over there he said we can't get anybody anywhere from anywhere to us i mean anywhere to do that and it's partly because their band is really tight and they're not able to drop on people to take that kind of time out the other thing that struck me on a trip to afghanistan last week was that we were one of the military liaison happened to be an intel officer and i thought wow what are you doing here you know i'd rather have you working on intel it's a well you know it's really you know it's part of the you know career ladder and we have to check off this box basically and that's striking that that that's the case and so i think you know it's really clear that we we don't have that capacity and trying to develop that capacity is is a major task that hopefully you know you address lots of ways of trying to do that and i think part of our task is trying to figure out ok you know where where can i conquer it's real you push in that so we don't have the situation that we certainly found ourselves in iraq and i think the one book that struck me  know and that was and i think by my second or third time i got you know it was real apparent to me that that was a problem and that's partly where i think a lot of us have come from and trying to figure out ok you know how do we get there because there are a lot of wonderful people in this country who would like to be part of that effort but we have have to find a way to do that as somebody who was in the i'm in the emerald city and did not feel that she was lessons from that was was the there was a an active exclusion of career professionals throughout the civilian agencies particularly in the early days in iraq and i think that comes through very much in that book by and large stage and you say people will step up to the plate but to kind of you know be the poor sports metaphor to death you know the benches is very very shallow and you know once you've gone through about two thousand of us that's that's it but some of it i think also was a reflection of a political decision on who do we want to staff these and again i think you know how we've best this and congressional oversight as to who is going out to do this is important i think another point that's that's that's very important is that this we not think of this slowly in terms of crisis response but we need to back this up a little bit as to what kind of structures inner agency funding staffing training that we need to get into crises to get into imploding state early enough so that the military will be there as as providing the security and providing some capability and assets that no one else has but that we don't have ourselves in the position that the only thing we can do is respond to a crisis after the implosion that we can get in there a little bit earlier could i just sa y i would agree that while there's no good model out there that we should webcam replication in terms of somebody who's really got it right their countries i do think that there is an emerging consensus of least an eighty percent solution i mean there's lot i think most of the things that have been said there's a lot more agreement than there is disagreement on at least some of the major elements of reform and i just want to make a comment about timing of reform when you've looked historically it your congressional reform whether it was the creation of special operations command whether it was goldwater nichols there tends to be a pattern of acknowledged operational at some level  period of serious you know investigation which is what you're doing right now an internal dialogue within the congress and broad sometimes broader national dialogue on the issue and then reform and i think you know is a pattern over the last fifteen years and so i think that and we're now trying to wrestle with you know what do we do about it i think once we're through the you know sort of silly season of presidential campaigns for any mention of anything  you know becomes a political football once we can get back to sort of a rational bipartisan discourse which i applaud this committee for hosting even in the midst of a silly season you know i think that in the new year there's going to be a real window for action  at least to begin down the road of the reforms where there's a very broad and deep consensus on these are some of the right things to do and i would hope that you'd sort of seize initiative in that timeframe and i think that about this is a project in a way because first of all this committee being a subcommittee we operate pretty much not a very political level we're more into solving problems and there does seem to be well though the committee is not full of optimism in a political world we can put solutions together when when the when there's a common understanding of a problem and that's where we do well i think that biggest thing working against this is somebody who's been here for thirty five years and they're on life support their drinking formaldehyde to stay alive in their head of a committee finally and they don't want to give up any jurisdiction and that is a surprisingly rigid structure that congress has politically  different things i need some help on the first is i'm just trying to think of america as it relates to foreign countries i'm trying to get up at the fifty thousand foot kind of level in general i think of the point person for america in a foreign country as being the ambassador and yet we also have different locations around the globe where we have the you know the seventh fleet is as a command vessel and that's a center of military sort of organization for a geographic area and we have these you know we're now just made africa and we've got europe in all this so you have the sort of d o d piece of it as well i'm trying to picture from an organizational point of view i would think first of all it be logical that if i'm some government person in a foreign country to be nice to know who's the point man for america i mean i would think that would you need to have sort of a single who's a top of the and then it would seem like to me that i'm trying to figure my own mind what was this if you were the executive what was the structure how would you set that structure up that was my first question my second question is goldwater nichols we did jointness you touched i think it was miss florida you mentioned something about incentives you know you  promoted promoted well you've got my attention you create incentives so that people need certain spots in their careers it seemed to me that we had joined us between navy and army in those other kinds of things does it make sense to have that same jointness so that state department literally trains with the military and the military trains with state to a certain degree so there is a sort of a at least an awareness of the structure that the other people are coming from and  does it make sense that in the state department that you have at least a section of state where people are told some things just happen in this country and you're going over there not to ask if you're going over there this is one of those things america needs to do same as a military do we need to have at least people volunteer for that type of a service that i'm not saying everybody in state would would want to do that but that there would be at least teams or groups of people that would say you know this is this is what i signed up for so that's that's my question can you flesh and how do you make that what is the interface with a foreign country in the u s government what does that look like and then how do you how do you build that jointness thank you maybe if i might pick up on the first point little bit on both points on the on the point person in another country barbarous media since both of us haven't started  title from previous incarnations and there is one place in u s legislation where there is one individual who is the president's representative and is responsible for representing the united states and elsewhere sees that same baster there are tensions with that tell you when the  head of european command flies in your country and has an aircraft and comes in with about fifteen twenty military along with him you know they look at the sasser and they sort of look at you know where is your army and it does create a striking difference and so there is an issue there with resources but i think that one of the things that we stand for as a country civilian control of the military and if we want other countries to abide by that we have to practice what we preach and if we put the military in control of an inner agency process that is looking at the future construction of a country and we're simply violating something that we don't stand for and we're setting an example that many countries are all too happy to to follow and so i think reinforcing the civilian capacity is absolutely credible on the issue of how do you create that jointness is one of the reasons why all of us have talked about some reserve capability and i think that the creation of what the state department has proposed is the active response  corps is key because it basically puts people into jobs where their responsibility for two years in that job is to engage in training operations where they're ready to move and deploy immediately when they're  y and in the meantime they have regular day jobs so if they're not being deployed they would work on conflict prevention in africa for example and you're not then looking at where those teams are going to come from in order to do it these are the individuals who also can be engaged in more effective joint exercises with the military when i was the head of the c r s one of the things we try to do is a lot of exercise and military we had some great exercises and southern command experience that we had in some cases was they were saying by the extent of interagency engagement that they had became the most realistic planning process that they had actually ever gone through to the problem is that we just don't have the numbers of people to keep up with terry in these kinds of planning processes and so i think if there can be the resources made available to in fact actually create this active corps then that's what is necessary to in fact also create a jointness and make it a much more viable concept as is the other person sitting up here with a hand as her served and worked out in the region the sink flies in you know with his own airplane and all of this staff and everything else or you know there's a great big ship off their coast and that's nice they come in you know his his idea of engagement is twenty four hours on the ground and you know me taking him around in a dinner party my job is to be there for four years on the ground every day my staff there on the ground every day and so when the government is thinking about who they should be dealing with who is representing the president's representative but also inner agency and even a very small  is inner agency that's where they look and that's where they should look and that's where we should encourage them to look and to the extent that we start projecting that there is an alternative to the ambassador picturing part of the value of our relations with those countries they had a tremendous level of stability to i might not be so stable particularly with china they are but certainly north korea no from a geopolitical point of view if we have joint military operations with japan and have joint military operations with south korea that provides not only additional capability militarily but it helps bring those countries kind of up to speed in their military capability and so i'm thinking ok now i'm the commander in chief  know and i've got these military things going on that can overshadow what's happening over to states and how do you see those kinds of because because that is a very valuable type about reach to build oh it's a critical outreach and  was very useful training but it's an element of a relationship and and one of the jobs that we have to do as ambassadors and as state is also to get those those kinds of assets and resources korda native was what we're doing more broadly and not think that they are a substitute as you said you know earlier it's nice to come in and vaccinate the goats but i need an id presence that is large enough flexible enough and funded enough that i can help the yemenis develop a veterinary service the joint exercises are great but they're not a substitute  art i found in my career in the middle east that the relationships with the sinks was was a very close one very supportive very constructive very mutually reinforcing and this is i did not see him as a competitor largely because i feel my position and in most cases they didn't really see it as an either or we don't want to do something that starts setting it up as a parallel and this gets back to what i was talking about as supported and supporting commands this is a concept the military is very comfortable with on the incentives so that's understand the need to have you be here and for you to coach them in the culture and absolutely and i mean you know we're sending out briefing memos before they arrive they get off the plane we're talking to them in the car you know this is who you need to meet with this is who you need to talk about this is what you need to do this is what i need from you this is what i can do for you and i had with i probably worked with ten different central command central command sayings and in almost all cases it was a very good supportive relationship where we worked closely and came up with some great things i want to say it's the incentives are a great idea  joint but not melding the idea that we're going to homogenize these i would say from again my my personal experience is that people in the state department want to do the training want to do these exercises would like to do the outreach we just simply don't have the personnel to do it there's not a there's not an institutional aversion to it it's improvement is in some of the sort of street planning or absence thereof that goes on and interagency basis for what is it the us is trying to do in a given country over a given period of time and to try to strengthen the inner agency dialogue on those issues at the country level and then at the regional level you see a lot of ad hoc activity where you know the cocom because there is you know maybe it is the entity that's in the region at that level will invite him basters of the region to a conference to talk for a few days on what it is we're trying to achieve i would love to see that kind of thing hosted by a civilian take but i think there is room for improvement in more sort of strategic beyond crisis response more strategic planning at the regional level i also think you know that you're seeing here to a pretty exceptional ambassadors who understood in there that their job was to be to lead in or agency country teams lead in or agency teams to get jobs and i don't think that is universally true the best embassadors understand that i don't know that we always prepare everyone who takes the position of ambassador to understand you're not just the state department representative you're not just a political representative of the president but you are the interagency integrator for this country  on the inside of peace i mean we've talked about how to incentivize the civilian side with whether it's pain scent of early promotion incentives there are types of things there are lots that can be done there i just want to for this committee to all i'd also highlight something on the military side right now and this is probably a larger discussion to be had with chairman skelton right now we define very very narrowly the particular positions for which  military officer can get joint credit so they there are lots of seriously joint an interagency experiences that people are having on t f staffs on  inner agency staff where you have officers spending two and three years doing these highly enter agency things but not getting joint credit for it i think given the increasing number of demands for putting on officers to check all these you know get out collect all these brass rings before you know and then make it to a general officer increasingly packed in short amount of time one of the things we should look at is opening up  list of things that count as joint credit to include i would argue more inner agency experiences so that you'd also incentivize more participation on the military side to come over to civilian agencies to come over to predominantly civilian staffs and enter agency staff just quickly on your second question the issue of establishing the right incentives in my mind is the only way to effectively address interagency problems because you can't you can't legislate cooperation you can't change an agency's culture the only thing that you can do is make it in their interest to do what you want them to do and that applies at all levels there need to be incentives created for agencies to cooperate with each other not just through the direction of the n s c but through some bilateral lateral by should say mechanism there need to be incentives for agencies to let their personnel participate particularly in field deployments as i described before but then also there need to be the right  sense of incentive as michelle has addressed for individuals to volunteer and for them to have the right career progress ahead of them so that undertaking these kinds of operations and experiences is not detrimental to the need the incentive to be lined up at all levels in  sierra leone right as the u n troops were going out at the end of that war has to be peacekeepers and joe melrose's our ambassador there and there was a i think a two hundred british military force that was providing training  tough guy and literally when he arrived by helicopter in the sierra leone he was with a woman in her sixty's who was working for an american n g o s an american citizen who was wearing a neck brace they got off the helicopter she got in a private car and went to her place outside of the town where she was going to live and work some time that the marines because of the marine corps rules could not leave freetown overnight and it just frustrated and at master melrose did not have the authority to make that decision it was fine with him that that marine go outside of the area and i don't want to take my time for a comment on that but it really brought home the intricacies of  i'm going to take a shit about that moment of it is ending it is the vital part of this country's democracy that has its moments of silliness but it is not the silly season and if we think that we can come back in january february march next year as members of congress and do some kind of dramatic change in fifty years in how national security policy is made  i was struck last night and disappointed last night in fact i publicly their last full committee hearing when secretary gates testified i pulled out his kansas state speech and said secretary this is a great basis for an inaugural speech which one of the way to flatter people right together and set this up for our next president we've got some problems institutional problems that the clinton ministration had this administration's had why not spend this year we've got mr davis and mrs davis working together and i was working the other why not spend the next ten or twelve months and work on that issue together in a in a nonpartisan bipartisan way i think there's a lot of interest in doing it it didn't get a mention so you know i not coming down the hardest but i think part of our job i would hope part of your job is to make these issues part of this presidential campaign in some capacity in some way because otherwise to think that we can somehow hatch and with the limited resources we have come january of next year that's not  been what's the word for keeping a warm incubated that's going to be a tough i apologize for my moment of sarcasm but in terms of actions speaking louder than words these recommendations came out of the beyond goldwater nichols work that i have done and i have personally briefed three and hoping to get to at least four of the major candidates two on each side on exactly these issues so i am you know my comment aside taking it very seriously we don't want this become a partisan issue with my point a political football but we want every candidate to really that this is good governance by over what they think culture i mean i mean it's not culture by leadership culture bad culture is bad habit and i think there's a variety of ways that you can change the culture of an institution if you decide that's important to change that culture that culture is hurting and part of just educating people that that culture is hurting i think that's the strength of secretary gates speech what he has said is that there's there's this going on within the pentagon that says right it may not all be us and then there's a change in culture who would have thought that we would have a secretary of defense making the most eloquent statement we've had in the last several years about why we need to do something for state department funding so i travelers in this that are raising the issue as well and in the early discussions it was very clear that they in many cases did not have a clue that this was a critical issue as some of been successful executives and i think i'll just my personality will do this not understanding the process to dr ben comment on not having incentives to change in the corporate sector the incentive is continued employment and i think that the models to look to for radical institutional change to adapt to changes to go or to change the marketplace is to go out into the commercial world if you look at what motorola did if you look at  this young provocateur upstart came in and force the transformation of american manufacturing because of a entirely different paradigm what they were able to do from a conceptual or a spatial standpoint is accomplished exactly what we're talking about today is a perfect by no means there's always the challenges that you face and i think what drove that having seen part of that from the inside in the in the manufacturing world is the state of the greatest source of inspiration is desperation when you realize there's a need to change speaking the silly season is aside there is one come visit my primary in the spring with the person who rides on u f o s and the indicted fellow and i think i can win in a three way so but it's in the back of the room and for an army guy that's a tough thing anyway but the i have to tell you talking to every one of them this issue interagency reform is the issue every service group that i have been with is being talked about here in the armed services committee based on that all that desperation to address the root the ultimate root cause state foreign affairs has had an authorization what twelve years fourteen years and when we get it it's i mean because they're giving i think it's a misguided priority frankly of just talking about resolutions of things that probably create things for you all to do in crisis messaging and things like that in different parts the world but at the end of the day there are a lot of members on that committee in a wide number that want to see these types of changes we've seen in the area the reform  t from the project for national security reform study which i think some of you are participating in that great collection of talent stumbling block to getting that done last january and february when we were in the hearings here in the in the full committee it was very clear it was the national security council staff where the objection points to preventing that study from going forward when we were going to talk about probably twenty three different case studies that show this process problem it's very bad it finally got around that but i think the agency itself has its own kind of shadow organization his own kind of shadow agency i've even seen visa problems fixed going through the n s c i don't even know how that happened but got the problem fixed but nonetheless there is a process unto itself and this integration i think is going to be critical at the end of the day but i  would highly encourage the folks from the corporate world who have done this to come into the dialogue specifically since fifty of the largest one hundred condoms in the world are companies wal mart is if it were a nation is the eighth largest trading partner of china and i'm not advocating copying all their marketing practices and things like this but it's this constant adaptation and integration to the change that would be of value the  thing that i would ask you to comment on and this might be the radical question what about moving to a point to have this gratian change in the commands themselves to go to something very hybrid indifferent to for example when in africa command we have an integrated diplomatic and military response to have the first or second person depending on what has to be the more lead focus to be a civilian working and it has with the military and if it switches to the other way then obviously some adaptation but maintaining it may be a tighter integration so you don't have kind of a proconsul on one side with his praetorian guard and centuries all around him and then the poor diplomat in the toga getting a ride on the chariot as he's coming by going off to the crisis  position which is what we normally have which was extremely personality dependent you know if the commander chose to listen to the call and it was great and if they didn't they really wasn't anything to they have regional regional focus they don't have a day to day on the ground capability and i think that is an improvement but it's we have to be very careful that we avoid what carla so eloquently talked about is this both the perception and in some cases the reality that we are leading with our military in in too many aspects of our foreign policy abroad there's a lot of reasons that we shouldn't be doing that and and again sort of getting into the supported supporting command issue is is is an important one on how we conduct ourselves how we manage the resources what kind of a message that we're giving to i think it's an improvement i would like to see very quickly on your deployment story from s lee on that is one issue that i did have with regional commanders is that they were making decisions on who could come into my country and do what that in many cases over my own judgments and my own and they were defining deployed forces not as something like the photograph behind you which anybody would expect you know understand that what goes on in afghanistan and iraq is deployed forces but two guys from the coast guard in polo shirt and dockers who are going to come in work out of my embassy and work on a coast guard for the yemenis was suddenly decided suddenly declared to be a deployed  and i lost control over when and how these people could come in and that at that point it started to become we were not working as well together if sir if i might just  one of the things i recommended in the past work is thinking about the notion of regional security council's where you would have an inner agency entity might be physical might be virtual terrorism w m d perforation i mean pick your issue it's very difficult to work these country by country the things flow across borders very quickly in terms of what we need to contend with so and i know that actually  a regional embassador role before so maybe you will comment on this but i think having an interagency entity that that is not just ad hoc but meets on a regular basis to try to work the regional integration issues would be very useful the key would be what can you do it without it just becoming another layer of bureaucracy which would not be helpful but i think one of the strengths that we have becoming increasingly complex you need individuals who are posted on the ground with historical in language and cultural knowledge to be able to understand what the problems are to design solutions and to oversee their implementation and you only get that with the deploy capacity so one of the things i would just underscore is that strengthening the capacity to have that country specific understanding and knowledge is still key and is still a central part of our national security requirements and it's a role that i think ambassador but it requires a whole inner agency involvement i think that there is a strong rationale for having a greater a stronger and better integrated regional function because as michel y you need to look at these across countries and so having a pet capacity to have a strategic vision in that way i think makes a lot of sense how you organize it and whether you put it into a combat command is worth debating and it gets out this question of who is leading and who is driving us policy but i think that the question needs to be asked a point that i would underscore chair mr chairman is the change in culture is the importance of leadership and as you just said you know secretary gates and his life is his leadership is has played a fundamental role in changing the way that people think about the inner agency and the integration of civilian and military functions and if we bring this back to the n s c you know we've had in a seize of henry kissinger and bran scowcroft and sandy berger and tony lake and condi rice and us are fundamentally different entities and structures and what that reflects is that depending on the leadership that you have at the top you can get very different results and so the kind of oversight that you provide of the inner agency process and here i understand your frustration you can't call a national security advisor in to testify but it is absolutely necessary to continue to have that check and balance the final point i would just make is that weak as some of the international experiments might be and nora did a great job of laying out what some of the problems are you still have an e u reserve mechanism that has two hundred monitors tw judges two hundred ministry there's five thousand police the germans have reserve mechanism that they run to and geo called the canadian seven hundred forty million dollar conflict response fine even the un has two hundred fifty million dollars response fund for peace building which we by the way do not contribute a penny to right now others are getting out there and doing this and we're falling behind and the kind of experimentation experimentation that we're doing because we're not putting forward the resources we're going benzo if you like last word yes please one a final note on the changing of organizational culture is of course it's possible to change them what i meant to emphasize is it's almost impossible to do from the outside it really comes from the leadership of those organizations and has to filter down from the top to people throughout the agency it's also very important for people within an organization to believe that something fundamentally wrong is happening whether it's failure desperation that the current way of conducting business is not succeeding something needs to be changed and i think that now you are seeing that within the department of defense not just within the leadership but among the soldiers who are on the ground and conducting u s operations i think in two thousand and four two thousand and five the early ish days of deployments in iraq what you heard from a lot of people who had of soldiers who had on the ground experience was that the military could solve these problems all right if his if the state department isn't coming a civilian authorities aren't coming we're just going to have to do it ourselves and i think we've seen a very profound shift in the last year to two statements from people from the very top from secretary gates on down to privates who are coming back from deployments saying that's not the solution the we can't do it we need help to do it the only solution is is to build up civilian capacity that is a very powerful message being sent from the people that we are asking to go serve the country and conduct these operations and i think that because that culture is changing within that organization from a perceived failure to succeed as much as as perhaps could be the we may get some impetus for reform thank you all for being here i'll give you the opportunity if there's a question from me for the record if you all have any additional