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94–063 PDF 2004

S. HRG. 108–481

BUILDING OPERATION READINESS IN FOREIGN

AFFAIRS AGENCIES

HEARING

BEFORE THE

COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS

UNITED STATES SENATE

ONE HUNDRED EIGHTH CONGRESS

SECOND SESSION

MARCH 3, 2004

Printed for the use of the Committee on Foreign Relations

(

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/senate

COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS

RICHARD G. LUGAR, Indiana, Chairman

CHUCK HAGEL, Nebraska

LINCOLN D. CHAFEE, Rhode Island

GEORGE ALLEN, Virginia

SAM BROWNBACK, Kansas

MICHAEL B. ENZI, Wyoming

GEORGE V. VOINOVICH, Ohio

LAMAR ALEXANDER, Tennessee

NORM COLEMAN, Minnesota

JOHN E. SUNUNU, New Hampshire

JOSEPH R. BIDEN, JR., Delaware

PAUL S. SARBANES, Maryland

CHRISTOPHER J. DODD, Connecticut

JOHN F. KERRY, Massachusetts

RUSSELL D. FEINGOLD, Wisconsin

BARBARA BOXER, California

BILL NELSON, Florida

JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER IV, West Virginia

JON S. CORZINE, New Jersey

KENNETH A. MYERS, JR., Staff Director

ANTONY J. BLINKEN, Democratic Staff Director

(II)

CONTENTS

Page

Binnendijk, Hon. Hans, Roosevelt Chair of National Security Policy, National

Defense University, Washington, D.C. ............................................................... 16

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 18

Dobbins, Hon. James, Director, International Security and Defense Policy

Center, RAND, Washington, D.C. ....................................................................... 4

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 6

Hamre, Hon. John, President and CEO, CSIS, Washington, D.C. ...................... 9

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 11

Lugar, Hon. Richard G., U.S., Senator from Indiana, Chairman, U.S. Senate

Committee on Foreign Relations ........................................................................ 1

(III)

(1)

BUILDING OPERATION READINESS IN

FOREIGN AFFAIRS AGENCIES

Wednesday, March 3, 2004

U.S. SENATE, COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS, Washington, D.C.

The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:30 a.m. in Room

SH–419, Hart Senate Office Building, Hon. Richard G. Lugar,

chairman of the committee, presiding. Present: Senator Lugar.

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. RICHARD G. LUGAR, U.S.,

SENATOR FROM INDIANA

The CHAIRMAN. This hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations

Committee is called to order.

Over the past decade the United States has undertaken a series

of post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction operations that

have been critical to United States national security. In the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq, the United States has cobbled together plans, people, and resources with the Defense Department

in the lead.

The efforts of those engaged have been valiant, but these emergencies have been complex and time sensitive. Our ad hoc approach

has been inadequate to deliver the necessary capabilities to deal

speedily and efficiently with complex emergencies.

Last week Senator Biden and I introduced Senate Bill 2127, the

Stabilization and Reconstruction Civilian Management Act. The

purpose of this bill is to establish a more robust civilian capacity

to respond quickly and effectively to post-conflict situations or

other complex emergencies.

International crises are inevitable, and in most cases United

States national security interests will be threatened by sustained

instability. The war on terrorism necessitates that we not leave nations crumbling and ungoverned. Our tolerance for failed states has

been reduced by a global war against terrorism. We have already

seen how terrorists can exploit nations afflicted by lawlessness and

desperate circumstances. They seek out places to establish training

camps, recruit new members, and tap into a global black market

in weapons technology.

In this international atmosphere, the United States must have

the right structures, personnel, and resources in place when an

emergency occurs. A delay in our response of a few weeks, or even

a few days, can mean the difference between success and failure.

As a nation, we have accepted the stabilization and reconstruction

missions in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq, but we need to go

2

a step further and create structures that can plan and execute

strategies to deal with future emergencies.

While recognizing the critical challenges that our military has

undertaken with skill and with courage, we must acknowledge that

certain non-security missions would have been better served by a

civilian response. Our post-conflict efforts frequently have had a

higher than necessary military profile. This is not the result of a

Pentagon power grab or institutional fights. Rather, the military

has led post-conflict operations primarily because it is the only

agency capable of mobilizing sufficient personnel and resources for

these tasks. As a consequence, military resources have been

stretched, and deployments of military personnel have been extended beyond expectations. If we can improve the capabilities of

the civilian agencies, they can take over many of the non-security

missions that have burdened the military.

The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations embarked on a bipartisan experiment beginning in late 2003, assembling an impressive array of experts from inside and outside of our government to

provide advice on how best to achieve this goal. This ‘‘Policy Advisory Group’’ held extensive discussions in which Senators, group

members, and invited experts spoke frankly about their ideas to

improve the United States response to post-conflict reconstruction

problems and complex emergencies. The bill that Senator Biden

and I have introduced draws heavily on those discussions. I believe

that we need structural change, accomplished through legislation,

to guarantee improvements in our capabilities.

Although Senator Biden and I have tried to incorporate into the

bill as many of the insights of the group as possible, we recognize

that not every participant will agree with each provision in the bill.

This is not surprising, given that one of our goals in constructing

the group was to guarantee a diverse set of perspectives. Nevertheless, there were several consensus themes that developed from the

group’s discussion. They were:

First of all, the civilian foreign affairs agencies should be better

organized for overseas crisis response, and the Secretary of State

should play a lead role in this effort.

Second, there should be improved standing capacity within the

civilian agencies to respond to complex emergencies and to work in

potentially hostile environments.

Third, the agencies must be capable and flexible enough to provide a robust partner to the military when necessary, or to lead a

crisis response effort when appropriate.

And fourth, the rapid mobilization of resources must be shared

by the civilian agencies and the military. While the need to ensure

security will continue to fall on the shoulders of the military, the

post-conflict demands on the armed services would be reduced by

more effectively tapping civilian expertise.

During this process, the Bush administration was extremely

helpful. Officials from the State Department, the Defense Department, the NSC, and USAID attended as guests of the group and

participated in their private capacities. The participation of these

individuals does not constitute an official endorsement of this bill

by their employing agencies, but the final product was greatly improved by their collective experience and wisdom.

3

Our bill urges the President to create a Stabilization and Reconstruction Coordinating Committee to be chaired by the National Security Advisor. This coordinating committee would ensure appropriate interagency planning and execution of stabilization and reconstruction efforts. The coordinating committee would have representation from the Department of State, USAID, and the Departments of Commerce, Justice, Treasury, Agriculture, Defense, and

other agencies as appropriate.

Our bill would authorize the creation of an office within the

State Department to coordinate the civilian component of stabilization and reconstruction missions. The Office would be headed by a

coordinator who is appointed by the President and reports directly

to the Secretary of State.

Our bill also would authorize the Secretary of State to establish

a Response Readiness Corps with both active duty and reserve

components available to be called upon at a moment’s notice to respond to emerging international crises. The reserves would include

federal government officials from the non-foreign affairs agencies

who have volunteered to participate and members recruited from

the private sector based on their applicable skills.

Finally, our bill urges the Foreign Service Institute to work with

the National Defense University and the United States Army War

College to establish a training curriculum for civilian and military

personnel that would enhance their stabilization and reconstruction skills and improve their coordination in the field.

Our intent is not to critique past practices, but rather to improve

our stabilization and reconstruction capacity for the future. We recognize that Senate Bill 2127 does not address many facets of this

issue that fall under the jurisdiction of the military and the Armed

Services Committee. I know that my colleagues on that committee

have many thoughts about these issues, and they may recommend

additional steps.

Today it’s our privilege to welcome as witnesses three key participants in our Policy Advisory Group process. Ambassador James

Dobbins is Director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center of the RAND Corporation, Dr. John Hamre is President

and CEO of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and

Dr. Hans Binnendijk is the Theodore Roosevelt Chair and the Director of the Center for Technology and National Security Policy at

the National Defense University. All three have played leadership

roles in research studies by their organizations on ways to improve

United States capacity in the areas of stabilization and reconstruction.

The inevitable post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction demands of future crises will require a formidable capacity to respond

to challenges, both military and diplomatic. It is crucial to our success that the necessary resources and plans be put in place now.

For this reason, we look forward to the insights of our witnesses

and the opportunity to discuss with them Senate Bill 2127.

I would like to call upon the witnesses in the order that I introduced them, which would include, first of all, Dr. Dobbins and Dr.

Hamre and then Dr. Binnendijk. You may be assured that your

statements will be published in the record in full. Please summarize them, if you can, since our intent, however, is to have as full

4

a comprehension of this subject as we can. Please do not feel constrained. You might aim for ten minutes or so as the initial summary before questions, but make certain that you cover the ground

that you believe is important.

Dr. Dobbins.

STATEMENT OF HON. JAMES DOBBINS, DIRECTOR, INTERNATIONAL SECURITY & DEFENSE POLICY CENTER, RAND,

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Ambassador DOBBINS. Well, thank you very much, Senator. I’d

like to thank you for several things: first, for having invited me

today to testify on this important subject; second, for having taking

it up and pursued it over an extended period of time; third, for having formed a Policy Advisory Group, which was bipartisan in nature and which included representatives of this administration,

previous administrations, and some of us who have served in both;

fourth, for having attended and actively participated in all of our

discussions; and finally, for having introduced legislation that so

closely parallels the consensus that emerged in those discussions.

My prepared testimony today largely repeats what I and, I think,

many others said in the course of the Policy Advisory Group. I’m

pleased that this can now be made part of the official record. I

won’t try to repeat it to you today, since you’ve heard it from me,

and you’ve heard it from several others. But it is strongly supportive of the legislation that you’ve introduced.

I submitted this testimony on Friday. Since then the United

States has embarked on yet another major nation-building mission,

which wasn’t entirely anticipated and isn’t covered in my testimony, so I thought I might say a word or two about it.

The CHAIRMAN. Our hearing was prescient.

Ambassador DOBBINS. Yes. And that, of course, is the American

intervention in Haiti, a country with which I became painfully familiar in the course of the 1990s. I’d like to address briefly the implications of Haiti for the legislation and for the steps that you’ve

proposed.

The first question that arises, of course, is why are we doing this

again? Haiti has this familiar, this tragic cycle. This, I think, is the

35th Haitian president to depart after a coup, it’s the fourth time

the United States has intervened in Haiti in a decade, it’s the second time that Aristide has been driven from office. What did we do

wrong the last time?

My own reflection on that is, first of all, that the preeminent responsibility for Haiti’s plight rests with President Aristide, who repeatedly failed to take advantage of the many opportunities that he

was offered to set Haiti on a new path. That said, however, I do

think that in the mid-90s the United States set its objectives too

narrowly and its time frame too briefly to accomplish a lasting

change in Haiti.

The Clinton administration intervened in Haiti with the intention of restoring a duly elected president, holding new elections, inaugurating yet another president, and then immediately leaving. It

achieved those objectives. In many ways it was a model operation

in terms of its benchmarks and stated mission. But two years was

5

too short a period to fix a society as deeply broken as Haiti. And,

in retrospect, the resources were quite inadequate as well.

Only a few years later the United States spent 5 to 10 times as

much to reconstruct Bosnia and Kosovo as it did Haiti, a country

which is 4 or 5 times larger than either of those and much, much,

much poorer. And today the United States is providing Iraq economic assistance 100 times greater than it provided—than Bill

Clinton provided Haiti at the absolute peak of United States interests in the mid-90s. So in retrospect, not only was the time frame

too short, but the resources were stinted as well.

Turning to the current intervention and looking at it from the

perspective of the legislation that you’ve offered and the reforms

that are being proposed, one would have to say that in this case,

again unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to have been a great deal

of planning done. This appears to be heavily improvised, and to

some degree that may be the result of fast-moving events.

Nevertheless, it does seem to me that the administration did

have a fairly clear choice over the last month or two, at least. If

its preeminent objective was to avoid having had to intervene, then

the logical consequence would have been a choice of providing diplomatic and financial support to Aristide as soon as a armed rebellion had broken out in the hopes that that would have proved adequate, unpalatable as that choice would have been in light of

Aristide’s record.

Alternatively, if the bottom line was that Aristide’s record was

such that Haiti could not be governed with him in charge, then one

should have started planning a great deal earlier for an intervention, since it was fairly clear that if Aristide were to leave, the circumstances would be such that only an international intervention

could have restored order.

One suspects that instead of making a clear choice between both

of these unpalatable alternatives, the administration debated them

until the last moment when the choice was thrust upon it over the

weekend.

We do also seem to be, again, in danger of doing what we did

in both Afghanistan and Iraq, which is underestimating the force,

the size of the force needed, dribbling in forces too slowly, not securing a degree of control, and establishing a stable environment

from the beginning. We’ve seen repeatedly that whenever a regime

topples, a period of chaos and disorder and a vacuum of power

open, and that this vacuum is always filled by a combination of

criminal elements and extremists. The longer the criminal elements and extremists are unchallenged in occupying that terrain,

the more difficult it is to regain that terrain and establish a stable

and secure environment. Indeed, we have not yet done so in either

Afghanistan or in Iraq.

On the other hand, it’s difficult not to be sympathetic to the administration’s difficulties in mobilizing the resources and the attention necessary to do something as difficult as we are embarked on

in Haiti, given the degree to which we are overextended in Afghanistan and in Iraq. There is, I think, a real question as to whether

even the world’s only super power is capable of assuming responsibilities for nation-building on this order.

6

1The opinions and conclusions expressed in this testimony are the author’s alone and should

not be interpreted as representing those of RAND or any of the sponsors of its research. This

product is part of the RAND Corporation testimony series. RAND testimonies record testimony

presented by RAND associates to federal, state, or local legislative committees; government-appointed commissions and panels; and private review and oversight bodies. The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit research organization providing objective analysis and effective solutions that

address the challenges facing the public and private sectors around the world. RAND’s publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.

In the Clinton administration there was an implicit one-at-a-time

rule, an understanding that while the resources for some of these

may not have been overwhelming, the amount of time and attention it demanded from policymakers precluded doing more than one

of them well at a time. And so the Clinton administration did not

go into Haiti until it got out of Somalia, it did not go into Bosnia

until it got out of Haiti, and it did not go into Kosovo until it had

stabilized Bosnia and begun drawing down its forces. This forced

some difficult choices. It chose not to go into Rwanda because it

was on its way to Haiti, and it knew it couldn’t do both at the same

time.

Now, in retrospect that might have not have been the best set

of priority and, indeed, President Clinton later suggested that he

would have done it differently had he had the chance to do it over

again. But at least it did represent a setting of priorities and a conscious knowledge of one’s limitations.

In this case, it is my hope that we don’t, by taking on so many

missions and doing none of them well, discredit the whole process

and concept of nation-building because we have demonstrated that

when we concentrate enough attention, enough men, money, and

manpower and time on it, we are capable of doing it well. But we

need to be careful regarding the number of missions we take on at

any one time.

I certainly do think that if the provisions of your legislation had

applied in the current circumstances, we would, at a minimum, be

in a better state regarding plans for the Haiti operation. We would

have had an office in the State Department that would have, at

least for the last month or two, have concentrated on developing

contingency plans, on looking at the levels of manpower, money

that would be required, and on having in place the civil components of an effort to rebuild the police force, to rebuild the justice

system, and some of the other programmatic aspects which will

have to be part of this effort in Haiti.

Let me just conclude, again, Senator, by strongly endorsing the

legislation and expressing appreciation for everything that you

have done to advance it.

[The prepared statement of Ambassador Dobbins follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF JAMES DOBBINS

I want to thank you, Mr. Chairman, and the committee for having invited me

here today, for having taken up the subject of post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction, for having organized the Policy Advisory Group on which I was privileged

to serve, and having submitted the legislation on that subject which we are here

today to discuss. All of us who served on the Policy Advisory Committee are particularly appreciative of the time and effort you and Senator Biden devoted leading and

participating in our discussions. It is particularly satisfying to see the results of

those discussions reflected so accurately in legislation you have submitted.1

After more than a decade of intense American involvement in nation-building it

is right that Congress and the Administration should be giving thought to how our

7

nation can perform these unavoidable and important tasks more effectively? The

participation in this Policy Advisory Group of senior representatives from the White

House, State and Defense, of Congressional leaders from both parties, and of former

officials from this and previous Administrations provided unusual, perhaps unique

breadth of experience to our discussions on this topic. I believe that the results of

those discussions, and the high degree of consensus they revealed are well embodied

in the legislation you have submitted.

In our discussions we were able to draw upon the results of work done on

postconflict stabilization and reconstruction by several of our nations leading research institutions, to include CSIS, the U.S. Institute for Peace, the National Defense University and my own home, the RAND Corporation. What is striking in this

work, as in our discussions, is the degree of consensus to be found on the essentials—that nation-building in some form will remain an inescapable responsibility

of the international community and its most powerful member, that we have conducted these missions successfully in the past and are capable of doing so more effectively in the future, that our most recent efforts have not drawn fully upon the

experience gained, often at some cost, over the past decade, and that better performance requires both that improved bureaucratic structures for planning and execution, and sustained investment in the capacity to conduct stabilization and reconstruction missions. Finally, there was uniform agreement that the successful conduct of these missions requires a broadly based response from our government, in

particular from both the Departments of State and Defense, and this responsibility

cannot be delegated to a single agency.

In its own recently published history of American role on nation-building over the

past sixty years RAND concluded that:

In its early months, the U.S.-led stabilization and reconstruction of Iraq

has not gone as smoothly as might have been expected, given the abundant,

recent, and relevant U.S. experience highlighted in this study. This is, after

all, the sixth major nation-building enterprise the United States has mounted in 12 years and the fifth such in a Muslim nation. In many of the previous cases, the United States and its allies have faced similar challenges

immediately after an intervention. Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo, and Afghanistan

also experienced the rapid and utter collapse of central state authority. In

each of these instances, local police, courts, penal services, and militaries

were destroyed, disrupted, disbanded, or discredited and were consequently

unavailable to fill the postconflict security gap. In Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo,

and Afghanistan, extremist elements emerged to fill the resultant vacuum

of power. In most cases, organized crime quickly became a major challenge

to the occupying authority. In Bosnia and Kosovo, the external stabilization

forces ultimately proved adequate to surmount these security challenges; in

Somalia and Afghanistan, they did not or have not yet.

Over the past decade, the United States has made major investments in

the combat efficiency of its forces. The return on investment has been evident in the dramatic improvement in war fighting demonstrated from

Desert Storm to the Kosovo air campaign to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

There has been no comparable increase in the capacity of U.S. armed forces

or of U.S. civilian agencies to conduct post combat stabilization and reconstruction operations. Throughout the 1990s, the management of each major

mission showed some limited advance over its predecessor, but in the current decade, even this modestly improved learning curve has not been sustained.

The reason for this lack of investment is not hard to find. Nation-building has

been a controversial mission over the past decade. The intensity of our domestic debate has inhibited agencies from making the investments that would be needed to

do these tasks better. Institutional resistance in departments of State and Defense,

neither of which regards nation-building among their core missions, has also been

an obstacle. As a result, successive administrations have treated each new mission

as if it were the first and, more importantly, as if it were the last. Each time we

have sent out new people to face old problems, and seen them make old mistakes.

Each time we have dissipated accumulated expertise after an operation has been

concluded, failing to the study the lessons and integrate the results in our doctrine,

training and future planning, or to retain and make use of the experienced personnel in ways that ensure their availability for the next mission when it arrives.

If agencies are to make the investments necessary to improve their capacity to

conduct postconflict reconstruction and stabilization missions, they will need, first

of all, a clear sense of their future responsibilities. In the 1990s, in the aftermath

of the Somali debacle, the U.S. militaries role in nation-building was excessively cirVerDate 11-MAY-2000 12:03 Jun 21, 2004 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00011 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6621 94063 SFRELA2 PsN: SFRELA2
8

cumscribed. The State Department was sometimes called upon to manage tasks better left to the Defense Department—training the Bosnian and Croatian armies for

instance. More recently we moved to the opposite extreme, with the Department of

Defense assuming responsibilities for a wide range of essentially civil tasks.

The draft legislation we are discussing today represents only a beginning at addressing this problem, but it is an important start. Both State and Defense need

to improve their skills and increase their institutional capacity to conduct stabilization and reconstruction missions. But the U.S. military, at least, already has in

place mechanisms to study prior campaigns, including nation-building campaigns, to

draw appropriate lessons and to integrate these in ongoing doctrine and planning.

Nothing comparable yet exists on the civil side of our government.

This legislation is designed to provide State greater authorities and resources to

carry out its responsibilities for postconflict stabilization and reconstruction. But in

the long run agencies will sustain investment only in capabilities that they know

will be used. The next step therefore, is to design an enduring division of labor between State and Defense for the management of stabilization and reconstruction

missions, a division that both Departments buy into, that both the Congress and

the Administration support, and that both Republicans and Democrats will be content to work within, no matter which controls the White House or the Capitol. Just

as the Goldwater/Nichols Act and preceding legislation provides the institutional

framework through which America goes to war, so, in my judgment, should a similarly enduring arrangement should be established for the conduct of postconflict reconstruction and stabilization missions.

This legislation will encourage and assist the Department of State to build up a

cadre of people with the special skills, interests and commitment needed for such

missions.

Nation-building always requires a broad array of U.S. agencies to work together

continuously in unfamiliar circumstances, both in Washington and on the ground.

Nation-building diplomacy is always multilateral, not only in Washington, New

York and Brussels, but also in the field, where the absence of any functioning host

government means even the simplest tasks have to be coordinated locally among a

wide range of state and non-state actors. These actors include not just representatives of other U.S. agencies and other governments, but also a myriad of NGO’s and

an even wider array of local leaders and would be leaders. These latter must be

dealt with individually because the instrumentalities for dealing with them collectively have disintegrated.

Even low-level officers working in a failed or occupied state deal on a daily basis

with more agencies, more governments and more local leaders than many Ambassadors Encounter over months in more settled circumstances.

Nation-building also requires the early mastery of both policy and program management. These two types of responsibility do not come together in most Foreign

Service careers until one reaches the Deputy Chief of Mission level. Nation-building

missions routinely require even relatively junior officers to both administer programs and set policy priorities, often while having to deal with the press and local

notables and negotiate with other governments. These responsibilities must be carried out on the basis of limited instructions and inadequate communications with

Washington.

The scale of programs also normally exceeds those managed by even our largest

embassies. In the late 90s aid to both Bosnia and Kosovo was, for instance, larger

than for all the rest of Europe combined. This year aid to Iraq will be larger than

that for the rest of the world combined.

Finally, nation-building takes place in the most dangerous, devastated and generally unpleasant places on earth.

Traditional diplomacy and crises response tend to appeal to different personality

types. State-to-state diplomacy calls for calm judgment, reflection, patience, attention to nuance, and carefully crafted prose and disciplined service within a well understood hierarchy. Failed state diplomacy calls for self-confidence, enterprise, initiative, calculated risk taking and an ability to work comfortably in highly

unstructured environments.

We face here the familiar prototypes of the cowboy and the farmer. They can be

friends, but it doesn’t come naturally. At the moment we have a Foreign Service

of farmers, in which cowboys are regarded with suspicion. The State Department’s

task, which this legislation will help them tackle, will be to create an environment

in which both types find a home and rewarding careers.

The Chairman: Well, thank you very much, Ambassador Dobbins.

Dr. Hamre.

9

STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN HAMRE, PRESIDENT AND CEO,

CSIS, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Dr. HAMRE. Mr. Chairman, first, my sincere thanks for permitting me to participate in both this hearing and in the process that

you and Senator Biden established. It is so gratifying to see the

kind of leadership that you’ve provided to this.

May I indulge the Chair just to let me introduce my colleague

who is with me, Bathsheba Crocker, who is really the author of

this testimony and the architect of so much of our work. I’m grateful that you would recognize her for her contribution.

The CHAIRMAN. An active participant in our advisory group.

Dr. HAMRE. Yes, sir. And I thank you for that.

Sir, let me, if I may. I come to this as a defense guy. And let me

say why I believe your work is so crucial. There are two dimensions

to America’s power: America’s power is both a power of intimidation and a power of inspiration. We’ve really perfected the powers

of intimidation. I mean, no one can stand up to us in the world

now.

Unfortunately, our powers of inspiration have atrophied, and our

sweeping idealism and rhetoric for democracy and opportunity is

undermined when we have inept application in the field. Unfortunately, the inept application of these very inspiring projects now

drag down and diminish our powers of intimidation, to be candid.

I think we are at a very crucial point where it’s in our interest,

and I speak now from the perspective of the defense community.

We have to have more competency in our sister agencies in the government so that their part of this integrated process makes the

whole.

It is not a substitute to have the mightiest military in the world

and then do so poorly in a post-conflict environment. Matter of fact,

it really hurts us. So it is in our interests—speaking as a defense

guy—it’s in our interests to do what we can to improve this in

every way we can.

Let me also say that I consider your legislation to be a budget

bill. If you could take one week off of the time we’re going to be

in Iraq, we’re spending a billion dollars a week. If you save us just

one week of that, we’ve saved money with this legislation. And I

have no doubt we’re going to save months if we had in place the

sort of planning infrastructure that lets us do a much better job at

the outset. So one of the best things that your colleagues can do

to help save expenditures in the future is to give these kinds of capabilities so that as a competent government we can save the resources that otherwise we’re having to devote to the Defense Department.

Sir, I strongly support your legislation. I think it is the essential

building point for competencies that we have to have in the government. You’ve struck the right balance, in my view, between having

to push an executive branch that doesn’t like being pushed and giving them the flexibility to do it well when they are asked to do it.

And this is a very hard thing. And I’ve been both on the receiving

end and pushing end, you know, of this sort of thing before, and

I commend you for really a very skillful mixing of the two.

The administration, the executive branch, I would have been in

their shoes three years ago and I would have said exactly the same,

10

I don’t like it, but I have to do it. And it’s an outside pressure. This

is what our democracy is all about. Our constitutional form of democracy with an independent branch of the people speaking

through the Congress is asking, We have got to fix it. You’ve done

the right thing by striking that balance.

I know that there are those that would like to go much further

and mandate things and there are those that don’t like it going as

far as it is. But you’ve done, I think, a superb job of finding the

right mix.

It’s—frankly, the success is really going to rest on the follow

through and the oversight that you bring to it after this is implemented. And may I encourage you to bring other committees of the

Congress into this process.

You need to have parallel efforts underway for the Commerce

Department, the Agriculture Department, the Treasury Department, the Defense Department, and they’re other departments here

that have to be brought along. And that really can be done through

your agency here in the Congress. And if you can inspire your colleagues in those committees to start putting the same kind of attention to this that you have given, it would do an enormous good.

Sir, building on the foundation that you’ve created with this legislation, there are, I think, a couple of steps we need to take further. I don’t want this, in any sense, to diminish the importance

of what you’ve put before us. We have to have this as a starting

point.

I think that two things that are very clear and especially from

the tragedy yesterday in Iraq, we do not have the capacity to provide intelligence that’s necessary to support these operations, and

we’ve got to reassess how we’re approaching the intelligence support for post-conflict operations.

Second, we still do not have the right formula for policing. Now,

the Defense Department understandably looks on a security challenge in the traditional military form, and so they are pursuing the

post-Saddam loyalists that most closely match the historical threat

profile that the Defense Department plans for. But the Defense Department does not plan for dealing with broad-scale criminality,

they do not plan for dealing with organized crime.

One of the things that we now see around the world is that

transnational organized crime has become the logistics backbone

for terrorists. We have got to tackle this, and our current response,

too much, I believe, in the Department is to approach our presence

in a dangerous environment from a forced protection posture, to

minimize our casualties. That is keeping us from getting an integrated picture on the security problem that we face when we move

into a place like Iraq or move into Bosnia, or, I hate to say, now

into Haiti. We have got to get a much more integrated security perspective than you can get if you do it alone from the Defense Department.

At some point in time the Defense Department, the State Department, the other elements, the intelligence community has to get together to get a truly seamless approach to security. We haven’t

done that yet. It’s something that you can’t do from this committee

alone; I understand that. This is something that you have to do

11

with your colleagues on Armed Services and have to do with your

colleagues on Intelligence. But it is indispensable for the next step.

As I said, this doesn’t diminish in any way the crucial nature of

this important first step you’re taking to get the competency inside

the State Department and the coordination structure inside the

NSC. Nothing is more important than getting that done. Please

make that your first priority, and then let us help you with the follow-on steps.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Hamre follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF DR. JOHN J. HAMRE

Mr. Chairman, I am honored to have the opportunity to address this distinguished

committee today on such an important and timely subject. I fully support your efforts to identify and address the key gaps in U.S. civilian post-conflict capacities

that are inhibiting fulfillment of our ongoing objectives in Iraq and Afghanistan and

that will continue to plague future efforts.

Mr. Chairman, you, Senator Biden, and this entire committee deserve particular

credit for your efforts to bring national attention to these issues, and the Iraq case

in particular, beginning with your early hearings in August of 2002 and a continuing series of hearings since then. Your decision to convene a Policy Advisory

Group to tackle the tough issues surrounding how to better set up the civilian side

of the U.S. government to handle future post-conflict cases, the important legislation

you introduced last week, and this hearing today are testament to the seriousness

with which you are approaching the challenges the United States faces in improving

our civilian capacities to approach future post-conflict cases. This committee’s attention has been critical to the increased attention these issues are now getting, inside

the U.S. government, among our friends and allies, and in the eyes of the U.S. public.

POST CONFLICT RECONSTRUCTION: AN ENDURING TASK

Since the successful examples of the reconstruction of Germany and Japan after

World War II, the United States has under-invested in the civilian capabilities needed to partner with its military forces to achieve overall success in complex operations. At the same time, the United States has also failed to adequately train,

equip, or mandate its military forces for the difficult post-conflict security tasks that

those forces are so often asked to carry out. The United States will spend over $200 billion on the military and civilian postwar efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq alone. Both places have served to remind us

that post-conflict reconstruction operations are an inherent part of modern warfare.

Our military forces can win the combat phase of wars decisively, but military operations themselves are rarely, if ever, sufficient to achieving the U.S.’s overall strategic objectives. To decisively win the peace, we need an immediate and sharper

focus on developing and institutionalizing the civilian and military capabilities the

United States requires for complex operations.

The facts speak for themselves: in nearly every operation from Somalia to Iraq,

a lack of rapidly deployable civilian capabilities has left military forces performing

tasks for which they do not have a comparative advantage and has extended the

duration of their deployments. Our success rate has been less than impressive: one

need look no further than the recent events in Haiti to understand that, despite a

well-intentioned intervention, serious resources, and tens of thousands of U.S.

‘‘boots on the ground,’’ without the requisite civilian capabilities to follow-through

in the post-conflict phase and the political will to stay the course, countries can easily revert to failing or failed state status. Afghanistan is posing a similar risk, and

Iraq could as well.

In the fall of 2001, in response to growing recognition of the gaps in the U.S. government’s ability to respond to the challenges of post-conflict reconstruction, General Gordon Sullivan (USA, Ret.), president of the Association of the U.S. Army

(AUSA), and I formed the Post-Conflict Reconstruction (PCR) Project, initially as a

collaboration between AUSA and the Center for Strategic and International Studies

(CSIS). Together, our two institutions assembled a high-level, bipartisan Commission on Post-Conflict Reconstruction, comprised of 27 former U.S. government officials, current members of Congress, experts in the field, and representatives of nongovernmental organizations and the private sector. (A list of Commission members

12

1Play to Win is submitted as an attachment to this testimony, and is available at http://

www.csis.org/isp/pcr/playtowin.pdf. 2Our trip report, Iraq’s Post-Conflict Reconstruction: Field Review and Recommendations, is

submitted as an attachment to this testimony, and is available at http://www.csis.org/isp/pcr/

IraqTrip.pdf.

appears at the end of the Commission’s report, Play to Win, which is submitted as

an attachment to this testimony.)

The Commission issued its final report—Play to Win—in January 2003, laying out

17 recommendations detailing how the United States should reconfigure its agencies, personnel, and funding mechanisms to improve response measures in post-conflict reconstruction situations.1

The PCR Project at CSIS is pursuing the implementation of the Commission’s recommendations through extensive interaction with the U.S. government and Congress, including many of you on this committee and your staffs, and public outreach

and education. At the same time, CSIS is undertaking a major project that looks

at necessary reforms not addressed in the landmark Goldwater-Nichols legislation.

CSIS’ Beyond Goldwater-Nichols Project is developing recommendations, including

a chapter on improving U.S. interagency and coalition operations in complex contingency situations.

As you are aware, Mr. Chairman, on the basis of our work, Secretary of Defense

Donald Rumsfeld and Ambassador L. Paul Bremer requested that CSIS lead a team

of experts to Iraq to perform the first independent assessment of reconstruction efforts there. We had the honor to brief this committee on our findings and recommendations upon our return from Iraq.2

NEW CAPACITY URGENTLY NEEDED IN CIVILIAN AGENCIES

This body of work only reaffirms the importance of this committee’s goals, in convening a Policy Advisory Group, holding this hearing today, and the legislation Senator Lugar introduced last week. The Stabilization and Reconstruction Civilian

Management Act of 2004 (S. 2127) (SARCMA), if enacted, would significantly

change the capacities and authorities available to the civilian U.S. government

agencies that carry out post-conflict operations.

Had this legislation been law before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, those

agencies would have been far better positioned to address the post-conflict challenges in both places.

Our work over the past several years has highlighted in particular four challenging and recurring issues the U.S. government has faced in post-conflict operations:

• The need for enhanced strategy and planning capacities;

• The need for experienced and robustly authorized civilian leadership of the

overall reconstruction effort;

• The need for sufficient, flexible, and immediate standby funding; and

• The need to achieve public safety in the aftermath of war.

Your legislation would make several meaningful changes with regard to the first

three issues, although further thinking is required, as I lay out below. The public

safety question is in part beyond the scope of this committee’s jurisdiction—at least

in so far as it involves the U.S. military and Department of Defense—but it must

be addressed in order for the U.S. to truly improve its postwar efforts.

Let me briefly address some of the important advances in this legislation.

• Strategy and Planning. The SARCMA recognizes the need to formalize the National Security Council’s (NSC) role in integrating and coordinating strategy

and planning efforts, through the establishment of an NSC directorate responsible for post-conflict operations. It suggests the creation of a new Directorate

of Stabilization and Reconstruction Activities within the NSC that would oversee the development of interagency contingency plans and procedures. The creation of a standing interagency committee, as suggested in the legislation,

would also address the need for greater interagency coordination in terms of

planning and execution of stabilization and reconstruction activities. This is a

critical provision and essential if we are to make progress.

Both Play to Win and our Beyond Goldwater-Nichols work also emphasize the

necessity of clarifying the NSC’s role in integrating and coordinating strategy

and planning efforts. The interagency disputes over post-war Iraq—and the failure of the NSC early on to ensure appropriate coordination of planning and opVerDate 11-MAY-2000 12:03 Jun 21, 2004 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00016 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6621 94063 SFRELA2 PsN: SFRELA2
13

erations—have had lasting impact on the effectiveness of the Coalition Provisional Authority’s (CPA) efforts.

• Funding. The SARCMA makes several very important advances in the area of

funding, by authorizing, upon a presidential determination, the provision of assistance to respond to crises, and the use of draw-down, account transfer, and

waiver authorities that would otherwise be restricted under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. The SARCMA also recognizes the need for a flexible, replenishing emergency account to provide assistance for stabilization and reconstruction activities. Importantly, it would also provide much-needed flexibility in

terms of contracting and procurement procedures that often delay the start of

important reconstruction work by civilian agencies. (On February 25, 2004,

Frederick D. Barton, Senior Advisor and Co-Director of CSIS’s PCR Project, and

former director of the Office of Transition Initiatives at USAID, testified before

the Subcommittee on International Economic Policy, Export and Trade Promotion of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on USAID’s contracting and

procurement procedures. Mr. Barton’s testimony is included as an attachment

to this statement.)

As highlighted in Play to Win, current U.S. funding mechanisms for post-conflict operations lack needed coherence, speed, balance among accounts, flexibility, and effective mechanisms for contracting and procurement. This means,

in practice, and as we have seen in Afghanistan and Iraq, that the President

does not have the ability to bring the full force of wide-ranging U.S. capabilities

to bear on these situations in a timely manner. This constrains our ability to

ensure that programs—such as disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration

(DDR), deploying emergency justice teams, quick start projects to jumpstart

basic services and economies, and support for national constituting processes

and civil administration needs—are started quickly, to avoid longer term repercussions. At the same time, post-conflict operations continue to be funded

through supplemental budget requests, outside the regular budgeting process.

• Operational Infrastructure. Your bill would also address the shortcomings that

result from the lack of standing capacity within the State Department to coordinate and oversee the civilian side of stabilization and reconstruction activities.

The bill would mandate the Secretary of State to establish an Office of International Stabilization and Reconstruction, headed by a high-level coordinator,

with wide-ranging functions related to tracking, planning for, coordinating, and

overseeing implementation of activities in crisis situations. Our PCR and Beyond Goldwater-Nichols Projects have highlighted this need. President Bush’s

decision to give such responsibility to the Department of Defense in Iraq reflects

the reality that without a well-staffed and resourced office in the State Department, with appropriately high-level authority and access to principals in the Department, other agencies, and the White House, the President will not be able

to rely on the State Department to carry out the essential tasks in countries

emerging from conflict or undergoing civil strife.

Obviously, this Office would require decision-making authority and high-level

access, the ability to marshal resources, including personnel, and other necessary special authorities, as discussed below. Your committee would play an

essential role in by following up through oversight hearings to insure the Office

is properly empowered.

Your bill would also respond to another need our work has identified: the creation of civilian rapid response capacity, sorely lacking under the current setup of our civilian agencies. The SARCMA would establish a robust response

readiness force of civilians—both inside and outside the federal government—

who would be readily available for deployment to conflict and post-conflict

zones. The bill allows for important and needed changes in the State Department’s personnel system in order to effectuate and reward the commitment and

dedication of Department personnel to take part in such operations.

• Training and Education. Finally, the bill would make important advances in

the area of stabilization and reconstruction training and education. CSIS’ extensive efforts to look at current gaps in U.S. capacities have also recognized the

need to establish a U.S. training center for complex contingency operations.

Thus Play to Win called for the establishment of such a center for training for

post-conflict operations. Our Beyond Goldwater-Nichols Project has similarly

highlighted the need for a training center for interagency and coalition operations.

The SARCMA’s call for the amendment of the Foreign Service Act of 1980

to include a stabilization and reconstruction curriculum for use in Foreign Service Institute, National Defense University, and Army War College programs

14

3 Both reports are submitted as attachments to this statement, and can be found, respectively,

at http://www.csis.org/isp/wiserpeace.pdf and http://www.csis.org/isp/pcr/0401_sudan.pdf.

would be a crucial step toward institutionalizing the civilian and military capabilities the U.S. needs to succeed in these situations. We second the committee’s recognition of the important work of the U.S. Institute of Peace in the area of

training, and look forward to working with the committee and others to help

define the training and education needs in this area.

Mr. Chairman, the Stabilization and Reconstruction Civilian Management Act of

2004 would break more ground than any efforts thus far to address some of the fundamental issues that constrain the ability of U.S. civilian agencies to respond adequately to stabilization and reconstruction tasks, and that have led to the U.S. military being over-stretched to meet global needs. The SARCMA is crucial if we are

to succeed in these efforts in the future, and will provide the institutional base upon

which those efforts must be built.

ADDITIONAL STEPS NEEDED BEYOND SARCMA

As the committee moves forward with this legislation, and looks to build beyond

it, there are several important areas that deserve further consideration, and I will

address some of those areas briefly.

• First, the United States lacks adequate civilian strategic planning capacities

and mechanisms. The U.S. government needs to enshrine a comprehensive

interagency strategy and planning process, including presidential guidance that

establishes standard operating procedures for the planning of complex operations. Had such a process and guidance been in place before the Iraq war, we

would not have seen the ad hoc, under-developed, and duplicative efforts at

planning that have plagued the U.S. postwar operations in Iraq.

• In recognition of this strategic planning gap, the PCR Project at CSIS has

issued two action strategies (relating to Iraq and Sudan) laying out recommendations of priorities for the U.S. government and the international community in preparing for postwar operations. A Wiser Peace: An Action Strategy

for a Post-Conflict Iraq was released in January 2003, and To Guarantee the

Peace: An Action Strategy for a Post-Conflict Sudan was released in January

2004.3

• Although the SARCMA recognizes the need for more coordinated contingency

planning, and for centralized oversight in the NSC, this and future administrations should ensure that appropriate guidance is in place to organize the crossagency planning and operational efforts in complex contingencies. Such guidance was promulgated in 1997 as Presidential Decision Directive 56 on Managing Complex Contingency Operations (PDD–56), but President Bush has not

yet signed the draft National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD–XX) on

complex contingencies that would have provided similar strategy and planning

guidance for executive agencies responsible for efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

• Congress should also work with the President to ensure that the Secretaries of

all agencies likely to be involved in complex operations abroad have the necessary authorities and resources to establish their own planning offices that

could lead the development of agency plans and participate in the interagency

planning process. Such offices do not currently exist in the civilian agencies

where they would be most needed, namely State, Treasury, Justice, and Commerce. May I suggest that this committee formally contact the leadership of the

other authorization committees to encourage them to make this an oversight

priority this year.

• Second, as the public safety vacuum in Iraq aptly demonstrates, the United

States lacks qualified civilian police that are available for short-notice deployments in postconflict environments. (The international community more broadly

also has a shortage of readily available civilian police for such cases.) In the absence of viable local police forces in many of these environments, our inability

to rapidly field civilian police requires U.S. military forces to take on tasks for

which they have not necessarily been trained or adequately mandated. Moreover, the U.S. government’s legal authority to train indigenous police forces is

constrained.

• The Congress and the President should work together to create a standing civilian police reserve force, to round out the civilian personnel needs in conflict and

post-conflict zones. The Congress should also consider replacing section 660 of

the Foreign Assistance Act with new legislative authority that would provide

15

clearer and more robust authority for the United States to train indigenous police forces in conflict, post-conflict, or civil strife-ridden zones.

• The Senate at some point needs to address the dire need to establish security

units that could execute the specific security tasks inherent in post-conflict environments. Competing proposals have already been set forth, from the idea of

creating standing units within the U.S. army that would perform stabilization

operations (as suggested in a recent National Defense University report) to having NATO structure, train, and equip multinational units to carry out such

tasks (as suggested in Play to Win). Although addressing this need is beyond

the scope of this committee’s jurisdiction, I believe it is worth the committee’s time to recognize this gap in U.S. (and international) capacity. Unless the

United States places more focus and attention on this issue, our future postconflict operations will continue to be undermined by our inability to fill the security vacuums that so often define these environments.

• Third, responding to crises such as Iraq and Afghanistan dwarfs all other State

Department activities, yet it is not clear whether the Coordinator of the new

Office of International Stabilization and Reconstruction would have the requisite authorities and resources to respond adequately to similar challenges in

the future. At a minimum, it should be clear that the Coordinator will have

oversight and management responsibility over the new emergency fund, and

any other State Department resources that may be tapped into for a particular

operation. The Coordinator’s authorities over personnel and resources of other

agencies involved in responding to any crisis also need clarification. Further

consideration should be devoted to the question whether a new State Department bureau, Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs

position, White House office with expanded budget authorities, or a new stabilization and reconstruction agency would more fully address the lagging civilian leadership needs.

• Further, the President should be encouraged to designate one senior official to

be in charge of and accountable for integrating U.S. civilian interagency operations on the ground in any country in which the U.S. is providing stabilization

and reconstruction assistance.

• Fourth, although it is crucial that the committee address the problems inherent

in the architecture and practices of the State Department, the capacities and

role of the international community must also be enhanced if these efforts are

to be ultimately successful. Just as the U.S. military should not be the sole or

even principal participant in reconstruction efforts, neither should the United

States shoulder a disproportionate burden in these endeavors, whether by design or due to our international partners’ lack of needed capacities. The President should strive to ensure that the United States works with its partners to

more fully integrate the political, military, economic, humanitarian, and other

dimensions of complex contingency operations. This will mean everything from

sharing information (as envisioned in the SARCMA) to conducting joint planning and training exercises to committing needed resources to strengthen capacities at the United Nations, among NATO countries, and elsewhere.

• Finally, and crucially, although perhaps beyond the scope of this bill, I cannot

over-stress the importance of creating ‘‘jointness’’ between the military and civilian sides of any complex operation in which the U.S. is engaged. It is imperative

that the military and civilian leadership in the field during any such operation

are linked together, through co-location and other means, and that there is one

designated point of contact back in Washington to whom they can both report,

from whom they can take direction, and who can bring problems and needs directly to the attention of a responsible decision-maker. This type of joint-ness

should be established long before any crisis situation arises, through enhanced

peacetime opportunities for civilian operators and planners to work with military counterparts, joint training opportunities, and by encouraging military and

civilian personnel to spend time working at each others’ agencies in Washington. (These same ideas should also be encouraged with respect to working

with counterparts from various countries.)

CONCLUSION

Mr. Chairman, I have been honored to serve on the Policy Advisory Group you

established to identify and discuss stabilization and reconstruction activities, and to

testify before you today. It is my sincere belief that if you continue to work with

Executive agency policymakers to implement the important changes outlined the

Stabilization and Reconstruction Civilian Management Act of 2004, the United

16

States will be better prepared to handle future needs in conflict, post-conflict, or

civil strife-ridden areas around the world.

CSIS will remain engaged on these crucial issues. We look forward to continued

interaction with this committee on these pressing questions, which will impact the

U.S.’s ability to protect itself, promote its interests and values, enhance its international standing, and improve the lot of people around the globe. We stand ready

to engage with you in whichever ways will be most helpful to your important work.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Hamre.

Dr. Binnendijk.

STATEMENT OF HON. HANS BINNENDIJK, ROOSEVELT CHAIR

OF NATIONAL SECURITY POLICY, NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIVERSITY, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Dr. BINNENDIJK. Chairman, it’s a pleasure to be here, again, with

you today. And let me join my colleagues in commending you and

Senator Biden and the committee not just for the legislation that

you introduced, but also, again, for the process that led to it.

My testimony will be based primarily on a report that was produced by the National Defense University called Transforming for

Stabilization and Reconstruction Operations. And I would just

stress that I’m here in my personal capacity.

The September 11th tragedy really did reinforce the fact that

conditions in otherwise obscure places can directly affect the security of our homeland. In our study we looked at about a dozen

cases in which U.S. forces might plausibly be deployed in the future in these kinds of stabilization and reconstruction operations.

And ironically we did not look at Haiti. But the point is that there

are plenty of potential needs out there, and we cannot continue to

deal with them on ad hoc bases. We need to set up permanent procedures and institutions to deal with them.

Another key point in our study is that a gap has been created.

We call it the ‘‘stabilization and reconstruction’’ gap. This is a gap

between our high intensity conflict, that period of the operations

and nation-building. And this gap has been created in large measure because we have been so successful in fighting the high-intensity war.

We win quickly with few troops in theater. It’s not a war of attrition. Very often parts of the enemy regime are still in place, but

we don’t have the troops there to deal with the new missions, and

so a gap has been created.

And the thrust of our study really looked more on the military

side to try to make suggestions on how the military needs to gain

these new capabilities and reorganize for them. And so I would just

stress John Hamre’s comment that as this committee goes forward

it’s vitally important that other committees also look at this. And

the Defense Department also needs to enhance its capabilities and

reorganize to meet these missions.

In order to deal with this stabilization and reconstruction gap,

we need both military and civilian capabilities. The military can do

an awful lot, especially on the stabilization side. They’re not as well

equipped on the reconstruction side. What is needed is economic

skills, developmental skills, legal, law enforcement, judicial, linguistic, cultural, political, and diplomatic skills. These are the

skills that reside primarily on the civilian side of the House, in the

State Department, in USAID, in other domestic agencies. The probVerDate 11-MAY-2000 12:03 Jun 21, 2004 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00020 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6602 94063 SFRELA2 PsN: SFRELA2
17

lem is that the domestic agencies and the State Department are

not organized well for this purpose, and they, incidently, also have

very strong ties to the NGOs, to the international organizations

that are critical for the success of this mission.

What is needed and what your legislation provides is taking

those skills that exist, expanding on them, and reorganizing them

and focusing them. With that, civilians can become in these kinds

of operations what the military calls ‘‘force multipliers’’; that is,

they can have capability well beyond the individuals who are there.

And some of the provisions in the bill, for example, the contingency

fund, will allow these individuals to become force multipliers.

It is very important, I believe, that the State Department play

a greater leadership role in these missions. It will allow greater

post-conflict planning in the pre-conflict stage together with the

military, and it also puts in place capabilities during this transition

period, during this gap period, so that when it comes time for the

nation building phase of these operations, we will have people and

programs in place already, and that’s key to accelerating the nation-building part of this. And as John Hamre said, ‘‘That saves

money.’’ There are a number of recommendations in our study, which are

available in my testimony. I’ll just hit a couple of the highlights.

We do recommend a significant new capability in the military,

the creation of two joint commands for these purposes.

We recommend changes in professional military education very

much in line with provisions in your bill.

We recommend changes in the interagency process, also very

much in line with those in your bill. The creation, for example, of

a National Interagency Contingency Coordinating Group.

Let me perhaps make some comments on the specific sections in

your bill. I know you have a markup tomorrow, and perhaps making a few specific comments on the provisions of the bill might

help.

Section 4 is, to me, very important. This is the section that creates a directorate at the National Security Council and creates a

standing committee, an interagency committee, to deal with these

kinds of contingencies. This creates what the military would call

‘‘unity of effort.’’ This is quite important for the success of these operations. The problem is that as you approach a crisis in a war

there is a tendency to centralize activity in one department, and we

need, therefore, a very strong coordinator, and that is what your

bill provides, to make sure that the entire interagency is orchestrated.

A suggestion for your markup would be to strengthen that provision. It may be difficult to make it mandatory. It’s currently a

sense of the Senate, but strengthening that in some way would be

useful.

Similarly, Section 4 talks about the importance of the international community in these operations. We need our allies today

more than ever before, but NATO is not organized for stabilization

and reconstruction operations. And you could consider adding a

provision in Section 4 which would suggest to NATO that it should

create a stabilization and reconstruction capability, which could be

military and civilian and add that to Section 4 of your bill.

18

Section 5 I considered to be very important. It is the waiver and

contingency fund. I see this as kind of a first-aid kit. As you indicated in your opening statement, what you do in the first hours

and days of these operations is crucial. You need that first-aid kit.

You need to have these fundings and the waiver so that when a

State Department or AID officer is on the scene, they have something to exercise. They can be the force multiplier.

But I would suggested—here I really reflect on this in my old capacity as being the legislative director of this committee—you

might want to take a look at the waiver. It is quite open-ended,

and you might want to think about some way to limit that, perhaps

a dollar ceiling or some other way to deal with it.

Section 6 creates the new State Department Office, which, I

think, again, is crucial. It creates a focal point for activity on the

civilian side. I would urge that the various authorities in your bill

be exercised so that this office is populated not just with civilians

or State Department officials but with an interagency group including the military.

We might strengthen this particular provision by adding a new

subsection which says,—this is under the functions section—which

says that this office would ‘‘support and oversee the operations of

the Response Readiness Corps and the Reserve Corps when they

are deployed.’’ That would keep a continuing tie between this office

and the overseas operations.

These civilian operations need to be both rapidly deployable and

in depth, and Section 7 of your bill does both. It creates a rapidly

deployable corps and it creates a reserve which gives you that indepth strength. It also includes a series of incentives, which I think

are critically important to get individuals to sign up for the corps

or for the reserve. These are going to be dangerous missions, and

I would suggest the committee could even be bolder there in terms

of creating incentives for individuals to join: additional danger pay,

recruitment bonuses; for example, time towards retirement, if

they’re government officials, you could double the time. If they’re

deployed for a year, they could get two years’ credit for retirement,

for example.

Section 8 deals with training and education, and, again, I think

this is crucial if this is to be successful. I would note that we have

a small foundation at the National Defense University for this kind

of an operation, that we have a program underway there that does

teach interagency contingency, complex contingency operations. We

do this, as the legislation suggests, in cooperation with the Foreign

Service Institute and the Army War College. And so, there is a

place where you can build. I would just note that this does have

to be properly funded, and as I look at your bill, I believe it is.

So let me just end where I started by thanking you for the opportunity to testify and commending you for your effort on this.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Binnendijk follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF HANS BINNENDIJK

Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to testify this morning in support of S. 2127, the Stabilization and Reconstruction Civilian Management Act of 2004. My comments are

based primarily on a study entitled Transforming for Stabilization and Reconstruction Operations prepared by the Center for Technology and National Security Policy

19

at the National Defense University, as well as my own experience in government.

A copy of this study has been made available to the committee.

REQUIREMENTS FOR A NEW CIVILIAN STABILIZATION AND RECONSTRUCTION CAPABILITY

The September 11 tragedy reinforces the fact that conditions in otherwise obscure

places can directly affect the security of our homeland. Our study considers at least

a dozen places where U.S. military forces might plausibly be deployed on stabilization and reconstruction missions. To avoid over-stretch, we will need to choose any

intervention very carefully. But if a decision to get involved is taken, we must be

able to put the full weight of all of America’s national security assets behind the

effort. History shows that the level of sustained effort is a major if not deciding factor in determining the success of these operations.

The American ability to win wars quickly with relatively few troops in the combat

zone has created some unintended consequences that require creative solutions.

Enemy regimes tend to collapse quickly under our transformed military’s pressure

without the more traditional war of attrition being fought. As we have seen in both

Afghanistan and Iraq, remnants of the old regime can survive amidst the post-conflict anarchy. We may have inadequate forces in theater to deal with this challenging development.

Nation building cannot succeed without stabilizing this situation. Early progress

is vital to long-term success; early mistakes are magnified. A ‘‘stabilization and reconstruction’’ gap has opened between the high intensity warfare phase of these operations where the military dominates and the nation-building phase where civilian

agencies dominate. The gap must be closed if America is to win both the war and

the peace.

It will take a mix of military and civilian skills to close this ‘‘stabilization and

reconstruction’’ gap. The military can use infantry and military police to bring some

order to society, and it can use its civil affairs, engineer, and medical units to provide immediate humanitarian relief. The Army rightly is developing more of these

assets at the expense of some traditional skills like air defense and artillery. But

as our study points out, more needs to be done to prepare the military for these

future tasks. This is an effort that should be carried out in parallel with what the

Foreign Relations Committee is proposing.

There are a number of skills that are insufficient in the military but are necessary

for success. They include economic, developmental, legal, law enforcement, judicial,

linguistic, cultural, political and diplomatic skills. They include ties to international

humanitarian organizations, non-governmental organizations and large private sector construction contractors. These skills and ties exist in the civilian agencies, at

the State Department, at USAID, and at several other agencies, but not in adequate

numbers. And most importantly, they are not organized for this purpose and not

quickly deployable to troubled regions. Properly organized and deployed, civilian

agencies can be what the military calls ‘‘force multipliers,’’ that is they can have impact well beyond their numbers. The military recognizes that it needs these civilian

skills during stabilization, reconstruction and nation building operations, and every

military officer that I have talked to about the committee’s initiative applauds it.

The State Department needs to develop these deployable capabilities so that it

can participate fully in the entire process and maximize its leadership role. Postconflict planning needs to take place in cooperation with war planning, and this will

require a much higher degree of collaboration between State, Defense and other elements of the interagency process. The State Department is the logical agency to lead

post-conflict activities in the field, but to do so effectively it must bring needed capabilities to the table early in the process. And deploying State Department assets

early in the stabilization and reconstruction phase will allow it to smooth the transition to the final longer-term nation building effort.

RECOMMENDATION IN THE NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIVERSITY STUDY

While the National Defense University’s study focused primarily on military requirements, it does cover several issues included in S. 2127. Our study recommends:

• Developing new strategic concepts for ‘‘post-conflict’’ operations.

• Creating two new joint stabilization and reconstruction military commands (at

about the division level), one in the active component and one in the reserve

component.

• Rebalancing the existing total military force to create new skills in this area,

especially in the Active Component.

• Modifying professional military education to focus more on new missions.

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• Harnessing technologies that enhance stabilization and reconstruction capabilities.

• Strengthening interagency mechanisms by creating a National Interagency Contingency Coordinating Group that would prepare for and plan such missions.

• Organizing a standing interagency team that could deploy to the field promptly

with skills needed to prepare for nation-building.

• Creating a State Department led reserve civilian crisis management corps that

could be called up to supplement the standing interagency team and accelerate

the transfer of command from the military to civilians.

• Encouraging NATO to create similar structures, such as a NATO Stabilization

and Reconstruction Force.

COMMENTS ON PROVISIONS OF S. 2127

The Stabilization and Reconstruction Civilian Management Act of 2004 is a bold

piece of legislation, but boldness is needed in light of the new nature of conflict and

the uncertain strategic environment that we face. I fully support the bill as introduced. I do have some comments on the need for specific provisions of the bill and

have some modest suggestions for improvements.

The sense of the Congress provision in Section 4 that suggests establishment of

a new directorate at the National Security Council and a new standing committee

to oversee policy will help with what the military calls ‘‘unity of effort.’’ This provision is needed. Plans for war and peace must be coordinated throughout government. As a nation moves towards war, however, there is a natural tendency to centralize these functions in one department, undermining unity of effort. The NSC

should not be operational, but it needs to be a strong coordinator to maximize all

agency contributions and set common policy directions. The committee might consider mandating these provisions rather than limiting them to ‘‘sense of the Senate.’’

Section 4 also highlights the importance of the international community in postconflict operations. The core of this international support on the military side must

be NATO, but NATO is not organized to deal quickly and routinely with these missions. As the United States builds these new capabilities, NATO must too. An additional subsection highlighting this would be useful.

Section 5 provides a broad waiver and special contingency funding. This is generally required to give deployed civilians the ability to have an immediate impact.

An analogy is a first aid kit to provide emergency treatment without which the patient might die. The committee might want to consider, however, whether the waiver authority is too broad. It appears open-ended, and the committee might want to

limit it in some way, for example with a dollar ceiling.

Section 6 creates a new State Department Office of International Stabilization

and Reconstruction that will become the focal point for civilian operations overseas.

This office indeed belongs at State, rather than at USAID, because these operations

take place in the context of political crisis and State’s leadership in the overall political context is crucial. This Office should be populated with civilian and military

personnel from all interested agencies, and the exchange programs and detail authorities included in the bill will support that requirement. A suggestion to

strengthen this section further is to add a new subsection 3(F) under ‘‘functions’’

which would make it clear that this Office would ‘‘support and oversee the operations of the Response Readiness Corps/Reserve when its members are deployed.’’

Civilian operations in these missions need to be rapidly deployable and they need

depth. Section 7 of the bill does both. The Response Readiness Corps is to be rapidly

deployable and the Response Readiness Reserve will provide the depth. The incentives provided for those who join these groups are useful, but given the potential

physical danger inherent in these jobs, the committee might consider even bolder

incentives. For example, recruitment bonuses might be paid, additional danger pay

could be provided, and time towards retirement could be doubled during the deployment.

Section 8 provides for vital training and education for the members of the Response Readiness Corps/Reserve. As the bill suggests, the foundation for this already resides at the National Defense University, in conjunction with the Foreign

Service Institute and the Army War College. The expansion of this educational effort appears to be properly funded. My only suggestion here is that civilians should

participate in this special curriculum together with military officers, perhaps in

equal proportions.

Mr. Chairman, let me end by commending you and the committee for the process

that led to this legislation and for inviting me to participate. I believe the legislation

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that you have produced will be vital to America’s ability to better deal with failed

states and post-conflict situations.

The CHAIRMAN. Well, I thank each one of you. Let me, first of

all, indicate that my colleague Senator Biden is equally interested

in this. This has been a bipartisan effort that has shared broad

support in our committee, and we appreciate that. The staffs on

both sides of the aisle have worked with you and with others on

crafting language.

I appreciate, Hans, your thoughts both as former director of this

legislative effort on one side of the table and likewise your distinguished work presently at the University in trying to draw attention in the section-by-section analysis to things we might be thinking of. I think those are good suggestions.

Dr. Hamre, I was struck by your thought that we have a military

that does intimidate by the very effectiveness and comprehensive

way in which we’re able to employ it. This is an important thought.

In some ways we may be diminishing the effectiveness of the military, the intimidation process. Others looking at all of this may say

fair enough, we take this strike and we lose, but after that the war

goes on.

In other words, we might wonder whether Saddam Hussein or

anyone else in Iraq was devious enough to think ahead and decide

that it’s apparent that their forces were not going to be able to

match the American or the allied forces, but at the same time they

anticipated that in the chaos that ensued, the Americans and others may get tired of all this, having won a military victory, while

the support for that business erodes and as a matter of fact the

country becomes virtually ungovernable, and by the time everybody

has abandoned the affair, they may be back.

I would say that I was enjoying the visit that I had in Baghdad

in June of last year. There was a feeling that some Iraqis were not

rushing to participate in neighborhood councils or to take their

roles in the civilian government, as people in testimony before our

committee before the war had rather naively anticipated they

would. Leaving aside the crowd dancing in the street, it was

thought that perhaps the normal middle class might have come forward. They did not come forward very fast. In large part there was

a feeling of keep your head down because this war isn’t over. Yet

from the U.S. standpoint the war was decisively done.

The fact is that we’re talking about the realities of what occurs

in this world today when we have such awesome intimidating

power. Maybe others are going to make provisions. The Haiti thing

is obviously very different. But Iraq was a full-scale war. It shows

the intimidating power and then the limitations of that war if we

do not have something else that follows through.

Having said that, it seems to me that we still have a daunting

set of prospects here. I think our legislation, in a modest way,

makes suggestions to whomever is the President of the United

States or whomever has the Cabinet roles or is in the NSC at the

time. Somebody’s going to have to fill in the blanks, is going to

have to bring vigor to this process and to the recruitment of civilians who may be in some sort of ready-reserve, with particular

skills, to encourage them to come forward. That is a daunting prospect, although not impossible. We have a lot of talent in America.

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As to the question of organizing all this, I would just say that

there are some parallels with Nunn-Lugar. You have all been very

supportive of the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Act.

At the beginning of this we start out with almost a blank sheet.

There’s $400 million authorized and finally appropriated, but for

the moment no one knows exactly what to do. So Sam Nunn and

I take a trip and bring along some administration people, much

like the advisory group that we’ve just been through, and we go to

Russia and Ukraine. People begin to think about this.

The problem then was not unlike our situation now. The Russian

officials that came to Sam Nunn and to me and to some of you

were saying, in essence, that the Cold War is over. At the same

time, you’ve spent $6 trillion containing our nuclear weapons in socalled ‘‘mutually assured destruction’’ or however you want to describe the deterrent effect. We’ve got to tell you things are different. Things may be loosening up. The army may not be reliable

at certain points, in terms of guarding what we have. Or, as a matter of fact, some people might want to appropriate some of these

weapons in an anarchic status in various parts of our country.

That’s different. Here you have a constructed thing for 50 years in

which everybody deters successfully and mercifully. This is a different ball game, and it should be our emphasis.

Fortunately we got together with Russians who shared in cooperative threat reduction. We expressed fears that proliferation was a

real threat, and we discussed security problems of these sorts.

This is different from Iraq, different from Haiti, but the problem

is still the transition after the Cold War. We have to set up for the

next one.

It appears to me that all of you have made the comment in your

papers, and some in your testimony today, that, in dealing with

terrorists and the lack of nation-state situations, we really do have

to improvise a whole lot more. The very people whom we’re looking

for, we don’t always see. The threats are hard to perceive, and they

are multinational.

This is going to require ingenuity, which we have in abundance

as Americans. We hope that we are bright and skillful enough to

handle this, but we’re not really set up for this. As a result, the

President in his speech to the National Defense University the

other day tried to hit head on again the proliferation danger, including all of the things that have come out of the closet with the

A.Q. Khan papers, and with the revelations of the Libyans and others. For 20 years all kinds of transactions were occurring. We may

have been none the wiser. It’s now interesting to fill in some of the

blanks. Several countries were dealing back and forth, sometimes

successfully, and as we know now with the Libyans. Perhaps after

all is said and done, maybe their warhead wouldn’t fit their missile. It’s not easy to do these things.

It’s chilling to think that you have a missile and a warhead that

didn’t fit, and so we maybe lucked out, as opposed to a situation

in which we really were on top of the proliferation all the way

through, and in which we had some idea who was dealing with

whom in this thing.

I mention all of this because it gets back to the necessity of

thinking about failed states that may have failed because, as was

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the case in Iraq, we effectively eliminated the controlling regime.

It may occur in the case of Haiti for all sorts of reasons. People

may be thinking, now why there? In the Balkans, there was a huge

number of reasons why things might or might not have gone well.

And who knows where else.

The problem with terrorism is, wherever there’s a failed state,

sort of a burn-out situation, there is also the possibility for the

building of an al Qaeda camp, or for others to do mischief. While

no one is responsible, no calling card for deterrence makes this imperative.

You pointed out, I think, Ambassador Dobbins, or perhaps it was

you, Secretary Hamre, that in the Clinton days the thought of

doing one at a time meant that we would not be over-extended. A

lot of people shared that point of view. Here on the Hill, as a matter of fact, people were constantly on the President’s case wondering why we were still there. How were we going to build down

as rapidly as possible? This was quite apart from what other problems he might have.

If I’m correct, and I am sketching a situation in which there

could be several failed states all at the same time, we can’t pick

and choose. The terrorists don’t really allow that prospect, because

they’ve picked up wherever the failure occurred. Many Americans

listening to this conversation will say, well, why us? Isn’t somebody

else interested in all this? Maybe?

The response that you’ve mentioned, Dr. Binnendijk, of NATO of

trying to think through this with other partners, is very important.

At the Munich Conference that some of us just attended, you get

back to the fact that even though our NATO allies may have armed

somewhere between a million and a half to two million people,

barely 55,000 might be available for so-called expeditionary missions. That is, we must work outside of the countries that the military has configured to defend those states, and not to go to Afghanistan, which is presently a mission taken on quite separately from

Iraq or anywhere else. So we are it. This is our situation.

Let me just ask this question. Do any of you have an idea, if you

were an American citizen listening to this, how many people may

be involved in these forces, these reserves of civilians who have

special skills, or people in the State Department, the Agriculture

Department, the Commerce Department? All of these people have

to be integrated into some sort of whole government if we are to

try to help bring wholeness to this situation. We’re authorizing

somebody to think about this, and, in fact, we are asking the President to appoint someone at NSC to coordinate, and so forth. Do you

have any conception of how many people ought to be signed up?

What kind of rosters ideally should we have in these areas?

Ambassador DOBBINS. Well, let me start. I think that if you

leave—first of all, if you’re starting with the State Department and

the number of State Department professionals that ought to be

skilled in and available for these kinds of tasks. And if you put

Iraq aside and look at the number who have actually been assigned

over the last 12 years or so in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and now Haiti again, I think the number in your bill

is about right.

24

In other words, an additional staffing of, I think it was 250 if I

remember correctly, would give the State Department the additional cadre it needs to staff these missions. But that’s only obviously part of it. So I think the number in your bill is a good number, if you assume Iraq is an exception, that Iraq is not the rule.

Because if you need the staff on the level of Iraq, you probably

have to double or triple that number to get an appropriate number.

Now, another category, which is very numerous or potentially

quite numerous, is police. The U.S. normally deploys police as part

of an international operation. It’s reasonable to assume that the

United States should be able to deploy about 20 percent of any

global operation. Just given the size of our GDP and importance in

the world, 20 percent is a reasonable share. And the European

Union has set a goal for itself and actually begun to meet that goal

of having 5,000 police deployable at any one time. They have a reserve of 5,000 police they can deploy. And the European Union already has two police operations underway in which they are deploying police in the Balkans in two different operations.

It does seem to me that the European Union’s target would be

a reasonable target for the United States, that we, too, should be

able to deploy 5,000 police as a supplement to our military. We’re

about the same size as the EU, we have about the same size budget. That would seem to me to be a reasonable number.

I haven’t given thought to numbers that might be from other

agencies, from Justice, from Treasury. I suspect they’re a good deal

smaller. I think those would be the two principal civilian components, the State Department professionals who staff and coordinate

the efforts abroad and provide programmatic management. And

probably including AID in that number as a subcomponent of

State. I don’t mean to neglect it. It may be the most numerous in

some cases. And then the police.

The CHAIRMAN. Yes, for instance, if the EU had 5,000 and we

usually do 20 percent, so we have 5,000, maybe this means 25,000

people. That requires, obviously, coordination on our part as to how

we get to our 5,000. As you say, there might be some other agencies. There might be some international diplomacy to make sure

that the EU is on board and wants to do nation-building wherever

it needs to be done. And then the other 60 percent is still to be

filled in.

There are others in the Caribbean now. Secretary Powell indicates that there may be Caribbean nations that would provide

some policing in Haiti, for example. We may determine, through

our experience in the Caribbean, who might be policing in the Middle East. Or is this more regionally based? We need to identify who

pays for the transportation, and maybe for a lot of other things, a

problem which is not insoluble.

I’m just taking the benefit of your collective wisdom today to try

to obtain a little more understanding because these questions will

be raised by other Senators, by the press, and by others.

A police force is implied. We’re going to be a part of that. We

think the EU has been thinking about that in a concerted, constructive way, which they have. Under Lord Robertson, NATO and

others, have gone out of area and said they are prepared to play

a role. They’re doing so in many nations, including Afghanistan, for

25

example. At least we have the benefit of that bridge having been

crossed.

Still, let’s say that there are specialists, people who are in this

country, and who, in their normal days, are bankers or economists

or people involved in agriculture or so forth. How do we identify,

through the State Department, or through NSC, or whatever the

appropriate recruitment is, people who are prepared to do national

service in this very extraordinary way of nation-building and resolving failed states? How do we find people who might welcome

this challenge? We might be calling upon then, hopefully not frequently. Yet given the number of instances in recent history, more

often than we might like, they may be called.

And yet I think that we have all seen in Iraq remarkable work

by young American servicemen, whom I personally saw out in the

neighborhood, or in police training, or in various duties. They certainly have never run for city council or the school board or what

have you back home, but at the same time they are using their native skills to try to organize people in the field in what is a failed

state, literally, with crumbling institutions. I would just say that

we need to think through this. We had to improvise because these

soldiers were the people on the ground. They did a good job in some

cases, but obviously they could not bring the expertise to state craft

as could other Americans, or maybe nationals of other nations, if

we’re more inclusive in this effort.

I wonder if we’ve touched upon this a little bit in the legislation

and in the discussions. Would you please amplify your own

thoughts as to how we get to that point, where we’ve got a pretty

good roster, and we can ring somebody up and tell them that we’ve

got a mission for them today that’s really important. You need to

take a flight there and help out.

Dr. BINNENDIJK. If I could make two points, first on question of

allies and then on the question of numbers.

With regard to our allies, I agree that NATO does have a problem with deployable troops. But here is an area where in many

ways our European allies are better at it than we are. They have

long-term experience, many of these countries, certainly the British

and the French, but also in the last decade in the Balkans and

elsewhere, now in Afghanistan. The Germans, the Italians, the

Dutch all are developing capabilities in this area, so I would not

underestimate the contribution that they can make.

With regard to the numbers. I agree with Jim that the active

duty element of this, 250 is the number in the bill. I think that is

about right. What is key here is not so much that number, but

what capabilities they have and whether they really do become

force multipliers, and that depends very much on the contingency

funding, on the other authorities and capabilities that they bring.

So I would say that that number is about right.

When you get to the last question of the reserve force, how large

should that be? I think the notion has been about 500. That may

be small. I think this will be essentially a list of people who are

trained part time. An analogy might be a civil affairs unit in the

military. I think you’re going to find many of these people, not just

in the federal government, but at the state and local level, and they

will not be like the military where you can call them up and force

26

them to go. There will be a voluntary element to this, so you’re

going to have to create very strong incentives. So I would anticipate that you’re going to have to come up with a longer list, in addition to the police issue.

The CHAIRMAN. Yes, because we’ve already identified maybe

5,000 policemen from somewhere in America.

Yes, Dr. Hamre.

Dr. HAMRE. Senator, we’re a nation of volunteers. I really don’t

think it’s going to be hard to find quantity of people. What we have

not done very well is organize that.

The CHAIRMAN. Yes.

Dr. HAMRE. What we really need is the capacity to organize and

to view it as a very constructive thing from the standpoint of the

federal government. Unfortunately, you know, government employees tend to be a little paternalistic about, you know, summer help

and whether they are up to the task. We have programs in the federal government; they aren’t terribly robust.

FEMA has a good program where they routinely keep track of

people. They are mobilizable executives. But you need to keep them

trained, there needs to be expectations of their involvement in

doing it, and you really have to manage this as a real intentional

effort. It’s not a question of getting—you’ll get the people; it’s

amazing the number of things that Americans are willing to stand

up and do. But it needs to be organized, and I think that’s missing.

This is going to be the key question: Can you find the right spirit

and attitude inside the foreign security policy establishment that

sees outsiders as constructive augmentees to their activity? Frankly, it’s a bit of an attitude challenge, I think, but that will be the

biggest thing to work.

May I say just a word——

The CHAIRMAN. Yes.

Dr. HAMRE [continuing].——on the policing?

We’re dealing here with a very central problem. The reason we

use the military all the time is because it’s the only part of the federal government that can mobilize and be qualitatively different tomorrow. We don’t buy excess cops, you know, and just keep them

in reserve units. We buy every cop we can afford and put them out

on the beat. Because of that when we have emergencies, people

work overtime or we borrow them from a nearby jurisdiction. We

just don’t have excess capacity.

I haven’t thought this through adequately, but it seems to me

that there is a need for the federal government to provide augmentation capacities for local police authorities for Homeland Security. They can’t train adequately because they’re taking time off

from being on the beat to go off and do training for Homeland Security exercise, and so then there isn’t the sustainable power.

Maybe there’s a possibility of putting together a program that

both provides federal support to state and local police authorities

that is useful on the Homeland Security front and also becomes

your augmentation that you could use for international emergencies. Again, I have not thought about it adequately, but I think

we need to be creative in this area, and I would certainly be

pleased to work with you and the committee in any way as you

think your way through it.

27

The CHAIRMAN. I thank you for that thought today because that’s

going to be the purpose of our hearing. This is a tease from all of

us, with some additional increments about this situation.

I think that your point about the attitude adjustment is critically

important because sometimes all of us going about our official work

believe that we are the persons that are supposed to do that work.

Suddenly we’re talking about people who are doing other things in

life, but who have lots of talents. How do we integrate those talents

together with the professionals and the people who come to work

every day at the State Department or the Defense Department or

so forth? It’s a very, very important situation.

We’re all seeing that the war against terrorism is something different. Nation-building is different. We weren’t intending to get

into this. As Mr. Dobbins pointed out, it was a conscious effort

after Somalia not to get into any place else. We were sort of

dragged, kicking and screaming, into this. Now we see the failed

states situation. If we don’t, at our peril, we’re going to see people

organize out, using these places to attack us, as they did on 9/11.

Let me just ask about Haiti, because Ambassador Dobbins

brought that as a topic that we had not anticipated, even when the

hearing was set. Here you are, and we’re on this threshold here.

Some of the press accounts of Haiti make these points: The year

in which we last restored President Aristide, we got him back into

power again. In the ensuing days, weeks, and months, Aristide understandably was opposed to retaining the army as it was in Haiti.

As for the policing, there was a feeling that these were people who

had been disloyal or would not be very loyal to him, so they were

effectively discharged.

The dilemma is that filling the vacuum there never quite occurred. As you pointed out, Ambassador, we were there for a while,

but on the other hand, we felt we’d achieved what we wanted to

do and left. As we come through this, I don’t want to minimize all

the particulars because they are important.

Let’s say that some of the old army people who were discharged

were still very unhappy about Aristide, or perhaps other policetypes decided to cause some trouble. These were described by press

accounts in the last two or three weeks as being maybe 200 in

number, maybe 300 people. This is in the whole country. They approached whoever is policing a small town in Haiti and said to

these folks, ‘‘You know, if you think about it, it’d be just as well

if you get lost. You just sort of move away from whatever your duties are because we really don’t want to take you on, but we’re fully

capable of making life miserable.’’

So these police decide that they, for the time being, will just not

do their policing. It’s not a question of clashes here and there. People just sort of disappear from the work.

As a matter of fact, some of the people who were employed, apparently by President Aristide, were commercially-employed people.

There are security agencies in this country and elsewhere that provide security. A good number are now employed by businesses in

Iraq. The businesses employ security agencies to help them in what

seems to be a very insecure situation, not very well policed.

Without making any judgment about the reliability of all these

people, the fact is that at the end of the day, in Haiti, it does not

28

appear there are very many reliable people in the policing area,

whether they are in the small towns and they disappeared, or

whether they are the old types who are against Aristide, or whether that are the people whom Aristide hired, and who might not

have proved very reliable.

I would just say, for the sake of argument, that when Secretary

Powell called me on Sunday morning, after he’d been working on

this problem for seven and a half hours, he pointed out that President Aristide very much wanted his help, that is, the help of Secretary Powell. He wanted safety. He wanted a plane. He wanted

a destination. There are a lot of postmortems about all this, but

nevertheless the reason that he wanted these things was that the

security that he felt that he had from the people whom he had employed apparently was very unreliable, to the point that it might

not exist fairly shortly. So the policing thing is really of the essence

here.

Many have said: Okay. Let’s say that’s right. Here we go into

Haiti, again. Try to stabilize with the Marines, with other nations

offering help, with the Europeans, with the Caribbean nations, suggesting they might do some policing temporarily. yet the training

from scratch of a security situation for the nation of Haiti is a

daunting task.

This may be something beyond the type of thing we’re talking

about in the stabilization force in our bill. In reflecting on Haiti,

I simply see a pretty wide-open question as to how you begin to approach this, and whether we are prepared now. I wonder whether

we’re of a mind to stay the course and to take on that responsibility.

If we don’t, you’re back to the situation of ten years ago, and

some government that is sort of on their own again, and sort of

looking over their shoulder, wondering if is there somebody who is

going to protect them if a few hundred people come along?

Do you have any thoughts as to how our legislation is applicable

to that kind of situation, as opposed to Iraq, which we’ve said is

sort of one-of-a-kind? The Haiti situation might be more common,

as time goes on, in various places that have never really had very

strong security or humane police, and so forth.

Ambassador, do you have some thoughts about that?

Ambassador DOBBINS. Well, what happened in the mid-90s is

that Aristide abolished the army, which had been both incompetent

and abusive, and we built up a new police force. And for a while

it was a, by Haitian standards, quite competent and quite untainted force, probably the best institution in Haiti, briefly. It was

a force of about 5,000 men who had been newly recruited, newly

trained. Over time it became a seasoned and reasonably professional force.

The CHAIRMAN. You were in government at that time, and you

saw all of this going on?

Ambassador DOBBINS. Right. The problem is that we didn’t put

comparable efforts into building up the judicial or—— The CHAIRMAN. I see.

Ambassador DOBBINS [continuing].——corrections system, and so

you had a reasonably competent police force that had no place to

try criminals and no place to hold them, so it was left with the diVerDate 11-MAY-2000 12:03 Jun 21, 2004 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00032 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6602 94063 SFRELA2 PsN: SFRELA2
29

lemma when it caught criminals that it either had to punish them

extrajudicially or let them go. Either of which, you know, inevitably

corrupts a police force no matter how honest it might begin. The

police force in Haiti gradually descended to the level of Haitian institutions as a whole.

The reason that Aristide was left bereft of support was first and

foremost his own mistakes and misbehavior. I don’t want to understate that. But it was also that he lacked resources to deliver on

his election promises, and increasingly he lacked resources even to

maintain the weak and effective institutions of the state. As the result of which he became even more dependent than he might have

wished on informal sources of power. Because the formal sources

of power had ceased to be available, and they ceased to be available

because we and every other country in the world had cut off all assistance to Haiti after 2000.

The decision to cut off assistance to Haiti after 2000 was entirely

justified and equally unwise, in my judgment. And it just shows

that sometimes you have to make difficult choices with unpalatable

outcomes at either end. This time I hope that we will take the current police force and build it back up. Many of the people who left

it are probably available to come back, and some of the leadership

that we managed to install probably can be recruited again. But it

is important that we put an equal effort into the judiciary and correction systems so that the police force can be supported by the

other elements of a rule of law process.

In terms of the legislation and what the additional capabilities

that are provided would allow, I think it would, first of all, obviously allow some rapid funding for this in the short term, while the

administration considered what type of supplemental it might require for the contingency so that you could get started right away.

The second is, I think that we—the U.S. government—having

had a decade of experience in building police forces, are probably

more or less adequately staffed to build police forces, but not adequately staffed to build judiciaries or corrections institutes. And so

some of the 250 people and some of the reserve people that would

be recruited under this and made available would be people, I

think, in those areas.

The CHAIRMAN. I think that’s a very important contribution to

this testimony. Certainly it is an insight that I have not heard expressed so forcefully: that it was not just simply the police business, but the police, that, as you say, may have fallen into corruption, in order to enforce the thing, the police had to either kill the

suspect or release the suspect. So it’s an impossible predicament,

even if you have good police training. That needs to be a part of

our understanding of this.

We’ve discussed the police aspect of it, but then as we get into

nation-building, the institution building, some other parts of the

body politic become critical too. This, then, leads skeptics to say,

there you go again; you’re going to be around for a long while.

This is a complex business, when you talk about building institutions. And yet with nation-building it’s sort of hard to avoid that

subject. A lot of institutions are pretty important, if there is, in

fact, to be much of a nation-state, as opposed to a hiatus, and then

failure again, and some lapse back into this.

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Doctor Hamre, do you have a thought about this?

Dr. HAMRE. I agree very much with Jim’s analysis of Haiti. I’d

visited the police training academy down there in the mid-90s, and

I agree very much with his analysis.

We had, to the extent that we were able in Haiti to do either

work on the judicial system or on the penal system, it was done

on an ad hoc basis through individuals, civil affairs officers who

tried on the side to do it. It was not a sustained effort. It needs

to be, and I think that should be an important omen of your bill.

Dr. BINNENDIJK. Sir, I know that you confront arguments all the

time that we shouldn’t do nation-building. But it seems to me that

September 11th demonstrated one clear thing, that we can’t tolerate incompetent or irresponsible nation-states.

The CHAIRMAN. Yes.

Dr. BINNENDIJK. We can’t tolerate it anymore. It is now an immediate national security risk us, if it exists. So like it or not, we’re

in the difficult process to fix that, and it seems to be we can’t do

it by ourselves. It’d be foolish to do it by ourselves. We need allies

to help us do that. So I think it’s all connected to a much larger

picture. I think you’re seen that. You’ve been in the forefront of

this for years.

But I think we have to answer those who have legitimately asked

why should we be doing this all the time. We can’t avoid it now.

It’s in our interest. We have to do this, and we have to find partners and allies to help us do it.

The CHAIRMAN. You offered another good argument that I think

Senators and the public can understand, and that is that the whole

networking, as you’ve described it, of transnational crime is a background for terrorism. These people, who are not necessarily nationalists but are involved in their own self-betterment through these

dubious means, are part of the way money comes to the terrorists,

if they are not terrorists themselves in perpetrating their crimes.

That’s something other than state-to-state relationships. There is

this whole murky background of people involved, and it is a

strange combination of communication and transportation networks, whether we’re talking about how al Qaeda is funded or anybody else. We’re finding that it’s a tough struggle as a country.

I have been in hearings, some behind closed doors, some in front

of the doors, in which it’s very hard for our Treasury, and our immigration services, and our military and our intelligence and so

forth, for all of them to cooperate, share files, and so forth. And for

good reason. We’re interested in civil liberties of Americans, the invasion of privacy of innocent people. As you become more adept at

all this data mining, some of these issues rise to the floor, as they

should. There are institutional barriers in which people have said,

this is our province; and I’ve been here for 30 years, by golly, and

I know how to do it. So we’re back to that problem.

With this crime and with the terrorist networks and so forth, as

you’ve said, we can’t afford to leave these vacuums of authority

where these people take advantage of the fact that the police aren’t

very good, or are corrupt, or there isn’t a judicial system, or there

are not the other deterrents that these societies generally have to

stop these things.

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Now, you know, we must discuss how we illustrate this in ways

that all of us as legislators and the public as a whole have to support. But I think this is the pattern that we’re looking at here, in

trying to authorize the State Department to be a nucleus leadership and then recognizing, as all of you pointed out, that there

were many other agencies, and that there are many other committees of this Senate that have jurisdiction. Our own diplomacy, with

all of our colleagues and all the hang-ups that we have, staffs of

committees and so forth, have to be looked at too. We have to help

reorganize ourselves as a government for the kind of things that

we face that are not as categorical, perhaps, as in the past.

Let me just ask, just to pluck one of these off. What would be

the importance of having an Agriculture or a Commerce Department component? What sort of people might be recruited in this reserve, or should we look for people? Should we go to Iowa State or

Purdue or some place like that and ask if people are prepared to

serve their country from time to time? Or, likewise, should we go

to the banking community or the investment community or—I’m

just brainstorming again.

How do we identify these people? How do we identify our program to begin with, if these are not only welcome, but necessary?

Do they have to be components of a successful state? Do any of you

have any thoughts about that?

Dr. HAMRE. Well, sir, from the time when I was over in Iraq, you

walk down to the palace or the CPA headquarters and there’s a

sign, you know, the Agriculture Ministry, you know, or the Irrigation Ministry. I mean, we needed to find people across the board

who had expertise, you know, in these skills.

The CHAIRMAN. Yes.

Dr. HAMRE. And so I don’t think this is hard for us to do. I mean,

all of us live in a world of networks. We are constantly bringing

people. I’m in a think tank. I’ve got hundreds of people that we’re

reaching across. I could find you 20 agricultural experts within a

day. So we know how we can do that.

You want to give a reliable structure where they know they can

plug in. I mean, most of the experts come in, but they don’t know

how to plug into a larger picture and into an integrated plan.

That’s why your legislation is important. That’s why you have to

have this planning cadre that gives you strategic plan and organizational skills, a standing capability. You can’t make that up on

the fly. We’ve been making it up on the fly.

You’re going to find lots of people in this country that are perfectly happy to cooperate and participate, if they know how they

can plug in and their efforts can be coordinated in a meaningful

way. You are going to need people from Agriculture, you’re going

to need people from Commerce.

Banking people. Right now we’re having to set up a banking system in Iraq. You’ve got to have that expertise. That’s not resident

inside the federal government.

So, sir, across the board we need that, but at its core we need

the planning, the strategic planning cadre that you plan to create

in your bill.

The CHAIRMAN. When you issued the Hamre Report, I can’t recall

whether you got into that aspect after you surveyed Iraq. As to the

32

recruitment of these people, would you please report back some of

your thoughts and language there?

Dr. HAMRE. Sir, we put special emphasis on the need to get a

consistent effort to pool resources inside the federal government.

We weren’t doing very well at that. And we still, frankly, are challenged. I don’t believe that Ambassador Bremer has had more than

60 or 65 percent of his strength that he was authorized to have.

The CHAIRMAN. Yes.

Dr. HAMRE. I mean, it’s inconceivable to me. This is the largest

demonstration of America’s might or weakness, you know, by how

well we do this, and to let him not be staffed has been just unacceptable.

The CHAIRMAN. And he may very well conclude his service and

still be only at two-thirds strength.

Dr. HAMRE. That’s exactly right.

The CHAIRMAN. But then on July 1 or, as he’s pointed out to me

and others, maybe by June 1, the group of people that are going

to be in our mission, in our embassy, has to have been found. According to press accounts, a lot of people are volunteering for this

service. Maybe this is the largest embassy effort we have ever had

anywhere in the world. I’m wondering whether all the disciplines

that we’re discussing will be represented there. I’m not privy to

who all is part of this business, and maybe it would be appropriate

for us to try to find out through a hearing. This may still be nationbuilding and one of a kind, but it’s very important that it succeed.

Yes, Dr. Binnendijk.

Dr. BINNENDIJK. As the process continues and you get into the

nation-building phase, the Agency for the National Development

does have close ties with many of these sectors. I think the problem

is more the immediate post-war period. It’s kind of the problem

that Jay Garner faced in the immediate post-war period as he tried

to pull together his team. There was not much depth there. And

so what you need is not—I mean, the capabilities a year later, you

can draw them. What you really need is sort of the couple of

months or even weeks right at the end of the high-intensity conflict

period or the collapse of the failed state.

The CHAIRMAN. There are different phases of this, in other

words, yes.

Dr. BINNENDIJK. Yes. And so what I’m trying to stress is the importance and the immediacy of the first phase where at least with

Jay Garner’s experience, as I watched it, those capabilities were

very thin.

The CHAIRMAN. Yes, the day after.

Dr. BINNENDIJK. Yes. And so the day after you need to have

these capabilities to draw on very quickly. Agriculture, across the

board, they’re not there.

The CHAIRMAN. And police certainly.

Dr. BINNENDIJK. Yes.

Ambassador DOBBINS. I think it’s important to recognize, however, that what we’re looking for are people who have skills in governance. What they need to do is know how to run a government

program. In the first instance, they need to know how to run an

American government program, how to implement policy within an

33

1The National Council on Disability submitted its report ‘‘Foreign Policy and Disability: Legislative Strategies and Civil Rights Protections To Ensure Inclusion of People with Disabilities,’’for inclusion in the hearing record. A copy of that report will be maintained in the committee’s permanent files.

American government framework; and secondarily, they need to

know how to help the host government run its own program.

So if you’re looking for people with agriculture, you’re not looking

for people who know how to run a farm, you’re looking for people

who know how to run an agricultural support program, who know

how to get seeds to farmers. They don’t have to know what you do

with them when you get them there, but they have to know how

to run a program. Similarly, in the banking area you need to know

people who know how to run a central bank and how to create a

bureaucracy that can regulate a banking system. Someone else can

go find people who know how to run a bank.

And so you are looking for a rather precise class of people because these are not skills that they can learn after they come on

board. So you’re going to be recruiting largely within people who

have had federal government experience or perhaps to some degree

state government experience in administering programs and in

teaching others how to administer programs. That’s what you’re

looking for.

Additionally, except in extraordinary circumstances like Iraq,

most assistance is actually delivered through contracts. In other

words, AID contracts with an NGO or a for-profit company, and

they actually provide the advice or assistance to the Ministry of X.

And that system facilitates recruiting. I mean, those contractors

then go out and recruit the people, and they’re making a profit.

And they do it, and it works quite well. What you need are people

who can administer that contract, who can make sure that the contractor is living up to his commitments, is doing the best job possible.

So those are the skills you’re looking for. It’s a rather precise set

of skills, which does span all of the functional areas we’ve talked

about, but from the perspective I’ve suggested.

The CHAIRMAN. Do any of you have any concluding thoughts? I’ve

raised the questions that I had.

Dr. HAMRE. Just to say thank you.

The CHAIRMAN. If not, we will look forward to your continuing

support and consultation on this effort. We very much appreciate

your coming today, and your forthcoming answers, as well as your

creative suggestions.1

Having said this, the hearing is adjourned.

Ambassador DOBBINS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Dr. BINNENDIJK. Thank you, sir.

[Whereupon, at 11:01 a.m., the hearing was adjourned.]