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i

40–361 2008

[H.A.S.C. No. 110–102]

PROVINCIAL RECONSTRUCTION TEAMS—

HISTORICAL AND CURRENT PERSPECTIVES ON DOCTRINE AND STRATEGY

HEARING

BEFORE THE

OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION

HEARING HELD

DECEMBER 5, 2007

(II)

OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE

VIC SNYDER, Arkansas, Chairman

JOHN SPRATT, South Carolina

LORETTA SANCHEZ, California

ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California

ROBERT ANDREWS, New Jersey

SUSAN A. DAVIS, California

JIM COOPER, Tennessee

HANK JOHNSON, Georgia

JOE SESTAK, Pennsylvania

W. TODD AKIN, Missouri

ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland

WALTER B. JONES, North Carolina

JEFF MILLER, Florida

PHIL GINGREY, Georgia

K. MICHAEL CONAWAY, Texas

GEOFF DAVIS, Kentucky

MIKE MCERLEAN, Professional Staff Member

THOMAS HAWLEY, Professional Staff Member

ROGER ZAKHEIM, Professional Staff Member

SASHA ROGERS, Research Assistant

(III)

C O N T E N T S

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS

2007

Page

HEARING:

Wednesday, December 5, 2007, Provincial Reconstruction Teams—Historical

and Current Perspectives on Doctrine and Strategy ........................................ 1

APPENDIX:

Wednesday, December 5, 2007 ............................................................................... 37

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2007

PROVINCIAL RECONSTRUCTION TEAMS—HISTORICAL AND CURRENT

PERSPECTIVES ON DOCTRINE AND STRATEGY

STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS

Akin, Hon. W. Todd, a Representative from Missouri, Ranking Member, Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee ............................................................. 3

Snyder, Hon. Vic, a Representative from Arkansas, Chairman, Oversight

and Investigations Subcommittee ....................................................................... 1

WITNESSES

Carreau, Bernard T., Senior Research Fellow, Center for Technology and

National Security Policy, National Defense University .................................... 4

Hicks, Kathleen H., Senior Fellow, International Security Program, Center

for Strategic and International Studies ............................................................. 11

Olson, Brig. Gen. Eric T. ‘‘Rick’’ (Ret.), Former Commander, Combined/Joint

Task Force-76, Former Director, National Coordination Team, U.S. Army .... 9

Warner, Gen. Volney F. (Ret.), U.S. Army, President and Chief Executive

Officer, V.F. Warner and Associates ................................................................... 7

APPENDIX

PREPARED STATEMENTS:

Akin, Hon. W. Todd .......................................................................................... 43

Carreau, Bernard T. ......................................................................................... 46

Hicks, Kathleen H. ........................................................................................... 74

Olson, Brig. Gen. Eric T. ‘‘Rick’’ ...................................................................... 63

Snyder, Hon. Vic ............................................................................................... 41

Warner, Gen. Volney F. ................................................................................... 53

DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:

[There were no Documents submitted.]

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:

[There were no Questions submitted.]

(1)

PROVINCIAL RECONSTRUCTION TEAMS—HISTORICAL

AND CURRENT PERSPECTIVES ON DOCTRINE AND

STRATEGY

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE,

Washington, DC, Wednesday, December 5, 2007.

The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 2:07 p.m. in room

2212, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Vic Snyder (chairman

of the subcommittee) presiding.

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. VIC SNYDER, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM ARKANSAS, CHAIRMAN, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE

Dr. SNYDER. The hearing will come to order.

Mr. Akin, the ranking member, is en route. He got temporarily

hung up, but he will be here shortly. He said we could go ahead

and begin. When he gets here, we will give him an opportunity to

give his opening statement also.

Welcome to the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations’

hearing on Provincial Reconstruction Teams—PRTs—Historical

and Current Perspectives on Doctrine and Strategy.

The subcommittee is conducting a series of hearings and briefings on the PRT programs in Afghanistan and Iraq to get a better

understanding of what PRTs are, what they do and the contribution that they are making in stabilizing Afghanistan and Iraq. We

have used this project as a case study of interagency operations. In

order to emphasize the importance of interagency operations and to

reinforce why our efforts here are so important, I would like to

quote the Secretary of Defense, Mr. Gates, on his recent remarks

on the subject.

Quote, ‘‘One of the most important lessons of the wars in Iraq

and Afghanistan is that military success is not sufficient to win.

There is economic development, institution-building and the rule of

law, promoting internal reconciliation, good governance, providing

basic services to the people, training and equipping indigenous

military and police forces, strategic communications, and more.

These, along with security, are essential ingredients for long-term

success. Accomplishing all of these tasks will be necessary to meet

the diverse challenges I have described.’’ That is the end of the

quote by Secretary Gates.

These imperatives cannot be accomplished by military alone. We

need the capabilities of our entire government brought to bear in

support of our current efforts.

2

The purpose of today’s hearing is to put our current efforts of

stabilization and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan into context where Secretary Gates says, quote, ‘‘Context is important,’’ end

quote.

The Nation has been here before. Throughout our history we

have experienced the difficulties of transitioning from the use of

force to the task of rebuilding war-torn societies from our own Civil

War to the hot and cold 20th century wars in Europe and in the

Far East and from smaller post-Cold War struggles such as in the

Balkans and in Haiti.

Perhaps the campaigns which most closely resemble efforts in

Iraq and Afghanistan are previous counterinsurgency efforts. In

such cases, we engaged in armed insurgency while attempting to

rebuild the physical and political structures of countries. Our goal

has usually been a stable, peaceful, democratic, and independent

nation state, friendly to the United States and its neighbors.

Secretary Gates recently cited the Vietnam Civil Operations Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) effort as an example.

Again, quoting Secretary Gates, ‘‘However uncomfortable it may be

to raise Vietnam all of these years later, the history of that conflict

is instructive. After first pursuing a strategy based on conventional

military firepower, the United States shifted course and began a

comprehensive, integrated program of pacification, civic action and

economic development. It had the effect of, in the words of General

Creighton Abrams, ’putting all of us on one side and the enemy on

the other.’ by the time U.S. troops were pulled out, the CORDS

program had helped to pacify most of the hamlets in South Vietnam. The importance of deploying civilian expertise has been relearned the hard way through the effort to staff Provincial Reconstruction Teams first in Afghanistan and, more recently, in Iraq.

The PRTs were designed to bring in civilians experienced in agriculture, governance and other aspects of development to work with

and alongside the military to improve the lives of the local population, a key tenet of any counterinsurgency effort.’’ That is the end

of, again, Secretary Gates’ quote.

We hope that today’s witnesses can help us gain a better understanding of and perspective on our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We have brought together practitioners and scholars who have experienced and/or studied these previous and current campaigns in

great detail. As always, we seek our witnesses’ recommendations

on what we should do, what this Congress should do, to increase

the likelihood of the success of our Nation’s efforts both in the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the wars of the future.

Our panel of witnesses today includes Mister—is it ‘‘Ber-nerd’’ or

‘‘Ber-nard’’?

Mr. CARREAU. Bernard.

Dr. SNYDER. Bernard, also known as ‘‘Bernie.’’

Mr. CARREAU. ‘‘Bernie.’’

Dr. SNYDER. We have Mr. Bernard Carreau, Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy at

the National Defense University.

General Warner, retired U.S. Army, President and Chief Executive Officer of V.F. Warner and Associates.

3

It is my understanding, General Warner, that your bride is with

you today.

General WARNER. Yes, she is——

Dr. SNYDER. We would like to acknowledge her presence here.

General WARNER [continuing]. And older son.

Dr. SNYDER. And older son. Good for you.

Brigadier General Rick Olson, U.S. Army, Retired, former Commander, Combined/Joint Task Force–76 in Afghanistan and former

Director of the National Coordination Team in Iraq.

Our fourth witness is Ms. Kathleen Hicks, Senior Fellow of the

International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and

International Studies.

We appreciate your all being here. Your written statements will,

without objection, be made a part of the record.

I also wanted to introduce a friend of mine, one of my constituents, Dr. Sharon Williams.

Dr. Williams, if you would not mind standing up so folks can see

you. Wave and say hello.

She is going to be with us for a few minutes. She is from Little

Rock, Arkansas. She has a husband and family and two lovely little

girls back home. She spent six months in Afghanistan as a veterinarian with the U.S Department of Agriculture. She has spent

seven months as the Ministry Adviser for Animal Health and Food

Safety at the United States Department of Agriculture in Baghdad.

She has been there for seven months. She came home for Thanksgiving. She spent time in Arkansas with her little girls and husband, and she is now heading back tomorrow to complete another

five months in Iraq.

Once we finish with all of your opening statements, we will go

to our five-minute rule. The members who were here at the gavel

will go first, followed by other members as they come in. I also ask,

without objection, unanimous consent for Dr. Charles Boustany to

participate in the hearing today after all of the regular subcommittee members have finished.

We will now go to Mr. Akin for any comments he would like to

make.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Snyder can be found in the Appendix on page 41.]

STATEMENT OF HON. W. TODD AKIN, A REPRESENTATIVE

FROM MISSOURI, RANKING MEMBER, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE

Mr. AKIN. Thank you, Dr. Snyder.

Good afternoon to our witnesses. We appreciate your being here

today.

Today’s hearing is this subcommittee’s fifth public hearing on

Provincial Reconstruction Teams. Our witnesses will not only offer

their perspectives on the current PRT program but will put these

operations into historic context. The only thing really new about

PRTs is the name. The concept of how an interagency team comprised of civilian and military personnel works to extend the reach

of the government into regional provinces and local areas comes

with significant historical precedent.

4

The most recent and commonly referenced analog to PRTs is the

Civil Operations Revolutionary Development Support, or CORDS,

program the United States employed during Vietnam. The CORDS

program was the interagency response to insurgency during the

Vietnam War. Like the PRTs, CORDS teams are made up of civilian and military personnel. CORDS teams spread out to the 44

provinces and personnel with the provincial and district levels embedded with the local government officials.

Most importantly and critical to our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan is that many believe the CORDS fulfill the most fundamental

mission of counterinsurgency. Proponents of this view believe the

CORDS program increased the effectiveness of the local government and security forces by training 900,000 Vietnamese, including

300,000 civil servants. CORDS helped establish the vitality of the

South Vietnamese Government by providing competitive services

and local security. This marginalized the Viet Cong, and people no

longer felt compelled to turn to the shadow Communist regime.

After the institution of CORDS, a Viet Cong colonel lamented,

last year we could attack the United States forces; This year we

find it difficult to attack even puppet forces. We failed to win the

support of the people and to keep them from moving back to

enemy-controlled areas.

This sentiment is exactly the type of thing we need to hear from

al Qaeda and Taliban operatives fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Again, thank you all for being witnesses here today. We are very

interested in what you have to say and in particularly the historic

connect and in what we should be learning from our experiences

in the past. Thank you.

Thank you, Dr. Snyder.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Akin can be found in the Appendix on page 43.]

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Mr. Akin.

We will put this little clock on there, which I assume you can see

from your side. Now, we will put it on five minutes, but that is

more just for your benefit to know when five minutes go by. If you

have other things you want to get to, you can feel free to ignore

it when the red light comes on.

Mr. Carreau, you are recognized, and then we will just go down

the line to General Warner and then to General Olson and then to

Ms. Hicks.

STATEMENT OF BERNARD T. CARREAU, SENIOR RESEARCH

FELLOW, CENTER FOR TECHNOLOGY AND NATIONAL SECURITY POLICY, NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIVERSITY

Mr. CARREAU. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman Snyder, Congressman Akin and distinguished members, thank you for inviting me here today to discuss current and

historical perspectives on PRTs. I am honored to be here and with

such distinguished fellow panelists.

Today, I want to talk briefly about civil-military and interagency

relations in Vietnam. Although the scale and historical circumstances of Vietnam differ greatly from those of Iraq and Afghanistan, some aspects of intergovernmental relations in Vietnam

may offer valuable lessons for today.

5

Like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Vietnam was a war in

which the United States was itself a belligerent, as opposed to a

third party intervenor. It was a war in which the United States

suffered significant casualties and extended significant resources,

and it was a war which had an enormous impact on our national

security interests and domestic politics.

Turning to the CORDS effort, pacifications efforts in Vietnam—

what might today be called counterinsurgencies or postwar stability operations—involved returning government control to a countryside that was infiltrated by Viet Cong insurgents. It focused on

local security efforts but also included distributing food and medical supplies, agriculture support, job creation, and land reform.

The Civil Operations and Rural Development Support program

was created in 1967 after years of unsatisfactory attempts at coordinating the activities of multiple agencies under the U.S Ambassador’s Country Team. President Johnson appointed Robert Komer

to the position of Deputy to General William Westmoreland, the

Commander of Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV).

Robert Komer’s nickname was ‘‘Blowtorch Bob’’ to give you an idea

of his forceful and no nonsense personality. The Deputy Commander carried a three-star rank. The union of the previously separate civilian and military pacification efforts into the combined

CORDS program resulted in what may have been the only truly integrated civilian-military command in U.S. history. The integrated

command placed civilians in charge of military personnel and vice

versa. It also placed military resources, including logistics, transport and force protection assets, at the disposal of civilians. Military and civilian units were collocated, often in the same building

at the national, regional, province, and district levels.

Komer developed a cordial relationship with Westmoreland, as

did Komer’s successor, William Colby, with Westmoreland’s successor, General Creighton Abrams. In turn, Generals Westmoreland

and Abrams showed great flexibility and allowed their civilian deputies considerable leeway in setting priorities and in allocating resources. By placing almost all pacification-related programs under

a single headquarters and by investing the single manager with

unprecedented access to resources, Komer had sufficient leverage

to force the various agencies to develop and to implement a nationwide pacification plan in conjunction with the South Vietnamese

Government.

Much of the impetus for reorganizing CORDS came from President Johnson himself. Johnson viewed pacification in Vietnam as

an extension of his vision for his domestic ‘‘Great Society’’ policies,

and began to describe the effort to help the Vietnamese people as

the ‘‘other war.’’

I wanted to make just a couple of observations about the CORDS

program and today’s PRTs. Of course, the scale of the pacification

of it in Vietnam dwarfed the PRT efforts in both Iraq and Afghanistan. For example, there were almost 8,000 U.S. participants in

CORDS and as much as 800,000 South Vietnamese army, national

police and local government officials, all of this against the backdrop of about 500,000 U.S. troops and 400,000 South Vietnamese

conventional forces. Compare this to Afghanistan where there are

approximately 30,000 coalition forces and about 3,000 personnel in

6

the PRTs. There are more troops, of course, in Iraq, but there are

fewer PRT personnel.

The lessons from CORDS have more to do with organizational

structure. Many former participants—State, the United States

Agency for International Development and the military—talk about

the surprising level of cooperation, large amounts of financial resources available for pacification projects in Vietnam. They talk

about the symbiotic relationship. The military needed civilian expertise, local governance and job creation. The civilians needed the

military protection, of course, and their expertise in

counterinsurgency operations, and they needed their lift and force

protection abilities.

One point I would make is to compare CORDS with the original

structure in Iraq. In Iraq, originally under the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), there was a retired

three-star general who was appointed to head up the reconstruction efforts, separate from the military command, with no access to

resources. No matter how competent, a retired three-star cannot

compete for resources and influence with an active duty four-star

general in charge of the entire operation.

I wanted to make a couple of points also about nontraditional security assistance, which I know is on today’s agenda and which my

fellow panelists will talk more about. I want to draw a sharp distinction between stabilization, pacification and counterinsurgency

activities in a war zone and security cooperation arrangements,

training equipment activity and longer term development activities

in noncrisis countries.

In my view, it is entirely appropriate for the military to have the

lead on reconstruction activities in a war zone. The lesson of

CORDS in Vietnam is that this structure works better than having

a civilian lead. In Vietnam, pacification had priority over traditional development assistance, although in practice on the ground

it was often hard to tell the difference between the two. Everyone

agreed that security had to come before reconstruction.

One example I would cite today as a contrast to that from Iraq

is the example of state-owned enterprises. It is an issue I know

well because when I was in Iraq with Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) I was on detail from the Commerce Department, and my

area was private sector development.

There is still disagreement today between the State Department

and the Department of Defense over whether to rehabilitate stateowned enterprises or to privatize them. It is my view now, as it

was when I was in Baghdad, that the state-owned enterprises

should be rehabilitated where possible in a war zone to get people

back to work and off the streets, even though of course this view

is entirely contrary to traditional long-term development orthodoxy.

So, in some final concluding remarks, I would say that unity of

command in a war zone is essential, and I say that as a civilian

and as a former civilian participant in one of these operations. In

a major contingency such as Vietnam or Iraq, the unity of command between military and civilian efforts which brings along with

it the enormous military resources I think is an imperative element. I think there needs to be a mandatory control structure. A

civil-military chain of command should be established at the very

7

highest levels of the government because without top-down direction there will be intense organizational resistance to the concession of the control of agency assets to a unified interagency headquarters. There should be a focus on the local population, which

CORDS incorporated. Counterinsurgency and stabilization activities require a focus on local populations and on understanding and

in fulfilling their needs. The focus in CORDS was on security first,

then economic well-being.

The final point I would make is that, in these types of activities

in a war zone, we need to encourage host nation ownership.

CORDS was designed to empower the South Vietnamese Government to provide security and essential services to the districts and

villages. In fact, the ratio of the U.S. participants was about 1 to

1,000, U.S. to South Vietnamese participants.

The final point I would make is that the lesson is to build the

local private sector. CORDS was designed to build the agriculture

and economic livelihoods of local villages and districts rather than

as a temporary employment or as a one-time donor contribution. I

will stop there.

I thank the committee for the opportunity to appear before you

today.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Carreau can be found in the Appendix on page 46.]

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Mr. Carreau.

Before you begin, General Warner, I want to acknowledge the

loss of your granddaughter, First Lieutenant Laura Margaret

Walker, who died in combat in Afghanistan on August 18th, 2005.

We know that has been a tremendous sacrifice for your family, and

you still have six other members who have served in the military.

We appreciate your service and the service of your family.

General Warner.

STATEMENT OF GEN. VOLNEY F. WARNER (RET.), U.S. ARMY,

PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, V.F. WARNER

AND ASSOCIATES

General WARNER. Thank you.

Well, it has been over 25 years since I have been in the building,

this building, so I appreciate——

Dr. SNYDER. It looks about the same, does it not?

General WARNER. There are still cakes in the hallway. I noticed

that, but I am honored to be here and to have a chance to participate.

I was thinking on the way over, since I have not been to Afghanistan and I have not been to Iraq, the reason for my appearance had

to be my presentation given to the National War College, and I

wanted to in my opening statement just mention what that was.

I think it is related to what happens next, really, and I believe the

committee has been provided the notes on my presentation given

to the National War College. I titled the presentation Getting Past

Iraq and that my greatest interest was to ensure that we come up

with a better solution to assist future failed states, where U.S. vital

interests are involved, without resorting to the deployment of conventional military force.

8

The U.S. cannot resolve most of the instability in the world militarily. Winning all battles is not excellence. Excellence is achieving

our goal without fighting, and the best way to win wars is to make

them unnecessary.

If there truly is to be a global Islamic movement and our enemies

are extremists, nonstate players using asymmetric warfare, if that

is the case, then the nature of future conflict, which includes both

hard and soft power, is more political than military. As such, we

need to fashion a better interagency preemptive response. Let us

call it ‘‘counterinsurgency,’’ commonly referred to as ‘‘COIN.’’

How should we proceed?

My thought would be that, first, we need to put together an overarching national counterinsurgency plan to start the process. The

national plan should be built from the bottom up by integrating

those counterinsurgency plans as coordinated between the Regional

Unified Commanders, called ‘‘Commander in Chiefs’’ (CINCs) in my

day—it has changed somewhat recently—and their ambassador

counterparts. Priority should be given to failed states where a vital

U.S. national interest is involved. The Congress should mandate

and fund the soft power agencies of the U.S. Government to enable

them to perform their part of the interagency task, to include the

State Department, the U.S Agency for International Development,

the Central Intelligence Agency, and a new U.S. information agency, just to name a few.

A new Department of Stability coequal to Defense and State in

authority and funding may be required to manage the efforts at the

national level under the watchful eye of a special assistant to the

President. Having been under the watchful eye of Komer for about

two and a half years, I understand exactly what that means. If we

could find a Komer clone somewhere in the United States, he

would be a welcomed special assistant to the President to bring the

agencies on board in the Washington region and to backstop the

Petraeuses of the world and those who are out on the ground trying to get the job done.

Once that would be established and the teams would be then

trained, we could have a microcosm country team, PRTs, in terms

of Afghanistan and Iraq. They should be trained and tailored country by country to support the forward-deployed U.S. ambassadors

and their Military Assistance Advisory Group Staffs, MAAGS,

which were greatly reduced in 1973 and should once again be augmented so that they can actually do the job required of them in the

countries they find themselves and, certainly, in working with the

local populations in counterinsurgency efforts at the province level.

Secure, hold and build is a good paradigm. It is very descriptive

of the team activities once deployed. As we have just heard, that

is exactly what happened in the Vietnam. The objective should be

not to impose our political and economic ideals on the locals but to

devise and fund plans supportive of both their and our interests in

the region. Only when it appears that an advisory effort has failed

will the President be faced with the critical decision of whether to

deploy conventional military force or to withdraw support or to

seek multilateral support.

I thank you for letting me make that pitch.

9

[The prepared statement of General Warner can be found in the

Appendix on page 53.]

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, General Warner.

General Olson.

STATEMENT OF BRIG. GEN. ERIC T. ‘‘RICK’’ OLSON (RET.),

FORMER COMMANDER, COMBINED/JOINT TASK FORCE-76,

FORMER DIRECTOR, NATIONAL COORDINATION TEAM, U.S.

ARMY

General OLSON. Mr. Chairman, thank you and thanks to the

members. I think the order that we are speaking is fortuitous because you have gotten a good introduction to the historical context.

I am going to talk a little bit about history that is more recent, and

then Ms. Hicks will talk a little bit about policy, I am sure, since

she has got a good background in that.

My association with PRTs began in Afghanistan where I served,

as the chairman said, as the Combined/Joint Task Force (CJTF)

Commander there, responsible for all U.S. military operations, and

as such I also ran the PRTs. In Afghanistan, PRTs are run by the

military. That is not the case in Iraq. Then in August 2006, as an

official of the Department of State, I became the Deputy Director

of the Iraqi Reconstruction Management Office and the Director of

the National Coordination Team. So, as a State Department official, I ran all of the PRTs in Iraq. There were very different effects

there, and we can talk about that more later on if you would like

to.

PRTs in Afghanistan were first established by Ambassador

Khalilzad. The first one was in Gardez Province in 2003, about 50

miles south of Kabul. The purpose of these organizations—and all

PRTs are civil-militaries, as you are well aware—was to serve as

the primary interface between the Coalition and Afghan provincial

and local governments, not the national government but the provincial and local governments, and to assist them in governing

their provinces more effectively and to deliver essential services to

the people.

PRTs in Afghanistan were commanded by military officers. That

is not the case in Iraq. In Iraq, they are not PRT commanders; they

are PRT leaders. Again, there is a difference. That produces a difference as well. The PRTs in Afghanistan were initially manned

primarily or staffed primarily by military personnel, overwhelmingly by military personnel. Later on the State Department and

USAID officials entered the fray.

The PRT program in Iraq was instituted in November 2005.

Again, Ambassador Khalilzad is the one who brought it on board.

By that time, he had moved from Afghanistan to Iraq. The first

PRTs there were opened up in Mosul, Kirkuk and then later on in

Baghdad. There were eventually 10 PRTs. That is how many

standing PRTs there are now. There are now 25 PRTs in total.

There are really three types of PRTs. There are the standing

PRTs, which are located within the provinces where they operate.

There are 10 of those in Iraq and about 25—all of the ones in Afghanistan are standing PRTs.

The next is what is known as a provincial support team. They

exist in Iraq, not in Afghanistan, but these are small civil-military

10

teams that are located outside of the province in which they are

supposed to operate, and they go back and forth into the province

from some type of hub PRT. Normally, you will see a PST in an

area that does not support from a security standpoint the actual

establishment of a PRT in that province.

Then there is what is known as the embedded PRT. Those were

started early this year in Iraq. Those PRTs are actually embedded

in brigade combat teams, and those PRTs work for the brigade

commander. It is very similar to the CORDS concept as I understand it.

I would like to very quickly go over some of the accomplishments,

if you will, the successes of the PRTs and then areas where they

have fallen short or where they have been challenged. The first

area is provincial and local governments in both Afghanistan and

Iraq are functioning. They may not be what we would all recognize

as, you know, the paragon of good governance, but they are up and

they are functioning in each one of the provinces, and that was not

the case before the PRTs were stood up.

There are reconstruction projects that the PRTs have started

that are having an effect and that are actually making a difference

in the lives of the people.

Third, micro-loans and micro-grants channeled through Provincial Reconstruction Teams are having a salutary economic effect, so

economic development is occurring as a direct result of the work

that PRTs are doing. PRTs have contributed to the reconciliation

process. This Sunni awakening in Anbar Province was, in many

ways, facilitated by the PRT, then, later on, the embedded PRTs

located in Anbar. Right now, there are four PRT organizations in

Anbar, and they are helping with the reconciliation process.

Then, finally, cooperation and coordination between provincial

and national governments has been improved through the efforts

of PRTs. PRTs have been directly involved in taking—take Iraq for

example—Iraqi officials to Baghdad and, in some cases, introducing

governors to their ministers, and that is through the efforts of

PRTs working with the military located in those provinces.

Very quickly, there are some challenges. Obviously, the demands

of the geography in both countries exceed the reach of the PRTs,

and the PRTs are not resourced with transportation assets to enable them to get out and to really reach into the provinces in some

of the remote areas. Especially in Afghanistan the geography is

very, very tough, and it is hard to travel in there.

In some of the more unstable provinces of Afghanistan and Iraq,

security restrictions have hindered the ability of PRTs to do their

business. In my personal opinion, some of those restrictions are artificial. There are civilians who are subject to much more restrictive security requirements than the military are. That not only

makes it difficult for PRTs to operate, but it also engenders some

hard feelings between the civilian and the military elements in the

PRT.

There is no established proponency for PRTs. Nobody really owns

them. The Department of Defense does not own them. The Department of State does not really own them. The PRT concept has no

godfather.

11

Then, finally, considerable lip service notwithstanding, PRTs are

not a resourcing priority. For the agencies tasked to support them,

we had some real difficulties in both Afghanistan and in Iraq in

getting people to man positions in the PRTs, especially from some

of the civilian agencies.

In conclusion, despite the significant challenges being faced by

PRT members—a lot of brave men and women who are out there

on the ground, making a difference—I think that the value added

by PRTs to the operations both in Iraq and Afghanistan has been

understated and, I think, underrecognized. I also think that

PRTs—and the colleagues to my right here talked about civil-military cooperation at the national level. I think PRTs can serve as

a good model. There are good lessons learned from PRTs that can

be applied to civil-military relations at other levels.

I thank the committee. I am sorry to run a little bit late.

[The prepared statement of General Olson can be found in the

Appendix on page 63.]

Dr. SNYDER. Ms. Hicks.

STATEMENT OF KATHLEEN H. HICKS, SENIOR FELLOW, INTERNATIONAL SECURITY PROGRAM, CENTER FOR STRATEGIC

AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

Ms. HICKS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee.

I am pleased to be here today to discuss the Defense Department’s evolving role in delivering security and humanitarian assistance. Over the past year, my colleague Stephen Morrison and I

have codirected a pretty unique task force on nontraditional security assistance that has sought to understand the evolution of Department of Defense’s (DOD’s) role and its international, interagency dynamics. This task force is co-led by your colleagues, Representatives Robert Andrews and Mark Kirk, and it formed from

a simple, yet surprisingly unusual concept to bring together experts

from the defense, diplomacy and development sectors to examine

military and civilian roles in U.S. security assistance and development. As you might imagine, these stakeholders brought a wide

range of experience and expertise to the problem set. The task

force’s recommendations, which are scheduled to be released later

this month, reflect a strong majority viewpoint that spans across

each of these sometimes divided domains.

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11th, the U.S. concept

and approach to global security has changed fundamentally. Weak

and failing states, long neglected, have risen in priority. We understand threats to the United States can emanate from within states

with which the United States is not at war; importantly, that persistent poverty can be a significant contributor to those threats.

There is now a strategic imperative to devise multi-decade, integrated approaches that are preventative in nature. Foundational to

this preventative approach is sustainable overseas partnerships

that build capacity for good governance and security, that foster

economic prosperity and social well-being, and that more effectively

promote community-led development.

Accordingly, we now place a far higher premium on the unity of

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cially defense, diplomacy and development. Provincial Reconstruction Teams are emblematic of this trend.

In just a few short years, the Pentagon’s role as the direct provider of foreign assistance has surged. From 2002 to 2005, DOD’s

share of U.S. official development assistance increased from 5.6

percent to 21.7 percent. The Defense Department has assumed an

expanding role in counterterrorism, capacity-building, post-conflict

operations, and humanitarian relief. Beyond implementing traditional military-to-military programs supported by State Department funds, the DOD has been granted temporary authority to use

directly appropriated funds both for prevention and for post-conflict

response, concentrated in conflict-ridden, nonpermissive environments where civilian actors have difficulty operating or where civilian capacities are weak or absent.

The DOD has also provided billions of reimbursement dollars to

Coalition members, such as Pakistan and Jordan, outside of the

formal, State Department-run economic support funds process.

Meanwhile, the United States has continued to underresource

the diplomatic and development instruments of its national power.

All of the other panelists have pointed out the staffing programs

and operational capacities of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department have continued to stagnate at

the very moment in history when diplomatic and development

agencies should be better, not less well-positioned to advance the

United States’ new, evolving global agenda.

By defaulting to the reliance on the military, the United States

is aggravating these existing institutional imbalances. Compelling

reasons exist, as Bernie pointed out, to give the DOD flexibility to

provide foreign assistance in specific circumscribed crisis situations. Granting more permanent global authorities, however, does

not address the larger structural problem and must be handled

carefully, as it risks undermining those sustainable, capacity-building and broader U.S. foreign policy interests.

To unify the U.S. Government’s approach to security and development assistance, the task force intends to make the following

four major recommendations:

First, the executive branch must provide increased budget transparency to Congress in the form of an integrated resource picture

of U.S. foreign national and homeland security policy. Wholesale

revision of the existing Congressional authorization of the appropriations structure would require bold leadership and near unanimous support in Congress, conditions that I do not believe we will

obtain in the near future. Nevertheless, the Office of Management

and Budget (OMB) and the National Security Council (NSC) should

be required to document more systematically how the foreign assistance streams for AID, State, DOD, and other relevant U.S.

agencies fit together. Such transparency would help provide an accurate portrait to Congress of what the United States is actually

spending across agencies to meet its most pressing national security challenges as well as to facilitate the creation of benchmarks

to assess progress in meeting these objectives through various instruments of national power.

Second, Congress should take steps to ensure more effective and

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grams across existing committee jurisdictions. One potential solution much discussed would be the creation of a select committee on

U.S. national security in the Senate and in the House, but simply

improving coordination processes across existing committees might

also bear fruit.

Third, both Congress and the Executive need to elevate the priority attached to development, placing it on an equal footing with defense and diplomacy in U.S., foreign and national security policy.

To this end, the task force is going to call for a significant increase

in U.S. official development assistance and for better integration

again of the multiple streams of development aid.

Finally, to improve the performance of civilian agencies in conflict prevention and post-conflict response, the task force will be

recommending that the next Administration appoint an NSC Senior Director For Conflict Prevention and Response to serve as a

locus of interagency coordination on these issues at the White

House level and to work in close concert with OMB. At the same

time, the State Department Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, S/CRS, should be empowered with a

larger multiyear funding stream so that it may lead contingency

planning for the State Department and USAID in support of the

NSC’s coordinating efforts. Congress should move now to fund S/

CRS’ plans for improving civilian response capacity, including its

Rapid Response Corps and Civilian Reserve Corps. Congress and

the White House should expand the expeditionary capabilities of

other civilian agencies, particularly USAID’s.

Before closing, I would like to very briefly review the task force’s

recommendations with respect to PRTs. PRTs are a potentially

promising platform for integrating civilian and military instruments working in unique and difficult operational environments. At

the same time, PRTs suffer from important limitations, many of

which have been described to you today or in previous hearings,

and we largely echo those. To maximize the potential PRTs, the

task force intends to make the following recommendations:

Advise the NSC to initiate a governmentwide process to clarify

PRT mandate and doctrine, including agency roles in ownership;

recommend that DOD and its civilian partners conduct more comprehensive strategic planning for the use of PRTs and create baseline assessments to identify the needs these teams should be addressing; recommend expanding the predeployment training of

these interagency teams and other interagency teams; endorse a

streamlining of USAID funds in post-conflict settings. AID’s quick

impact project funding is a good start, but it is insufficient, and

many other resourcing streams exist that must be integrated; call

for greater monitoring and evaluation of the impact of PRT

projects, including from security, governance and development perspectives; advocate the development of robust civilian response and

reserve corps as a human capital base for future civilian-military

teams and provide them again with attendant training and participation incentives; and welcome the recent DOD agreement with

Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) on rules of the road to

guide their interaction in insecure environments.

I want to conclude by restating what I am sure everyone in this

room believes. Meeting the security challenges of the 21st century

14

requires the United States to march with a full range of instruments of national power and influence. Creating a whole-of-government approach and requiring the executive branch to explain how

its budgets and programs support the unified national security and

foreign aid strategy will substantially improve the Nation’s ability

to address the structural roots of poor governance, instability and

extremism in the developing world.

Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Ms. Hicks can be found in the Appendix on page 74.]

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you all for your testimony.

We have also been joined by Dave Loebsack, who is a member

of the full committee, and without objection, will be allowed to participate after the other members of the subcommittee have asked

their questions.

Goodbye, Dr. Williams. Good luck to you. See you in Arkansas.

By the way, she was nodding in response to some of the things

you all were saying about PRT.

You know, this subcommittee, this Oversight Investigations Subcommittee, is in a bit of a peculiar situation because we really have

had a lot of control over what we can look at, and you know, when

people talk about oversight or investigations, we think about contracts and cost overruns and all of those kinds of things, but there

has been a lot of enthusiasm on both sides of the aisle of this subcommittee in looking at the issue of what is going on on the civilian

side of our government because, in many ways, we see that as

maybe the key to our success today in Iraq and Afghanistan and

to our success in the future in other wars, and I am going to, I

guess, carry that point to the extreme here.

General Warner, in your written statement that we have from

you, which I think is part of the text of your previous speech you

referred to, you talked about the need to have, quote, ‘‘a vastly empowered, funded and resourced State Department,’’ not Defense Department but State Department, ‘‘that only the Congress can mandate and make happen,’’ was the end of your quote.

Then, Ms. Hicks, on page one of your statement, you say, ‘‘Meanwhile, the United States has continued to underresource the diplomatic and development instruments of its national power of the

staffing programs, and operational capacities of the U.S. Agency for

International Development and the U.S. Department of State have

continued to stagnate at the very moment in history when diplomatic and development agencies should be better, not less well-positioned to advance the United States’ new, evolving global agenda.’’

Then on page six, Ms. Hicks, of your statement, you ask ‘‘Perhaps the key question of this is how realistic—’’ I am quoting you

‘‘—how realistic is it to expect that robust civilian capacities will

actually emerge and be funded?’’ end of your quote, and you discussed that a little bit.

I think that issue of—we have been spending quite a bit of time

on how that relationship between DOD and the military and the

civilian side should work. I would think that the answer to your

question is, if we come up with a model that seems to point in the

right direction, we will greatly enhance our ability to get it funded

15

and operational because I think there is really a lot of concern

about where we are going.

I wanted to ask one preliminary question, perhaps starting with

General Warner and General Olson, and any comments the other

two—you need to start the clock on me here. I am sorry—want to

make.

Take a step back, and look just at the military side. As to the

troops that we have in the military today who we are sending to

Iraq and Afghanistan and knowing of the work that they are doing,

the ones that are on almost a daily basis dealing with Iraq and Afghanistan civilians, is there more that we could or should be doing

to prepare them for success and to prepare them to avoid mistakes?

I am thinking of language skills, culture skills, those kinds of

things.

What should we actually be looking at with regard to our troops

on the ground, the boots on the ground guys, who are really involved on the fighting side of it? Should we be doing more with an

eye toward these other goals that we have?

General Warner, we will start with you.

General WARNER. I think, as to the troop increase that is forecast

and the existing capability of Special Forces, Rangers, civil affairs,

civic acts and psy war, the Army soft-power components, if you

will, are fairly well-attuned.

What they need to do is their military input to what we have

been talking about today, and I think, with the personnel increase,

that some of those, whether they go to Special Forces or elsewhere,

will be able to do that. I think, if you have a return, though, back

to where we were 15, 20 years ago where we had certain people

dual-tracked within the military who basically could pop in and out

of military assistance advisory groups, be immersed in a particular

region and have a regional orientation and also have language

training, that you could eventually then build a cadre of people

who you could call on when needed to go to Bogota or to go to Lisbon or somewhere else and who could be used rather than waiting

until you have a problem and then suddenly saying, ‘‘Well, we do

not speak the language, and nobody has been there in 25 years.’’

So there are things that can be done. Just from what I have

heard the military say in recent days, I believe that is fairly underway.

I do not worry about the military’s capacity to respond to what

is required of them on this issue. I worry a great deal about the

civilian side as well and about the fact that the civilian side has

a tendency, as they did in Vietnam, to go mufti, borrow Army, put

them in civilian clothes, and then perform their mission. That is

not a good long-term solution to the problem.

Dr. SNYDER. General Olson, any comments?

General OLSON. Yes, thank you.

I think you have got to break the answer to that question down

into short-term and long-term. If we are confused about what we

can do right now, I do not think there is a lot of programmatic

help—I agree with General Warner. There is not a whole lot of programmatic help that they need right now, but I would like to highlight, really, three things.

16

First of all, the military is starting to integrate in a big way into

their mission rehearsal exercises, the integration of soft power with

their kinetic operations, and that needs to be encouraged and probably expanded.

The second thing that I—and I am not familiar with how far this

has gone, but a good ‘‘lessons learned’’ process that takes the lessons that are being learned in Afghanistan and Iraq right now

about dealing with civilians and then the sharing that, especially

with units that are going over there, I think is important.

Then I am going to underscore what General Warner said. I

think there is work that can be done right now to train key civilian

personnel who are going to Iraq and to Afghanistan and who are

going to work with the military to train them and to indoctrinate

them about military culture or about processes, systems and that

kind of thing. Just a planning process, I think, is a great example

of that.

Longer term—and I will not go on too much about this, but there

are organizational issues. I think especially ground force formations could be modified to, let us say, capitalize on the potential of

the integration of military and civilian efforts. It has to do with the

manning of headquarters, for example, and at lower levels as well.

Then there are some real institutional issues that I think need

to be addressed, and that is how do we build into the professional

development system and the military education system. Enough of

this, the impact of soft power. Are we doing that enough? I think

there is certainly room to improve in those areas. So those would

be my comments.

Dr. SNYDER. My time is about up.

Ms. Hicks, do you have any comments or Mr. Carreau?

Mr. CARREAU. I just wanted to follow up a little bit on what General Olson just said.

I totally agree. I think that the civilians need to join on to some

of the military structures and capabilities. I think one of the secrets of the CORDS program is that the civilians joined in on existing military structures because they are much larger; they were

better resourced; also, they do operational things that most civilian

agencies do not know how to do, like planning and training. So I

think that that sort of thing, as Mr. Olson was saying, would be

extremely important. I think you need cross-pollination on both

sides, but I think that would be very helpful for this agency.

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you.

Mr. Akin for five minutes.

Mr. AKIN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Just sort of backing up a little bit, as to the experience in Vietnam, which is of interest to some of us oldsters who are kicking

around here, did these reconstruction teams do some good? Apparently, from your testimony, they were doing some good. If they

were doing good, why did we end up where we were? Were we on

the right track and gave up too soon? Is that the bottom line?

Mr. CARREAU. Well, I think it is a difficult question to answer,

and historians will argue over this.

I think what the consensus seems to be is that the program

itself, the CORDS program itself, achieved its limited objectives,

but the patience still died anyway. Remember, CORDS was set up

17

to defeat the Viet Cong infrastructure, so it was really about local

insurgencies. Local insurgencies were extracting rents and taxes

and land and grown goods from the local people. The idea was to

win over the hearts and minds of those people. It was never intended to defeat the North Vietnamese, the conventional army. So

what ultimately happened was it was a combination of the counteroffensive and a lot of the CORDS programs in all of the little villages that pretty much was fairly effective in defeating the Viet

Cong insurgency, but it did not stop, you know, the North Vietnamese conventional army from invading the south.

Mr. AKIN. Okay. I guess the other question I had was:

My understanding was that there is quite a lot of difference between the way these teams work in Afghanistan and Iraq. What

is your impression about what we are doing? Should they be operating the same in both or is the situation different enough that

they need to be different in the way that they are focused?

Last of all, if you are trying to build depth, which is always hard

for us politically to try to plan more than just what dinner is going

to be tonight, let alone what language skills we are going to need

five years or ten years down the path, how would that best be

funded? You know, politically and logically, where would that repository—I remember back in the Vietnam days that my friend was

in the Green Berets, and they were getting cross-trained in the

Czechoslovakian language and, you know, on how to fix a dog that

had its leg shot off and all kinds of different things, so you had people who were cross-trained to do a lot of different things. I assume

that was pretty expensive, and to be well prepared in terms of

PRTs would probably be an expensive commitment as well.

So just a few thoughts on that subject. Thank you.

General OLSON. I will take a shot at the first part of the question

about Afghanistan compared to Iraq.

The answer is, yes, they are different. I think the fundamental

purposes—it starts right there—are different, and I think that is

appropriate. The purposes are tied to the respective missions, and

they are different.

In Afghanistan, the purpose of those PRTs is more directly

linked to the counterinsurgency effort of winning the hearts and

minds, to use that term. Some people are reluctant to use it. I

think it is a good term. So their focus is on short-term, high-impact, high-visibility actions, activities and projects directly in support of a military commander.

In Iraq, the purpose is a little bit different. It is a little bit longer

term, and the purpose of the PRTs in Iraq, very broadly, is to accomplish capacity-building to rebuild, in many cases, institutions

that will endure over a longer period of time. Functional——

Mr. AKIN. For rebuilding local government or for something beyond that?

General OLSON. Yes, it means local government. It means rule of

law. There are actually five pillars: Local government, rule of law,

economic development—there is one other I am forgetting—and

then public diplomacy. Oh, the infrastructure, reconstruction of the

infrastructure.

Mr. AKIN. But in Iraq we are not having road builders and sewer

builders and stuff like that.

18

General OLSON. No, but we are having experts who can advise

where to go to contract for a road builder. We have got experts who

can advise how a government should determine that there is a requirement for a sewage treatment plant. So it is a little bit more

on the side of the institution building, the longer term, and a little

bit less focused on the short-term, directly tied to

counterinsurgency. There is obviously some slopover.

The last point I would make is that the embedded PRTs are a

little bit different in Iraq. They are, in fact, working directly for a

brigade combat team commander, and they are focused on his

counterinsurgency efforts, and they are also very successful.

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you.

Mrs. Davis for five minutes.

Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you

to all of you for being here.

I wonder if we could just turn for a second to the international

efforts because I had an opportunity over the break to speak with

some of our NATO counterparts, and there was certainly a lot of

frustration about the fact that we really are not doing a lot of sharing of information or necessarily learning from one another of the

PRT operations. I wondered if you could speak to that. I think

maybe at the higher levels there is some discussion, but there did

not seem to be—at least it was not getting down to the folks who

are really doing the work.

How should we be organizing that? Even if we did, is that important? Is that something that we ought to be looking at if we are

engaged in this kind of effort with our partners?

General OLSON. First, to talk about Iraq, where my most recent

experience is, there are two Coalition PRTs from Europe. One is

supported by Italy, which is in Di-Qar, and then by the United

Kingdom, which is in Basra.

I think there what you would find is that—you know, you are always going to find the one PRT member who has got a complaint

along those lines, but there, I think, you would find that there is

a sharing of information, a cross-pollinization, because there is an

organization there that used to be called the National Coordination

Team that is now the Office of Provincial Affairs. It is specifically

designed to coordinate the efforts of all PRTs, to include the Coalition PRTs.

In Afghanistan, at least while I was there as the CJTF Commander, there was no like organization that was specifically focused on running PRTs. It was a chain of command function.

Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. We are focusing mainly on Afghanistan.

General OLSON. Okay. Then I am not 100 percent current there,

but I will speak for when I was there.

There was no organization that was focused on PRTs and on coordinating their efforts. It was a chain of command function. As

you know, in Afghanistan the chain of command’s focus is very

busy. They are focused on a lot of different things.

Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Is that something that we should be

at least trying to address and to understand how we can best——

General OLSON. I think so. I think an organizational improvement would be to have, in operations like this, a separate, I will

19

say, headquarters, a military term, where they are specifically focused on coordinating the efforts and supporting PRTs. That

seemed to work pretty well in Iraq. In Afghanistan we did not have

it. I will admit to you, frankly, as a CJTF Commander, at times

the PRTs were kind of an afterthought.

Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Yes. Yes. I think why this should be

important is partly for moving public opinion and in helping to see

that this is an effort that is succeeding in some ways and that it

is an effort that is important.

You know, what strikes me as well is that there are a lot us who

have had an interest in trying to pursue this question, and there

are a lot of efforts actually going on. I actually did not know about

the task force, and we have talked about trying to do a number of

different things, really, to just bring Members of Congress up to

speed and into the fold so that we might even see our committees

as having more of an interagency focus, if you will, across jurisdictions—and an understanding.

I think what I always come back to in some ways is, you know,

why aren’t we getting this? Why is it really taking us a while to

get to the point of seeing that the investment, certainly in this

interagency work, is so important? I am just wondering if you

could—you know, why is that? Why are we struggling with this?

Ms. HICKS. I do have thoughts on that.

My view is that, if you look around this room, you will see—obviously, a lot of people who have spoken today and I know a lot of

you on this committee are involved in this interagency working

group up here on the House side, but most people are coming at

it from a defense perspective, and it is very ironic in some ways

that it is the defense community, the well-resourced, large defense

community, that feels most passionate, really, about this issue of

interagency reform. That is not to say there are not parts of the

civilian agencies that feel similarly, but I do not think it is organic

there the way it is on the defense side, and that is a real hurdle

to overcome. I will not say you cannot have reform without it—I

think that would be too pessimistic—but I think you need to have

State and AID, State in particular, start to feel, again, organically

within their own organization that things have got to change.

Without that, you do not have, really, willing recipients on the civilian side where a lot of the change is harder to come by. They

have got a harder resourcing battle to make, and they have got no

constituency throughout the United States the way the defense

community does. So I think it would be difficult but important.

Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Okay.

Dr. SNYDER. We will go to Mr. Sestak, and that will conclude the

folks who were here at the gavel, and then we will go to Mr. Bartlett.

Mr. Sestak for five minutes.

Mr. SESTAK. Thanks, Mr. Chairman.

If I could, maybe, give an observation and then ask your opinion

on it. We will start with you, Ms. Hicks.

To some degree, I have always been taken that the military has

forces, and then there is military force, which of course we use in

war. Military forces have been used at times from intelligence to

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tened to—or if I have not been here, I have at least perused—testimony on this issue over time, I have begun to kind of slightly

change my mind about our moving to an interagency process on

this, particularly as I think about, oftentimes, these types of what

you call in the military a ‘‘general’s phase four operations’’ that

often come about at the end of a conflict where strife is still present

or of concern.

As I step back—and with all due respect to the Army generals—

is there potentially a different model we might pursue much like

in the Marine Corps where they are supposed to be light, fast,

quick, in there, and where they kick open the door, and then the

Army with its half comes in? Might we not accept the cold, brutal

reality of the fact that the DOD has forces because they are so

well-resourced and accept that the, quote, ‘‘PRTs’’ that may be initially helped to stabilize or to do things should be built around the

DOD? They are often there in strife where we need these. We just

do not calmly or quickly walk into these countries sometimes. Really, the interagency process is one where it is the Army’s, so to

speak, coming in afterwards, built around not trying to have them

there initially. Maybe it is the National Guard with a bunch of

armor that initially starts moving them toward something, because

I am struck, Ms. Hicks, by your saying we do not have any interagency doctrine and that we need to institutionalize this and that

there is lack of significant resources. Maybe that is okay, much like

we do not tend to live by our doctrines in the military anyway as

the Russians always told us.

So my question is: Would that potentially be a different model

to look at rather than this wonderful interagency thing that is supposed to come in? Maybe it is this quick corps presently built

around DOD, and then there should be a natural transition that

is ready to go but that kind of comes in rather than forces this in

in an unknowing, strife-worn situation.

Ms. HICKS. I definitely think the right model is that in the early

stages of a conflict, as the security environment is difficult, you are

going to have it be military led. And I think there is wide recognition that that is the way you have to go at the problem and then

transition into a civilian led. And of course, I defer to my military

colleagues on how they sense the time is right to make that transition. But having said that, I think it is very important not to lose

sight of the idea that the military is not always the right face.

Even if you said well, we want to build all the right skills into the

military, we are going to focus on the military, give them all the

right skillsets, which is a good thing to do.

The problem is, if you then come to rely on the military as your

instrument, that is not the face of development in foreign policy

that other countries or other individuals in countries, populations,

want to see in their nation. And it alters the way our foreign policy

then is presented overseas.

Mr. SESTAK. But for that quick rapid opening, like the Tsunami

report, our military probably got better play, and I saw all and purposefully went to see the foreign press, and gave more of a positive

face to our military than we garnered in Iraq. So I understand the

long-term implication as to what you are saying, but I am talking

about opening that door.

21

Ms. HICKS. I completely agree. In our task force report, as an example, we look at humanitarian assistance as one of our core issue

areas. And we end up strongly endorsing the way in which we currently have a civil military division of labor, for lack of a better

term, on humanitarian assistance. The military can get there faster

often, they can bring resources to bear. And that is a good thing.

It is a great public diplomacy approach, it is a great true humanitarian effort. But in the long run when you have to transition that

into sustainable development, that is not where the Department of

Defense is A, trained, or B, necessarily the face you want to put

forward.

Mr. SESTAK. General, comment?

General OLSON. I would say that I agree with what Ms. Hicks

said. But I also think that if, in fact, the type of missions that you

are talking about are going to become core missions for the military, that is going to require some culture changes. There is a real

controversy in the military. I don’t speak for the military, but there

is a controversy about whether or not, you know, whether we do

windows, do we do nation building. Even in the opening phases,

some of these things can amount to nation building.

So if, in fact, the military buys into that, then there are going

to be organizational changes they need to make. And there is definitely some resistance, as this committee is probably well aware.

And then it flows from there; doctoral changes, provincial military

education changes, equipment changes and on and on. So though

I might agree that this is a good approach, to do this across the

military would take some effort.

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Bartlett for five minutes.

Mr. BARTLETT. Thank you for your testimony. A day or two ago,

I was reading a reprint on Early Bird of an op-ed piece. I forget

which newspaper it appeared, which said that Iraq was the third

most corrupt, I forget whether it said country or government in the

world. When I read something like that, I am always curious who

the heck is number one and two, you know.

General OLSON. You may not want to know the answer to that

question.

Mr. BARTLETT. Yeah, I do want to know the answer. Who is number one and two? They said that like everybody ought to know. I

thought gee, maybe I just wasn’t on the know on this thing. Who

do you think they might have had in mind as number one and two

as one of the most corrupt countries or government in the world?

General OLSON. It might have been Russia.

Ms. HICKS. I think Somalia might be up there.

Mr. BARTLETT. Somalia and Russia? Okay. I will check to see if

that is what they had in mind. They said that a third of all of the

money in our grants and contracts in Iraq just disappear or are stolen. That is about right?

General OLSON. My current position is working as the chief staff

of the special inspector general for Iraqi reconstruction. I am not

here in that capacity. But just based on my general knowledge,

that is probably a good figure. It is a very hard figure to estimate.

But about a third is probably not overstating the problem.

Mr. BARTLETT. It just disappears or is stolen. Do we have an opportunity to help them understand that this is not productive, that

22

at the end of the day, they will be better off if they can somehow

control this, or do we just have to accept this as a part of the cost

of doing this kind of business?

General OLSON. I think some of it is the cost of doing business

in an area where there are tremendous security challenges in

where you have got a government that is not transparent, that is

developing, actually being built in some cases. But some of it must

be addressed. I think Prime Minister Maliki has made that one of

his top priorities. He calls that the second war, the war against

graft and corruption. There are organizations, the Board of Supreme Audit inside the Iraqi Government, that is specifically focused on graft and corruption. So the problem is recognized. It is

debatable whether or not recognition translates to actual action.

Mr. BARTLETT. Help me understand the reason for this problem.

In many countries in the world, we have a lot of corruption simply

because they don’t pay their public officials enough. And if they are

going to feed their family, they have got to be blackmailing people

and so forth. Is that the case here? Is this just a way of life in that

country, that if you have a job that is what you do, you steal and

so forth?

General OLSON. The Iraqi Government has a remarkable record

in terms of budget execution. It is remarkable because of how poor

it is. One thing they can execute, however, is their operating budget. In other words they pay salaries very well. So I don’t think it

is a case of government officials who are starving on the street. I

do believe that there are government officials in fairly high positions who are corrupt and on the take. They have been historically

in Iraq, and I believe that continues to be a problem.

And then some of the money disappearing is not necessarily disappearing into Iraqi pockets. As you well know, Congressman,

there is ample evidence about corruption in fraud, waste and abuse

that is attributable to international entities that are working in

Iraq, some of which are American.

Mr. BARTLETT. I am concerned that we not be seen as a supporter or facilitator of this kind of thing. Is this such an ingrained

practice in their country that it is probably inevitable and there is

darn little we can do about it unless we plan to stay there for 50

or 100 years?

General OLSON. I think you would get varying answers to that

question. There are differences of opinions. I am an optimist, and

I think that the more developed the Iraqi Government becomes, the

more they are supported by the Iraqi people, the more transparent

they become, and the more measures that are put into place to ensure that they are transparent, I think that the graft and corruption problem gets better. Let us face it, they are a Third World nation, and graft and corruption are a sad fact of life in virtually all

Third World nations.

Mr. BARTLETT. I thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Mr. Bartlett. We will now go to our two

representatives who are not a member of the subcommittee in the

order in which they came. And Dr. Boustany is recognized for five

minutes, and then we will go to Mr. Loebsack.

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Dr. BOUSTANY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate you extending the courtesy to me. And I want to commend you on this

hearing. This is an excellent hearing. This whole issue of post-conflict stabilization is something I developed an interest in about two

years ago. I have been reading extensively on it in books and papers by a council on foreign relations, some work done by General

Nash, General Rupert Smith’s recent book, The Utility of Force,

where he talks about deployment versus employment of force. And

what is remarkable as I go through this, I remember reading

Churchill’s first book in the 1890’s where he described his deployment in the Swat Valley where we are currently seeing problems.

And he decried the lack of political expertise on the ground to

complement the military expertise and that they were constantly

trying to quell these rebellions, but yet they couldn’t get long-term

stability because of a lack of a civilian political component. And

here we are, we fast forward and we see a State Department that

has 6.5 percent of the funding that the Department of Defense has.

We have currently about 6,000 foreign service officers worldwide,

which puts us about on par with the United Kingdom today and

yet we are a superpower. And Mr. Carreau’s testimony indicated

we had 8,000 personnel in Vietnam alone. So we don’t seem to

learn from history what we should be doing.

This testimony was excellent. And I think the order of testimony

was just perfect as well. And you pointed out many, many things

that we need to do. And from my reading, what you have pointed

out today corroborates everything I have read. It is astounding to

me that there is all this information out there in the think tank

community, yet Congress is not acting and our Administration has

not really worked in that regard as well. And so clearly we have

got problems in Congress with stovepiping our committee structure

and so forth, which Ms. Hicks, you offered some recommendations

which I think are excellent.

One of the things that strikes me, I spoke with Barbara Stevenson starting back in December about PRTs in Iraq. And I have

been talking to her on a regular basis about how is it going with

the different phases. And particularly phase three with the backfill

has been very difficult in mobilizing the civilian component and

having a reserve force. So this is clearly something that you all addressed and it is something that needs to be looked at. One question I have for the panel would be instead of trying to put together

ad hoc PRTs, should we have PRTs or some sort of equivalent put

into place that participate in the scenario planning, contingency

planning, so that we don’t get into certain difficulties late into the

crisis, and that we avert a crisis with that type of expertise and

planning and so forth? And I open it up to the panel for their comment.

Ms. HICKS. I will start. I think from what I understand of what

Ambassador Herbst is attempting to do at the State Department

Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilizaiton (S/

CRS), that is exactly the plan. And they will require the Department of Defense’s openness to their participation in their planning

process. But also S/CRS needs much more empowerment to run an

interagency planning process as they are chartered to do for postconflict and stabilization issues. But the idea is that you will have,

24

if you follow the model they are attempting to put in place, a

standing civilian response capability of U.S. Government employees.

And then two tiers beyond that, the last of which is the civilian

reserve corps, which I think most people have heard because it was

in the President’s State of the Union Address that is calling upon—

it is a reserve model like the military has. It calls upon folks in

every day life who have skillsets to provide to be pulled into service

when we have more time. But inherent in that whole model is

planning well before you are actually in a contingency for how you

are going to use these forces. And under the Clinton Administration, there was a process known as Presidential Decision Directive56 (PDD–56), which was both a directive and then it directed a

process for how one plans in peacetime for these events.

There is a follow-on National Security Presidential Directive

(NSPD) in this Administration for the same thing. And I think inevitably what you really need to move to is that sort of standing

peacetime, if you will, process of planning.

Mr. CARREAU. I would just like to follow up on that. I absolutely

totally agree with everything Kathy has said. I would make a couple of other observations. One about PDD–56 which a lot of folks

are looking to as a model. It is an interesting document. It was

written though for peacekeeping operations. It was, you know, at

the time it was the Balkans, it was Kosovo, Haiti. And the instruction to the PDD–56 actually talks about it wasn’t intended to apply

to armed conflict. Again, I draw a sharp distinction between a

peacekeeping operation and a war zone where the U.S. is itself a

belligerent. I think that requires a different level of planning. But

as Kathy said, S/CRS is working on this issue. I would actually like

to see it go maybe even a little bit further.

And I want to follow up on something that you started with. The

civilians, I believe, do need to be involved in the planning and it

needs to be steady state. Again, I think this is something that

needs to glum on to the military system that is already there. Civilians with the Combatant Commanders (COCOMs), this sort of

steady state, very top secret planning that is going on, that is when

the civilian agencies need to get involved.

Mr. BOUSTANY. One thing I thought about——

Dr. SNYDER. Charles, your time is expired. Let us go to Mr.

Loebsack and then we will go around again. Mr. Loebsack.

Mr. LOEBSACK. Thank you Mr. Chair. I will be very brief. I just

have a couple basic questions. And I missed the—and I apologize

for being late and missing some of the testimony. But in particular,

I guess I just want to ask General Olson, in your testimony you

mentioned that on page six the establishment of measures that reflect true outcomes, that is the actual impacts that PRT operations

have had on achieving large coalition objectives has been an elusive

goal. I am new to the Congress. I hear a lot about—I am a former

educator. I taught at a small college in Iowa. My wife taught second grade. I heard a lot about outcomes based education, I heard

a lot about accountability, I heard about that before I got to this

office, I have heard a lot about it since I have been here, I have

been to Iraq a couple of times.

25

I am very concerned about measures. The military has developed

certain kinds of measures obviously to sort of indicate to us that

as a result of surge, we have seen a significant decline in violence

in Iraq. I get very frustrated when I read something like this because I really want something that I can sort of wrap my head

around as far as what these PRTs are accomplishing if anything,

especially in Iraq. And I think I was, when I came I think there

was reference to the sort of economic development, political development, military success and all the rest. I remember when I first

got here, we had in the Armed Services Committee, the large committee, we heard from a number of our military folks about sort of

the three-legged stool. And maybe that is what was being referenced when I came in, I don’t know.

Economic development is hugely important obviously. Can you

talk to us about any other sort of more concrete measures, if there

are any, because you have a few examples here of successes, but

it is kind of loosy goosy for me in some ways. Sorry about the

slang.

General OLSON. I will use an educational metaphor, Congressman. You can measure the number of hours that a student studies,

input measures, and make some determinations about how conscientious a student is, or she is. You can measure how that student does on tests. The grade or the score that they get on an

exam. That is an output measure. But how do you really measure

whether or not that student is becoming a better person, better

mathematician, better political scientist? Grades won’t do it for

you. And so I turn that question back to you. I would be interested

in talking about how you did that.

What I will say is this: We have wrestled really hard with PRT

measures that really mean something. And so good governance, let

us take that as an example, in Iraq. We have, in fact, reported the

number of government officials at local levels that we have trained.

I am not so sure that that is all that good. Then we went to output

measures. How many successful council meetings did they hold in

a given period of time? An output measure again. Very problematic

from all standpoints. But then we went to things like asking a

question what do good governments really do, can they execute a

budget, can they pass laws, can they stand up entities that we

would consider to be associated with a good local government? And

we try to capture those.

I will tell you that there are some problems with doing that, as

I am sure you are well aware. There is a causality issue. Does the

fact they can execute a budget, is that directly related to anything

that the PRT did or was there some other factor that is involved?

So I would say, I would stand on my statement that it is still an

elusive goal. But I will tell you it is getting better and better. The

last thing I will say on that is one of the measures I used was getting out there and seeing what was going on and talking to Iraqis

in the streets and saying, how do you feel about your local government, are they doing better, are they doing worse? And the other

thing I did is talk to local military commanders. You can think

what you want about this measure, but the military commanders

are impressed with and very much rely upon their PRTs in their

overall effort.

26

Mr. LOEBSACK. I appreciate that. And I realize that there is

nothing systematic that is going to come from this any time soon,

in all likelihood. But I get very concerned about sort of anecdotal

evidence and then using that one way or another in what still is

a political argument about whether we ought to stay in Iraq and

for how long and all the rest. So it is just a concern I have and

thank you very much and thank you, Mr. Chair. I will turn it back.

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Mr. Loebsack. We will go a second

round if you got the endurance, of course. I want to ask Ms. Hicks

this question because you say both Congress and executive need to

elevate the priority attached to development and place it on equal

footing with defense and diplomacy in U.S. foreign national security policy, and I agree with that.

What I find, I guess, frustrating right now, if you asked probably

about everyone that is in the Congress what do, you think is one

of the top one, two or three issues, it would be immigration that

concerns the American people. In the view of a lot of people, that

issue will never be solved for this country until Latin and Central

America are economically developed. That as long as we have this

incredible economic engine up here it is going to draw in people

who want to support their families and do well?

So you would think that kind of development issue would be part

of our answer to immigration. But I think Americans have gotten

pretty frustrated through the years, maybe not justifiably so with

the impact that U.S. development dollars have on other countries.

But I’ll ask you one specific question and you can comment on that

if you want.

I have gone back and forth about whether I think that the answer to this inter-agency deal is like one big Goldwater-Nicholstype process that you talk about, or more, just a series of legislative actions, executive actions, that we are more on the spirit of

nudgings on different bills kind of on down this road that recognizes perhaps this is not just one big magic bill that’s going come

up and solve our problems. Where do you come down on that given

that you make some very specific proposals that would indeed take

both legislative and executive action.

Ms. HICKS. I hope you’ll indulge me answering both of those, because I just returned from Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) last

week.

Dr. SNYDER. Maybe it is just my ears, Ms. Hicks, your

microphone——

Ms. HICKS. I just returned last week from SOUTHCOM, and as

you probably know, they are undergoing sort of a transition there

under Admiral Stavridis in trying to raise the profile, both of Latin

America, but also the sort of the mixed smart power hard and soft

power approach that the military is attempting down there. And

they are explicitly actually attempting to tie the issue of immigration.

So I would just encourage you to speak a little bit to them about

how they are thinking about the importance of development and

creating noncorrupt, nongang-ridden sustainable societies, not as a

military instrument alone, but as part of a whole approach from

the U.S. Government, and how they think that they can sell that,

if you will, because of the immigration link.

27

So I think you’re really on to something there. On your second

question, you know, I think, I tend to think I was trained as a

strategist in the Department of Defense, and I tend to think in a

systems level. And as a systems kind of person, I prefer to think

of it as putting all the solutions set out there together and understanding the whole concept. I think there’s a lot of value in that.

Having said that, I think the reality is that you have to make

progress piece by piece sometimes, but I don’t think the two are

mutually exclusive, I think they are mutually supporting. I think

in the environment we are in today where we don’t have broadbased support for inter-agency reform, or at least there doesn’t appear to be. Where we can make change we should; there are small

specific changes we can make that are important, particularly the

executive branch about its business, if you will, and the Congress

about its business. I think good leadership on both sides can lead

to internal reforms that really help.

Having said that, I do think at some point there is going to need

to be a holistic look at the national security process, at the structure we have, at how we train our people and how we populate our

organs of government. And that change is coming. It is just a matter of when there is openness to it.

Dr. SNYDER. Do you have any suggestions on how that holistic

look might come about? We have one oversight investigation subcommittee, and I think we are the only game in town right now in

terms of the legislative side of things that is looking at this in any

systematic way.

Ms. HICKS. I belong to an organization that has done several

such looks beyond the Goldwater-Nichols effort and I won’t talk

more on those. I am also part of what I think some of you are familiar with the project on national security reform, which is seeking to gain funds to do just such an approach.

And we are divided into seven working groups that look across

issues of resource. I lead the process group. We will be looking at

strategy and planning across the inter-agency. There are groups

who are looking at the structural elements and so forth. Groups

that are within that who might look at Congress and see how Congress might play into this. That effort, again, it is waiting for funding, it was funded in the appropriations bill. It was funded on the

defense appropriations. We are waiting to see if the Department of

Defense picks that up. I think some of the reluctance again is that

it is all coming on the defense side. It is the defense community

that has been interested; it is defense who would have to fund it,

and there just doesn’t seem to be the same ground swell—there is

in the intelligence world and there is, to some extent, in the homeland security world, but not in the State and AID world.

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Akin for five minutes.

Mr. AKIN. Could you speculate as to why there isn’t the interest

or support in the State Department particularly? If I had to point

to places where I would do things differently having been in Congress now seven years and taking a look at what’s happened in

Iraq particularly, I think my, probably I would want to change

things in State more so than things that the military did, per se.

Why is it State doesn’t have an interest in that?

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Ms. HICKS. Well, first I wouldn’t say that all of State doesn’t

have an interest, but I do not think there is again what I would

call a ground swell of support from the bottom up. And.

Mr. AKIN. Is it partly because they are not engaged and involved

and don’t see the need as obviously as Defense does? I mean, Defense has to live with it every day. State has got all these different

places in different countries and they go there for couple years and

then they go to another one. They are not seeing what is happening, is it that?

Ms. HICKS. No, again, I am really speculating, but I will give you

my thoughts on that. Part of it is that they are very beleaguered,

they are small and they are underfunded. And when people say you

need to change, they take that as not—you need to change in the

sense that we are going to resource you more. They take it as, oh,

great, one more complaint about how we are not doing not enough

with too little. So I think that is part of the issue.

I also think there is a basic cultural difference. I think the Defense Department, and actually PRTs are, in some ways, a good example of this. The culture of the military as I have observed it over

my time at DOD, is to have a very can-do attitude. If there is a

vacuum, they are going to try to fill that vacuum, very whether the

best instrument or not, even knowing they are not the best instrument. They know there is a void and it has to be filled, so that is

a very leaning forward attitude, very can-do attitude.

So I think, the same thing is what you are seeing with DOD on

the inter-agency piece, and Secretary Gates’ recent speech was a

good example of this; things are broken we need to fix it, and that

is the military way.

My observations on the State Department side are more cautious. They are just trained differently. They are trained to find the

right tool for the right job. They need to define what the problem

is and then fix the problem. And that is a very different and more

cautious approach that takes longer to get to the solution set.

Mr. AKIN. Anybody else want to speculate?

Mr. CARREAU. I would like to offer just a few thoughts. I agree

absolutely with everything Kathy said, and many of us are looking

at these issues. I wrote a case study at the National Defense University (NDU) on the formation of S/CRS and sort of the international problems and bureaucratic issues that arose within State

and within other agencies. There was contention with AID as well.

I agree with Kathy, it is largely an issue of agency culture. It is

how they think, what their core missions are. In some ways, it is

almost an odd thing to ask a diplomat who is trained to do conflict

prevention and to negotiate and to prevent problems from occurring to plan for post war stabilization. Obviously, if war or conflict

breaks out and you are a diplomat, something has gone horribly

wrong, and it is just sort of contrary to the way they think. So I

think you have to overcome that cultural barrier first.

General WARNER. Just to add one point. State definitely is not

an operational agency. They report on what exists, but they really

don’t try and get down at the provincial or district level and do

much about it in X country. I do think, though, as the ambassador

being the direct representative in country X, that one of the better

ways to move forward is to strengthen this country teams, straightVerDate 22-MAR-2001 10:20 Sep 08, 2008 Jkt 040361 PO 00000 Frm 00032 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\110-102\339160.000 HAS2 PsN: HAS2
29

en the mag, strengthen the mission, so he has more wherewithal

to work in the country. Then that feeds back into the government

as a better assessment of what is needed. In my sense, if you have

to deploy conventional forces into country X then the ambassador

of this country team has failed.

Mr. AKIN. I didn’t hear any of you say that the thing that first

springs to my mind, but maybe just looking at it more from a political point of view, I think of State Department as always a bunch

of commies that are working at Foggy Bottom and everything, and

I don’t trust them too much. I have a little bit more confidence in

the military, they’ll go solve the problem. I am drawing a caricature to a certain degree. I am just wondering whether or not the

sense that State sort of perspective in what we should even do in

a country may be different than what we are talking about. So it

is maybe beyond a culture, it is almost a political mindset.

General OLSON. It is interesting, just based on my recent experience, the younger foreign service officers that come into the field

going to what General Warner said, they have this sort of operational mindset and they jump into these missions because they believe in them. Some of the more senior foreign officers keep this

whole business a little bit more at arm’s length. I don’t think it is

because they are not patriots or they don’t agree with the mission.

I think it is a combination of what everybody said here, they see

their role differently. Plus they have not been—they have come up

through a system, a professional development system, an education

system.

Mr. AKIN. That has not encouraged that.

General OLSON. Exactly. It is focused on diplomacy. It is not focused on stability and security operations.

General WARNER. On the other hand, if you look at Vietnam you

have Ambassador Holbrook, Ambassador McManaway, Ambassador

Wisner. There are about eight or nine ambassadors either currently

serving, or recently serving who are 6s and 7s in the mid 1960’s

to beginning of the 1970’s performing in an operational capacity

and running accords for Ambassador Port. So it is possible.

Ms. HICKS. I just want to add one very concrete thing, which is

in the military you have a practice of doing lessons learned after

action reports; you have a self-reflective professional development

approach where you come out of the service periods of time when

you are an officer to spend some time in a think tank or at a war

college. And that has a big impact in how reflective the military is

on its own need to adapt. It makes it, as much as we all decry the

lack of adaptation sometimes, relative to other agencies of government, it is much more adaptive. You don’t have a parallel like that

for State.

Mr. AKIN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Dr. SNYDER. Mrs. Davis for five minutes.

Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you. And maybe we can just

continue this conversation. I was watching the General. It looked

like you wanted to say a few things in response to the State Department role as well. Part of the problem is that there is a bias

against soft power I think. I heard someone say it should be smart

power, not soft power. But there is kind of that built-in bias. And

yet at the same time, it seems like so much of what we anticipate

30

of our role in the world is based on that effort. And I don’t know,

is that a correct assumption?

I mean, because I am hearing that even among our NATO

friends, that they think they don’t do civilian very well either. You

know, that somehow we all have to try and find a better way to

use this capacity, which I think we have. We just haven’t utilized

it very well. Everything seems to be, at least from here, we see it

as much more DOD centric than probably I hope that we might see

that in the future. Could you comment on that?

General WARNER. I think you have already identified it. The

Army, the Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, they will fill the gap,

they will do the job whatever it is. Even though they may be a volunteer service and the sergeants didn’t really volunteer to come in

and figure out how to move trash, they want to defend their country, that is the reason they are there, if they are told to figure out

a plan in Baghdad to get rid of trash, they will do it and they will

do it and they will do it as well as anyone in the world.

Whether you have a big enough army and whether you can continue to get people to reenlist for that and whether they are the

right structure to do that, that is a completely different issue. And

my feeling is that the soft power, or smart power, really needs to

be shaken a bit to pick up that mission, take that pressure off the

Armed Forces, who really have too few to do the missions they

have now and do it well, but from another agency, another approach.

Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. You suggested the department of stability in your comments.

General WARNER. If you have to get the mid level people out

from other care worn bureaucracies in order to permit them to do

a job they know how and will do, then create another bureaucracy.

Not necessarily another homeland defense. I don’t think that mixture is good enough. But I don’t think we are talking about that

many people that have to come from the various agencies or expand aid as the operational arm of the State Department to be able

to do development as we are talking about. It doesn’t take that

much. But it does take somebody at the top to drive it.

Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. One of the questions I think we have

asked a few times in this committee is where do some of these individuals come from? And I think part of the answer has been, well,

you know, they are really out there and it is just a matter of trying

to, I think, provide the opportunities perhaps in some cases, but at

least build something that is sustaining. And it seems to me that

one of the things that we haven’t discussed very well, partly because it is a long-term solution, is how you incentivize young people in school to think about going into a field which maybe they

don’t think State Department, they also aren’t thinking military.

But they maybe would think along Peace Corps lines or something.

And we haven’t done that. I am just wondering, is it the Peace

Corps model that you think is good? What model out there that we

have utilized or internationally has been utilized that we ought to

be thinking about in a long-term way?

Mr. CARREAU. Well, it is a difficult issue, and many of us have

been grappling with this. I think most of us would agree it is a

problem of core mission. When you look at stability operations, it

31

doesn’t belong to anyone. And in my more cynical moments, I

would say that no one really wants it either when you go around

all of the agencies, and that is a problem. And it hasn’t been given.

It hasn’t necessarily been put on anyone’s plate. The military gets

stuck with it.

As General Zinni has said, we have become the stuckee. But it

doesn’t mean that they actually want to do it. I think that there

is a lot of movement afoot right now, as Kathy was saying and

General Olson was saying. The President has signed a national security professional development executive order. And this idea sort

of that you would develop a cadre in all of the agencies who would

specialize in national security issues. And maybe it is going to be

post-war stabilization, maybe it will be a Katrina type event. But

where you need the Department of Transportation, you need Commerce, you need Justice, you need Labor to get involved. Mr. Chairman you were asking earlier what is Congress’ role. Many of us

have talked to Jim Locker, who was involved at the time of Goldwater-Nichols I. And that was complicated enough dealing with

just one congressional committee; two in both Houses.

To do sort of a Goldwater-Nichols II might involve as many as

six or eight committees. But I think at the margins we don’t necessarily need to change that much. If you could create some, and

I don’t know what the percentage is, maybe it is two percent,

maybe it is three percent. But if all of the agencies and if all of

the congressional committees could mandate that all of the domestic agencies, what I call the domestic agencies, the Commerces and

Justices out there, as opposed to the foreign ops agencies, to have

some kind of a national security focus such that when there is an

emergency, when an Iraq comes along, when an Afghanistan comes

along, Commerce, Justice and Treasury and Labor has some small

contingency, and maybe it is only 100 people, who have been specially trained, they have exercised with the military, that is their

job.

You can’t convert USDA into a foreign agriculture development

organization. Obviously you can’t do that. But you can take small

portions of it and have them specialize in agricultural development

and overseas contingencies.

General OLSON. If I can just, there really are two models. The

one is the one the chairman mentioned about nudging various legislative pushes. That is certainly one of the models, one of the

courses of action. The other is very much along the lines of what

Bernie was talking about. I think the need is recognized. I think

the basic requirement is what gave rise to this war czar concept.

Now, there is all sorts of—that has evolved as it has for lots of reasons. But there was a recognition that somebody needed to be in

charge when it came to integrating the civilian and the military effort. Now, the problem of a war czar ad hoc, he is not empowered.

He is a great guy, a great military professional. But he cannot

make these things happen. Now, I think there are models. Governmental models of standing organizations that can kind of care for

the integration of civilian and military effort on a continuing basis.

That is what it is going to take. Because it is going to take doctrine, it is going to take education, it is going to take training. And

we can’t just, all of a sudden, do that when a crisis breaks out. So

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the other model is a standing organization. And there are, you are

more familiar than I am with what they are, but there are models

that integrate a multi-developmental effort in other areas that

could serve perhaps as a model.

Ms. HICKS. The only thing I would add is that we have sort of

evolved a little bit in answering the question, but I want to stay

on the line we are on, which is if you look at the problems the

United States faces as it moves in the future, it is not just stabilization, they are all complex. Almost all of them are multi-agency. We are not going to be able—you know, we can pick and choose

particular issues that are so important that we are going to create

an organization, a standing structure to deal with them, and that

is fine. But what we really need overall is to have a different approach to our problem sets. We have to understand that organizations need to be working across them. That we need to have more

horizontal integration approaches. The National Counterterrorism

Center (NCTC) is one example that really, I believe, was not empowered effectively to do what it was asked to do. But if empowered appropriately, if able to go above and beyond what the cabinet

agencies can do independently and really break that sort of what

becomes a resource budget lock that the cabinet secretaries have,

then you start to see well, maybe there are ways to get into that

interagency space and empower individuals in organizations or collective units of people to look at prioritization across basic missionaries.

And it is very much along the lines of what DOD is looking at

internally in terms of capabilities. Portfolios, for instance. A whole

sort of, you think about that interagency wide, a portfolio approach

to how we look at national security would be very useful.

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Mrs. Davis. The issue of the—I forget

who I was talking to. It may have been Mr. Armitage who we were

having a conversation about some of these issues. And he said it

is just real hard from the State Department side. The word goes

out they need 200 people and they have got to have these specialties, these specialties, these specialties. And it means when you are

pulling them, it leaves work undone in Uzbekistan and Bulgaria,

wherever it is that you are working on it. And I suspect if we

would take what you say, Ms. Hicks, and General Warner said and

others are saying about the under—pretty dramatically

underresourcing of the State Department and do a little bit of a

carrot and a stick, which is we are going to recognize that and do

a fairly dramatic increase in budget, which will reflect staffing.

But as part of that there has got to be a sense of some of these

people are going to be a bit redundant and they will be available,

don’t be surprised if one of your two ag people get pulled to go

someplace else. I would think that that is really hard to do right

now when they are underresourced.

I wanted to ask two final questions. And if Mrs. Davis has any

final questions. The first one, Ms. Hicks, on your upcoming task

force report, you talk about your four main recommendations. And

we talked, I think, about one of them, the issue of development. So

it is the other three I want to at least touch on. This issue of an

NSC senior director for conflict prevention and response to serve as

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the locust of inter-agency coordination on these issues in the White

House.

And then you also talk about the importance of having better

congressional oversight and following. It is hard for us in the Congress to do oversight of NSC. They are not required to testify. They

are Presidential advisors. If that is where the game is going to be,

we might as well say let us put money into a black box and we

don’t ever see it until we evaluate years after what happened to it.

I don’t see how that is going to work in terms of practice. Why

are we choosing somebody within the NSC? Now, in defense of that

approach I talked to one former Secretary of State about this whole

issue a few months ago who said we don’t need to do interagency

reform, it is supposed to be the NSC. They just need to do their

job. If they would recognize that they are the ones who should be

putting all this together. How is that going to work when, in fact,

it will not be something that we will have any impact on.

Ms. HICKS. Right. The thought there is that if you have—basically it takes what is S/CRS’s, well, sort of mandate now, and

moves it up to the National Security Council level to give it higher

visibility, to have to the extent that the President endows that senior director with his confidence or her confidence and trust, it gives

that person an ability to look all the way across the inter-agency

and as you quoted, act as the NSC ought to act.

But that does not mean that you lose oversight of what it is seeing. All it says is that the executive branch’s activities need to be

coordinated. And to coordinate that that is the role of the NSC, and

it ought to be elevated to an NSC position. The individual pieces

that support that and how they are put together is still absolutely

under the oversight of the Congress. It is under the oversight of

various jurisdictions.

Dr. SNYDER. Looking ahead, doesn’t that put us, if I understand

what your suggestion is going to be, I recognize this is one of about

three sentences of what I suspect will be a fairly lengthy discussion, doesn’t it put the Congress in a position to say, well, we have

got the person in the State Department sitting here, I got the person in the DOD sitting here, and we have got a problem in country,

why are you all not coordinating?

And they both say, well, we did our part, we did what the NSC

asked us to do and we don’t hear from NSC. The buck has got to

stop somewhere. I would say it stops at the President. That is how

it operates. But I was thinking we would end up with some kind

of a body that we have more—that there is a trail that we can follow. You talk about having the big joint committee or some kind

of select committee on U.S. national security. But we can create all

the committees we want to. If we can’t get at the person that you

designate as being ultimately responsible to have to be held accountable for decisions in that interagency process I am not sure

we are going to accomplish what you are hoping to accomplish by

these changes.

Ms. HICKS. I think the more radical approach again is the NCTC

model. If you wanted to, you could create an organization that sits

in interagency space and that has authority over the various cabinet agencies to coordinate and to prioritize, if you will, budgets. It

is sort of the drug czar approach, but taken to an organizational

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level and placed outside of the White House. And that is, I think

that is a more radical solution.

You could look at the problem as getting it set up appropriately

so that other agencies do recognize it. The fact of the matter is

today in the system in which we operate there is only one organization that the foreign policy communities even sort of recognize as

perhaps above them. And that is the White House. And the fact of

the matter is that is the National Security Council. So it has to

come. It has to be the National Security Council. Again, not just

stabilization, but across all areas that is trying to coordinate and

bring these issues together.

Dr. SNYDER. But my concerns are not off the mark about that?

Ms. HICKS. No. The fact of the matter is if you wanted to call

witnesses, you are right. You would get the rep from the Defense

Department and the rep from the State Department. You would

not get that one view. And they would just tell you what they are

supplying upward.

Dr. SNYDER. I wanted to, my final question is very quickly, the

one piece that is sitting out there that potentially addresses some

of these concerns is the President’s proposal for a civilian reserve

corps, the money has been appropriated, the legislation hasn’t been

moving it, but would you quickly talk about what you think about

that proposal and where it fits in and do we need to move ahead

with it in an expeditious way?

Ms. HICKS. I strongly support it. I think the Congress needs to

move forward in an expeditious way. And frankly it is not a oneshot issue. There is going to be a need to grow that capacity beyond

what has been requested for this tranche over time.

General OLSON. I support it too. And it is based on experience.

When we went to expand the so-called civilian surge, expand the

PRTs and the number of people serving there, we were looking for

people with specific specialties. And there is no data bank we could

really go to for who was an expert in this particular area. We were

lucky to get Sharon when she came in as an agricultural expert on

veterinary affairs. But if there were some kind of system as you

just described, I think it would be much easier to get the right type

of capabilities to match requirements.

General WARNER. If you don’t do it, civilian contractors will probably fill it.

Mr. CARREAU. Yes, I support it as well. With the caveat that I

think it is almost more important to get sort of the interagency element of government up and running first to make sure you have

proper oversight so that you don’t end up with a Blackwater-type

situation where you have contractors running amuck.

Dr. SNYDER. Then that presents a question what does that mean

to have an interagency up and running? And that could be some

years down the line. I don’t think we want to wait that long in

doing something. Mrs. Davis, anything further?

Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Just to follow up with this because it

is an idea that is out there, it is expensive and maybe people think

that it is pie in the sky a bit. But something like the civilian academy to mirror our military academies where you have young people

again who study and plan and do the kind of strategic thinking

hopefully that we have in the military academies and some sharing

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that goes on. So some of those folks eventually will take on a major

responsibility. In thinking about these things, is that part of the

discussion? I mean, is that sort of, wow, we will never get there,

or do you think that is realistic, or not necessary, I guess?

General OLSON. Military cabinets are focused on

precommissioning development, whereas your idea has excellent

applicability further on down the line. Right now the Army runs

the School of Advanced Military Studies. The Marines have an

equivalent that they call School of Advanced Warfighting (SAW),

SAWS. As a matter of fact, USAID, for the first time, has a student

at the School of Advanced Military Studies. And that is where the

Army anyway learns how to think strategically and do strategic

planning. And now this USAID official is going to be able to go to

an operation, let us say, and plug in very comfortably with a military planning team, whereas right now military planning teams

stand up, officials from civilian agencies go there and they are completely lost. They don’t understand the processes. They don’t think

strategically about operations like the military guys do.

So I think your idea is right on the mark. I would say bump it

up a level in terms of where these officials are in their careers and

I think you have got a great idea there.

Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Ms. Hicks.

Ms. HICKS. I would just add there is this concept of the national

security university, which is more along the lines of what Rick is

pointing to. And the thought there is that you would bring together

sort of maybe in brick and mortar, but also sort of in a virtual

sense a consortium of institutions where individuals, whether it is

the Fire Academy in Emmitsburg for the Department of Homeland

Security (DHS) or it is the Foreign Service Institute for State or

it is the National Defense University, you have these centers of excellence that can teach these bodies, folks coming from all across

the interagency a common skillset, and at the same time, a diverse

set of issues.

Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. I appreciate that. I am trying to get

them a little younger, I guess. But just one other quick question

about the asymmetry between civilian and military, Ms. Hicks,

that you have spoken to, and again what can Congress be doing

and seeing that as really it is a budgetary role. You know, how you

share those resources, how do you—any suggestion?

Ms. HICKS. Well, I think, again, it has to—it is essentially at its

core a cultural and then resource issue. And I do think you can

make the resource the leading edge of the change. So if you can increase the float, so to speak, for the foreign service and for the foreign service that are serving out of USAID that helps tremendously

in terms of their ability to support operations. And then also to go

get trained. To go down and be at the war colleges or other institutions or even the Foreign Service Institute (FSI). So I think that

the resourcing piece of it is just really bumping up their total personnel, making sure they have funds for adequate training, and

then starting to think having those organizations be tasked to

think strategically about now that they have these things or as

they are going to get these resources, how they are going to think

strategically about employing them.

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General OLSON. Can I take 30 seconds? I think it was the chairman that said it is hard to put resources against something where

there is no real model yet. I think we need to have the model. I

think we need—the model needs to be on the table. I think also one

of the members said that there are a lot of, there is a lot of energy

being put into looking at this problem. CSIS is doing it. And there

are other think tanks and governmental agencies out there. I

think, and I am not sure exactly the mechanism, but if there were

a way to tie these all together, I think we could come up with

something pretty good for Congress to consider.

I am not proposing another commission or anything exciting like

that. But I think there are ways for Congress to work a more—to

force, let us say, a more collaborative effort here. I think organizations would be interested in doing that if there was something to

kind of coalesce around it. Right now there isn’t. Everybody is kind

of moving in different directions. Looking at different pieces of it,

but it is stitching all the different pieces together that I think could

really help the overall effort.

Mr. CARREAU. I would like to add just a couple of comments. I

totally agree with what my colleagues have said. I spent the first

year at the Pentagon trying to organize the civilian agencies to

send folks to Baghdad and it was one of the most frustrating years

of my life. I think that one of the things I think that Congress can

do, the agencies don’t respond because it is not their core mission.

And they really have no reason to. They are not being graded on

it. There is no accountability, as you mentioned Mr. Chairman.

And I think one thing that Congress could do is give them that accountability. Give them a modest mandate or authorization to care

about the stability activities. the Department of Agriculture

(USDA), the Foreign Agricultural Service, their mission in life is to

sell U.S. soybeans and corn. And God bless them for it. That is a

national interest that we want to do. But there comes a time when

we are going to need agricultural experts to help out in Kosovo and

in Afghanistan. The same with the Foreign Commercial Service at

Commerce. They are to promote U.S. exports.

But there will be a time when they need to help out to do business development and private sector development in Iraq. And

until they have that mandate and until someone is put on the hot

seat, someone at the Commerce Department, and asked what are

you doing to support the effort in Iraq as you were mandated to

do, you won’t find that kind of an effort.

Ms. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you all very much. Thank you,

Mr. Chairman.

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Mrs. Davis. Thank you all for being

here. Let me just extend you an open invitation to submit any additional materials as a question for the record right now. So if you

think of something you think would be helpful, please feel free to

send it in. We appreciate you-all’s service and we appreciate your

thoughts. Ms. Hicks, we look forward to your report. We hope we

are one of the first on your list to receive it when it is done. Thank

you all. The committee is adjourned.

[Whereupon, at 4 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]

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DECEMBER 5, 2007

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