U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE

WASHINGTON : 

For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office

Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512–1800; DC area (202) 512–1800

Fax: (202) 512–2104 Mail: Stop IDCC, Washington, DC 20402–0001

i 

57–052 2010

[H.A.S.C. No. 111–55] 

COUNTERINSURGENCY AND IRREGULAR 

WARFARE: ISSUES AND LESSONS 

LEARNED 

HEARING 

BEFORE THE

TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL THREATS AND 

CAPABILITIES SUBCOMMITTEE 

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 

ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS 

FIRST SESSION 

HEARING HELD 

MAY 7, 2009 
(II) 

TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL THREATS AND CAPABILITIES 

SUBCOMMITTEE 

ADAM SMITH, Washington, Chairman 

MIKE MCINTYRE, North Carolina 

ROBERT ANDREWS, New Jersey 

JAMES R. LANGEVIN, Rhode Island 

JIM COOPER, Tennessee 

JIM MARSHALL, Georgia 

BRAD ELLSWORTH, Indiana 

PATRICK J. MURPHY, Pennsylvania 

BOBBY BRIGHT, Alabama 

SCOTT MURPHY, New York 

JEFF MILLER, Florida 

FRANK A. LOBIONDO, New Jersey 

JOHN KLINE, Minnesota 

BILL SHUSTER, Pennsylvania 

K. MICHAEL CONAWAY, Texas 

THOMAS J. ROONEY, Florida 

MAC THORNBERRY, Texas 

BILL NATTER, Professional Staff Member 

ALEX KUGAJEVSKY, Professional Staff Member 

ANDREW TABLER, Staff Assistant 
(III) 

C O N T E N T S 

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS 

2009 

Page 

HEARING: 

Thursday, May 7, 2009, Counterinsurgency and Irregular Warfare: Issues 

and Lessons Learned ........................................................................................... 1 

APPENDIX: 

Thursday, May 7, 2009 ............................................................................................ 31 

THURSDAY, MAY 7, 2009 

COUNTERINSURGENCY AND IRREGULAR WARFARE: ISSUES AND 

LESSONS LEARNED 

STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS 

Miller, Hon. Jeff, a Representative from Florida, Ranking Member, Terrorism, 

Unconventional Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee ................................. 2 

Smith, Hon. Adam, a Representative from Washington, Chairman, Terrorism, 

Unconventional Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee ................................. 1 

WITNESSES 

Kagan, Dr. Frederick W., Resident Scholar, The American Enterprise Institute ........................................................................................................................ 6 

Kilcullen, Dr. David, Partner, Crumpton Group LLC, Senior Fellow, EastWest 

Institute, Member of the Advisory Board, Center for a New American 

Security ................................................................................................................. 2 

Lund, Dr. Michael S., Consulting Program Manager, Project on Leadership 

and Building State Capacity, Woodrow Wilson Center .................................... 10 

Schirch, Dr. Lisa, Director, 3D Security Initiative, Professor of Peacebuilding, 

Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, Eastern Mennonite University ........... 14 

APPENDIX 

PREPARED STATEMENTS: 

Kagan, Dr. Frederick W. .................................................................................. 43 

Kilcullen, Dr. David ......................................................................................... 37 

Lund, Dr. Michael S., joint with Dr. Lisa Schirch ......................................... 50 

Miller, Hon. Jeff ................................................................................................ 36 

Smith, Hon. Adam ............................................................................................ 35 

DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD: 

[There were no Documents submitted.] 

WITNESS RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS ASKED DURING THE HEARING: 

[There were no Questions submitted during the hearing.] 

QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MEMBERS POST HEARING: 

[There were no Questions submitted post hearing.] 

(1) 

COUNTERINSURGENCY AND IRREGULAR WARFARE: 

ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 

COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES, 

TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL THREATS AND CAPABILITIES

SUBCOMMITTEE, 

Washington, DC, Thursday, May 7, 2009. 

The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:05 a.m., in room 

2212, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Adam Smith (chairman 

of the subcommittee) presiding. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. ADAM SMITH, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM WASHINGTON, CHAIRMAN, TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL THREATS AND CAPABILITIES SUBCOMMITTEE 

Mr. SMITH. Good morning. I will call the committee to order. I 

apologize for being a little bit late. We were in back-to-back hearings this morning, from 9 to 10 and then from 10 forward. So there 

was a little transition time, but thank you very much for being 

here. 

We are here this morning as part of our continuing discussion on 

irregular warfare and how we design our national security defense 

apparatus to deal with the changing threats that we face: the basic, 

principal threat being that we now are most likely to face our main 

threats from non-state actors and terrorist groups, and we are moving into the debate of the next defense budget which talks a great 

deal about where we should be spending our money to meet this 

threat. 

As we evolve forward from the Cold War days and the notion 

that we should be prepared to fight two major conventional wars 

at the same time is the idea of how we can confront many different 

terrorist organizations in many different areas, principally interested in counterinsurgency tactics. But there are many, many implications for policy and budget that we need to work out as we go 

forward to confront this threat. 

And we are very lucky today to have four experts in these fields 

to tell us a little bit about what they think we ought to be doing 

so that we can get ready for the budget cycle. 

I have a full statement which I will submit for the record, but 

I will leave it at that so we can get to the witnesses as quickly as 

possible. And I turn it over to the Ranking Member, Mr. Miller, for 

any opening statement he may have. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Smith can be found in the Appendix on page 35.] 
2 

STATEMENT OF HON. JEFF MILLER, A REPRESENTATIVE 

FROM FLORIDA, RANKING MEMBER, TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL THREATS AND CAPABILITIES SUBCOMMITTEE 

Mr. MILLER. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Absolutely, 

we all await this budget cycle to see the details of Secretary Gates’ 

vision in the fiscal year 2010 Defense budget. I look forward to 

hearing from the witnesses today and yield back. I would ask that 

my statement be entered in the record. 

Mr. SMITH. We will do that, and thank you very much. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Miller can be found in the Appendix on page 36.] 

Mr. SMITH. With that, we will turn over to the witnesses. I will 

introduce all four. We will work our way left to right. Try to keep 

your statements somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes. We will 

then get into questions after that. 

First, we have Dr. David Kilcullen, who is a partner in the 

Crumpton Group, LLC, and a Senior Fellow at the EastWest Institute and member of the Advisory Board, Center for a New American Security, also is very, very involved in the campaign that was 

developed in Iraq. Look forward to hearing your testimony. 

Dr. Frederick Kagan, Resident Scholar of the American Enterprise Institute, also regularly testifies before the Armed Services 

Committee, has done so about Iraq and other national security policies as well. Always a pleasure to see you. 

Dr. Michael Lund, Consulting Program Manager, Project on 

Leadership and Building State Capacity, from the Woodrow Wilson 

Center. Good to see you as well. 

Dr. Lisa Schirch, Director from the 3D Security Initiative, Professor of Peacebuilding, Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, Eastern Mennonite University. 

Thank you all for being here. Look forward to your testimony. 

Dr. Kilcullen. 

STATEMENT OF DR. DAVID KILCULLEN, PARTNER, CRUMPTON 

GROUP LLC, SENIOR FELLOW, EASTWEST INSTITUTE, MEMBER OF THE ADVISORY BOARD, CENTER FOR A NEW AMERICAN SECURITY 

Dr. KILCULLEN. Mr. Chairman, thank you for having me. I would 

just like to take a moment to thank your professional staff for 

being so incredibly flexible over the past week while I have been 

sitting on my ass with flu, not swine flu, just regular old human 

kind. 

Mr. SMITH. Did that make it better that it wasn’t part of the 

great threat? 

Dr. KILCULLEN. I would like to focus my opening remarks mainly 

on counterinsurgency and unconventional warfare, because there is 

a lot of expertise in other areas at the table, and I would like to 

just give the areas that I am most focused on. 

Since 9/11, I have fought and worked alongside some incredibly 

professional and brave American men and women from the Department of Defense (DOD), from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), State, Justice, the Department of 

Agriculture, Department of Homeland Security, in theaters right 

away across the war on terrorism from Iraq, Afghanistan, Paki-
3 

stan, the Horn of Africa, parts of Southeast Asia and even Latin 

America. So I am offering these comments as a non-American but 

one who has seen a really incredible process of adaptation and improvement across all the branches of the U.S. Government since 9/ 

11, and I think that is something that you and they should be very 

proud of. 

Regular army units—that is, conventional, standard infantry, artillery or cavalry units operating on the ground today have techniques and capabilities that only existed in certain Special Forces 

units in 2001, and special mission units have capabilities, as you 

well know, that only existed in Hollywood in 2001. So they have 

seen an incredible, development, adaptation and improvement. 

We have learned a lot of lessons on the way, and we still have 

some lessons that I think we need to lock in as we go forward. So 

let me focus on two areas. One is best practices for counterinsurgency, and the other is surrogate forces in unconventional warfare. 

In my written testimony, I have listed what I consider to be the 

eight key best practices, and I just want to run through them very 

quickly. 

The first one, the most important, is that to be successful in 

counterinsurgency you need to have a political strategy that builds 

government effectiveness and legitimacy, while marginalizing insurgents, winning over their sympathizers, and coopting local allies. That is the most important thing. It was our most important 

weakness in Iraq and Afghanistan going in, and fixing that has 

been one of our most important successes. 

Second key best practice is that you need a comprehensive approach that closely integrates civil and military efforts—— 

Mr. SMITH. I am sorry to interrupt. You said Afghanistan. Did 

you mean Iraq in terms of fixing it in this one of our most important successes, or did you mean Afghanistan? 

Dr. KILCULLEN. I think actually both, much more so in the case 

of Iraq. But in Afghanistan I think we are on the right track to getting a viable political strategy in the sense of what kind of Afghan 

government do we want to see, how do we want that Afghan government to function, what are the steps we are going to take to put 

that government in place. That is what I mean by a political strategy, not so much a U.S. political strategy, but a strategy on the 

ground for standing up the government that we are trying to support. 

So then the second best practice is a comprehensive approach 

that integrates civil and military efforts based on a common diagnosis of the situation and a solid long-term commitment to the 

plan. The third is continuity of key personnel and policies and people having sufficient authority and resources to do their jobs. 

The fourth one is population-centric security which is based on 

presence, on local community partnerships, on making populations 

self-defending, and on small unit operations that keep the enemy 

off balance. 

The fifth one is cueing and synchronization of development, governance and security efforts, so that the three work in parallel together to generate a unified effect. 

The next one is close and coordinated and genuine partnerships 

between intervening coalition forces and the local communities on 
4 

the ground. The seventh one is strong emphasis on building effective and legitimate local security forces, with the emphasis on local. 

And then the final one is a region-wide approach that not only 

deals with the insurgency in the country where it is manifesting 

but also tries to disrupt insurgent safe havens, control borders and 

frontiers, and undermine terrorist infrastructure in neighboring 

countries. 

We can expand on each of those if you would like to in Q and 

A, but my observation across all the theaters where we have been 

operating since 9/11 is that where we have applied those best practices we have done better than in places where we haven’t. So I 

think there is some pretty good empirical evidence on that, that 

that is the way to go. 

These are basically lessons we learned. We already knew this 

stuff in the sixties. We almost deliberately forgot it after Vietnam. 

But the next category is something that is a little different, which 

is the use of surrogate forces, and I guess as a cautionary point 

here, that we sometimes learn the wrong lessons from campaigns 

that we conduct. 

I want to take you back to 2001 where we did the lightning-fast, 

seven-week campaign to topple the Taliban. After the end of that 

campaign, Secretary Rumsfeld said that we engaged in a transformational campaign that basically changed the rules of warfare, 

and he focused on the use of small, light-footprint Special Operations Forces (SOF) on the ground, backed by precision air power, 

and that was sort of his description of what the recipe was for success. 

General Franks who commanded the force also said that Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) coming from spacebased and high altitude and also unmanned systems was critically 

important. And he said in his memoirs that he had the kind of godlike perspective that Homer gave to his heroes based on all that. 

He was obviously very pleased with his performance in Afghanistan. 

I won’t agree with both those points, but I think they weren’t actually the main reason why we succeeded in Afghanistan. On 7 December, 2001 when the last Taliban stronghold fell, which is 

Kandahar, we only had 110 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers and about 300 U.S. Special Forces operating in that part of Afghanistan, but we had 50,000 Afghans fighting on our side against 

the Taliban. That, I think, is the real reason why we succeeded in 

2001. 

I have talked to hundreds of Afghans on the ground since I have 

been working in the field since 2006. None of them has ever described to me what happened in 2001 as an invasion. They always 

talk about we kicked out the Taliban and you assisted us, and I 

think that the use of surrogate forces and building partnerships 

with local communities was actually the critical element of our success in 2001. 

Mr. SMITH. How did that happen so fast—sorry to interrupt— 

pre-9/11, these forces were out there but they really weren’t making much progress. And then in a matter of, gosh, a month and a 

half after 9/11, was it as simple as, you know, the Afghan warlords 

saying, we see which way the wind is blowing and it is blowing 
5 

against the Taliban so we are going to go against them? What 

made that rapid change? 

Dr. KILCULLEN. It was an extremely conscious approach, based 

on our CIA campaign plan of winning and generating partnerships 

with local commanders. And you know, I wasn’t on the ground with 

those teams, but my boss was, and he has told me in detail and 

we have published accounts of how they operated where they essentially dropped in by helicopter, established relationships with 

people, identified what the critical requirements were, and were 

able to back them up rapidly, whether it be medical supplies, blankets, food aid and so on, on the one hand, or a Joint Direct Attack 

Munition (JDAM) to clear away a Taliban position on the other. 

So a full spectrum approach of clearing the obstacles out of the 

way of our local partners and bringing them on our side led to basically a cascading series of defections from people that supported 

the Taliban, and groups in the civil society, coming alongside U.S. 

Forces, leading to that success. 

I want to point also to al Anbar in 2007 where pretty much exactly the same thing happened, where we had enough forces on the 

ground finally to make people feel safe enough to turn against al 

Qaeda. And once we were able to enable that, we had the whole 

of civil society on our side, and we were able to push al Qaeda in 

Iraq out of that province relatively quickly, after years of failure, 

based on building a population alliance with people on the ground. 

So the arithmetic of local security forces is actually very important here. We do not have and we will not ever have enough forces 

to generate that sort of dominant 20 counterinsurgents per thousand head of population, which is sort of the theoretical number 

that people talk about. But if you generate local alliances, you can 

really radically compensate for that lack of forces. 

Let me give you an example, and then I will finish on this point. 

Imagine that we had had 50,000 U.S. troops to put into Iraq in 

2007, extra troops. We didn’t have those, but imagine we did. If we 

had put them in, we would have had a benefit for that 50,000 

troops investment of about 10,000 out on the ground at any one 

time, because you have to run your headquarters, you have to look 

after your lines of communication. That takes about 20,000 troops 

out of your 50,000. And then the remaining 30,000 have to be on 

a rotation plan. They have got to be out patrolling but then resting 

and then preparing. So you only have about a third of those guys 

out on the ground at any one time. So the bang for the buck is 

10,000 out of an investment of 50,000. 

Now, let us put an alternate possibility. Instead of putting 50,000 

U.S. troops in theater, we recruit and gain on our side 50,000 

Iraqis, which is actually what we did. Instead of getting a benefit 

of your investment for 10,000, you get the full 50,000 out on the 

ground all the time. There is no headquarters, no lines of communication, no rotation plan. They live there. So you get a benefit of 

50,000. But actually it is more than that, because those 50,000 

guys who work for us used to be in the enemy’s recruiting pool. 

They used to work for the enemy. So the benefit is a net benefit 

of 100,000. We gain 50, the enemy loses 50. So the benefit of recruiting and employing local security forces on our side is 10 times 

the benefit putting in American troops into the same environment. 
6 

When you look at the dollar cost as well, it is dramatically more 

cost-effective to work by, with, and through local partners. And as 

you know, that is what we talk about in terms of foreign internal 

defense. It is one of the areas that we have been weakest on in 

terms of our lessons learned since 9/11. 

What I will do is stop there and let the other witnesses testify 

and then perhaps you may wish to pick at some issues. 

Mr. SMITH. Certainly. Thank you very much. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Kilcullen can be found in the Appendix on page 37.] 

Mr. SMITH. Dr. Kagan. 

STATEMENT OF DR. FREDERICK W. KAGAN, RESIDENT 

SCHOLAR, THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE 

Dr. KAGAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, members of 

the subcommittee; and thank you also, congressional staff, for 

being very gracious about the outrageous lateness of my testimony 

and I apologize. 

Mr. KLINE. Did you have the flu? 

Dr. KAGAN. I didn’t even have that excuse, I am sorry, but I am 

sure I will have the flu now. 

Customarily, when Dave and I do our traveling road show, we 

spend a lot of time saying, I agree with everything he said. In this 

case, I agree with almost everything that he said. But since there 

are actually a couple of things that I am not so sure I disagree 

with, but I would like to put a little bit sharper point on it, I would 

like to start with that. 

First of all, the difference between surrogate forces and local security forces and I think it is very important to highlight that distinction which Dave made, but to bring that out. Surrogate forces 

are forces that you use instead of your own troops to fight on your 

behalf, pursuing your interests as well as their own, and that is 

what we did in Afghanistan in 2001. 

I am less pleased with the outcome of that operation than a lot 

of other people have been, and I have always been less pleased 

with the outcome of that operation because the 50,000 Afghans 

that we had—and Dave is absolutely right about how that war was 

won, unquestionably true—but the 50,000 Afghans did not form a 

cohesive force, could not be allowed on their own to form a government because the government would not have been legitimate, and 

were not in fact able to hold the country on their own. And there 

was no way that you were going to build local security forces in 

that context rapidly enough to fill the security gap that was created by the collapse of what little government the Taliban had been 

providing in time to prevent what actually happened, which is sort 

of a fragmentation of the country and some renewed warlordism 

and, in general terms, creating conditions for some of the problems 

that we now face. 

The answer to that, of course, is not to send 500,000 American 

troops into the country, but it was to send some American troops, 

and ideally international troops, into the country because the thing 

to take away here is that the 20-odd thousand population requirement for counterinsurgency is real, it is a real requirement. Dave 

is absolutely right that you have to count local security forces in 
7 

that mix, and it is not a question of we have to put 20 troops on 

the ground for every thousand of population, nor would it be desirable or sustainable in any sense for us to do that. But you do have 

to meet that requirement; otherwise you run the risk of real deep 

lawlessness that can set conditions for long-term failure, even after 

what looks like a very stunning success, which is what happened 

in 2001. 

And so the question is, how do we initially fill the gap between 

whatever exists after we have helped someone else take down a 

government, or whatever we have done, and how long it takes actually to develop the local security forces that will be necessary. That 

is our exit strategy, if you will, is developing local security forces, 

legitimate government, civil society, and all those things that are 

necessary. But we do have to have a plan for filling the security 

gap with our own forces, with international forces, otherwise you 

can’t get there from here. 

And so I think that leads into the point that I tried to emphasize 

in my testimony, which is although we are engaged in wars against 

unconventional enemies fighting irregular warfare against us, what 

we need to fight those wars are the conventional true tools of state 

craft that we actually have. We need to apply them properly. 

There is a lot of sort of search in this town and around this country for some sort of magic bullet that would allow us to fight our 

enemies without maintaining large, expensive, conventional forces, 

and without having to deploy our troops, and by using local proxies 

and so forth. And I know that that is not what Dave is advocating, 

but there are a lot of people who are advocating that. And it is distressing that a lot of arguments that we heard during the strategic 

pause of the 1990s about how to be a cheap hawk are resurfacing 

now with, really, virtually no changes made to them, as though the 

last eight years didn’t happen. And that is very distressing to me 

because that didn’t work. We tried that. 

The problem is, it is not that we haven’t tried that. We did try 

that. That is what we did in 2001. That is what we did in 2003 

in Iraq. We experimented with this. Small footprint, high technology, blitzkrieg, get in, get out. And the problem is that it doesn’t 

work. 

And so I am worried that we are being led down a path again 

of trying to persuade ourselves that there is some way to do this 

that is less painful; and as usual, I am here to say, no, it is going 

to hurt. We need this capability to fight the kind of enemies that 

we face. We are going to have to pay for this capability, and there 

really isn’t any alternative. 

I would like to ask that my written testimony be submitted for 

the record. I don’t want to recite it for you. What I would like to 

do instead is listen to the words of my favorite, the greatest novelist of all time, Leo Tolstoy, who said in describing his writing 

process, ‘‘The key is show, don’t tell.’’ 

And so instead of sort of lecturing you about general principles, 

I would like to take you through the three map slides that I have 

given you to underline the point that I don’t think you can actually 

have an abstract conversation about how to do this beyond what 

Dave has laid out, which is very solid and spot-on. 
8 

But if you are going to take it to the next level and really understand what we need to do, you actually have to put enemies on the 

ground in context and talk about what you are facing and how you 

have to deal with it. And since obviously the most significant intellectual challenge we face right now is in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 

I would just like to quickly take you through what the enemy set 

is and talk very, very briefly about what we need to be doing about 

this. 

If you start with the first slide that is labeled Major Enemy 

Groups, the point that this slide attempts to make is that we are 

facing seven, eight, nine, ten significant enemy groups in Afghanistan right now, of which only about three actually have objectives 

within Afghanistan. And that would be the Quetta Shura Taliban 

of Mullah Omar, the Haqqani Network that is now based in 

Meydan Shahr in north Waziristan, and the Hizb-e Islami 

Gulbuddin (HIG), Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s group which is much 

less significant than the other two and operates in the east. 

These are the only groups that are actively trying to achieve objectives in Afghanistan, and these are the groups that are the principal threats to American mission failure or mission success in Afghanistan right now. If we don’t, in conjunction with the Afghan 

government and while setting up civil society and a variety of other 

things, defeat these groups, then we are not going to succeed in Afghanistan. 

The problem is these groups are very heavily focused on Afghanistan. That is really what they are focused on, and if you look at 

them and ask are these major threats directly to United States national security, are these groups going to attack us, the answer is 

no, that they are not. These are not global jihadist groups. These 

are not, right now, even regional jihadist groups. These are Afghan-focused groups. So why are we fighting them? We are fighting 

them because we need to succeed in Afghanistan. Why do we need 

to succeed in Afghanistan if these groups aren’t trying to actively 

hurt us? 

Well, part of the answer is because we know that Mullah Omar 

previously provided safe haven to Osama bin Laden, is certain to 

do so again. Jalaluddin Haqqani has personal friendships with 

Osama bin Laden; invited him to his territory in the eighties, 

would certainly do so again. So we could have the recurrence of a 

safe haven, but that is a secondary concern. 

The real concern is that when you look across the border into 

Pakistan, what do you see? You see a collection of other groups 

that are playing in Afghanistan. They are sending fighters to Afghanistan, they are working on killing Americans in Afghanistan, 

but they don’t actually have objectives in Afghanistan. 

And those groups include the Tehrik-e Taliban in Pakistan (TTP) 

with Baitullah Mehsud’s group. They include Tehrik-e Nafaz-e 

Shariat-e Mohammadi (TNSM), Sufi Mohammad’s group, and they 

include the Lashkar-e Tayyiba (LeT) and, of course, al Qaeda. 

Why are those guys fighting in Afghanistan? Well, it is a good 

place to kill Americans, and for those groups, it is always a good 

day when you can kill an American. It is live-fire training for their 

cadres. This is where they send their troops to experience war and 

get blooded. They are willing to accept much higher attrition rates 
9 

in training than we would be, and it is also a way for individual 

commanders to gain combat patches and then bid for participation 

in one of the shuras in Pakistan. 

So it is a very strange dynamic. And you could say, well, if we 

pulled out of there wouldn’t these guys stop fighting us? Well, if 

we weren’t there, they wouldn’t be fighting us, that is for sure, and 

they might well lose interest in Afghanistan to some extent. 

But here is the thing. These are the groups that pose the principal threat to the stability of Pakistan, and, if you include 

Lashkar-e Tayyiba, to the stability of the entire region. Lashkare Tayyiba is commonly identified as a Kashmiri separatist group, 

which is the one thing it is not. It is not primarily Kashmiri. It is 

primarily Punjabi. Its headquarters are not in Kashmir. They are 

in a small town called Muridke which is near Lahore. It has something like 2,200 offices throughout Pakistan. 

And if you flip to the next slide, I tried to give you some idea 

of the major LeT bases, which include a significant base in Karachi 

from which parts of the Mumbai attack were launched. 

This is a very significant challenge to the region and global security order, because the objective of LeT is not to regain Kashmir 

but to destroy India; to destroy Hindu India and sort of make the 

world safe for India’s Muslims. That is what LeT is all about. If 

it is allowed to proceed, it will destroy the subcontinent. That is its 

objective. This is a major problem for us. 

TNSM and TTP are much more focused on Pakistan. I know that 

Baitullah Mehsud said he is going to blow up the White House, and 

I wish him luck with that; but fundamentally, these are groups 

that are a threat to Islamabad. 

Mr. SMITH. You don’t exactly wish him luck. 

Dr. KAGAN. I don’t exactly wish him luck. I don’t wish him luck 

at all. I thank you for correcting me. 

Mr. SMITH. Just for the record. 

Dr. KAGAN. Just for the record I wish him failure, but I am not 

going to lay awake nights worrying about him doing that either. 

But if we succeed in Afghanistan, we have the opportunity not only 

to see these groups, as we now can, and to interact with them to 

some extent, as we now can, but also to influence the populations 

among which they exist, because the most important bases for 

these groups lie in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) 

in Balujistan and in the Northwest Frontier Province, a part of 

that which is another problem, and those populations are heavily 

influenced by what goes on in Afghanistan. 

As an example, we have recently, working with the Afghans, succeeded in making something of a success out of the town of Khost. 

Khost is the home base of Jalaluddin Haqqani, and it is a major 

problem for Haqqani that Khost looks like it is succeeding in the 

context of American and Afghan efforts. Haqqani and the InterServices Intelligence (ISI) have said it is a priority to defeat our efforts in Khost, because if they don’t defeat our efforts in Khost it 

delegitimizes their movement in their heartland. Their heartland 

extends into Waziristan. 

Where am I working to with this? I reject the notion that there 

is some grand unified field theory of Pakistan that will get us 

magically to the solution of all of our problems there. I don’t think 
10 

there is. I think it is a vital American national security interest to 

work toward the stability of Pakistan. I think we need to use the 

instruments and opportunities that are available to us to do that. 

I think when you understand what the enemy laydown looks like 

and how the groups overlap and how the populations overlap, you 

can see how important it is to succeed in Afghanistan as something 

that we can affect directly in Pakistan, in contrast to the many, 

many things that we can’t affect directly in Pakistan, to work toward Pakistani stability. And I think your successful Pakistani 

strategy, at best, will end up being a composite of a variety of 

things that we can do and leverage that we can generate, and pressures and incentives that we can apply, put together over a long 

period of time to move Pakistan in the right direction. 

But that is why I think it is, in many respects, less useful to talk 

about general, how do we fight the unconventional war, how do we 

fight the global insurgency, if you will—even though I think that 

is a valid concept, and I think those principles are important—than 

it is to say let us look at the specific problem that matters most 

to us and let us talk about what the challenges are, what the enemies and the threats are, and what our capabilities are. And if we 

do that in a number of areas, including areas that I am not competent to talk about—like Somalia, Yemen, Egypt, Algeria and so 

forth—that is the only way you can really figure out what your 

force requirement is. That is the only way that you can really figure out what your large strategy is going to be, because the solution set for each one of those problems is going to be different. It 

is going to be based on the principles that Dave identified and 

some other general principles, but it will be a unique solution, because each one of those problems is unique. 

And so what I would like to leave you with is let us have the 

general conversation but let us also talk about specifics as we think 

about this defense budget. And I would encourage you to press Defense Department officials and the military officials who testify before your committee and your subcommittee to speak in detail and 

not just offer you general bromides about how they are going to address these problems. 

I thank the committee. 

Mr. SMITH. Thank you very much. 

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

Mr. SMITH. Dr. Lund, I understand you are going to testify and 

then Dr. Schirch is going to be available for questions. 

Dr. LUND. That is correct. 

Mr. SMITH. Please go ahead. 

STATEMENT OF DR. MICHAEL S. LUND, CONSULTING PROGRAM MANAGER, PROJECT ON LEADERSHIP AND BUILDING 

STATE CAPACITY, WOODROW WILSON CENTER 

Dr. LUND. Thank you. Well, thank you all for this opportunity to 

present some insights and ideas about a phase of conflict which 

does not get as much attention as the active ones. 

Basically, we are going to talk about what is actually going on 

in societies that are on early warning lists and are threatened with 

the potential for insurgencies and terrorism or other kinds of con-
11 

flict, in terms of what we have learned from these experiences or 

what needs to be done to make them even more effective. 

If you want to put it in military jargon terms, we have a chart 

on page three that came from DOD. We are talking about what is 

actually going on out there in phase zero, what is called the steady 

state, in terms of nonkinetic activities on the part of both civilian 

and military agencies and Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs), 

and how can we use those activities, those programs, those tools, 

to avoid getting into phase II, III, IV and V altogether. 

Let me say a little bit our own experience. Lisa and I have had 

the privilege, I think you might say, of going to lots of obscure, relatively obscure, remote places like Tajikistan, Guyana, rural Georgia, northern Kenya, Uzbekistan, Zimbabwe, Indonesia, Serbia, 

Lebanon, Sri Lanka and so on over the last several years, some of 

which are in active conflicts as you know, some of which at least 

show indicators of potential conflict. 

What we would like to do is share some of our insights from both 

our direct observation, as well as our research. We are both sort 

of half practitioner and half analyst. So we try to take an independent position vis-a-vis the various clients that we may serve at 

various times. 

The need for difficult, often deadly, counterinsurgency, counterterrorism campaigns, can be reduced to some extent, not completely, by targeted strategic efforts to preempt the ability of insurgent groups to capture the hearts and minds of the populations in 

these kinds of vulnerable societies. The typical conditions that the 

populations are motivated by or concerned about are lack of daily 

security, absent or corrupt government services, discrimination 

against certain regional groups or ethnic and sectarian groups, lack 

of job opportunities, especially for young men, lack of any political 

voice, and lack of unity and great factionalism at the higher levels 

of the governments, as well as the addition of extremist ideologies 

that seem to offer a way to remedy these grievances. 

Addressing these factors in a very specific and targeted way, 

through close analysis done on the ground, and using a variety of 

actors with various kinds of programs addressing the various drivers of conflict, can avoid the need for getting involved in militarily 

internal wars or for humanitarian intervention to prevent a genocide like we have seen unfolding in Darfur, as well as save the 

money that is spent on many post-conflict reconstruction countries. 

We cite some data from research that has compared the costs of 

wars of this type with the preventive efforts that were made in 

similar situations. Other countries where there were risk factors 

evident but preventive activities were taken, such as Macedonia, 

and the ratios between the costs of military efforts and other efforts compared to the preventive efforts are really incredibly great. 

The average in one study was 1:59; that is, the preventive activity 

costs, the ratio, 1:59, however you put that. 

The good news is the thousands of low-visibility programs in mediation, governments, governance development, human rights, as 

well as track two diplomacy and so on in these countries from 

Azerbaijan to Zambia. For example, I did a study of what USAID 

has been doing in southern Serbia, in the Presevo Valley east of 

Kosovo, where as you know there was an Albanian insurgency in 
12 

2001, in terms of what kind of reconciliation, what kind of building 

of defense against a reemergence of conflict between the Albanians 

and the Serbs might occur. 

And in Presevo city itself, town itself, there are several activities 

that are sort of working in tandem to create a more responsive 

budget process in Presevo, vis-a-vis that particular district, as well 

as at the village level, bringing together Serbs and Albanians in 

joint projects to do development. 

Those are just a couple examples of thousands of projects and 

programs that are going on and being carried out not just by the 

U.S. Government but by the U.N., the Organization for Security 

and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), some of the multilateral organizations, regional organizations like the Economic Community of 

Western African States (ECOWAS). 

In some ways what this hearing is bringing out is that there has 

not been a lot of conversation between the security communities 

and the development communities, so that this area called phase 

zero is basically zero. I mean, it is an unknown territory for the 

security community. But what I am saying is that those of us in 

the peacebuilding or development communities have been actually 

working with a number of these sorts of activities, programs, and 

there is just a lot going on there that we need to understand better 

and link up to a more coherent strategy: police training, microcredit, nonarmed protective accompaniment, election monitoring, 

civic education, disarmament, Disarmament, Demobilization and 

Reintegration (DDR) activities, civil society forums and so on. 

And as I say, organizations like ECOWAS, for example, in West 

Africa have been quite active in mediating some of the election disputes coming up during the campaigns in places like GuineaBissau and so on. One doesn’t read about this in the newspaper because it is not particular exciting information, but it is very important and it has had its definite effects. 

Over these years since the middle nineties, a number of researchers have tried to collect some of the lessons from some of these situations. I will just mention a couple of them, and you will find that 

they are quite compatible, quite supplementary and corroborative 

of what has already been said by David and Fred. 

Among the most successful examples in the Baltic, South Africa, 

Slovakia, Albania and, for example, Kenya last year, where there 

was fast-track diplomatic effort by the U.S. and U.N., most of them 

have been multidimensional in nature; that is, they are a shortterm diplomatic effort that is brought to bear immediately on the 

behaviors, the most threatening activity by high-level leaders. But 

there is also effort at addressing reconciliation issues and so on at 

the lower level among the general population. So a combination of 

carrots and sticks, along with dialogue that is applied in a fairly 

concentrated and synchronized manner in both situations where 

there are threatening clouds on the horizon, and when that is 

best—— 

Mr. SMITH. Sorry, Doctor. Could I ask you a specific question 

about that? This is actually an area that this subcommittee, and 

myself in particular, are very interested in, the merger of sort of 

global development strategy with security strategy. And some of 

those conversations actually are starting a little bit, particularly 
13 

with Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and State Department, and it is an awkward relationship. They have different sorts 

of viewpoints on the world, and to a certain degree don’t trust each 

other. But it is beginning, and I think making that happen is absolutely critical to our security strategy; leveraging all of our national 

ability, you know, from State Department, Agriculture, whatever is 

necessary to do the development piece that you talked about, meshing that up with some of the stuff that DOD is doing. Particularly 

with SOCOM, because SOCOM does, what creeps up to being development in a lot of areas, and how they work together with the 

State Department I think is critical. 

The two questions I have about that, that I would like you to try 

to address in the remainder of your testimony, is how can we better coordinate development strategy in our country. I have a very 

strong bias that it is hopelessly screwed up at the moment, but 

there are a lot of good things going on in isolation, but they are 

in no way coordinated and do not come together in any sort of cohesive strategy. 

One little sub-piece of that is the degree to which that strategy 

is based on a general approach to reducing poverty, which would 

be a good place to start, but, on the other hand, meshing that with 

our security needs. That is where the development community 

tends to freak out a little bit. It is like you care more about poor 

people and devastating things happening in Pakistan because of security than you do in, say, somewhere in Latin America, because 

you don’t think you have a security interest. But we have to care 

about our security in terms of how you put out that money, how 

do you mesh that. 

And then beyond coordinating our global development strategy as 

a country, how do you see the meshing of security and global development happening? What would be the best way to develop an 

interagency process to make that happen so that we are working 

more in concert? 

A big challenge there, of course, is dividing up responsibilities, 

you know, and trusting each other in terms of their talents. But 

I am curious, your thoughts on those two things. 

This is me kind of cheating and working in one additional question to the question time that I will have when you are done, but 

if you could address that. 

Mr. MARSHALL. You are not giving up your questions, then? 

Mr. SMITH. No, I am actually not. 

Dr. LUND. Would you like us to address those questions? 

Mr. SMITH. If you can take a stab at it. I realize you could give 

an hour-long answer to that. It would probably be better if you 

could do two or three minutes. 

Dr. LUND. Maybe Lisa has some things to add. I think you are 

right; the conversation has started, quite actively. 

The particular mechanisms, formulas and so on haven’t been arrived at yet. Among the recommendations we were going to make 

were certainly to push that process much further, more vigorously. 

And we both had the experience, along with David a couple of 

weeks ago, to be involved—and Mr. Natter addressed this group— 

a week-long simulation that was designed and organized by the 

Center for Irregular Warfare of the Marine Corps that focused on 
14 

a Horn of Africa scenario. And they brought together over 200 representatives, playing different roles, from DOD, State, USAID, 

multilateral organizations like the U.N., World Bank, France, Italy, 

U.K., and so on, to sort of ask the question, how would you behave 

in responding to this particular situation. 

It was an incredibly illuminating and, I thought, enlightened activity in terms of what has happened in this field so far. I have 

been working on conflict prevention for over ten years, and I 

thought this was the most coherent and on-the-case event that I 

have been at. And a number of recommendations came out of that 

which address exactly your concerns. So I would really advise—— 

Mr. SMITH. I will take a look at that, those recommendations. 

Dr. LUND. I don’t know how much I can get into the details of 

exactly whether a central direction should be in the Office of the 

Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (SCRS) in State 

Department or the National Security Council. Maybe the other 

panelists have specific ideas of that. 

That event spent quite a bit of time working through obstacles 

and funding authorities and so on. I don’t think there is a magic, 

clear—there is a consensus that that needs to be figured out. That 

was one of our main points. I don’t think it would be that helpful 

for me to run through one approach or another. 

[The joint prepared statement of Dr. Lund and Dr. Schirch can 

be found in the Appendix on page 50.] 

Mr. SMITH. Dr. Schirch, do you have something quick you want 

to say? And then I think I will go to Mr. Miller and begin the questions, unless there was something else. 

STATEMENT OF DR. LISA SCHIRCH, DIRECTOR, 3D SECURITY 

INITIATIVE, PROFESSOR OF PEACEBUILDING, CENTER FOR 

JUSTICE AND PEACEBUILDING, EASTERN MENNONITE UNIVERSITY 

Dr. SCHIRCH. Thank you, Chairman Smith and committee members, for inviting us here today. 

The field that we are talking about is conflict prevention, and 

this conference that Joint Forces Command (JFCOM), and the Marine Corps put on together was called ‘‘Whole of Government Conflict Prevention.’’ And many of us in the NGO community are working actively now to try to figure out how to build a more comprehensive approach to the issues of terrorism. And for the NGOs, 

we have been working actively on the ground in Iraq, Afghanistan, 

and we have many partner networks who are indigenous Iraqi 

NGOs and Afghan NGOs who have been sharing their perspective 

on counterterrorism and how best to prevent the spread of the 

kinds of insurgencies we see in these regions. And they very much 

want to be able to feed into the process. 

And part of the challenge here is that the interagency coordination is so new here in Washington that there are really no points 

of contact for NGOs who are on the ground, who have cultural intelligence, information to share that would inform U.S. strategy. 

Over the weekend, Dr. Kilcullen made some statements that 

were in the media about the drones flying over Pakistan, bombing 

villages, actually having a counter-effect to our national interests 

in the U.S.; that the drones ended up creating more fuel on the 
15 

ground for recruitment into Taliban, al Qaeda insurgencies. We 

have been hearing that in civil society and NGOs for several years, 

that this kind of drone activity is counter to U.S. interests. 

So that is the kind of information civil societies want to give over 

and have conversations with the government. So it is actually very 

much in our interest as civil society to help to foster and think 

about what is the best way for the defense development, diplomacy 

tools of American power, how they are coordinated, because this 

impacts then how civil society can feed into the process. 

Again, we don’t take particular stands on whether it is the State 

Department’s Coordinator for Reconstruction Stabilization, although we very much support that, or the National Security Council (NSC). There are a variety of models that I think we need to 

have more hearings on how is this best going to be done in this 

country, because it is very urgent. 

The ratio of cost prevention versus response to terrorism is not 

met in terms of our U.S. budget in terms of national security. So 

several of us have argued for a unified security budget that would 

try to balance out more of these preventive responses because, 

right now, if you look at one tax dollar, less than half of a percent 

is going to all of our development activities abroad, whereas almost 

60 percent of that dollar goes to defense approaches. 

So this balance is off and makes coordination in this interagency 

process very difficult. For USAID at the simulation on conflict prevention, they couldn’t really risk a lot of the staff time because they 

have so few staff to even give over to this conversation. 

Mr. SMITH. It also pushes DOD into doing a lot more development work than they are actually qualified to do because they have 

the money. 

Dr. SCHIRCH. Right. And there were comments at this conference 

that DOD is being forced to create its own internal USAID, its own 

civilian response corps, which is mirroring structures that also 

exist in the State Department and USAID, which is a waste of taxpayer dollars. 

[The joint prepared statement of Dr. Schirch and Dr. Lund can 

be found in the Appendix on page 50.] 

Mr. SMITH. I will yield to Mr. Miller to begin the questioning. 

And the other piece of that is the NGO community just gets really freaked out about the DOD getting involved in that, a little bit 

of paranoia there. But part of it also is good reason that when you 

are trying to build the type of support within a community that you 

need, there is a perception of the U.S. military that is different 

than a perception of an NGO or USAID that in some ways makes 

that mission more difficult. 

Dr. LUND. Another concrete answer to your question of how to 

move toward more coherent coordination is starting with a really 

good on-the-ground conflict assessment or field-state assessment 

and getting people on the same page in terms of what is going on 

in the situation, at the country level but then also at the Washington level region. 

Mr. SMITH. Several of those have been done, Brookings and a few 

other folks. But with that, I really impinged upon the patience of 

my committee members here. So I will yield to Mr. Miller. We will 

stick to five minutes as we go around. Mr. Miller. 
16 

Mr. MILLER. You probably impinged on the patience of your colleague, Mr. Marshall, at the other end. 

Mr. SMITH. He is always impatient. I am used to that. 

Mr. MILLER. Dr. Kilcullen, would you care to expand on your 

comments regarding the drone activity? 

Dr. KILCULLEN. Sure. In fact, the media report on the weekend 

was a quote from my congressional testimony in front of the House 

Armed Services Committee, which I think some committee members may already be aware of. 

Since early 2006, we have conducted a number of drone strikes 

into Pakistani territory. In that time, we have killed 14 mid-level 

al Qaeda leadership and Taliban leadership targets in that area. In 

the same time frame, we have killed about 700 noncombatant Pakistani civilians. That is a hit rate of about two percent: 98 percent 

collateral damage, two percent accurate hits. 

The strikes themselves, based on what we hear from community 

organizations in the FATA, actually are not particularly unpopular. 

There are people in the FATA who think it is actually a good thing 

that the bad guys have been struck. Where they are particularly 

unpopular is in the Punjab and Sind, and we have seen a very substantial rise in militancy in those parts of Pakistan over the time 

frame since 2006. 

What I said to the committee last week, or the week before, was 

there is no doubt that the strikes are very, very tactically useful 

in disrupting al Qaeda and in hampering their operations. Right 

now, because of the situation in the rest of Pakistan, they also have 

a downside, which is they are contributing to political instability. 

What I suggested to the committee was that right now our biggest problem is not the networks in the FATA but the fact that 

Pakistan may collapse if this political instability continues. And so 

I suggested that we may want to return to a much more narrow 

targeting approach of focusing only on al Qaeda senior leadership, 

only on targets that are in areas where the Pakistanis don’t control 

the ground, and working with the Pakistanis rather than doing it 

unilaterally. 

So that is just to expand on the comments. But if you look in the 

testimony record from last week, there is a lot more there in that 

discussion. 

Mr. MILLER. I yield back my time and give a chance to other 

members. 

Mr. SMITH. Thank you. Mr. Marshall. 

Mr. MARSHALL. Dr. Lund, the idea of an ounce of prevention is 

worth of pound of cure, the statistic of the relationship of $1 of prevention might equal $59 of cure is very tempting. I wonder, Dr. 

Kilcullen, if you agree with those statistics. 

Dr. KILCULLEN. I certainly don’t know. I don’t have any data to 

prove or disprove the 59:1. But I think it is certainly true that in 

considering intervening in countries, we often underestimate how 

much time, money and blood is going to be involved. It is a consistent pattern. Overall, nations that get involved in counterinsurgency over the last 200 or 300 years have tended at the outset to 

underestimate the costs and the difficulty of the process. 

I think where we can, we should most certainly be working to 

prevent rather than to treat conflict environments. I don’t think 
17 

that is necessarily a sound basis for capability planning within the 

DOD, though. I think we need to be focusing on the military as the 

force of last resort and structuring it so that it can actually get— 

it is like the difference between fire prevention and firefighting. 

You have to structure the fire department to fight the fires. 

Mr. MARSHALL. The problem that we—well, this is not new news. 

This has been a consistent worry of ours since World War II, actually—— 

Dr. KILCULLEN. Yes, and before. 

Mr. MARSHALL [continuing]. When we put a lot more money into 

foreign aid than we do right now. And the reason we don’t put as 

much money into foreign aid is, politically it is very difficult to sustain that in a country that has lots of many other needs, and many 

of those needs are internal. So sometimes it is quite difficult to justify sending a dollar to someplace remote that could have been 

spent right here on your folks. And that is an easy target for politicians. 

We do routinely, however, spend huge dollars through DOD on 

preventive measures that may or may not be essential. For example, parking large numbers of soldiers in Europe and in Korea for 

extended periods of time, a cost of billions and billions of dollars. 

And I wonder to what extent, as you think about how we get 

more money into prevention, you think also about how whatever is 

set up can be politically sustainable. And if you look at history, you 

might wonder to what extent this does need to go through what is 

classified as national security somehow, as opposed to State Department; because if it just goes to State Department, it is going 

to get ultimately viewed as feel-good, generous money that American taxpayers are sending elsewhere, when that feel-good, generous American money could be spent meeting needs here at home. 

And so in the long run, it is very difficult to sustain. 

So that is just an observation I have been quite concerned about. 

We ought to take every opportunity we can to start putting more 

of this money through our security side as opposed to our State Department side, and if money goes to DOD and then somehow winds 

up in State, that is fine. 

How do you know when you need to spend a dollar for prevention? It seems to me that a dollar spent for prevention at the right 

place might be this 1:59 return because we avoided having to take 

corrective action, but a dollar spent for prevention, where, in 100 

different places around the globe? We don’t really know which of 

those places is ultimately—if we don’t spend that dollar, we are 

going to wind up being something where we are going to feel like 

we need to take corrective action. 

So the ratio winds up being, really, when you think of the challenge of identifying where corrective action should be, it can’t be 

1:59. It is going to have to be a heck of a lot more than that. 

Dr. SCHIRCH. Absolutely, these are important questions. Let me 

answer your first one in terms of the American public, because 

polls of Americans have consistently shown that they support foreign aid, and they assume that we are giving much larger quantities than we are. They assume that 25 percent of their tax dollar 

is going to foreign aid. They have no idea that it is less than one 

percent. 
18 

Mr. MARSHALL. It could well be that they assume that because 

they are outraged at the very thought. 

Dr. SCHIRCH. Absolutely. When they are asked what percentage 

of their tax dollars should go to foreign aid, it is 10 percent, which 

is far above what we are even talking about in terms of prevention. 

Mr. MARSHALL. So it is less than 25 percent, so they are basically 

communicating that they want less spent on foreigners. 

Mr. SMITH. I have been down this road a thousand times, and 

that is not the best argument that I have heard. I respect it being 

made, but the bottom line is, Mr. Marshall is right. The public has 

no idea what goes into the budget. All they know is they think too 

much is going in, and so they want it cut. That is not as helpful 

as it first appears, and I am pro-foreign aid. I say it as a friendly 

comment. 

Mr. MARSHALL. And me, too. It is just trying to figure how to do 

it in a sustainable way. But history shows it is unrealistic in a 

democratic political system to sustain it on just sort of feel-good 

stuff. 

Dr. SCHIRCH. Although there is an assumption that we have of 

first resort, so that defense is our last resort. And I think if Americans understood how weak our first resort is in terms of State Department and USAID, and looking at the proportions of the budget—and I often speak to American audiences where I show them 

pie charts of where things are going, and they are stunned at that 

ratio. 

The other thing is in terms of choosing where we spend those 

preventive dollars, there is an extensive network, global network of 

early warning systems to identify, narrow down, prioritize those 

areas, so there is a recognition that we have to make choices. 

Mr. SMITH. We will have to come back to this, if we could. I want 

to get to Mr. Kline. 

Mr. KLINE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am reluctant to jump 

into this particular piece of it, but our perception is that the perception of the people in our districts think we are spending way too 

much on foreign aid, and it is an easy target for them. So it is 

tough politically. 

I am impressed by the number of NGOs that are around the 

world and the terrific work that they are doing. I remember being 

in Mogadishu back in the 1992–93 time frame. We were there for 

Operation Restore Hope and I was standing on the ramp out in 

front of my helicopter, getting ready to go do something. And this 

man walked up, and he was an NGO and he looked at my name 

tag and it said ‘‘Kline’’ on it. And he said, ‘‘Kline,’’ he said, ‘‘are you 

any relation to Vicky Kline?’’—who is my wife. They had served together. She was an Army nurse and they had served together some 

years ago. And so it is a small world thing, and they are everywhere, and there was no doubt that they have a good sense for 

what is going on. 

I am interested in knowing how better to tap into that, but it 

seems to me the one thing we have here is a very serious indictment of the country teams. We have ambassadors, we have embassies, we have people, we have State Department and all manner of 

representation in these country teams who, in theory, should be 

able to tell us what is going on in that country, that should be able 
19 

to tell us if this is a country that maybe we need to intercede earlier. But somehow that is not connecting, and I am not sure exactly 

why that is. We have intelligence—— 

Mr. SMITH. Let me interrupt, just quickly. I think what the country team needs to tell you, they are telling you. And they know 

they only have the resources to deal with about five or so—— 

Mr. KLINE. Reclaiming my time, Mr. Chairman. If they are, then 

they are ineffective in the telling, because we are obviously not 

interceding, perhaps, where we should. So the system, I guess, is 

what I would say, Mr. Chairman, isn’t working as it should. 

Mr. SMITH. Absolutely. 

Mr. KLINE. I want to go very quickly, and anybody can feel free 

to comment on any of this stuff. But I want to in my couple of minutes left, I was very interested, of course, in Dr. Kilcullen’s points. 

And I wrote down, I think, the numbers three, four, six and seven 

on your list that have to do with personnel, continuity, populationcentric, local security and so forth. 

And in going to the specifics that Dr. Kagan talked about in Afghanistan, we are in the process right now in putting in some 

21,000 more U.S. Forces, and there are a number of issues here 

which aren’t matching up with your list. For one thing, there are 

Marines going in, and the Marines on the ground are going to be 

there for seven months. Leadership will be there for a year, so we 

have got a little continuity problem going there. And the Commandant has told us he has big concerns about the other three that 

I went through there. 

There are not Afghan partners. The Afghan National Army isn’t 

there in big numbers. The Afghan police isn’t there in big numbers. 

There isn’t a local security force. And so I am wondering what your 

thoughts are about what can we do. I mean, we are in the process 

of this now. I think everybody from the Commandant of the Marine 

Corps and General Petraeus and McKiernan and everybody across 

the road would like to see more interagency, and they would certainly like to see faster development of the Afghans. So, a comment 

from anybody. 

Dr. KILCULLEN. Well, I might make a brief comment but then 

defer to Dr. Kagan who knows a lot about this topic. 

I think to a certain extent what we are doing in Afghanistan is 

filling in the gaps in the current North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) plan. So if you look at where the NATO allies were 

located before the Afghan surge, we are putting U.S. troops into 

areas where there were not a lot of European troops to kind of fill 

the gap. 

I would argue that we ought, instead, to be identifying where the 

population lives primarily and focusing on securing the population 

as distinct from territory. That would be my first point. 

And the second point would be we need to be taking a partnering 

role where a U.S. unit always operates with an Afghan military 

unit and an Afghan police unit. 

Mr. KLINE. Excuse me, but that is the complaint right now from 

the Marines, is there isn’t that partner unit available. 

Dr. KILCULLEN. Yeah, that is right. And so those would be my 

two sort of points of concern about where I am seeing things develop in Afghanistan. 
20 

If I could just jump back very quickly to a previous point that 

you made, sir. There is a thing called the Regional Security Initiative that was created by the Counterterrorism Bureau in State precisely to address this question of reporting from posts and understanding the security environment. And there is a report, Country 

Report on Terrorism to Congress, that comes every year, which actually addresses all of those questions as well. You may be interested in holding a hearing on that issue because there has been 

some very substantial development inside State in the last few 

years on that. 

One other final point is two big changes happened to the foreign 

assistance world under President Bush. Firstly, a very substantial 

expansion of the foreign assistance budget. In 2000 it was $11 billion; by 2008 it was $20 billion. So a lot more was being done in 

terms of foreign assistance. 

But the other big shift was that as of the end of the Bush Administration, more than half of that foreign assistance was being delivered in conflict or post-conflict environments, and yet we have an 

aid organization that is primarily structured to do aid as a poverty 

alleviation tool and not necessarily well-organized or conceptually 

well-focused on operating in a conflict or post-conflict environment. 

I think we could do a lot to assist the USAID without necessarily 

spending a lot more money, with simply helping them get their 

heads around the new environment they are operating in. 

Mr. SMITH. Dr. Kagan, go ahead. 

Dr. KAGAN. Thank you. I think the last point is really critical, 

and I want to emphasize it. Mr. Chairman, I was itching to make 

a comment on your question along those same lines. 

The problem is exactly as Dave said. We have, you know, 

USAID, why is USAID in State? It is in State because of the Foreign Assistance Act. Why did we have the Foreign Assistance Act? 

Because we saw foreign assistance as being an aspect of our public 

diplomacy, and because we felt as a Nation that is very generous 

in their international giving, we felt that it was both in our interests and ethical for us to alleviate poverty. 

If you ask the question, why is this system broken now, the answer is the system isn’t broken from the standpoint of what it was 

designed to do. The system was designed to be an adjunct of our 

public diplomacy. It was never designed to be a major element of 

our national security policy. And what we have come to realize over 

the course of the last eight years—which, granted, we should have 

known before—is that this kind of assistance is a critical part of 

our national security policy, and it ranges from everything from 

phase zero engagement to try to avoid conflict—and by the way, 

that includes military components as well. As you know, when military talks about phase zero, it doesn’t mean fighting, but it does 

mean things that military forces can and should be doing. And it 

continues through conflict and post-conflict. But when you start 

beating up the State Department about why the country teams 

aren’t doing this sort of thing and why the State Department isn’t 

able to do this, this is not the State Department’s job. The State 

Department is American—— 

Mr. KLINE. Country team is much more than just State. 
21 

Dr. KAGAN. Absolutely. And I was referring only to your comment. There is a tendency to beat up State about this a lot and say 

we really need to pound State into doing this right. I question that. 

The State Department is a diplomatic service, and we need to 

have a diplomatic service, and the purpose of a diplomatic service 

is to pass paper. That is what diplomats do—and have negotiations. Not only that, but primarily you don’t have a diplomatic 

corps to conduct major operational planning and oversee the expenditure of huge amounts of money over large areas. That is not 

what a diplomatic corps does. 

So if you are going to look for an aid organization that can be 

a player in national security policy, I am not at all convinced that 

that should be State, and I think we really need to revisit it. It is 

a very fundamental question you raised, sir, and I think it really 

merits a lot more discussion than it has had. 

If I could beg your indulgence to comment briefly on the specifics 

in Afghanistan. I was last in Afghanistan in March of this year, 

and I had the opportunity to meet with the commander of the 

205th Afghan Corps, who is based in Kandahar and has to fight 

in the south where the Marines are going to be going. And he 

raised a very interesting question. He said, ‘‘Are you Americans 

trying to create an expendable Afghan Army or an enduring Afghan Army?’’ 

And what he meant by that was that we have been creating Afghan security forces, and the Afghans have been assigning them 

into combat without, as Dave says, rotational periods, which also 

means without rest periods, which also means without relief. There 

is no red, amber, green training cycle in that corps. If you are assigned to the 205th Corps, you are fighting all the time until you 

either retire or die, and that corps has been having some retention 

problems, and there are a variety of other things going on. 

Although I supported the President’s statement of his policy— 

and I do support it and I strongly support it and I think it is the 

right policy—I was very disappointed by one thing in his speech. 

He did not commit to increasing the size of the Afghan National 

Security Forces. And this is a big, big problem, because if you look 

at the 20 counterinsurgents on the 1,000 ratio that you need and 

you look at the population of Afghanistan, which by the way is an 

absolute swag, no one knows how many Afghans there actually are. 

We haven’t had a census in 30 years. And this is a major problem, 

as Dave was alluding to. 

But let us say there are about 30 million Afghans. You do the 

estimate and you would need about 600,000-some-odd counterinsurgents. Okay, let us cut it down and say that we are not fighting in parts of the country, although I don’t find that persuasive, 

but okay. What are we aiming at? 

With the current augmentation of U.S. Forces, with the current 

planned end state for Afghan national security forces, by the end 

of 2011 we will have 316,000 forces total on the ground. Now, there 

are two problems with that. First is it doesn’t get you the counterinsurgency ratio; and second is, since that is right now the permanent end state of the Afghan National Army, it doesn’t give us an 

exit strategy. Because if we pull out even 100,000 foreign troops 

out of there, then you have got 216,000. 
22 

So this is a problem, and it is really unfortunate that we have 

not focused enough on the expansion of the Afghan National Army, 

and I privilege that instead of the Afghan National Police for a reason. I think that we really need to consider the phasing of the development of security forces more than we have done hitherto. We 

want to get to an end state where you have police doing policing 

and not Army, but in the context of a war-torn society, with an ongoing counterinsurgency, right now that is not what we are focused 

on in the counterinsurgency area. 

The Marines are not interested in local beat cops on crime. The 

Marines are interested in how many counterinsurgents are on the 

ground. If you are trying to raise a police force to beat counterinsurgents, then you are not raising them to be a police force; and 

if you can’t raise them to be a police force because the situation 

doesn’t permit it, then you should be raising more counterinsurgents, and that means Army. 

So what we should be doing in Afghanistan, among other 

things—and I agree entirely with Dave also that we are seeing gapfilling with these soldiers and we have not seen a fundamental review or revision of American strategy in Afghanistan or international strategy in Afghanistan parallel to the review that accompanied the surge in Iraq in 2007. We have not yet seen that on the 

ground in theater, and I think we urgently need to. 

Mr. SMITH. We could explore—but I am begging Mr. Thornberry’s 

indulgence, and I want to give him a chance to ask his questions. 

We will follow up on that. We will try to come back to this, but 

Mr. Thornberry. 

Mr. THORNBERRY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I appreciate 

very much the work of each of you. 

Dr. Kilcullen, one of the things this subcommittee has focused on 

a fair amount the past couple of years has been what we call strategic communications. I notice in your book you use a slightly different term, but as I recall, you put some importance on the government communicating in a clear, unified way as part of dealing 

with this accidental guerrilla, noting that what we do talks louder 

than what we say, admittedly. But I would be interested in your 

thoughts on where we are with that as a government and where 

we should go. 

And I am reminded—I am little hazy about this, but I think the 

radio woke me up this morning talking about allegations that we 

killed a bunch of civilians in Afghanistan this morning. And the 

military was saying, well, it wasn’t really us; it was Taliban who 

may have played a role. And we have looked into a number of instances in the past where bad guys get in a firefight with our folks, 

and then before we can get back to the base, they have made it 

look like the bad guys were in prayer and were shot in the back 

of the head. I mean, they are really sophisticated in this area, and 

it looks to me like we are playing catch-up. So I would be interested in your views. 

Dr. KILCULLEN. Thank you, sir. I would just make two quick 

comments. One is that we place a different priority within the military on information operations to the priority that our enemy 

places. 
23 

The Taliban, as I have observed them in the field since 2006, put 

informational propaganda first. So the first thing they do is they 

decide what is the propaganda mission that we are trying to send. 

Then they figure out what operations to design and carry out to 

meet that propaganda objective. We do it the other way around. We 

design how we operate, and at the last minute we throw it to the 

information ops folks and say, hey, can you just explain this to the 

public. So we use our information operations to explain what we 

are already doing. The enemy uses their physical operations to 

send a message, and I think that is the fundamental mental shift 

that we need to make. 

We have tended to treat information ops as a black art and as 

akin to artillery planning and of fixed targeting. So we have people 

looking at it as a targeting problem. It is actually not that. It is 

a political maneuver problem. And in the book, I get into a lot of 

detail about the political maneuver that we did that succeeded in 

eastern Afghanistan. The same would be true in Iraq. We carefully 

maneuvered to send a message in 2007. 

So I think some people, notably General Petraeus and people associated with the surge in 2007, do get this; but it is not necessarily structurally built into the U.S. Government. Some people 

have talked about recreating the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), 

which as you know was disestablished in 1998, became the odd bureau within State. I think it certainly couldn’t hurt. But the information environment has changed a lot since USIA was designed. 

It is a much more itemized and fragmented media marketplace out 

there. So I think civil society is actually a very key part of this 

message that we are trying to send, and I would emphasize that 

element. 

And one final legislative issue. We had a lot of trouble in Iraq 

trying to counter al Qaeda in Iraq—propaganda—because of the 

Smith-Mundt Act, which meant that we couldn’t do a lot of things 

online because if you put something on YouTube, and it is deemed 

to be information operations and there is a possibility that an 

American might load onto that page and read that and be influenced by that, that is technically illegal under the Smith-Mundt 

Act. And so we had to get a waiver, as you may recall, to be able 

to do that. 

I think for Congress it might be worth looking at how that legislation may need to be relooked at or reexamined in a lot of the new 

media environment, so that it still has the same intent but doesn’t 

necessarily restrict us from legitimate things we might want to do 

in the field. 

Mr. THORNBERRY. Good point. 

Dr. Kagan, could I just ask you, briefly, as my time runs out, I 

understand what you are saying about we need to look at each 

place individually. But don’t we need to push increased capabilities, 

for example, taking this, that could be available to be tailored to 

each particular location? 

Dr. KAGAN. Yes, absolutely. And the thrust of my written testimony is anything we do anywhere, we draw from a pool of general 

purposes forces, both military and nonmilitary, that has to be adequately sized. And all I am trying to say on the specifics is the only 
24 

way to size it is to basically look at each of the specifics and sum 

them up, which is not what we do. 

It is a question of we have always had this discussion about 

threat-based planning versus capabilities-based planning and so 

forth. Capabilities-based planning is just a way of deciding that you 

are not going to look at what the actual real-world requirement is, 

because it is budgetarily unpleasant. I don’t think that is a good 

way to go in a world where we have active enemies who are actually shooting at us, trying to kill us every day. 

And I think what we should be doing is looking at what the realworld requirement actually is by going place by place, and the military can do this and does this to some extent, although not, frankly, it doesn’t sum this up in the way it should, again because it is 

budgetarily unpleasant. 

I don’t know the civilian side of things well enough, but I strongly doubt that this is done in that coherent fashion on the civilian 

side. So I don’t think Congress is being presented with the information that it needs to understand what the real-world requirement 

is. You are not going to fund the real-world requirement at 100 

percent, of course, because that would be tantamount to insuring 

everything, so you can never take a loss on anything, and it is unreasonable. You have to accept risk. 

But until you have gone specific-by-specific and summed that all 

up and looked at what the real-world requirement is, you don’t 

even know what risk you are accepting. And in the context of the 

current defense budget, where it has been made clear that we will 

be accepting risk, but where there has been virtually no public discussion anyway of how much risk we are actually accepting and 

where we are accepting it, I think this is a matter that Congress 

should interest itself in. 

Mr. SMITH. Thank you. A couple of observations and a couple of 

questions. 

Smith-Mundt is something we have looked at and it absolutely 

needs to be fixed because of the way the Internet works, frankly. 

And the way other things work, you put any message out anywhere, it is going to get to an American, and Smith-Mundt did not 

contemplate that. 

The problem we are going to have and as you are lobbying and 

talking about this issue, it is something we want to try to fix. The 

problem we are going to have is sort of the paranoia of the American public right now that the government is trying to manipulate 

them. It certainly didn’t help when we had the incidents of the reporters being paid. 

So if we open up the Smith-Mundt window—and I would love to 

be able to open it up, make that little tweak that you talked about, 

because I think it definitely needs to be done, maybe just expand 

the waiver ability, something—you are going to have a whole lot 

of folks on the other side who are going to come in and say, gosh, 

no, anything we need to do with Smith-Mundt, we need to 

strengthen it. We need to make sure the government is doing none 

of this. And I just worry that if we walk down that path we will 

wind up with more of a problem than we can handle. 

On the country team thing and on whether or not it is the State 

Department job to sort of organize this, Mr. Kline was pointing out, 
25 

let us know what is going on in country, what the threat environment is. I think you are absolutely right, Mr. Kagan. State Department is supposed to be about diplomacy. I think they do more than 

push paper, but it is diplomacy that they are focused on. 

Dr. KAGAN. I mean that with the greatest of respect. 

Mr. SMITH. It is important paper that is being pushed. I think 

the problem we have discovered as we have gone around, just did 

a trip to Africa and sort of ran through a bunch of different countries with a bunch of different problems, Yemen, Kenya, Morocco, 

Egypt. The problem is the Ambassador, the Charge D’Affaires, 

whoever, the Chief of Mission is the person who is in charge of the 

country. And yes, there are a lot of other people there who do a 

lot of other things, but they all respond to him. We are having a 

little bit of a problem with that actually in SOCOM and Military 

Liaison Elements (MLEs), DOD chain of command versus State Department chain of command. 

But I think Mr. Kline is essentially right; that if we are going 

to do this sort of holistic approach to a threat environment and 

take a walk through the messed-up world that we have and say, 

you know, where do we start at that zero point and how do we do 

that, the country team head has got to be the person who is, you 

know, this is where we are at, okay, and this is kind of what we 

would like to be done, and he is orchestrating it. Then you sort of 

move up from the country-by-country level, maybe a regional organization, however you do it. I think that needs to be done. 

And I want to let Dr. Schirch comment on this, but ask an additional question, because the other thing that struck me as we look 

at this, the Brookings Institute did a study on failed states. Someone else did one about the same time. It is great. It is also like 

walking into your room where you haven’t picked anything up in 

15 years and going, where the hell do we start. There are so many 

countries with so many problems, rule of law, security, you know, 

if you put aside whether or not al Qaeda is in there trying to recruit, you know, just the basic governance issues. So how would we 

organize it both structurally, getting back to the State Department 

versus, you know, Chief of Mission issue, and then how would you 

prioritize when you are looking across one remarkably messed-up 

globe. 

Dr. SCHIRCH. Absolutely. The challenge of addressing failed 

states, which many authors have been dealing with lately, has not 

taken into account something that Dr. Kilcullen noted; that the capacity for doing this is largely local in these countries, and it is 

strengthening and partnering from the U.S. to civil society, often, 

to build the capacity of their own state. 

Mr. SMITH. Millennium Challenge Corporation, by the way, is 

outstanding, another change of the Bush Administration, that feeds 

into that local approach. 

Dr. SCHIRCH. If I could just give an example, particularly on the 

strategic communication point as well that ties in with this one. I 

was in Iraq in 2005 working with Iraqi NGOs, and I took a lot of 

taxis. I talked with a lot of people. Overwhelmingly at that point, 

Iraqis felt that the U.S. was in Iraq for oil and to build permanent 

military bases. So, in terms of communicating what the U.S. interest was, there was a vast disconnect with what State Department 
26 

people were saying here and what Iraqis on the ground felt. There 

was a large gap. And largely that was Iraqis in civil society looking 

at what was being done in their country and saying, a lot of civilians are dying, it doesn’t feel like it is about this population-centered security. 

At that point, I was working with Iraqi NGOs to integrate reconciliation activities into their development. So when they are giving microcredit loans, they had a precondition for a Sunni-Shia 

business plan. They were doing very small-scale reconciliation, 

building security from the ground up and being very effective at it, 

going from village to village. And they were a mixed NGO group 

of Arab, Kurdish, Sunni, Shia people, all working together, going 

into different communities, unarmed, spoke the local language, operated on security based on their relationships with people, and 

they were doing fantastic work all over Iraq. 

United States Institute of Peace, just in the last couple of years, 

has started to empower and build the capacity of local Iraqi NGOs 

and civil society to run the reconciliation workshops that are now 

happening across the country in Iraq. 

Mr. SMITH. I am going to have to ask you to wrap up because 

I want to give my colleagues another chance. We have a 15-minute 

vote. We have another 10 minutes before we have to leave, but just 

give me another quick 10, 15 seconds. 

Dr. SCHIRCH. Just in terms of the country teams, I think looking 

at the United States Institute of Peace and the NGO community 

as the resources for some of these challenges. 

Mr. SMITH. Okay. Jim, did you have anything more? I think everybody else is leaving. 

Mr. MARSHALL. Yeah, I do actually. 

Dr. Kagan, I thought maybe I was seeing a reprise or sequel to 

‘‘No Good Way’’ as you were describing what needs to happen with 

the Afghan Army. And frankly, it is hard for me to see how we are 

going to have an effective enduring Afghan institutional army without having an Afghan government that is in much better shape 

than the current Afghan Government is. And I don’t see how the 

Afghan Government is going to get into a much better position 

right now. Just the corruption and other challenges that they have 

got are enormous. 

But I am fascinated and would really like to explore your 

thoughts about this sort of divide between the appropriate responsibility given State historically, more than just pushing paper, and 

what we now recognize should be done, you know, in part because 

of repeated comments from folks like Dr. Lund and Dr. Schirch. I 

mean we all know this, that an ounce of prevention can really 

avoid a pound of cure; and that pound of cure comes with huge 

costs in terms of lives and limbs for Americans and others. 

And I don’t necessarily agree with the Chairman’s sort of summary, that it has to all be controlled or that the driving force, the 

guiding light, has to be the country team, unless country teams 

wind up getting redefined—which seems to me. 

And I would really like you to talk a little bit more about if you 

already had some thoughts concerning how we might reorganize. 

You have heard me say—I have said this many times—I am absolutely convinced we won’t fund it as long as it stays in State and 
27 

it is described as the historic diplomacy mission. We are just not 

going to do that. It is unrealistic to think we will. Political history 

is completely against the notion that we will. So what is your alternative to get the appropriate funding to have the ounce of prevention? 

Dr. KAGAN. Let me start by clarifying the remark that I know 

is going to come out of this meeting. Full disclosure: My sister-inlaw is a former ambassador, and I am very familiar with what ambassadors do, and I did not—I actually wasn’t trying to denigrate 

the State Department at all, but simply to say there are things 

that they are designed to do and things they are not designed to 

do. 

And the issue isn’t so much with the ambassador actually, and 

I want to make this point and I will give you the full disclosure. 

Ambassadors can—especially professional Foreign Service Officer 

ambassadors can be, and many of them are capable of thinking 

about these things and trying to do the right thing. What they 

rarely have is the right kind of staff to do the planning, you know, 

intelligence gathering, intelligence assessment, planning and so 

forth—— 

Mr. SMITH. Beyond their capability—sorry to interrupt here. I 

take Mr. Marshall’s point. Beyond their capability, their responsibility within our flowchart, if we want to change that flowchart we 

can change it; but if the whole thing is by, through and with, okay, 

you work with the local population, whether it is on development 

or counterinsurgency. The ambassador is our representative in that 

country. If anything goes on in that country done by the United 

States of America that he doesn’t know about, he or she is rightfully pissed off and completely undermined in their ability to do 

their job, the job that we have assigned that person to do. That is 

my only point. But go ahead. 

Dr. KAGAN. So I think one of the questions is how are the missions staffed, and missions need to be staffed differently in different places. One of the things that sent shivers up my spine more 

than anything else are the discussions that you hear in the corridors of the new embassy complex in Baghdad about the need for 

the embassy to return to normalcy, by which is meant a normal 

diplomatic representation with some sort of foreign assistance. 

That is insane. It is not a normal situation, and the Ambassador 

in Iraq is going to continue to have to do things beyond the norm. 

But there is an institutional bias within State that drives against 

creating the structures that are necessary to do this. 

How do we fix it? Look, in the short term, the reason this is 

going into the military is because the military is the only organization that is capable of doing this, for two reasons. One, and the 

most important, is because the military does have the capability to 

put together planning staffs to develop intelligence analysis, plan, 

conduct and execute operations on this scale, and we don’t have 

country teams on the whole that can do that, with a handful of exceptions, and that is probably going to persist for some time. So, 

in the short term, I doubt that there is an alternative to putting 

this kind of resource through the military in areas where we have 

troops present, in countries where we have a very active military 

assistance program and so forth. 
28 

In the long term, I can’t tell you what the structure should be. 

I can tell you what it shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t be what we have, 

nor is there going to be a simple fix like making USAID a Cabinet 

post or something, or pulling it out of the flowchart. Because what 

we have to do—look, we do want USAID to be a part of our public 

diplomacy. We do give foreign assistance for that reason. We do 

want to alleviate poverty. We do give assistance. We don’t want to 

stop doing that. But we also can’t have USAID as a national security tool beholden to those principles, as it is right now. 

So I suspect that the long-term fix for this is going to require two 

separate organizational structures, either within one USAID organization—although I am skeptical of that—or in two separate organizations. And I would say I don’t see that it matters whether this 

is housed at DOD or State or somewhere else. And I think that we 

need to get over the allergy to making this a DOD function. There 

are lots of things that are DOD functions that could be done elsewhere. 

I agree with you that if you want to be funded—but I would say 

even more importantly, if you want this to be integrated well into 

our national security strategy and executed well as part of that, integrating it into DOD is probably the best long-term solution. But 

this is something that I think really merits very, very serious study 

and much more serious study than it has received. I am sorry I 

can’t offer you more specific than that. 

Mr. SMITH. I think the bottom line is it is an interagency approach. It has to be an interagency approach. No one agency is 

going to be in charge. The key is, how do they cross over. 

Dr. LUND. There are definitely exceptions to how the country 

teams relate to these issues. It has been enough years so I can sort 

of say this. 

In Zimbabwe, USAID was keeping its own sort of early warning 

grid for some years and not letting the ambassador know they were 

doing it because they felt that maybe, you know, he would want to 

take it over, he wouldn’t do it right and so on, but this is seven, 

eight years ago, before the crisis really grew, and adjusting their 

programs as much as they could to these drivers of conflict. 

In Mindanao, we have got the ambassador and U.S. administrator, just like this in the southern Philippines. A lot of programs 

pushed into Mindanao over the last seven, eight years, quite integrated, quite strategically targeted and so on. They need a little 

tweaking here and there, but linked up with the military aid to the 

Philippine marines, and in local areas, working in Basilan, for example, working in tandem with each other more or less. 

So it really is where the leadership can be carried out. So I think 

maybe the security rubric is really important overall, but the fact 

that you can save money, I mean, doesn’t that have some marketability these days? 

Mr. MARSHALL. We have always known that. I am sorry. I mean, 

this is not new news. We have known this for generations, and we 

still have a problem politically sustaining it. So from a strategic 

perspective, that is all I am offering here, is sort of oversight; 

somebody needs to think through how this is sustainable, because 

this problem is not going away for the foreseeable future as weapons become more sophisticated and available retail. 
29 

Mr. SMITH. Dr. Kilcullen. 

Dr. KILCULLEN. I just wanted to answer your question. 

One of the things that we did towards the end of the Bush Administration—which was actually signed off on by the Secretaries 

of State, Defense, and the Administrator of USAID just before the 

inauguration, and I believe has received support from the Obama 

Administration as well—was we produced an interagency counterinsurgency handbook designed for policymakers at the higher level 

in the legislative and executive branch. 

And in that we talked about something called a mission augmentation team, which is a small team that goes into an embassy 

that has one of these situations of a developing insurgency or conflict prevention, and it is specifically tailored to support that country team in exercising the responsibilities that you are talking 

about. So we have approved a structure to actually do that. I don’t 

know if the current State Department leadership plans to go ahead 

and develop that fully, but it is there, it is approved, and it is 

something that we may want to look at to build this capacity that 

you are talking about. 

In writing that handbook, we went into a lot of detail on prevention, and we also now have interagency agreement on some of the 

prevention issues that are required. So a lot of the intellectual 

foundation is there. 

The problem I would go back to is, State is the size of an Army 

brigade, you know, it is 6- to 8,000 people, and it is just not big 

enough to do a lot of this stuff. It needs to be bigger and better 

resourced. And I know Fred was being a little flippant, but you 

know, the reason that we managed to get the CIA into Afghanistan 

27 days after 9/11 was the State Department, basing, overflight, 

fuel supply, diplomatic clearance, preventing the Russians and the 

Iranians from interfering. That was all State Department. State 

Department work, diplomacy is like air support. You don’t walk 

down the street in Baghdad and look to your left and see an airman providing air superiority and to the right and see a diplomat. 

But you can’t operate without those two guys. 

Mr. SMITH. We have got to run, could talk about this for a great 

deal of time. You have all been very, very helpful. I think this is 

critical. I didn’t even get into the questions about the budget, how 

we go forward on this and how we plan for implementing the strategy, but obviously, this has come out from our conversation here, 

and it is not just the DOD budget, it is the whole budget. And I 

like the idea of a sort of holistic security approach across agency 

lines in terms of how we put together the budget, and I think there 

are some good ideas there. And of course there are tough choices 

involved, and everyone is always very good in government at telling you where we should spend the money. It is getting the people 

to say this is where we shouldn’t spend it that is always, always 

the challenge. 

But thank you, and certainly this committee wants to stay in 

touch with all of you. I think you have very important knowledge 

and insights on this critical subject. So thank you for your testimony, and we are adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 11:35 a.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.] 

A P P E N D I X 

MAY 7, 2009 

PREPARED STATEMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD 

MAY 7, 2009 

(35) 
36 
37 
38 
39 
40 
41 
42 
43 
44 
45 
46 
47 
48 
49 
50 
51 
52 
53 
54 
55 
56 
57 
58 
59 
60 
61 
62 

Æ