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42–901 2008

[H.A.S.C. No. 110–109]

INTERAGENCY REFORM: CAN THE PROVINCIAL RECONSTRUCTION TEAM (PRT)

CASE STUDY ILLUMINATE THE FUTURE

OF RECONSTRUCTION AND STABILIZATION OPERATIONS

HEARING

BEFORE THE

OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS

SECOND SESSION

HEARING HELD

JANUARY 29, 2008

(II)

OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE

VIC SNYDER, Arkansas, Chairman

JOHN SPRATT, South Carolina

LORETTA SANCHEZ, California

ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California

ROBERT ANDREWS, New Jersey

SUSAN A. DAVIS, California

JIM COOPER, Tennessee

HANK JOHNSON, Georgia

JOE SESTAK, Pennsylvania

W. TODD AKIN, Missouri

ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland

WALTER B. JONES, North Carolina

JEFF MILLER, Florida

PHIL GINGREY, Georgia

K. MICHAEL CONAWAY, Texas

GEOFF DAVIS, Kentucky

ANDREW HYDE, Professional Staff Member

THOMAS HAWLEY, Professional Staff Member

ROGER ZAKHEIM, Professional Staff Member

SASHA ROGERS, Research Assistant

(III)

C O N T E N T S

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS

2008

Page

HEARING:

Tuesday, January 29, 2008, Interagency Reform: Can the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) Case Study Illuminate the Future of Reconstruction

and Stabilization Operations .............................................................................. 1

APPENDIX:

Tuesday, January 29, 2008 ..................................................................................... 43

TUESDAY, JANUARY 29, 2008

INTERAGENCY REFORM: CAN THE PROVINCIAL RECONSTRUCTION

TEAM (PRT) CASE STUDY ILLUMINATE THE FUTURE OF RECONSTRUCTION AND STABILIZATION OPERATIONS

STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS

Akin, Hon. W. Todd, a Representative from Missouri, Ranking Member, Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee ............................................................. 2

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

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

WITNESSES

Bensahel, Dr. Nora, Senior Political Scientist, RAND Corporation .................... 18

Bodine, Ambassador Barbara K. (Ret.), Diplomat-in-Residence, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University ........................................................................ 8

Flournoy, Miche`le A., President, Center for a New American Security .............. 14

Pascual, Ambassador Carlos, Vice President and Director, Foreign Policy,

The Brookings Institution ................................................................................... 4

APPENDIX

PREPARED STATEMENTS:

Akin, Hon. W. Todd .......................................................................................... 49

Bensahel, Dr. Nora ........................................................................................... 88

Bodine, Ambassador Barbara K. ..................................................................... 51

Flournoy, Miche`le A. ........................................................................................ 74

Pascual, Ambassador Carlos ............................................................................ 62

Snyder, Hon. Vic ............................................................................................... 47

DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:

[There were no Documents submitted.]

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:

Mr. Conaway ..................................................................................................... 101

(1)

INTERAGENCY REFORM: CAN THE PROVINCIAL RECONSTRUCTION TEAM (PRT) CASE STUDY ILLUMINATE

THE FUTURE OF RECONSTRUCTION AND STABILIZATION OPERATIONS

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE, Washington, DC, Tuesday, January 29, 2008.

The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:06 a.m., in room

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

of the subcommittee) presiding.

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

Dr. SNYDER. Good morning. We are going to go ahead and get

started.

Mr. Akin, we are told, is on the way, but he said it is okay for

us to go ahead. Mr. Bartlett is here this morning.

We appreciate you all being with us this morning.

This is the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations hearing on the implications for interagency reform, derived from the

specific example of the establishment and operation of Provincial

Reconstruction Teams (PRTs).

We are part of the Armed Services Committee, and yet we have

spent the bulk of our time the last six months looking at really the

interaction between the civilian side of our government with the

military side and what it means for our national security.

And I would ask unanimous consent that my written statement

be made a part of the record; the same with Mr. Akin, if he has

a written statement, I am sure he does, be made part of the record;

as all your opening written statements will be made part of the

record.

I just want to make several comments. This effort to look at the

PRTs, we think, has been very worthwhile. Perhaps it is the first

formal way that this Congress has really looked at this issue of

interagency reform, other than the buzz that has been going on in

town here for some time.

Good morning, Mr. Akin.

It was brought home probably most forcefully to me with one of

my constituents who is currently in Iraq and works on the civilian

side. And in an e-mail that she sent several months ago, which I

have shared with this subcommittee before, she stated that in her

experience that it sometimes seems to her like the conflicts between her agency and other U.S. Government civilian agencies is

2

more severe than between her agency and the Iraqis. And that is

what you all, in a perhaps more academic and concrete way, are

talking about here this morning.

I was also struck—I forget which one it was, maybe it was you,

Ms. Flournoy, that was talking about in your first page of your

statement that while we have had some spectacular military and

national security successes, we have had some failures. And the

failures may be ones that we can lay at the feet, not on our military, but at its failure of us to mobilize—on all of us, I include us

here—to mobilize all aspects of our national security strengths so

we can have the kind of successes we want.

And of course we are all familiar with, I thought, the excellent

speech that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates gave November 26

of last year at Kansas State.

And I am going to ask, Mr. Akin, that this Secretary Gates

speech be made part of our record today too, in which here is the

Secretary of Defense at a time when they really would like to have

additional funding for resetting the force and all kinds of things.

And I will just read one of his quotes, ‘‘What is clear to me is

that there is a need for a dramatic increase in spending on civilian

instruments of national security, diplomacy, strategic communications, foreign assistance, civic action and economic reconstruction

and development.’’ That is Secretary Gates, our secretary of defense, talking about this.

Then very specifically, Mr. Wilkerson—last week, the topic of

interagency processes came up, as this subcommittee, led by Mr.

Davis and Ms. Davis and others, this topic comes up quite frequently in our hearings, and Mr. Wilkerson, a former close associate of Secretary of State Powell, stated he thought that while we

could look at this broad issue of interagency stuff across the spectrum of civilian government, that if the Department of State and

the Department of Defense if they can come, either because of imposition from the Congress or the President, but if those relationships get worked out, that the rest would fall in line fairly readily,

which I thought was an interesting point.

So we come here today to hear from you all following the evaluation that we have had over the last several months of the PRTs.

We appreciate your presence here this morning.

And before introducing you, I will recognize Mr. Akin for any

comments he wants to make, and his opening statement will be

made part of the record also.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Snyder can be found in the Appendix on page 47.]

STATEMENT OF HON. W. TODD AKIN, A REPRESENTATIVE

FROM MISSOURI, RANKING MEMBER, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE

Mr. AKIN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to all of our

witnesses for joining us here this morning.

After studying the Provincial Reconstruction Teams and the subject of interagency stability operations for over four months, the

subcommittee is nearing the close of that investigation.

3

Today’s hearing offers an opportunity to hear from experts on

what lessons we should learn from the PRT Program and processes

for planning and executing stability operations.

One of the challenges this subcommittee faces as we close our

work on the PRTs and interagency stability operations is to try to

figure out how, if at all, the Congress can move legislation that will

ensure that the agencies, like the Department of Defense and

State, will work seamlessly and apply the tools of national power.

Much of what needs to be done are matters that are within the

constitutional prerogative of the executive branch. Other initiatives

that the Congress could appropriately address would still face hurdles because much of what needs to be done can only emerge outside the various congressional committee systems.

I thought the concrete proposals you have recommended in your

prepared testimony are helpful and consistent with what the subcommittee has learned over the course of this investigation.

As we discuss your suggestions today, I would like our witnesses

to delineate which proposals could be done in the short term and

how Congress can advance such an initiative.

I would also just mention that some years ago there when Harvard MBA programs came out with a thing, a case study approach,

one of the things that they always asked witnesses would be, ‘‘If

you just had only one thing you could do, what is the most important change that you would make?’’ So if in your testimonies you

could address that, say, ‘‘If there were just one thing to change,

this is what it would be.’’

Mr. Chairman, thank you. I look forward to the testimony.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Akin can be found in the Appendix on page 49.]

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Mr. Akin.

Our witnesses today are Ambassador Carlos Pascual, Vice President and Director of Foreign Policy, The Brookings Institution and

the first coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization at the

State Department; Ambassador Barbara Bodine—am I saying that

right, Bodiney?

Ambassador BODINE. Yes.

Dr. SNYDER. Diplomat in residence at the Woodrow Wilson

School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University

and a former Foreign Service officer with over 30 years of experience concentrated in the Arabian Peninsula and the greater Persian Gulf, including as ambassador to Yemen; Ms. Michele

Flournoy, President of the Center for a New American Security,

formerly of the Center for Strategic and International Studies

(CSIS), did work on the Beyond Goldwater-Nichols project, and before that principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for Strategy and Threat Reduction and deputy assistant secretary of defense for Strategy; and Ms. Nora Bensahel, senior political scientist, The RAND Corporation and author of numerous studies on

post-conflict reconstruction and the related policy challenges.

Ambassador Pascual, we will begin with you. We will put on this

five-minute clock with its very attractive green light that seems to

rapidly turn to red. It is a signal to you that five minutes is up,

but you feel free to ignore it if you have things you want us to hear

4

about. We just put that up there so you will have a sense of the

passage of time. And then we will just go right down the line.

Ambassador Pascual.

STATEMENT OF AMBASSADOR CARLOS PASCUAL, VICE PRESIDENT AND DIRECTOR, FOREIGN POLICY, THE BROOKINGS

INSTITUTION

Ambassador PASCUAL. Very good.

Mr. Chairman, Mr. Akin, other members, thank you very much

for this opportunity to testify before you. Thank you for accepting

our written testimony for the record.

Dr. SNYDER. Pull that microphone a little closer, if you would,

please.

Ambassador PASCUAL. I very much want to commend the committee for the focus that it is giving on the integration of civilian

and military capacity to support our national security. One of the

things that I have learned in working with our military is that in

today’s world the military will tell you that kinetic force is not

enough to achieve our national security objectives, and Chairman

Snyder, you stated that very well at the beginning.

These comments are based on the work that we did in setting up

the Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization meetings with virtually every combatant command, meetings with the joint staff,

joint planning exercises that we undertook with them, as well as

experiences that I had at different times in my career working on

the National Security Council staff, the Agency for International

Development (USAID) and the State Department.

So I have at least had the benefit of some experiences that allow

me to bring together some of these different perspectives from different agencies in some, I hope, useful ways for you.

Let me just underscore a couple of key findings from the work

that we have done and things that we have learned from stabilization and reconstruction.

First is that it takes at least five to ten years until it is possible

to get local partners to really take the lead in the stabilization and

reconstruction effort. To imagine that you can build capacity and

help them build capacity any faster is a fantasy, and it just simply

hasn’t been done. Look at small states like Bosnia and Kosovo.

The easiest part is up front in the most destabilized period because the international community is actually coming in and doing

something to a country. The hardest part becomes as you start to

build that capacity over time, and it slows down that process of

transition, and we haven’t understood that. In fact, in a place like

Iraq 2003 and 2004, those were the easy years.

The other thing that we have to understand is that we need multilateral engagement to succeed, in order to have the depth and the

range and the time commitment that is necessary to undertake

these missions.

Afghanistan is a good example where we have the U.N. and

NATO and the United States and 30 nations, and here we are still

struggling to succeed. To imagine that we can do this alone is just

simply a fantasy. If we even look at tiny Kosovo and the effort that

it has taken multilaterally, we have to remember that the capacity

5

that we build as the United States to be successful has to be leveraged with multilateral engagement.

And, finally, I would underscore that security is a prerequisite.

There is a certain irony here that on one hand you need security

as an enabling environment. If you don’t get progress on stabilization and reconstruction and begin to normalize life, you can’t actually sustain that security. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves, and

until there is some basic environment of security, it is very hard

to have a sustainable stabilization and reconstruction effort.

In order to address some of these issues, I have tried to underscore in the testimony that there are three levels of capacity that

we have to look at building. And let me try to draw, since this is

the House Armed Services Committee, an analogy with the military.

The first is the functional equivalent of a joint staff, and this is

what the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, S/CRS, was intended to do. The joint staff and the military

tries to create a common strategy in a given theater where there

is interoperability across the forces. It does not mean that you don’t

need the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines and the Coast

Guard. It means that they actually understand how to work together toward a common goal.

And, similarly, the Office of S/CRS was to play that function of

creating a joint staff capacity across civilian agencies and between

civilian agencies and the military. That process has started. It has

been given some foundation in National Security Presidential Directive-44 (NSPD–44), but it is a very, very fragile foundation that

has been created thus far.

The second capacity that you need is the ability to establish an

operational headquarters on the ground in a theater of action. In

the military, you have this with a combatant command actually establishing a field headquarters. You have tens of thousands, if not

hundreds of thousands, of individuals who constantly work together, train together, plan together and are able to deploy together.

In civilian parts of our government, we essentially send a cable

around the world and ask for volunteers of who might be able to

come to establish that headquarters. Not surprisingly, it takes

months to find the individuals. They have never worked together

on these kinds of issues, they usually don’t know anything about

the country that they are going to, and so, not surprisingly, we are

not the most terribly effective in the deployment of those individual

in establishing the headquarters.

The PRTs are one form of establishing that nature of the headquarters, and one of the things that we have learned is that if you

don’t have the staff capabilities to put on the ground quickly, the

PRT is a theoretical exercise.

And, finally, the third level of capacity that we need are the foot

soldiers. If in the second level we have a headquarters where we

have the individuals who are developing, designing and managing

our programs on the ground, you need those who can actually deliver them—the police, the police trainers, the rule of law experts

and so forth. And here we have essentially depended on contractors

in the past.

6

I would think that if the U.S. military were asked to be deployed

with comparable resources and training, they would tell us that it

would be irresponsible. And yet at the same time, we continue to

deploy civilian missions which fundamentally affect the success of

military missions without the necessary type of planning capabilities and implementation capabilities.

Let me come back then to bring forward a few recommendations

and, Congressman Akin, on your question of what that one specific

intervention would be.

I would ask you a question first, and that question would be,

what do you want? Do you want a better planning agency in Washington or do you want the capacity to deploy on the ground? If you

want the capacity to deploy on the ground and you do it without

planning, then you are going to have a haphazard process.

So I am going to take a mild deviation on your question and say

that you actually need two things: The capacity to plan effectively

and the capacity to deploy effectively. And in order to be able to

do that, there are a few things that I think are critical.

The first is establishment of a budget authority that creates an

account for stabilization and reconstruction. This may seem an arcane recommendation, but if you look at the foreign affairs budget,

there are at least 20 different accounts. The experience that I went

through when we were developing a strategic plan on Sudan, for

example, was to get individual agencies, offices and bureaus that

manage those accounts as fiefdoms to direct them to a particular

goal.

In one case when I asked an individual, ‘‘What is the U.S. Government goal that you are trying to achieve and how do you contribute to it,’’ the response I got was, ‘‘I have done this job for ten

years and nobody has ever asked me that. Why should I begin to

do that now?’’

Unless there is a way to break across those account structures and be able to identify, for example, $100 million, $200 million that

are necessary for a particular initiative, and then ask the question,

‘‘How do we use those resources to most effectively achieve the U.S.

government’s objectives on the ground,’’ you can’t come to an effective strategic plan.

The environmental that we have right now—and I have been in

it in the field—is that you look across these 20 accounts and you

ask the question, ‘‘How can I get money from any of these accounts

to bring those resources here to the problem that I have in the

field?’’ And so you end up making choices that are not always the

most strategic, you don’t get resources for the things that are necessarily the most important on the ground.

And a way to deal with this would be to allow the President to

make a determination on the creation of a stabilization and reconstruction account for a particular country when the circumstances

warrant it, to reach agreement on that with the Congress and

within that account to allow transfers from anywhere else in the

foreign affairs budget so that it goes into a common account where

you can basically say that the resources there can be used for any

purpose in the foreign affairs budget.

This is not terribly complicated to do, it doesn’t cost additional

money, it has been written up in the Lugar-Biden bill since 2004,

7

and it has gone absolutely nowhere, and it is the kind of action

that can be done immediately at very little cost.

The second recommendation is on the creation of what the State

Department has called an active response corps. It is 250 people in

the State Department and other civilian agencies. The purpose of

this is to have individuals who take as their assignment the capacity to train for fast deployments on the ground, individuals who

work together, so that when you have a situation where you need

to establish that headquarters on the ground, you are not going

worldwide trying to find who are the individuals that are available,

but you have 250 people who are immediately identified.

And if those people go into a standby corps, you can imagine that

over years you can build a cadre of 750 people or so who have gone

through this training and are your immediate pool for that kind of

response capacity. This is a relatively low-cost way in order to be

able to move quickly in establishing our capabilities on the ground

and to be able to draw the personnel that are necessary for deployments to a Provincial Reconstruction Team.

The third recommendation would be the creation of a civilian reserve corps. I would propose a civilian reserve of about 3,000 people. I would recommend that it focus initially on police, police

trainers and rule of law experts, because this generally has been

the long pole in the tent in being able to establish stability on the

ground and to transfer functions from the military to indigenous

police.

Right now, we have contractors that we draw from all over the

United States with no common doctrine, deploy them on the

ground. In a place like Afghanistan, it was actually two years before we actually even began to put together a strategy that effectively started to address issues related to the rule of law, and we

still don’t have the capacity to implement it on the ground.

In the 2007 supplemental, a $50 million appropriation was provided in order to begin to establish a civilian reserve. It is absolutely frozen because there is no authorization. H.R. 1084, sponsored by Congressman Farr, is available. Moving that forward and

getting that passed is the first way to create that civilian reserve

capability.

The fourth recommendation is the creation of a conflict respond

fund with about $200 million. We know that this will not fully fund

any major mission, but what it can do is begin to create the capability of getting your teams on the ground for the first two to three

months of implementation. Because what we do know is if you have

to wait for a reprogramming of funds or a supplemental appropriation, it will be months before that money is available. If you can

get your teams on the ground in that dynamic moment where you

can influence the course of change, it can have an impact that can

influence the overall success of the mission.

And, finally, I would just underscore the importance of this subcommittee’s support for section 1207 of the defense authorization

bill that allows for a transfer authority from the Defense Department to State, because even with a conflict response fund, that is

a tiny down payment on the requirements necessary for quick deployments in the field.

8

I will just conclude by underscoring that creating these capabilities, I think, is truly a bargain. In effect, the total cost of the active

response corps, the staff in S/CRS, the conflict response fund is

about $350 million. The defense authorization capability in section

1207 creates an authorization against existing appropriated funds.

It is a relatively small cost when we look at how much we are

spending on the defense side.

But look at it from this perspective: If by creating this capacity

we would create or would have created the capacity to withdraw

one division from Iraq one month early, we would have saved $1.2

billion, not to mention the lives that would have been involved.

And so I just underscore again the importance of the work that

this committee is doing and the way that you are reaching across

defense and civilian lines, because the only way that we can really

address these issues is if we think about a national security budget

and not a defense budget and a foreign affairs budget. Until we integrate these to understand what is necessary for the national security needs of the United States, we will not succeed in our objectives.

[The prepared statement of Ambassador Pascual can be found in

the Appendix on page 62.]

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Ambassador Pascual.

By the way, Mr. Farr, that you mentioned, that has the bill you

referred to, has participated in subcommittee hearings and has a

conflict today.

Ambassador Bodine.

STATEMENT OF AMBASSADOR BARBARA K. BODINE (RET.),

DIPLOMAT-IN-RESIDENCE, WOODROW WILSON SCHOOL,

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

Ambassador BODINE. Thank you for the opportunity to meet with

the subcommittee today. I am very grateful that this subcommittee

is taking—for its interest and the time that it is taking to explore

very thoroughly, very critically and very constructively what can be

done by the interagency with the full support and oversight of Congress to encourage and repair and rebuild the interagency in this

process and player so that we can much more effectively and consistently support and defend the interests of this country.

A couple of weeks ago, I had met with about 20 cadets from West

Point, and I started my meeting with them by asking them what

the difference was between national security policy and foreign policy. And then I watched them spend about 15 minutes getting

themselves twisted into pretzels and finally broke it by saying that

there really isn’t a difference. National security policy and foreign

policy are the same and they have to be addressed jointly, constructively, and it has to be done with all the tools.

I also asked them, since they were West Point cadets, ‘‘Would

you have an army that was made up entirely of armor?’’ Well, obviously not. There were two midshipmen among the group, and I

said, ‘‘Well, would you have an armed services that was solely

Army?’’ Well, no, you wouldn’t do that either.

Well, then why should we be trying to do national security strategy and foreign policy with really almost one element, one tool and

that it has to be a civilian-military effort as much as it has to be

9

joint services and as much as the services have to have a range of

tools.

In the 21st century, the greatest threats that we are going to be

facing are not going to be from standing armies from strong competitor states like the Soviet Union, but they are going to come

from instability within the very weakest states. It is not going to

come from powerful adversaries but from failed and failing states

that are imploding from a perverse lack of legitimacy, their inability or their unwillingness to provide services and structures and

from a lack of a basic social compact with their own citizens. And

this is going to spawn domestic violence and humanitarian misery

that is going to be unacceptable to both us and the international

community.

This is also going to create a vacuum where transnational players will be able to come in and exploit this to either spread violence

within these imploding countries or to spread the threat outwards,

and we are going to be facing civil wars, secessionist movements,

insurgencies and, yes, even terrorism. And this is not a prediction

for the future, but this is an assessment of what the current reality

is.

We don’t have a consensus yet on when and exactly how to intervene with these imploding states, but I think that we can recognize

that these reflect political and economic and social dislocations and

that we have to have all of the tools available to respond.

The two corollaries of this new threat is that, first of all, the continuum between threat and actual violence interstate is going to be

much longer and far more ambiguous than it was with conventional threats and conventional interstate violence, and there is

going to be greater opportunities for crisis prevention and mitigation. And the second is going to be that the concept of a clear postconflict break, the shift from the military to civilian, is going to be

equally ambiguous. And what for too long the military considered

unconventional warfare is simply going to become the new conventional warfare.

I think the Army and the Marines have recognized this shift

with their new counterinsurgency manual, and yet despite the acknowledgement within that manual of the primacy of the political

and the need for a civilian agency partner, the net conclusion remained one of the military lead.

Now, this is natural and appropriate. For one thing, the Army

and the Marine Corps can’t write the doctrine for the civilian agencies, but I think that it also reflected a feeling that the civilian

agencies either could not or would not be full partners. It reflected

the imbalance in the resourcing, and it was a need on their part

for some prudent planning if you were going to accept that those

two imbalances were going to maintain.

The lack of coordination and collaboration, is that inevitable and

irreversible? No, it is not, and I think that, again, this committee

is looking at, ‘‘How do we reverse this breakdown in the system?’’

There has been a fundamental structural change, but I don’t believe that the system itself is broken or antiquated, but proactive

corrective action is needed.

The interagency process and how you make it work has long

been a debate between the legislative and the executive branches,

10

and it goes back to the 1947 creation of the Department of Defense

(DOD) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the first place and

the National Security Council (NSC). And it is very curious if you

look at the original legislation on the NSC, which was to coordinate

and collaborate, one of its goals was to provide a level playing field

so that the new agency, DOD, could have a voice up against the

far more established and very prestigious Department of State. We

may have overcorrected on that a little.

The tensions that we have within the interagency are not in and

of themselves necessarily bad. They present the President, the

interagency, Congress with a range of views, a range of options and

a whole range of skill sets, and this is not necessarily bad so long

as it is done within an understanding of a process and, I would say,

a sense of mutual respect.

I have spent over 30 years of my—I have spent my entire adult

life in the foreign service, and almost all of it was working interagency, and almost all of that was working with the Department

of Defense and the uniformed military. And I won’t go through my

history, but what I found in working on these issues, be they arms

sales or counterterrorism or what do we do in East Africa, is that

there was always a fundamental understanding of shared goals and

objectives. And we might very much disagree on how to get there,

but we did understand on where we were trying to get to. And we

worked within at least understood parameters on how to do it and,

as I said, with a mutual respect.

There were times when I might very well doubt the wattage of

some of the people I was dealing with, but I never ever doubted

their loyalty or their commitment to the national security. And was

it ever ideal? No, it never was, and I remember in the mid–90’s

that Michele and I worked on a project on complex contingency

planning, along with Tony Zinni following the intervention in Somalia. The fact that we are here over ten years later talking about

the same thing is perhaps a little depressing, but I do think that

some movement has taken place.

But whatever happened interagency there was great debate, and

at the end of the day, when a decision was made, you saluted

smartly and you did it, you carried it out.

What I was not prepared for when I came back to Washington

in 2003 was how bad the process had become; in fact, it was virtually dysfunctional or almost afunctional. A wall had been put up

between the military and the civilians on working on both the planning for Iraq prior to National Security Presidential Directive-24

(NSPD–24) and after NSPD–24.

A colonel friend of mine was told that when he suggested it was

time to do a political military plan that if he brought it up again,

he would be fired. Efforts by the Department of State to bring uniform military into the Future of Iraq Project was met by a directive

from DOD to the uniform military that they could not participate

in this, and this was simply not the way that we had functioned

for over 50 years at that point.

So the issue is not so much one that we had a system that was

antiquated or incapable of handling interagency collaboration. We

had one where there was actually walls put up and made that we

could not do this.

11

And there is a wonderful quote in David Rothkopf’s book, called

‘‘Running the World,’’ where he quotes a former senior Administration official in looking at the decision-making process in 2002,

2003, 2004, and said that he had never seen more high-level insubordination within the U.S. Government within 30 years.

My point in recounting some of this history, and in my statement, is to make the point that we don’t have a systemic failure

of an antiquated mechanism but we do have a system that was undermined, in some cases consciously, that cascaded down and rippled out, and this is what we are now trying to fix. It is a very important distinction between, is the system broken or was the system subverted.

As the nature of the threat has shifted from the most powerful

to the weakest and the root causes have shifted to political, economic and social with this complex continuum of civilian and nonkinetic tools, we have also had this counterintuitive reorientation

of our foreign policy toward a lead with force, and other national

security tools have become subordinated or absorbed. To put this

in military parlance, the military has become the supported command, and the civilian agencies have become the supporting command.

The reorientation of our foreign policy has been compounded by

this crippling and chronic imbalance in resourcing. And to borrow

a phrase that I heard from someone at a conference, we now have

one agency on steroids and the rest of the national security apparatus on life support.

It has now gotten to the point where that what we have, our missions are following resources rather than resources following missions. And I think if there is one critical area that Congress can

and should be looking at is, how do we write this balance so that

we sit down and we critically look at what are the missions and

which agencies are best able to fulfill those missions and have the

resources following them? We need to just turn this over.

The military will take on the roles and the missions of the civilian partners if they are unable to do so, and they often end up both

reinventing wheels that have been already up and running and

often not as well, and then if we have, as my colleague pointed out,

instead of them actually being able to take them on, it then ends

up being outsourced to contractors. And the contractors you have

a problem of standup, you have a problem of accountability, as we

have seen, and it is not just with the security contractors.

And so we privatize a number of the non-warfighting functions.

We then add to the military a whole host of non-kinetic functions,

and we end up with having to contract this out. And it simply, to

me, does not make any sense if you are trying to have what the

military likes to call it, a unity of command or a whole government

approach.

The Provincial Reconstruction Teams, I think, are a very creative, very useful, still imperfect and evolving response to these

kinds of problems, and they present a good laboratory. They do

raise a number of questions at this point: Should the PRTs be

counterinsurgency (COIN)-centric, and, again, should they be in

the service of the military mission or not? Are we looking for quick

12

fixes to further security or are we looking for longer term solutions

to build stability—and security and stability are not the same.

To what degree can and should we be looking to bring in local

stakeholders, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and multilateral partners and international organizations? And does the primary mission and who has either de facto or de jure leadership,

how does that affect our ability to bring in these other partners?

And the answer on that is it has an enormous impact.

And then most finally, can there be any kind of effective interagency coordination and collaboration in the field if you don’t have

something comparable back here at home?

Drawing from the lessons of the PRTs, they are a very good transitional mechanism, they should be in support of COIN operations,

but they shouldn’t be an extension of them. It has to have a political strategy, and they should be focused on sustainability development.

One problem that we have to look at is that we don’t delegitimize

local stakeholders by doing things too much ourselves, and I saw

this as ambassador in Yemen where the military would come in

and do things for as opposed to with. And while it was very good

to come in an vaccinate every single goat in Yemen and all the little two-legged kids as well as the four-legged kids, it did nothing

to build any kind of capacity for the local government, and in some

ways if done incorrectly underscores to the local population that actually the local government is not able to do this. So we have to

think about not just what we are doing but how we are doing it.

This is not a recommendation that there be a strict division between security, but there has to be a better balance of missions.

The counterinsurgency manual is revolutionary and radical, but

it draws very heavily on the lessons of the past, and it goes back

to basics, but then it tries to get them right for the 21st century.

And I think this is what we need to do on the interagency process

is go back to basics and then try to make it right.

What do we need to do? Very quickly, the basic decision-making

and policymaking process needs to be reaffirmed. There needs to be

clarity on who are the supported and the supporting agencies. I

would say there needs to be a reaffirmation of the authority of the

chief of mission. The National Security Council needs to serve the

President by serving the interagency and also supporting effective

congressional oversight.

To echo what my colleague has said, there has to be formalized

civilian-military coordination in anticipation of crises, not just in

response to them, and this would include mandating. And I think

this is something Congress can do quickly and easily is to support

the Biden-Lugar and formalize what is contained in NSPD–44 and

the structure of S/CRS.

Very importantly, there has to be sufficient, regular and predictable funding. Parity with the military is not the goal but equity is.

We have to have the funds, the staff, the resources commensurate

with the challenges and the threats that we are facing. We need

the staff and the resources in the State Department particularly,

and I would certainly agree with Secretary Gates. We need what

the military calls a training cushion so that we can train to languages, to area studies, to the new skill sets and expertise that we

13

need. The State Department does not have a training cushion at

all; in fact, we are short.

We need to have enough of a training cushion so that we can

send our people for advanced education opportunities. I have now

taught at four different universities. I have been very much impressed by the number of captains and majors and sometimes lieutenant colonels who are at Harvard and MIT and Princeton and

UC getting one-year MPAs studying these issues. And it has been

very sad to see that there is almost never an a Foreign Service Officer (FSO) among this group. We need the training cushion and

the resources to take advantage of these opportunities.

The Foreign Service Institute—I was dean there for a while—

needs to be an institution that is capable to fulfill these kinds of

missions, these training missions, area studies, language. Also to

be the center for this interagency training that has to take place.

If we are going to do it, I think that this is the place it should be

done, but it cannot be done without the proper support.

There does need to be long-term interagency training. We need

to know who we are, who the other person is. I had the opportunity

to do the one-year senior seminar at the State Department, which

was half State, half other agencies. And what we learned from each

other in being on a bus for almost a year driving around the country was probably more important than what we actually learned

when we got to wherever the bus was going.

We need to be able to staff our embassies fully and completely.

Admiral Gehman who came out to Yemen following the Cole was

appalled to find out that the country the size of France, I had one

political officer, one economic officer and one Public Affairs Officer

(PAO), that was it. We need to staff embassies, we need to reopen

consulates, and we need the money for our public diplomacy program that is real.

We need to staff so that we can respond to crises without stripping our embassies. I had a colonel once ask me why the State Department simply didn’t send everybody to Iraq. Even if we sent everybody to Iraq—there are only 7,000 of us, I don’t think it would

make a big difference—but it would also mean that we had no one

in our embassies to work with our coalition partners. We would

have no one in our embassies to work with those who do not support our efforts. We would have no ability to do any of the other

work that we need to do. We can’t manage crises by stripping Peter

to pay Paul. We need the people.

We need a staff and the resources to go with that to do outreach

to other agencies. We once had people in almost every agency, all

over town. We need more Political Advisors (POLAD). We need the

staff to do this.

And then, again, S/CRS needs to be given the staffing and the

funding to do its job as a joint office.

If the Administration, either a Republican or a Democrat, does

not request sufficient funding, Congress does have within its prerogative to set levels, and I do think that this is something that

Congress needs to take a look at.

Interagency coordination and collaboration is not an alien concept within the interagency. We do know how to play nicely together, but we need to be given the ability to do that. It would help

14

to have the mandate to do that and the resources. It is prudent and

wise to ask the question whether we have the structure, the process and the people. Do we want to respond quickly, effectively and

well? Do we want to anticipate, respond early and wisely? And that

is a different kind of structure.

I have seen the tremendous good that comes when this is done

in spirit. I have seen the damage and the frustration and anger

when it is done poorly, and I certainly do commend and support

this committee’s efforts to try to help the civilian agencies and the

interagency to get back to where they were so that we can serve

this country properly.

Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Ambassador Bodine can be found in

the Appendix on page 51.]

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you.

Ms. Flournoy.

STATEMENT OF MICHE` LE A. FLOURNOY, PRESIDENT, CENTER

FOR A NEW AMERICAN SECURITY

Ms. FLOURNOY. Thank you very much.

Mr. Chairman, Mr. Akin, Ms. Davis of my home state of California, Mr. Davis and other members, thank you very much for the

opportunity to speak to you today.

And I wanted to commend your focus on this issue of improving

U.S. Government performance and interagency operations, because

since the end of the Cold War, from Somalia through the 1990’s to

present-day Iraq, we have experienced repeated operational failures at the interagency level.

And I think there is no more important area for you to focus

when you have Americans of all stripes—military, civilian—on the

ground, putting themselves in harm’s way, trying to reach our strategic objectives as a nation and yet being thwarted because of some

of these interagency problems. So I really want to commend you

and thank you for focusing on this effort. And I hope that the committee’s efforts in this regard will actually produce some important

results.

I want to just take a moment to describe what I think the problem is. The various failures that we have experienced in interagency operations some certainly stem from misguided policy or

judgment, but many have stemmed from just poor execution. The

U.S. Government time and time again has had trouble bringing to

bear all of the elements of its national power in a cohesive and effective way, and I think that the problem stems from several

sources—and Carlos and Barbara have also touched on this.

We lack a standard approach, an interagency doctrine, if you

will, for planning and preparing and conducting these operations.

So we tend to go into each operation reinventing the wheel, and

this ad hoc approach has kept us from learning as a nation. It

keeps us from learning lessons from past mistakes and then improving the performance next time.

We also lack adequate interagency mechanisms to coordinate and

integrate our efforts at all levels: strategic in Washington, operational at the, sort of, planning within regions and then practically

in the field.

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And then, finally, we lack capacity, particularly on the civilian

side. And coming from a DOD background, what I observe is this

has very—this is not only bad for mission success, it has very detrimental effects on the uniformed military. Because what lack of civilian capacity means in their experience is, number one, huge mission creep. So they get stuck holding the bag, doing all kinds of

tasks for which they really weren’t trained or designed. And they

do it and in most cases they do it very well, but it is no way to

run a railroad.

The second is even more disturbing, that inability to bring the

capacity to bear to meet our objectives in the field means we don’t

meet milestones, which means we don’t have a viable exit strategy,

and we get stuck. And the longer we are stuck, the more vulnerable we are to increased costs, not only financial costs but also,

most importantly, human costs.

So, again, I just want to underscore and applaud your efforts of

trying to wrestle with this.

I said more about the problem in my written statement. I want

to just jump to highlighting some of the most—and try to answer

Mr. Akin’s question, what are the most important things that can

be done and what can be done near term.

The first set of things I want to highlight are changes that a new

Administration, or this Administration but I think it is unlikely in

the final year, but any Administration, any President could change

and get very near-term results from.

The first is using the National Security Council as a means of

providing clear Presidential guidance, commander’s intent, for

what the President wants to achieve in an operation before we ever

go in and to create some capacity in the NSC—a senior director

and a small office—that is really expert in doing strategic-level

planning for operations.

I am not talking about an operational NSC or running operations

out of the NSC a la Ollie North, we don’t want to do that. What

I am talking about is an NSC that is able to identify clear objectives, agency roles and responsibilities, who is lead, who is support

in a particular area, red lines not to cross, policy guidance that

planners can then take and then translate into viable plans.

Coupled with this, a second piece, is investing in the planning capacity of the different agencies who need to participate in the process. You have got it in spades in the DOD because DOD has a

planning culture and a whole cadre of military planners. You don’t

have it at State, you don’t have it in a sufficient capacity at AID,

at Treasury, at Commerce, at Justice. That is an investment that

Congress and the executive need to make. It is not a whole lot of

people, but it is a core planning capacity in each of those agencies,

which is critical.

The last piece that is sort of an easy good government thing to

do is to standardize an approach, how we are going to do this.

When I was in the Clinton Administration, we had Presidential Decision Directive-56 (PDD–56), and that kind of gave us an integrated approach to doing pol-mil planning.

In the Bush Administration, they came up with a PDD that was

never signed, NSPD-XX, which was excellent. It was actually an

improvement on PDD–56. It was never implemented. NSPD–44

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came along, we have got other approaches. Pick one. Use it again

and again, refine it, train people to it and stick to it, as opposed

to reinventing the wheel every time we have a new Administration

or every time we have a new operation.

At the operational level, create rapidly deployable interagency

crisis planning teams. The military does this exact thing. They basically—you know, a flag goes up, we have a warning order for an

operation, put together a team, start planning for it.

Given the nature of these complex operations, they are not military operations alone; they are whole of government operations.

You need to have an interagency approach to that campaign planning. Again, not that resource intensive but something that I think

the kinds of initiatives that Carlos was talking about funding at S/

CRS would populate some of these planning teams and make that

very easy to achieve in the near term.

And then at the field level, I think we need to look at how we

organize. Right now, we have two parallel structures. For example,

in Iraq, we have a very robust country team and embassy, and we

have a very robust Combined Joint Task Force (CJTF) staff headquarters, and they do coordinate with mixed degree of success, very

well at the top, mixed down below.

I would submit to you that in the future we need to move toward

a model where we have an integrated interagency task force where

you have got the ambassador and the military commander working

hand in glove at the top but their staffs are completely integrated,

so there is a civil-military J1, a civil-military J2, a civil-military J3

and on down the line—you can translate that into civilian terms

of admin operations, intelligence, et cetera. But that is really what

we have to do for the future.

Now, turning to what can Congress do and what are the most

important things for Congress, I think the real role of Congress

and the most important thing you can do is invest in the capacity

on the civilian side. This is something a President cannot do. It requires leadership and legislation to create the civilian capacity, not

to match the military person for person but to partner with the

military in effective ways.

And I will give you an example. The opening days of Somalia you

had one diplomat, Ambassador Bob Oakley, paired with an entire

military force, and that one diplomat negotiated the permissive

entry of tens of thousands of American Marines without a shot

fired. One experienced diplomat made a huge difference. So, again,

the right people, in the right place, at the right time can make an

enormous contribution.

I think the first step in creating that deployable civilian capacity

is to fully fund the S/CRS initiatives that Ambassador Pascual described. I think longer term we need to also be building that capacity in other places like AID and other departments. Longer term

we have to determine whether we need to establish a separate field

operating agency.

It is still an open question in my mind whether you can build

highly operational, deployable cadres inside agencies who have a

fundamentally non-operational culture. I am willing to give it a

chance, but I think if the experiment of what we are trying to do

with S/CRS does not make it, I think at that point you move to creVerDate 22-MAR-2001 14:26 Nov 20, 2008 Jkt 042901 PO 00000 Frm 00020 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\110-109\029160.000 HAS2 PsN: HAS2
17

ating a new field operating agency where civilian operators are recruited, promoted, trained and rewarded for being operators.

Very important to go with this is the personnel float that Ambassador Bodine highlighted—5 to 10 percent. This committee, others

routinely grants the military 10 percent, 15 percent personnel float

to do professional military education, training, interagency joint experience, because you expect the highest professionalism from your

military, and that is what enables it.

We don’t do that on the civilian side. If I am a manager in the

State Department and you are asking me to send my best and

brightest to training, I have to be down my best and brightest. I

have to lose that person with no backfill for a year or two—very

hard decision. And the incentive structure is exactly wrong.

Third aspect of the investing in capacity, and I think we can take

some inspiration from the Goldwater-Nichols legislation that really

has become the foundation for jointness on the military side. One

of the most important elements of that legislation was changing

the incentive structure.

So joint service went from being, sort of, something that people

didn’t like to do because it took them away from the service that

was their home and where they would get promoted, et cetera, to

being joint service then became something that you have to punch

this ticket if you are going to make general officer, if you are going

to make flag officer. So it completely changed the incentive structure 180 degrees.

I would submit that if we made promotion to SES, Senior Executive Service, on the civilian side among key policy jobs in the various national security agencies, we made that promotion contingent

on interagency education and experience, rotations in other agencies, you would fundamentally change the culture, and you would

have the best and brightest running to the door to get that experience.

And over time, as we see in the military, over 20 years, over a

generation, you would have a fundamentally more joint capacity,

interagency joint capacity, because you would have people with experience after experience of working cross-agency, living in other

agency cultures, et cetera.

And the last piece of this, I think, is also endorsing something

that has come up, which is creating a center of excellence for training people who are going to be interagency planners, who are deploying, participate in PRTs, who are going to go staff the planning

team, staff the task forces, et cetera, a training center where you

can capture lessons learned and then ensure those lessons learned

from the past operation inform the planning for the next operation.

It is something that could be easily put together between the National Defense University (NDU), the Foreign Service Institute

(FSI) and other appropriate training centers. Not a lot of money,

huge potential impact.

So I would just, again, highlight, I think there is a lot that the

executive branch can do to better use the instruments it already

has to get more integrated approaches, but there are areas where

it is imperative that Congress make some additional investment to

build the capacity, to do better in these operations over time.

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And, again, I would just say that the payoffs really cannot be

overstated, both in terms of achieving our strategic objectives but

in doing so at far less cost in terms of both blood and treasure.

Thank you.

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

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you.

Dr. Bensahel.

STATEMENT OF DR. NORA BENSAHEL, SENIOR POLITICAL

SCIENTIST, RAND CORPORATION

Dr. BENSAHEL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for inviting me here

today.

You asked me to talk about the ways in which other countries

have reformed their interagency processes for improved capacity for

stability operations in order to perhaps identify some lessons that

the United States could apply. Unfortunately, there are very few

good lessons to be learned.

The problems of interagency coordination are not limited to the

United States. None of these international reform efforts have been

successful enough to date to achieve their mandates anywhere in

the world. Most of them continue to suffer from the same problems

of bureaucratic competition and lack of capacity that the United

States does.

In my written testimony, I describe the specific reforms that

have been undertaken in the United States with the formation of

the coordinator for reconstruction and stabilization, the United

Kingdom with the formation of the stabilization unit, Canada with

the formation of the stabilization and reconstruction task force,

Germany with efforts to improve civilian crisis prevention and the

European Union, which is struggling to determine which of its institutions should take the lead in crisis management and stability

operations.

I would be happy to discuss the details of any of these efforts

during the question period if you are interested.

These efforts have improved capacity in some areas, so the story

is not entirely bleak, but despite significant differences in both

their substance and their national context, they all suffer from the

following four problems.

First, bureaucratic turf wars. The United States, the United

Kingdom, Canada and Germany all created new offices that are

supposed to either lead or coordinate interagency coordination. All

of these offices have, not surprisingly, faced very stiff resistance

from the agencies whose efforts they are supposed to coordinate.

The greater their mandate, the more likely they are to provoke resistance from agencies that view them as intruding on their turf

and interfering with their mission.

Second, poor organizational placement. These offices tend to be

too low in their government hierarchies to compel other agencies

to work with them.

Third, lack of financial resources. Most lack the budgets that

they need to achieve their missions. This contributes to the problem of turf wars since money and bureaucratic power are often

linked.

19

Fourth, lack of qualified personnel. These offices often rely heavily on secondments from other agencies to include needed expertise

and to augment their small staff. But other agencies are often reluctant to provide people for these secondments and also prevent

their best people from serving in them.

Why is interagency reform so difficult, not just in the United

States but in other countries as well? Simply put, our governments

aren’t structured for it. Our political systems are very decentralized. That is a deliberate political choice and one that isn’t going

to change. But what that means is that there is always going to

be some amount of stovepiping, turf wars and competition for resources.

That said, there are some ways to minimize the negative effects

of interagency competition and to increase U.S. capacity for stability operations. The first is to create incentives for interagency

secondments. This is a step short of what Michele suggested about

a field operational agency but I think is something that could be

done in the short term and is an important step to enable civilian

personnel who want to operate in the field, on deployments, in

order to get them there.

Right now, there are several strong disincentives that prevent

even willing agencies from cooperating, particularly in these personnel areas. Congress should establish mechanisms to reimburse

home agencies for the costs involved in seconding personnel for

these operations, including salary costs and temporary hires to

compensate for their absence.

Second, increase the capacity of USAID. USAID is the government repository of knowledge on promoting stability and development in post-conflict situations, but it is hindered by its small size

and its lack of resources. While this committee does not have jurisdiction over the USAID budget, it does oversee issues that are directly affected by its lack of capacity since U.S. military forces are

regularly required to fill its gap.

To take but one example from Iraq, military forces are actively

involved in setting up city councils. No one thinks that military

forces are best suited to be establishing local governance structures, especially not the military personnel who are on the ground

doing it. But they often have no choice, because USAID and other

civilian agencies simply lack the capacity to get into the field and

to do everything that needs to be done in these important operations, and military forces are stuck filling that gap.

Third, establish flexible funding mechanisms. Those of us on the

panel here seem to be in violent agreement on this point about the

need to establish flexible funding mechanisms and to adequately

resource these types of operations.

Stability operations require funds to be quickly allocated in order

to respond to rapidly changing environments, particularly at the

outset of an operation.

In particular, Congress has consistently failed to fund the Administration’s request for the conflict respond fund, which was

mentioned earlier. There are legitimate concerns which have prevented it from being funded, including those about the role of congressional oversight, but those legitimate concerns can be addressed through some sort of reporting requirement once funds

20

have been disbursed. But requiring the State Department to specify in advance the ways in which that fund would be used defeats

the entire purpose of a contingency fund.

Fourth, and finally, there is no substitute for an involved President and an involved Congress. Only the President has the political

power to break through the bureaucratic conflict that inevitably

arises as part of the interagency process. And I would suggest that

in the cases where the interagency has worked well, which Ambassador Bodine mentioned, very often one of the key reasons why is

that the President has been involved and made sure that this is

one of this top priorities.

And only Congress has the power to provide the funds necessary

to improve the country’s ability to effectively conduct stabilization

and reconstruction operations.

Thank you very much.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Bensahel can be found in the Appendix on page 88.]

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Dr. Bensahel. Appreciate both your all’s

comments today, and all of your written statements, as I mentioned, will be made part of the record.

What we will do now is begin the question and answer period,

and we will follow what we call our five-minute rule. And in this

situation, I would ask that when you see the red light go on, we

will give you time to finish your sentence or finish your thought,

but if you would wrap that up when you see the red light on because that means that we are then taking time away from the next

member on the list.

We will begin with Mrs. Davis for five minutes.

Mrs. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and

thank you to all of you for being here.

I think it is one of the first times maybe that we have even suggested that it is systemic, but it also depends on the kind of vision

that people have about how this can be accomplished, and so you

have been able to lay that out and I appreciate it.

I wanted to just hit on one area. There are many questions and

Congress member Davis and I, the Davis and Davis team here, we

are trying to work with this, as are many of the other members,

and that is why I especially appreciate it.

If we think about this response corps, we have so many individuals who have been involved already, have been involved in the

PRTs, most of them from the military, bringing their skills, whether it is engineering, whatever that might be. I wonder if that is a

way to try and capture them and to have them in some ways,

where it is appropriate and, obviously, by their decision, to come

down the line to be part of a response corps.

It is maybe kind of premature in terms of where we are with this

discussion, but I am just wondering how you might see talking

about this in a way that you are developing a career ladder out of

all these incredible people who have done this job, who didn’t anticipate doing it. That wasn’t what they signed up for, but that is

what they ended up doing.

And I think one of the things that has really impressed us in

speaking to especially the men and women who have served in the

21

military, who have been part of this, it is the most important thing

they ever did.

How can we do that? Is that appropriate? Do you see a mechanism for doing that? And how would it fit within the discussion

that we are having? Is it too far down the line to even try and get

out there with it or is that something worth facing right now?

Ambassador PASCUAL. I am happy to start on this. The response

corps capabilities are some of the things that we have been debating for some time.

There are two types of responses to consider. One is the U.S.

Government capacity to actually get the teams on the ground that

lead and direct our efforts, and I think that that is absolutely necessary now, and it is absolutely appropriate to think about how

these individuals who have had these experiences can be integrated

into the government functions in those capacities.

And then there is a separate response corps capability of how

you get the actual assistance providers—the police, the police trainers, the humanitarians and so forth—which requires a separate

kind of mechanism of drawing individuals from civil society more

broadly as the military draws in individuals with civil affairs.

One point I would just note, in work that we have done with the

civil affairs groups, they have underscored that their role right now

is like applying a tourniquet. They can avoid somebody dying, but

they don’t have the capacity the set of strategic skills to actually

save the life in the way that you wanted to.

And so that is what we are trying to create is the individuals

within the government who have the strategic planning capacity

overall, the individuals who can be brought in that provide the

skills that are necessary across a very broad range of areas and

complementing that still with a very extensive capability and military civil affairs, which addresses an immediate humanitarian

need.

Ambassador BODINE. I think what I would add to that, the military has done a very good job of trying to capture lessons learned

from an ongoing conflict, and rewriting doctrine in the middle of a

war is quite an undertaking. The civilian agencies don’t have the

numbers of people coming back, but I was at FSI last week talking

to the area studies class—it was about 100 people—and I asked

how many in the room had either served in Afghanistan, Iraq,

PRTs or were going out to them, and it was easily two-thirds of the

class.

And so one of the things that the military did that was right,

good and proper was they started trying to capture what the captains and the majors and the lieutenant colonels were learning on

the ground and bring that back and we have ended up with a new

counterinsurgency (CI) manual.

What we haven’t had the opportunity to do, the mandate, the

time, the resources—I do think that S/CRS is the place to do it but

it isn’t funded—would be to sit down and try to do a comparable

process on the civilian side, and it would mean bringing in the military who have been part of the PRTs but also bringing in the civilians who have been part of the PRTs, the NGOs who have worked

on it and, in a sense, almost trying to write a companion volume

22

to the CI manual. And as I said, I don’t think that we should limit

ourselves to just CI operations, but it should be pre and post.

Mrs. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. What would it take to do that?

Ambassador BODINE. First, money. Second, I think a mandate.

This is something that perhaps Congress could mandate is, ‘‘S/CRS

is hereby mandated to organize this.’’ And I think that would be

the one thing you could do—mandate it, fund it and give it to S/

CRS.

Mrs. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you.

Ms. FLOURNOY. I would just add a couple of other ideas. One is

to make sure that we capture in a database a description of who

has had what experience.

And then the second piece is to create some incentive structures

for those people as they go into the next step in their careers to

consider further operational experiences down the line, whether it

is higher pay, better retirement points, earlier promotion opportunities, but to sort of capture who we have got out there, capture

the experience base and then incentivize it for people to offer that

experience again.

And then the third thing, as Barbara said, is I think some greater mechanism for capturing lessons learned from all of this experience that has been had.

Dr. BENSAHEL. I agree with all of that. I would just add that the

military has great difficulty doing this, even on its own, even

though it has a formidable personnel system identifying people who

have been participating in these kinds of civil military operations.

And so while I certainly think the need is there to track the civilian expertise and line up incentives to continue cooperation, identifying people on the military side who have this expertise is a problem as well.

Mrs. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Thank you.

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Mrs. Davis.

Mr. Davis for five minutes.

Mr. DAVIS OF KENTUCKY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. One thing

I would like to recognize, I really appreciate what Chairman Snyder has done in continuing to bring this effort to light. We have got

a little triumvirate going here to try to force the dialogue. Many

times in Congress, it might surprise you, it is sometimes difficult

to get things done. I think we are working in the epitome of the

founders’ vision the last few years here.

But one analogy that comes to mind for me on this whole issue

was making pinewood derby cars with my cub scout children, with

the boys—I went through the equivalent with our military experience for the last few years—making the car last year with a coping

saw, a knife, a block of wood and a piece of sandpaper and was

ready for physical therapy when that was over and a little counseling.

Finally broke down and bought myself one of these fancy grinding and cutting tools with literally dozens of different attachments,

which was great fun for all of us, and we didn’t destroy any furniture this time either, which was somewhat pleasing to my wife.

But in that vein, one of the things I look at, just having been a

process consultant for years, is having the ability to have a real

strategy, which I think we are lacking and have lacked for many,

23

many years with the end of the Cold War. But having the inherent

planning capacity, I think, is so important that the agencies have

this. The military had to go through a huge adaptation after moving from operational combat to kind of make it up as they went

along.

And I think the real question, first of all, for an organization, we

see four State Department bureaus and one Central Command

(CENTCOM), which is immediately a recipe for disconnect, and you

have got many, many dedicated people in all of these agencies who

are, in effect, having to work around the system.

Funding, I think, is certainly an issue. One of my friends in J5

predicted the President would—when they announced the additional folks for PRTs, that, effectively, the State Department would

say, ‘‘yes,’’ publicly and quietly say, ‘‘no,’’ and it would become a

military mission, which it did in many ways with many officers

from the Air Force and the Navy having to come and backfill literally empty buildings because of a capacity issue, not a lack of resolve on the part of foreign service professionals to do that.

I guess my feeling there is I would almost like to see us go to

a toolbox where we certainly increase the capacity of the other

agencies where necessary to have expeditionary capability, have

funding more along the lines of a block grant so you can allocate

that practically by the team that comes together. Around that, organizationally, a toolbox, sometimes it might be better to lead with

an NGO, with people who don’t have the same face that become so

typical of our deployments. And it is no denigration of the great

work our young people have done but a challenge, nonetheless, to

take people into unfamiliar terrain.

And then, finally, the issue of Congress could be very troublesome in this, and I mean it more from an organizational and a

committee structure.

And, I guess, throwing all those things out on the table, I would

like your comments on any one of those pieces and specifically, perhaps, if one of you might comment on the end, on that role of Congress. Is our structure, committee-wise, an impediment to this?

And what would you recommend we take some steps internally to

begin to address this interagency issue in such a way that we don’t

become a stumbling block to a necessary reform?

And we will just throw it open to whoever would like to start.

Ambassador BODINE. Go down the table again?

Ambassador PASCUAL. On the toolbox, one of the things that has

been created and is not really extensively recognized is that there

is actually an agreed interagency planning framework that was developed. S/CRS led the process, it was done together with Joint

Forces Command. It was actually circulated to all of the combatant

commands. It was tested for over a year. It has been tested on the

civilian agency side, on countries like Sudan and Haiti, and it

works fairly well, and it is not fully recognized that it even exists.

So, actually, in fact, elevating that would be a starting point.

Second set of tools that exists is an essential task matrix, which

basically goes through and identifies in five critical areas the best

lessons from the interagency about the kinds of actions that need

to be taken immediately, what needs to be done to build local capacity, what needs to be done to build sustainability over time.

24

It is not a cookbook, but it is a pretty good checklist of questions

that you need to ask. If we had simply gone through that checklist

before the operation in Iraq, we would not have deployed, because

the answer to most of the initial questions would have been, ‘‘I

don’t know——

Mr. DAVIS OF KENTUCKY. I think that is my point; in fact, probably should qualify and say, preventing deployment is an issue in

this case as well.

Ambassador PASCUAL. Right.

Mr. DAVIS OF KENTUCKY. Because many voices I know quite well,

with extensive Middle East experience from my other life, were not

allowed at the table effectively, and I just see the structure being

a real problem on getting those other respective services.

Ambassador PASCUAL. And let me just say one thing on the

structure. I think that if there is a way to deal with setting budget

resolutions on these issues of national security that cuts across the

foreign affairs and the defense budget, that that is absolutely critical to do.

The 1207 versus S/CRS conflict response fund side-by-side allocation is a proxy for getting at that, but the reality is that you are

talking about questions of budget resolutions where those who are

dealing with the 150 account are looking at the constraints that

they face and they are saying, ‘‘We can’t accommodate them.’’ And

so, in effect, these kinds of capabilities just aren’t going to get funded in the foreign affairs budget.

Ambassador BODINE. Just to make a couple of comments, I think

that there are two elements, but the most important one, from your

point of view, is I think you bring up a very interesting point on

congressional structure, and the doctor mentioned the issue that

turf wars, when you try to do these in other places, has been a

problem and with funding being an element of the turf war.

The fact that you all are looking at this issue and grappling with

it as seriously as you are is great, but where is our Foreign Affairs

Committee, where is the intel? I mean, until there is some coordination and collaboration, if you like, on the congressional side, we

end up getting stuck in turf wars here.

There are a lot of things that we have talked about in terms of

staffing and funding and incentives that don’t necessarily come out

of this committee, and so some way of building some of those

bridges on the congressional side so that we can get to a single

funding mechanism, so that we can really get the economies of effort from this side as well.

And I think to the extent that you could get some of that at this

end of Pennsylvania Avenue, it would, again, help drive—when we

are talking about, for example, legislating NSPD–44 and S/CRS

and all the other initiatives that we have brought up, if even those

kinds of things were coming out of Congress as a joint armed services-foreign affairs initiative, to make it very clear that this is what

you all wanted. I think that would send a powerful signal.

The issue of Presidential will and what comes from the top, you

don’t have a lot of control over that, but that is very important.

What kind of signals are being sent as to who should have the lead,

who should be playing well together, what is the NSC role as a

planning and staffing mechanism? Those things have to be done,

25

and that is where you get at the toolbox. I think Congress can help

guide that. Some of it is going to be probably reflected in whoever

comes in in the new Administration.

Ms. FLOURNOY. Two quick comments, sir. On the funding issue,

I think that the block grant idea is very interesting, something that

gives more flexibility and more responsive funding, time-urgent

funding flexibility to the people in the field.

The good news here is there some precedent. ERMA, for example,

small account, Emergency Refugee Migration Assistance, has all

the right authorities. It is a great example where Congress realized

that if you wait until people come ask you in the midst of a refugee

crisis for the money they need and go through that process, it is

going to be too late by the time it shows up. So there was an agreement to give a little bit in terms of—give a lot more flexibility and

then impose some pretty substantial reporting requirements. I

think that that is a great model for this, sort of, conflict response

fund and is urgently needed.

On the committee question, I think there are two ways to go at

this. One is, sort of, a higher level of regular cooperation between

the Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committee, but I think you

could also consider a standing committee for oversight of interagency operations. And I think given that we are going to be doing

these things not necessarily on the scale of Iraq but a lot of preventive things, a lot of complex operations of various colors and types

over the coming years, these issues come up again and again and

again. And so some kind of structure that would bring together the

leadership or selected members from the key committees to regularly engage and iron out these issues, I think, would be extremely

helpful and very important to success.

By the way, this was a recommendation in our first goal beyond

Goldwater-Nichols report, and I think it was the one that was received with the most deafening silence up here on the Hill. [Laughter.]

Dr. BENSAHEL. I agree with what was just said about the importance of creating new committee structures and oversight, because

I think that the committee structure of Congress is one of the most

detrimental aspects of being able to fund these kinds of operations

across the civil-military gap the way that they need.

And while it really is a pleasure to see this committee take such

interest in civil-military cooperation, I would have been happier,

for one, if this invitation had come from the Foreign Affairs Committee, because I think they are the ones that have the job of appropriating the funds for these types of things as well. And so increased coordination. to the extent possible, between this committee and the Foreign Affairs Committee, to make sure that the

budgets for these kinds of operations can be increased, I think, is

extraordinarily important.

I once had a Canadian colleague ask me, in complete confusion,

why we didn’t just transfer $10 billion or so from the defense budget to the State Department budget and wouldn’t that solve all of

our problems? And in a parliamentary system you can do that. In

a system that we have in this country you can’t do that so easily,

but we need to get closer to that in terms of being able to allocate

funds rapidly and effectively where they need to be.

26

Mr. DAVIS OF KENTUCKY. Thank you.

Dr. SNYDER. Mrs. Davis, would you like another bite at the apple

before you have to leave?

Mrs. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Mr. Chairman, thank you so much.

I appreciate that, but I was going to go to another meeting that

Secretary Gates was at. I think he has left by now. You were all

so compelling I had to stay.

Dr. SNYDER. Well, if you are not to leave, then you are going to

wait your turn. [Laughter.]

Mrs. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. Please, Mr. Chairman, go ahead.

Dr. SNYDER. I wanted to ask, the NSC has come up several

times, and we have talked a lot about congressional role and—I always forget the name of the one—Ms. Hicks, Kathleen Hicks and

their report that Mr. Andrews was involved in and Mark Kirk and

some others. NSC was a prominent part of their state.

Several of you have mentioned NSC and the role they should

play. Would you discuss—of course, we talk about congressional

oversight and the job that this body, the Congress, should play in

making sure that we are achieving the national security objectives

through the systems that we set up.

The more that we put in the NSC, the less congressional oversight there will be. That is the nature of it. NSC folks don’t come

up here and testify. They won’t come testify. They will maybe come

if we say, ‘‘Please, oh, please,’’ for a private breakfast, but that is

about as far as we get.

Discuss that, if you would, please.

Dr. Bensahel, why don’t we start with you and go this way, for

a change?

Dr. BENSAHEL. Thank you.

Dr. SNYDER. We will let Ambassador Pascual get a chance to get

his thoughts together.

Dr. BENSAHEL. The NSC plays a crucial role in interagency coordination for these, and, frankly, much of that is done at the NSC

despite the fact——

Dr. SNYDER. No, I want to get to the issue—that may be true,

but how do I know that? How is Congress going to provide the kind

of oversight—the word, ‘‘failure,’’ has come out here several times

when you look back at the past in your interagency stuff. How do

we provide the kind of oversight because of putting things in the

NSC, the Presidential advisors?

Dr. BENSAHEL. Well, I think part of the way that you do that is

through the usual mechanisms of oversight with the various agencies themselves directly. Even though you can’t get oversight into

what is going on in the NSC, you can find out a great deal from

those who the NSC is supposed to coordinate, the extent to which

they are doing that and how that process is unfolding.

But, ultimately, I think that despite the fact that it is not easily

acceptable to congressional oversight, the NSC plays a very critical

role in setting up some of the planning parameters and issuing

some of the policy guidance that is essential for this process to

work properly. If it is doing its job right, you should be able to see

that manifesting itself throughout the rest of the government process, and, likewise, if it is not doing its job well.

27

Ms. FLOURNOY. I think when you were talking about planning

and integrating effort, you really can’t expect agencies to direct one

another. I think the NSC plays a critical role, but I understand

your concern.

I think one of the ways you can work around that is, in some

cases, to have a dual chair, and I know that Ambassador Pascual,

this is probably what came out of NSPD–44 in some cases, where

you have an NSC and departmental co-chair of, for example, a

planning process of a particular interagency team.

And so the President maintains the prerogative to have his staff

serving him in privacy and in confidentiality, et cetera, but you

also have a way to tap into people who are very well-informed

about that process who you can call and ask to testify, et cetera.

I underscore the point that Nora made, which is I think one of

the problems we have run into recently is that this Administration,

among others in our history, has chosen a lead agency model where

you put DOD in charge of Iraq and they are going to run the show

and bring everybody else to the table.

Well, that typically doesn’t work very well in our system, because

agencies don’t take direction, particularly with regard to resource

allocation, very well from one another. You need the honest broker

of the NSC, with the President—the imprimatur and the power

and the backing up of the President—to do that integration piece

effectively.

But if there is an agency that has a lead role or a predominant

role, you can make that agency co-chair with the NSC to try to,

sort of, bridge the gap.

Ambassador BODINE. I want to take a slightly different position.

We have been, as you said, agreeing so furiously. I agree that if

too much is vested in the NSC, you run the risk of not just the

oversight issue that you brought up but the NSC morphing into an

operational organization. And the few times that the NSC has gotten into operational issues, they have generally not been a good

thing.

And part of that is because not only does Congress not have oversight over the NSC but to some extent even sometimes the agencies

don’t necessarily know what they are doing. So I would be hesitant

to put too much of this into the NSC formally. The NSC’s role is

to coordinate, to collaborate, to be the honest broker, but I was involved in the Office of Counterterrorism for about four years, and

we had a co-chair, at least we did have a co-chair for a while, and

it was clear that State had the lead role as the coordinator—and

that was the name that was used—and that the other agencies

were expected to provide staff and resources. And for awhile it

worked extremely well. And I think that this is what S/CRS can

do.

Other agencies don’t like to give money to someone else, but I

think, again, if we are talking about a mandate, if we are talking

about legislation, if we can get it from Biden-Lugar to Biden-Lugar

and several others, that is doable.

NSC should set policy. You need an agency that is responsible

for the implementation of that and for the day-to-day coordination

of that. That should not really be at the NSC. I think you do need

supported agency and then supporting agencies. We have had

28

times when that has worked and it has worked very well, and I

would suggest that model.

Ambassador PASCUAL. Let me go back and try to draw on the

analogy that I created between S/CRS and the joint staff of the

military. I think everybody here would recognize that the joint staff

in the military is absolutely necessary. It should be in the Pentagon. I think everyone would recognize that there is a necessity for

a director for defense in the NSC, and they have a relationship

with one another, which is also linked, the relationship to the Office of the Secretary of Defense as well as to the civilian agencies.

On stabilization and reconstruction issues, if indeed this model

of S/CRS as a joint staff on issues related to conflict is the one that

we want to pursue, their are link back to the NSC is one director

who is within the directorate that is responsible for humanitarian

affairs that reports to the deputy national security advisor who is

responsible for the G8 process and trade issues, who then passes

on information to the principal deputy national security advisor,

who then reports to the principal national security advisor.

In other words, there is no effective linkage here. The individuals

who are involved in the NSC are tremendously dedicated—or the

individual—but there is no structure here.

And the reason that we come back to the importance of an NSC

function and role is that let us say you had a reshaped interagency

committee that would be brought together on, let us pick Lebanon—not to put it in the context of Iraq or Afghanistan—and

there is a particular issue that needed White House attention and

resolution and we wanted to bring it back to the deputy’s process

and the principal’s process. There is no immediate and obvious link

back to the NSC process.

The individual who is responsible for stabilization and reconstruction is constantly struggling for a voice internally within the

NSC and other regional bureaus. You don’t get the same thing on

defense issues, you don’t get the same thing on intelligence issues,

because there is an established office there that has greater weight.

What we are talking about here is a senior director and maybe

three directors, not a huge structure.

Ambassador BODINE. Yes. And I would agree with that.

Dr. SNYDER. Mrs. Davis for five minutes.

Mrs. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. I think more of a comment.

I am really interested, Doctor, in what you were saying about the

fact that there really aren’t any good examples to look at, any good

models of many of our friends elsewhere. And I was struck when

we happened to visit the Royal College of Defence studies and they

were talking about how they pull in the military people international to be part of that effort, and I asked them, ‘‘Well, what

about the diplomatic corps, is anybody over there,’’ and he said,

‘‘We can’t get anybody from anywhere, not just the U.S., I mean,

anywhere, to do that.’’ And it is partly because their bench is really

tight, and they are not able to draw upon people to take that kind

of time out.

The other thing that struck me on our trip to Afghanistan last

week was that one of the military liaisons happened to be an intel

officer, and I thought, ‘‘Wow, what are you doing here? I would

rather have you working on intel.’’ He said, ‘‘Well, you know, it is

29

part of the career ladder, and we have to check off this box, basically.’’

That is striking that that is the case, and so I think, you know,

it is really clear that we don’t have that capacity, and trying to develop that capacity is a major task.

You have addressed lots of ways of trying to do that, and I think

part of our task is trying to figure out, ‘‘Okay, where can the Congress really push in that so we don’t have the situation that we

certainly found ourselves in Iraq?’’

I think the one book that struck me, ‘‘Imperial Life in the Emerald City,’’ and I think by my second or third time it was real apparent to me that that was a problem. And that is partly where I

think a lot of us have come from in trying to figure out, ‘‘Okay, how

do we get there?’’ Because there are a lot of wonderful people in

this country who would like to be part of that effort, but we have

to try to find a way to do that.

Ambassador BODINE. As somebody who was in the Emerald City

and did not feel that she was living an imperial life at all——

Mrs. DAVIS OF CALIFORNIA. No, hardly. I agree with that.

Ambassador BODINE. I know, and I know the regime, that some

of that was ironic.

I think one of the lessons from that was there was an active exclusion of career professionals throughout the civilian agencies,

particularly in the early days in Iraq, and I think that comes

through very much in that book.

By and large, State and, you say, people will step up to the plate,

but to kind of beat the poor sports metaphor to death, the bench

is very, very shallow. And once you have gone through about 2,000

of us, that is it. But some of that, I think, also was a reflection of

a political decision on who do we want to staff these. Again, I think

how we vest this and congressional oversight as to who is going out

to do this is important.

I think another point that is very important is that we not think

of this solely in terms of crisis response, but we need to back this

up a little bit as to what kind of structures, interagency, funding,

staffing, training that we need to get into crises, to get into imploding states early enough so that the military will be there as providing the security and providing some capability and assets that no

one else has but that we don’t have ourselves in the position that

the only thing we can do is respond to a crisis after the implosion,

that we can get in there a little bit earlier.

Ms. FLOURNOY. Could I just add, I would agree that while there

is no good model out there that we can replicate in terms of somebody who has really got it right, other countries, I do think that

there is an emerging consensus of at least an 80 percent solution.

I mean, I think most of the things that have been said today there

is a lot more agreement than there is disagreement on at least

some of the major elements of reform.

I just want to make a comment about timing of reform. When

you have looked historically at major congressional reform, whether

it was the creation of Special Operations Command, whether it was

Goldwater-Nichols, there tends to be a pattern of acknowledged

operational failure at some level.

30

A period of serious investigation, which is what you are doing

right now, and internal dialogue within the Congress brought

sometimes broader national dialogue on the issue. And then reform. And I think we are in that period of we are acknowledging,

not capital ‘‘F’’ failure but recurring failures at the operational

level that are not exclusive to any Administration or any operation.

This is a pattern over the last 15 years.

And we are now trying to wrestle with, what do we do about it.

I think once we are through the, sort of, silly season of Presidential

campaigns where any mention of anything becomes a political football, once we can get back to sort of a rational bipartisan discourse,

which I applaud this committee for hosting, even in the midst of

a silly season, I think that in the new year there is going to be a

real window for action, at least to begin down the road of the reforms where there is very broad and deep consensus on these are

some of the right things to do.

And I would hope that you would, sort of, seize the initiative in

that timeframe. And I think you are likely to get support on the

executive side, no matter who comes in as our next President.

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Akin, for five minutes.

Mr. AKIN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I share your optimism

about this as a project, in a way, because, first of all, this committee being a subcommittee we operate pretty much not at a very political level; we are more into solving problems. And there does

seem to be, although the committee is not full of the members, but

the members that are on this committee, liberal, conservative,

there is the consensus that you need decent organization in this

area and that things are not right.

And so that is something that gives us room for optimism that

in a political world we can put solutions together when there is a

common understanding of a problem. And that is where we do well.

Of course, the biggest thing working against this is somebody

has been here for 35 years and they are on life support and they

are drinking formaldehyde to stay alive and they are head of a

committee finally and they don’t want to give up any jurisdiction.

That is the surprisingly rigid structure that Congress has, politically.

There are a couple of different things I need some help on. The

first is, I am just trying to think of America as it relates to foreign

countries. I am trying to get up at the 50,000-foot kind of level.

And, in general, I think of the point person for America in a foreign

country as being the ambassador, and yet we also have different

locations around the globe where the 7th fleet has a command vessel and that is the center of military, sort of, organization for a geographic area.

Then we have these—you know, we now just made Africa, and

we have Europe and all this. So you have this, sort of, DOD piece

of it as well.

I am trying to picture from an organizational point of view—I

would think, first of all, it would be logical that if I am some government person in a foreign country, it would be nice to know who

is the point man for America. I mean, I would think that would—

you need to have, sort of, a single person who is the top. And then

it would seem like to me how that then—I am trying to figure in

31

my own mind if you were the executive, how would you set that

structure up? That was my first question.

My second question is, Goldwater-Nichols we did jointness.

I think it was, Ms. Flournoy, you mentioned something about incentives. You get promoted. Promoted? Now, you have got my attention. You create incentives so that people need certain spots in

their careers.

It seemed to me that we had jointness between Navy and Army

and those other kinds of things. Does it make sense to have that

same jointness so that State Department literally trains with the

military and the military trains with State, to a certain degree, so

that there is, sort of, at least awareness of the structure that the

other people are coming from?

Does it make sense that in State Department that you have at

least a section of State where people are told, ‘‘Something has just

happened in this country and you are going over there,’’ not asking

if you are going over there. This is one of those things, ‘‘America

needs you,’’ just the same as the military.

Do we need to have at least certain people that volunteer for that

type of service? I am not saying everybody in State would want to

do that but that there would be at least teams or groups of people

that would say, ‘‘This is what I signed up for.’’

So that is my question.

What is the interface with a foreign country and the U.S. government? What does that look like, and then how do you build that

jointness?

Thank you.

Ambassador PASCUAL. Maybe if I might pick up on the first

point, a little bit on both points. On the point person in another

country, Barbara is—since both of us have ambassador at the start

of our titles from previous incarnations, I mean there is one place

in U.S. legislation where there is one individual who is the President’s representative and is responsible for representing the United

States, and overseas that is the ambassador.

There are tensions with that. I will tell you, when the head of

European Command flies into your country and has an aircraft and

comes in with about 15, 20 military along with him, they look at

the ambassador and they, sort of, look at, ‘‘Where is your army?’’

And it does create a striking difference. And so there is an issue

there with resources.

But I think that one of the things that we stand for as a country

is civilian control of the military, and if we want other countries

to abide by that, we have to practice what we preach. And if we

put the military in control of an interagency process that is looking

at the future construction of a country, then we are simply violating something that we don’t stand for, and we are setting an example that many countries are all too happy to follow. And so I think

reinforcing the civilian capacity is absolutely critical.

On the issue of how you create that jointness, this is one of the

reasons why all of us have talked about some reserve capability,

and I think that the creation of what the State Department has

proposed as the active response corps is so key. Because it basically

puts people in the jobs where their responsibility for two years in

that job is to engage in training and operations where they are

32

ready to move and deploy immediately when they are necessary.

And in the meantime, they have a regular day job, so if they are

not being deployed, they would work on conflict prevention in Africa, for example.

And you are not then looking at where those teams are going to

come from in order to do it. These are the individuals who also can

be engaged in more effective joint exercises with the military.

When I was the head of S/CRS, one of the things that we tried

to do was a lot of exercises with the military. We had some great

exercises. In Southern Command, the experience that we had, in

some cases, was they were saying by the extent of interagency engagement that they had, it became the most realistic planning

process that they had actually ever gone through.

But the problem is that we just don’t have the numbers of people

to keep up with the military and these kinds of planning processes,

and so I think if there can be the resources made available to in

fact actually create this active corps, then that is what is necessary

to in fact also create jointness and make it a much more viable concept.

Ambassador BODINE. As the other person sitting up here with AM-B as her first name, I would very much support what Carlos just

said. There is a big difference, on the civilian lead and all of that,

between ambassadors and Commanders in Chief (CINCs), having

served and worked out in the region.

The CINC flies in with his own airplane and all of his staff and

everything else, and there is a great big ship off your coast. And

that is nice. His idea of engagement is 24 hours on the ground and

me taking him around and a dinner party.

My job is to be there for four years, on the ground, every day.

My staff is there, on the ground, every day. And so when the government is thinking about who they should be dealing with, who

is representing the President’s representative but also interagency,

and even a very small embassy is interagency.

That is where they look and that is where they should look, and

that is where we should encourage them to look. And to the extent

that we start projecting that there is an alternative to the ambassador, we start breaking this down very badly. It was a discussion

that I had with a number of CINCs is, ‘‘We are here every single

day and meeting with the minister of defense is not engagement.’’

So the——

Mr. AKIN. Could I stop you just a second, because I just came

back from over in Japan and South Korea——

Ambassador BODINE. Yes, right.

Mr. AKIN [continuing]. Two different countries but in a way there

are some similarities here. I am picturing part of the value of our

relations with those countries, as they add a tremendous level of

stability to a region that might not be so stable, particularly with

China there, but, certainly, North Korea.

Now, from a geopolitical point of view, if we have joint military

operations with Japan and we have joint military operations with

South Korea, that provides not only additional capability

militarily——

Ambassador BODINE. Right.

33

Mr. AKIN [continuing]. But it helps bring those countries, kind of,

up to speed in their military capability.

So I am thinking, okay, now I am the commander in chief and

I have got these military things going, and that can overshadow

what is happening over at State.

So how do you see those kinds of—because that is a very valuable type of outreach to build contact with——

Ambassador BODINE. Oh, it is a critical outreach, and in very

poor countries where I have served, for example, the military’s ability to come in and do Medical Civic Action Programs (MEDCAPs)

and Dental Civic Action Programs (DENTCAPs) and Veterinary

Civic Action Programs (VETCAPs), and all of this other kind of

thing, was critically important. This was very useful training. But

it is an element of a relationship——

Mr. AKIN. Right.

Ambassador BODINE [continuing]. And one of the jobs that we

have to do as ambassadors and as State is also to get those kinds

of assets and resources coordinated with what we are doing more

broadly and not think that they are a substitute. As I said earlier,

it is nice to come in and vaccinate the goats, but I need an AID

presence that is large enough, flexible enough and funded enough

that I can help the Yemenis develop a veterinary service. The joint

exercises are great but they are not a substitute; they are a part.

Mr. AKIN. Sure.

Ambassador BODINE. I found in my career in the Middle East

that the relationships with the CINCs was a very close one, very

supportive, very constructive, very mutually reinforcing. I did not

see him as a competitor, largely because I assumed my position.

And in most cases, they didn’t really see it as an either/or. We don’t

want to do something that starts setting it up as a parallel.

And this gets back to what I was talking about as supported and

supporting commands. This is a concept the military is very comfortable with.

On the incentives——

Mr. AKIN. Well, so that is helpful for me to know that, that the

CINCs understand the need to have you there and for you to coach

them in the culture and——

Ambassador BODINE. Absolutely. I mean, you know, we are sending out briefing memos before they arrive, they get off the plane,

we are talking to them in a car, ‘‘This is who you need to meet

with, this is who you need to talk about, this is what you need to

do, this is what I need from you, this is what I can do for you.’’

And I have probably worked with ten different central command

CINCs, and in almost all cases, it was a very good supportive relationship where we worked closely and came up with some great

things.

I want to say, the incentives are a great idea but not melding,

not the idea that we are going to homogenize these. I would say

from, again, my personal experience is that people in the State Department want to do this training, want to do these exercises,

would like to do the outreach. We just simply don’t have the personnel to do it. There is not an institutional aversion to it, it is just

there are only 7,000.

34

Ms. FLOURNOY. I hesitate to comment on the first issue, because

I am not an ambassador, but through my observation I think where

there is room for improvement is in some of the, sort of, strategic

planning or absence thereof that goes on on an interagency basis

for what is it the U.S. is trying to do, in a given country, over a

given period of time and to try to strengthen the interagency dialogue on those issues at the country level and then at the regional

level.

You see a lot of ad hoc activity where the combatant command

(COCOM) because it is the entity that is in the region at that level

will invite ambassadors of the region to a conference to talk for

what it is we are trying to achieve. I would love to see that kind

of thing hosted by a civilian entity.

But I think there is room for improvement in more, sort of—beyond crisis response, more strategic planning at the regional level.

I also think that you are seeing here, too, pretty exceptional ambassadors who understood that their job was to lead interagency

country teams, lead interagency teams to get jobs done. I don’t

think that is universally true. The best ambassadors understand

that. I don’t know that we always prepare everyone who takes the

position of ambassador to understand you are not just the State

Department representative, you are not just a political representative for the President, but you are the interagency integrator for

this country.

On the incentives piece, I mean, we have talked about how to

incentivize the civilian side, whether it is pay incentives or promotion incentives, other type of things. There is lots that can be

done there.

I just wanted for this committee to also highlight something on

the military side. Right now—and this is probably a larger discussion to be had with Chairman Skelton—right now, we define very

narrowly the particular positions for which a military officer can

get joint credit. So there are lots of seriously joint and interagency

experiences that people are having on Joint Task Force (JTF)

staffs, on COCOM staffs, on interagency staffs where you have officers spending two and three years doing these highly interagency

things but not getting joint credit for it.

I think given the increasing number of demands we are putting

on officers to collect all these brass rings and then make it to general officer, increasingly packed in a short amount of time, one of

the things we should look at is opening up the list of things that

count as joint credit, to include, I would argue, more interagency

experiences so that you would also incentivize more participation

on the military side to come over to civilian agencies, to come over

to predominantly civilian staffs and interagency staffs.

Dr. BENSAHEL. Just quickly, on your second question, the issue

of establishing the right incentives, in my mind, is the only way to

effectively address the interagency problems, because you can’t legislate cooperation, you can’t change an agency’s culture. The only

thing that you can do is make it in their interest to do what you

want them to do. And that applies at all levels.

There need to be incentives created for agencies to cooperate

with each other bilaterally, not just through the direction of the

NSC, but through some bilateral—lateral, I should say, mechaVerDate 22-MAR-2001 14:26 Nov 20, 2008 Jkt 042901 PO 00000 Frm 00038 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\110-109\029160.000 HAS2 PsN: HAS2
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nism. There need to be incentives for agencies to let their personnel

participate, particularly in field deployments, as I described before.

But then also there needs to be the right incentives, as Michele has

addressed, for individuals to volunteer and for them to have the

right career progress ahead of them so that undertaking these

kinds of operations and experiences is not detrimental to them. You

need the incentives to be lined up at all levels in order to mitigate

some of the worst aspects of interagency competition.

Mr. AKIN. Thank you.

Dr. SNYDER. If you can hang on for about ten more minutes, I

will take five minutes and we will go to Mr. Davis for five minutes,

and then we will be right about lunchtime.

I wanted to share a quick anecdote, as we are talking about the

ambassador on the ground. I think what your phrase was—Ms.

Fournoy, you referred to the ambassador as being the interagency

facilitator or someone like that.

Some years ago, I visited Sierra Leone right as the U.N. troops

were going out at the end of that war to be peacekeepers, and Joe

Melrose was our ambassador there. And there was, I think, a 200-

Brit military force that was providing training for the new Sierra

Leone army, and there were three U.S. troops there so that it was

a joint training force.

And one of them was a Marine—I have two marines on my staff

sitting in the back, so probably why I am telling this story. This

young marine was a tough guy and literally when he arrived by

helicopter into Sierra Leone he was with a women in her 60’s who

was working for an American NGO, she was an American citizen,

who was wearing a neck brace. They got off the helicopter, she got

into a private car and went to her place outside of Freetown where

she was going to live and work some time.

That marine, because of the Marine Corps rules, could not leave

Freetown overnight, and it just frustrated—and Ambassador Melrose did not have the authority to make that decision. It was fine

with him that that marine go outside of the area. And I don’t want

to take my time for a comment on that, but it really brought home

the intricacies of some of these relationships that can mess up the

ability to fulfill a mission. We got that corrected, but it shouldn’t

have been corrected by a Member of Congress.

I wanted to make one comment, Ms. Flournoy, and then ask a

question. You referred to the Presidential campaign as a the silly

season.

Ms. FLOURNOY. I am sorry.

Dr. SNYDER. I want to pick on you about that.

Ms. FLOURNOY. In a moment of too much candor, I am afraid.

Dr. SNYDER. It is the most vital part of this country’s democracy.

It has its moments of silliness, but it is not the silly season. And

if we think that we can come back in January or February or

March of next year as Members of Congress and do some kind of

dramatic first change in 50 years in how national security policy

is made and conducted and not one Presidential candidate talk

about these issues between now and November, or November and

swearing in, or no mention or reference in the inaugural speech, I

think that is going to be tough.

36

I was struck last night, and disappointed last night. In fact, I,

publicly, at our last full committee hearing when Secretary Gates

testified, I pulled out his Kansas State speech and said, ‘‘Mr. Secretary, this is a great basis for an inaugural speech,’’ which is a

wonderful way to flatter people, right. He got all flustered because

he doesn’t want to have anything to do with that. But it is. It is

talking about a vision for the future of American national security.

Last night, we got a mention of the PRTs by the President, but

there was no mention about, ‘‘let us pull together and set this up

for our next President. We have got some problems, institutional

problems that the Clinton Administration had, that this Administration has had. Why not spend this year—we have got Mr. Davis

and Mrs. Davis working together, we have got others working together. Why not spend the next 10 or 12 months and work on that

issue together in a non-partisan, bipartisan way?’’

It didn’t get a mention.

So I am not coming down on you hard, Ms. Flournoy, but I think

part of our job, and I would hope part of your job, is to make this

issue part of this Presidential campaign in some capacity, in some

way, because, otherwise, to think that we can somehow hatch an

egg out with the limited resources we have come January of next

year that has not been—what is the word for keeping the egg

warm—incubated, that is going to be a tough——

Ms. FLOURNOY. Sir, I apologize for my moment of sarcasm, but

in terms of actions speaking louder than words, these recommendations came out of Beyond Goldwater-Nichols work that I have done.

And I have personally briefed three, and hoping to get to at least

four, of the major candidates, two on each side, on exactly these

issues.

So I am, my comment aside, taking it very seriously.

We don’t want this to become a partisan issue was my point, a

political football, but we want every candidate to agree that this is

good governance for the United States.

Dr. SNYDER. I would love to see the candidates fight over what

they think is the best way to bring about interagency reform.

Ms. FLOURNOY. Right.

Dr. SNYDER. I think that would be a wonderful discussion and

debate to have. And it may have its moments of silliness, but I

think it is—I appreciate you doing that, because if we think this

issue is important, then we ought to have people standing up at

these town meetings and saying, ‘‘What about interagency reform?’’

Now, that is probably not going to happen, but there will be moments of serious foreign policy discussions, and I would hope that

these would come up.

I want to ask Dr. Bensahel, in just the remaining few seconds

I have, you said you can’t change culture. I think you can change

culture. I mean, culture is set by leadership. Bad culture is bad

habit, and I think there are a variety of ways that you can change

the culture of an institution if you decide that is important to

change that culture and that culture is hurting. And part of it is

just educating people that that culture is hurting.

I think that is the strength of Secretary Gates’ speech. What it

said is that there is this sense going on within the Pentagon that

says, ‘‘Something ain’t right, and it may not all be us.’’ And there

37

is a changing culture. Who would have thought that we would have

a secretary of defense making the most eloquent statement we

have had in the last several years about why we need to do something for State Department funding. So I think that is a change of

culture.

Mr. Davis, for five minutes, and then we would better let you all

go to lunch.

Mr. DAVIS OF KENTUCKY. Just taking from Chairman Snyder’s

comments, I have talked to several of the Presidential candidates,

and I began this effort a year ago. I know there are other fellow

travelers in this that are raising the issue as well. And in the early

discussions, it was very clear that they, in many cases, did not

have a clue that this was a critical issue. Some have been successful executives and they think, ‘‘Oh, my personality will do this,’’ not

understanding the process.

To Dr. Bensahel’s comment on not having incentives to change,

in the corporate sector, the incentive is continued employment, and

I think that the models to look to for radical institutional change

to adapt to the marketplace is to go out into the commercial world.

If you look at what Motorola did, if you look at how Toyota, this

young, provocative upstart came in and forced the transformation

of American manufacturing because of an entirely different paradigm.

What they were able to do, from a conceptual or a spatial standpoint, is accomplish exactly what we are talking about today. Is it

perfect? By no means. There are always the challenges that you

face.

I think what drove that, having seen part of that from the inside

in the manufacturing world, it is the old statement, ‘‘The greatest

source of inspiration is desperation,’’ when you realize there is a

need to change.

Speaking of silly season as an aside, there is one. Come visit my

primary in the spring with the person who rides on UFOs and the

indicted felon. I think I can win in a three-way, but it is going to

be a very interesting few months. [Laughter.]

But back to the—I just wanted to salve your wound there for a

moment. [Laughter.]

But coming back to this issue, I traveled to the Middle East with

some of the marines sitting in the back of the room, and for an

Army guy that is a tough thing anyway, but I have to tell you,

talking to every one of them, this issue, interagency reform is the

issue, every service group that I have been with it is being talked

about here in the Armed Services Committee based on that old desperation to address the ultimate root cause. Foreign Affairs hasn’t

had an authorization in, what, 12 years?

Ambassador BODINE. Yes.

Mr. DAVIS OF KENTUCKY. Fourteen years?

Ambassador BODINE. And when we get it it is——

Mr. DAVIS OF KENTUCKY. Yes. I mean, because they are giving—

and I think it is just a misguided priority, frankly, of just talking

about resolutions of things that probably create things for you all

to do on crisis messaging and things like that in different parts of

the world.

38

At the end of the day, there are a lot of members on that committee in a wide number that want to see these types of changes that

we have seen in the interagency reform caucus group that has been

recruited on both sides—some folks who can’t even be in a room

together on any other issue but at least they will agree on this.

And the issue of the NSC—and this is really where I would like

folks to comment for a moment—the one area of objection that we

had from the Project for National Security Reform study, which I

think some of you are participating in that great collection of talents to direct it—a stumbling block to getting that done last January and February when we were in hearings in the full committee,

it was very clear it was the National Security Council staff with

the objection points to preventing that study from going forward

when we were going to talk about probably 23 different case studies that showed this process problem that is very embedded.

We finally got around that, but I think the agency itself is its

own kind of shadow for—the organization is its own kind of shadow

agency. I have even seen visa problems fixed going through the

NSC. I don’t want to even know how that happened. But got the

problem fixed.

But, nonetheless, there is a process unto itself. And this integration, I think, is going to be critical at the end of the day.

I would highly encourage the folks in the corporate world who

have done this to come into the dialogue, specifically since 50 of the

largest 100 economies in the world are companies. Wal-Mart, if it

were a nation, is the eighth largest trading partner of China. And

I am not advocating copying all their marketing practices and

things like this, but it is this constant adaptation and integration

to change that would be of value.

One thing that I would ask you to comment on, and this might

be the radical question, what about moving to a point to have the

integration change in the commands themselves, to go to something very hybrid and different, to, for example, in an Africa command, we have an integrated, diplomatic and military response, to

have the first or second person, depending on what has to be the

more lead focus, to be a civilian working hand in hand with the

military?

And if it switches to the other way, then, obviously, some adaptation, but maintaining maybe a tighter integration so you don’t

have, kind of, a pro-consul on one side with his patrolling guard

and centurions all around him and then the poor diplomat in the

toga hitching a ride on the chariot as he is coming by, going off to

the crisis. [Laughter.]

Ambassador BODINE. I do applaud that with African Command

(AFRICOM) that a State Department person is the number two,

and I think that that is, in many ways, an improvement over the

political advisor position, which is what we normally have, which

was extremely personality dependent. If the commander chose to

listen to the POLAD, it was great, and if they didn’t, there really

wasn’t anything to do.

I would certainly not want this to be seen as a substitute or, to

go back, an infringement on the ambassador’s prerogatives. They

have a regional focus; they don’t have a day-to-day, on-the-ground

capability. I think that that is an improvement but we have to be

39

very careful that we avoid what Carlos so eloquently talked about

is both the perception and, in some cases, the reality that we are

leading with our military in too many aspects of our foreign policy

abroad. There are a lot of reasons that we shouldn’t be doing that.

And, again, sort of, getting into this supported-supporting command issue is an important one on how we conduct ourselves, how

we manage the resources, what kind of a message that we are giving. I think it is an improvement.

I would like just very quickly on your deployment story from Sierra Leone, that is one issue that I did have with regional commanders is that they were making decisions on who could come

into my country and do what, in many cases, overrode my own

judgments and my own—and they were defining deployed forces

not as something like the photograph behind you, which anybody

would understand that what goes on in Afghanistan and Iraq is deployed forces, but two guys from the Coast Guard in polo shirt and

Dockers who were going to come in, work out of my embassy and

work on a Coast Guard for the Yemenis was suddenly declared to

be a deployed force. And I lost control over when and how these

people could come in. And at that point, it started to become—we

were not working as well together.

Ms. FLOURNOY. Sir, If I might just add, one of the things I have

recommended in past work is thinking about the notion of regional

security councils where you would have an interagency entity—

might be physical, might be virtual—but with an original ambassador appointed, whose job is not to usurp the authorities of the

country ambassadors but really to have a full-time job of coordination. There are so many of these, whether terrorists, weapons of

mass destruction (WMD)—I mean, pick your issue, it is very difficult to work these country by country. The things flow across borders very quickly in terms of what we need to contend with.

And I know that, actually, Ambassador Pascual has played a regional ambassador role before, so maybe he will comment on this,

but I think having an interagency entity that is not just ad hoc but

meets on a regular basis to try to work the regional integration

issues would be very useful. The key would be, can you do it without it just becoming another layer of bureaucracy, which would not

be helpful.

Ambassador PASCUAL. I think one of the strengths that we have

had as a country is our embassy presence and at one time our

USAID presence around the world, and a lot of that has shrunk,

particularly USAID has shrunk.

And one of the things, I think, that was driving Secretary Gates’

statement is a recognition that in a world that is becoming increasingly complex, we need individuals who are posted on the ground

with historical and language and cultural knowledge to be able to

understand what the problems are to design solutions and to oversee their implementation. And you only get that with a deployed

capacity.

One of the things I would just underscore is that strengthening

the capacity to have that country-specific understanding and

knowledge is still key and is still a central part of our national security requirement and it is a role that I think an ambassador

heads up, but it requires a whole interagency involvement.

40

I think that there is a strong rationale for having a stronger and

better integrated regional function, because, as Michele just said,

many of the problems that you are dealing with are transnational,

whether it is transnational terrorism or risk of proliferation or the

role that insurgents play across country, the inner linkages you

have between drug trades and insurgency. You need to look at

these across countries.

And so having a capacity to have a strategic vision in that way

I think makes a lot of sense. How you organize it and whether you

put it into a combatant command is worth debating, and it gets at

this question of who is leading and who is driving U.S. policy. But

I think that the question needs to be asked.

A point that I would underscore, Mr. Chairman, in changing culture is the importance of leadership. And as you just said, Secretary Gates, in his leadership, has played a fundamental role in

changing the way that people think about the interagency and the

integration of civilian and military functions.

And if we bring this back to the NSC, you know, we have had

NSCs of Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft and Sandy Berger

and Tony Lake and Condi Rice, and those are fundamentally different entities and structures, and what it reflects is that depending on the leadership that you have at the top, you can get very

different results.

And so the kind of oversight that you provide of the interagency

process—and here I understand your frustration, you can’t call a

national security advisor in to testify—but it is absolutely necessary to continue to have that check and balance.

The final point I would just make is that weak as some of the

international experiments might be—and Nora did a great job of

laying out what some of the problems are—you still have in the EU

a reserve mechanism that has 200 monitors, 200 judges, 200 administrators, 5,000 police. The Germans have a reserve mechanism

that they run through an NGO called ZIF. The Canadians have a

$140 million conflict response fund. Even the U.N. has a $250 million respond fund for peace-building, which we, by the way, do not

contribute a penny to right now.

Others are getting out there and doing this, and we are falling

behind in the kind of experimentation that we are doing, because

we are not putting forward the resources.

Dr. SNYDER. Dr. Bensahel, would you like the last word?

Dr. BENSAHEL. Yes, please.

Dr. SNYDER. Go ahead.

Dr. BENSAHEL. A final note on the changing of organizational cultures. Of course, it is possible to change them. What I meant to emphasize is, it is almost impossible to do from the outside. It really

comes from the leadership of those organizations and has to filter

down from the top to people throughout the agency.

It is also very important for people within an organization to believe that something fundamentally wrong is happening, whether

it is failure or desperation, that the current way of conducting business is not succeeding and something needs to be changed.

And I think that now you are seeing that within the Department

of Defense, not just within the leadership but among the soldiers

who are on the ground and conducting U.S. operations.

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I think in 2004–2005, the early-ish days of deployments in Iraq,

what you heard from a lot of soldiers who had on-the-ground experience was that the military could solve these problems. ‘‘If the

State Department isn’t coming, if civilian authorities aren’t coming,

we are just going to have to do it ourselves.’’

And I think we have seen a very profound shift in the last year

or two to statements from people from the very top, from Secretary

Gates on down to privates who are coming back from deployment,

saying, ‘‘That is not the solution. We can’t do it, we need help to

do it. The only solution is to build up civilian capacity.’’

That is a very powerful message being sent from the people that

we are asking to go serve the country and conduct these operations.

And I think that because that culture is changing within that organization from a perceived failure to succeed, as much as perhaps

could be the case, we may get some impetus for reform.

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you all for being here. I will give you the opportunity as a question from me for the record, if you all have any

additional written comments you would like to make, you have, I

don’t know, some time to submit those to staff, and we will include

those as part of the record and distribute them to the committee

staff.

Thank you all again for being here. This committee stands adjourned.

[Whereupon, at 12:18 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]

A P P E N D I X

JANUARY 29, 2008

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QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MR. CONAWAY

Mr. CONAWAY. You asked a very important question about the effectiveness of

interagency coordination and collaboration during real-world operations if it is not

practiced at home. Obviously, the ability to coordinate effectively is severely degraded when not practiced sufficiently prior to deployment. But the opportunities

for that very training exist today. Actually, interagency workshops in 2006 developed an agreement among DoD, DoS, and USAID to implement SSTR training initiatives (specifically regarding PRTs) that would integrate the appropriate USG

agencies into DoD pre-deployment training.

Do you have any knowledge of the progress of this integrated training? Are there

examples where it’s working well? If not, what are the challenges that continue to

prevent this invaluable opportunity?

Ambassador BODINE. There has been progress on interagency pre-deployment

training and other steps taken toward improving interagency cooperation and collaboration, many run out of the NSPD–44 Training Workshop ‘‘Training, Education,

Exercises and Experimentation’’ co-chaired by State/S/CRS, DOD and USAID.

In talking with those most directly involved, there is broad agreement that the

introduction of training, education and lessons learned has improved the effectiveness of those in the field, and that with each training iteration; the training becomes more relevant to those to be deployed. There is also broad agreement that

there are serious challenges that need to be addressed if the USG is going to realize

the full potential of these changes, not just for the PRTs and not just for Iraq and

Afghanistan, but our ability to respond quickly and effectively in future post-conflict, pre-conflict and disaster situations. We need to not only figure out how to do

Iraq (and Afghanistan) better, but how to avoid the next Iraq.

Some of the positive steps taken to date include:

> Interagency PRT Training: Includes Iraq pre-deployment training coordinated

through State’s Foreign Service Institute and Afghanistan training at Ft.

Bragg. Each offering of these courses works to improve on the strengths and

grow beyond the weaknesses of the previous offering, with feedback from recent graduates.

> A host of war colleges and institutes—NDU, PKSOI, Army War College, and

Naval Post-graduate—have done a variety of interagency training, simulations etc. on the gamut of R&S issues.

> Exercises: The military has long included civilian agency personnel in its exercises. I personally participated in a number well over ten years ago with

both the Army and the Marine Corps. This has ramped up considerably in

recent years and State/S/CRS regularly participates in at least four large integrated exercises. These include:

Æ United Action: One of the first to include State/S/CRS in the planning

stages, it focuses on the three D’s (defense, development and diplomacy)

and covers the spectrum of conflict prevention to post-conflict.

Æ Multinational Experiment-5 (MNE–5): Focuses on multinational, interagency, comprehensive engagement and includes government, non-governmental and others. Includes crisis prevention.

Æ Blue Advance: A SouthCom initiative that has in recent years sought increased civilian participation. State/S/CRS had a team of 84 civilians at the

last Blue Advance.

Æ Certain Trust: For newly-minted civilian affairs officers at Ft. Bragg, it

mimics field-level interaction one might find in a PRT.

All of this is quite impressive, especially on paper, and certainly speaks to recognition on the part of the military that they need to train and exercise for an interagency environment and for non-kinetic operations. This is all to the good. In talking with a number of military officers and others involved, these and other opportunities all enhance the military’s understanding and appreciate of the capabilities,

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organization, skill sets, mind sets of their civilian agency and, in some cases, NGO

counterparts.

As one military officer described it, it reminds us we are all one government, that

we each have strengths and weaknesses, and that together we can build on the

strengths and cover/compensate for the others (including the military’s) weaknesses.

As someone who has done civilian-military work her entire career, as has this army

officer, it is reassuring to see that the mutual respect and sense of shared professionalism was being reinstilled in younger generations of civilian and military officers as an antidote to the culture of misperception and suspicion that had begun

to grow in the past several years. This is without question important and perhaps

of far greater lasting value than any Iraq or Afghanistan-specific training, however

vital that is.

The Challenges:

This significant up-tic in interagency training and exercises is overwhelming, literally. It has become a beast the civilian world can barely begin to feed, and certainly cannot feed, continue its day-to-day functions and operations and address its

own crisis prevention and response requirements.

Æ There simply are not enough civilians to meet the military’s demand.

Æ There is no ‘‘one-stop shop’’ for PRT (or related) training. Each agency has

its own programs, timelines etc. There is a central issue of a lack of overarching and sustained leadership.

Æ Iraq and Afghanistan training programs are not formally connected. Iraq

joint training occurred only with the start of the surge. The State/NEA run

program can best be described as ‘‘in flux.’’

Æ Inadequate and uncoordinated use of human resources to design and deliver training exacerbated by the multiplicity of providers among and within agencies and divergent goals and operational and institutional needs.

Æ Most training is designed/scheduled to meet military deployment cycles and

needs, which do not necessarily correspond with civilian cycles.

Æ Much of the pre-deployment training is of very short duration—less than

a month—which is insufficient to build the full level of understanding needed for seamless collaboration, or understanding of the field environment.

(See, for example, the training provided for CORDS/Vietnam).

Æ Since the planning and design is often done to meet military operational

needs, and since there are not enough civilians to participate in the design

phase, the training is less relevant to civilian needs than it could be. Thus,

civilians may end up playing roles rather than acting as participants. Such

role playing, while of some benefit to the military participants, draw civilians away from their own readiness requirements.

Æ Most of the training is crisis/operational driven. Of the three D’s, ‘‘defense’’

is largely short-term, immediate and kinetic, while ‘‘diplomacy and development’’ are long-term, incremental and non-kinetic.

Some Efforts to Address These Issues:

The fundamental difference between the military’s short-term/pre-deployment

needs and timelines, the ‘‘urgent’’ (Iraq and Afghanistan), and the civilian/interagency need to prepare for the ‘‘important’’ (the ability to respond the next crises

and conflicts) is, of course, the essence of the need for greater training toward the

goal of greater collaboration, and its fundamental challenge. In talking with both

civilians and military involved, there is a recognition that some rationalization of

training and exercises needs to be done to both optimize its effectiveness and relevance for all parties, and to address the staffing, time and resource constraints on

the civilian side. A pre-deployment driven training and exercise agenda drains the

civilian side of highly limited resources without necessarily meeting the needs of

those same personnel nor does it necessarily build a more sustainable structure of

crisis identification, pre-emption and preparedness on the civilian side. (It goes without saying that the civilian side of the equation needs an equitable ramp-up on resources).

The operations-centric training needs to be reoriented or at least balanced with

interagency training and acculturalization on pace and needs of ‘‘diplomacy and development’’ and how ‘‘defense’’ can be integrated into this longer-range dynamic.

This is the very dynamic that is at the core of crisis prevention and crisis mitigation

as well as post-conflict stabilization.

Two related initiatives have begun to address this more fundamental difference

and the need to look beyond and prepare for the next crises. One, the Center for

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Complex Operations (CCO), which includes representatives from State/S/CRS, State/

PM, USAID and DOD (civilian and uniformed military and PKSOI), recently began

work on lessons learned from existing PRT efforts with the goal to improve training

and operations and, perhaps more importantly, develop new doctrine which can be

supported by a structure properly resourced and staffed.... and then trained to.

Right now, we are doing this in reverse and building backwards.

The second, the Reconstruction and Stabilization (R&S) training strategy began

in late 2005 under State/S/CRS resulted in seven course offerings for interagency

participants at State’s FSI. The Stability Operations Division, originally at S/CRS

and now at FSI, emphasizes integrated, one-government approaches to conflict assessment, strategic and implementation planning and conduct of stability operations

beyond Afghanistan, Iraq or PRTs. This is being updated through the Training

Workshop and will be revised following a comprehensive survey of all offered R&S

courses, currently underway by the CCO and the US Institute of Peace.

Mr. CONAWAY. Many of the recommendations to integrate a form of GoldwaterNichols policy into DoS and USAID seem to be quite valid. But I am concerned with

some of the specifics of your recommendations. For example, a civilian reserve is a

great idea on paper, but when it comes time to deploy these individuals, DoS will

run into the same problems as they do today—struggling to fill the requirements.

Unlike military reservists, the civilian reservists will not be held accountable if they

refuse to deploy, and therefore, can not be forced to go. Also, overhauling the agency

so proper incentives can be incorporated and deploying entities are not penalized

makes a great deal of sense. How can these incentives be adequately employed and

the dependable, consistent capability be maintained if this system isn’t completely

self-contained within the agency?

Ambassador PASCUAL. There are 2 different types of reserve capabilities. One is

a reserve within the government, which is focused on deploying staff to design, manage and implement U.S. government operations in a post-conflict situation. The second is the deployment of skilled specialists, such as police trainers and rule of law

experts who are the deliverers of post-conflict stabilization programs.

A reserve capacity within government can be created through an Active Response

Corps (ARC) and a Standby Corps has been proposed by the Office of Stabilization

and Reconstruction (S/CRS) in the State Department. Both the ARC and the Standby Corps can include representatives from the State Department, USAID, and other

civilian agencies. Individuals would apply for positions in the ARC as they do for

other positions for Foreign Service deployment. At the time that these positions are

advertised, it would be made clear that these individuals signing up for the ARC

would accept overseas assignment anywhere, including places such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Once the ARC is created, the Secretary of State would have the capacity

to direct the deployment of these individuals as necessary in overseas assignments.

The range of assignments could vary. They can include creating a new U.S. government civilian presence in places such as Baghdad and Kabul, where there is no such

presence. It can also include supplementing existing operations, such as in Sudan

or Haiti, in a moment of crisis. Incentives can be built into the personnel system

to encourage individuals to apply for these positions.

Once individuals complete their assignments in the ARC, they can remain in the

Standby Corps for a period of at least 5 years. Part of the requirement for the

Standby Corps is participating in annual exercises to update and maintain their

skills. Between an ARC of approximately 250 people at any given time and a Standby Corps that could be built up to 600–700 people over several years. The U.S. government would have a significant pool of skilled individuals from which to draw in

order to staff immediate overseas emergency deployments.

A Civilian Reserve Corps overseas for delivery of stabilization and reconstruction

services would need to be structured differently than the ARC or the Standby Corps

and in a more similar way to which the military staffs its National Reserves. National recruitment capability would have to be established. It would need to include

clear rules for participation in the reserve, including: reservists to have the right

to re-employment in their jobs once they return; during the period of time that individuals are in the reserve, they would become U.S. government employees just as

individuals who enter the military reserve become employees of the military.

Rules for the deployment of the reserve need to be clearly delineated. Just as with

the military, the reservists would have limitations on the number of times in which

they could expect to be deployed; however, the reservists would also have to agree

to respond once called and to be ready to deploy within a minimum period of time.

By making clear the ground rules for Civilian Reserves, the problem of civilian

reservists refusing to deploy can be avoided, just as the military avoids this issue.

Mr. CONAWAY. Ambassador Bodine asked a very important question about the effectiveness of interagency coordination and collaboration during real-world operVerDate 22-MAR-2001 14:26 Nov 20, 2008 Jkt 042901 PO 00000 Frm 00107 Fmt 6601 Sfmt 6621 C:\DOCS\110-109\029160.000 HAS2 PsN: HAS2
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ations if it is not practiced at home. Obviously, the ability to coordinate effectively

is severely degraded when not practiced sufficiently prior to deployment. But the opportunities for that very training exist today. Actually, interagency workshops in

2006 developed an agreement among DoD, DoS, and USAID to implement SSTR

training initiatives (specifically regarding PRTs) that would integrate the appropriate USG agencies into DoD pre-deployment training.

Do you have any knowledge of the progress of this integrated training? Are there

examples where it’s working well? If not, what are the challenges that continue to

prevent this invaluable opportunity?

Ambassador PASCUAL. Some of the best examples that I have seen of interagency

training across civilian agencies and between civilians and the military have occurred in the context of specific simulations that force civilian and military players

alike to grapple with how they would operate in deployments with one another. S/

CRS has undertaken a number of these simulations along with various combatant

commands in the U.S. military. There have also been examples that have included

international military and civilian participants. In one case, NGOs were also included in order to understand the equities and issues that arise in the integration

of humanitarian personnel with other civilian and military actors.

The problem with undertaking more of these training programs is the lack of adequate staff. The military has tens of thousands of individuals who they can dedicate

to such exercises and training. For the civilian parts of government, it is a struggle

simply to get the number of individuals necessary for immediate deployments, much

less for training programs for two to three weeks. Until the number of civilian personnel are increased in reserve mechanisms such as the ARC, it will be extremely

difficult to have adequate numbers of personnel who can dedicate time to effective

interagency training exercises.

Once training exercises such as these simulations are conducted, it then becomes

possible to focus attention on how civilian and military agencies together can effectively plan with one another on how to extract necessary guidelines for doctrine that

will direct future deployments and planning, on the necessary personnel and skills

needed in order to make these deployments effective, and on resources that are

needed in order to support the deployments. The issue of training cannot be looked

unless it is examined alongside the supply of adequate personnel. Even the best

training programs will fail because adequate numbers of people will not be able to

participate in them and the lessons will not reverberate backwards through the bureaucracy.

Æ