As the Global Peace Operations Initiative (GPOI) completes the last of its five planned years in FY2009, the 111 th Congress has begun consideration of continued funding through this program for training foreign military and police forces, and for other purposes. For FY2010, the Obama Administration has requested $96.8 million for GPOI. This request follows the decision of the George W. Bush Administration's White House to continue the program. In October 2008, the National Security Council's Deputies Committee approved a five-year renewal of GPOI's mandate. The Obama Administration affirmed this decision once it took office, according to a State Department official. Previous Congresses have generally endorsed the concept of this program, but also have questioned whether the program is as well-managed as possible and whether it will achieve its goals. The 111 th Congress may wish to consider whether its concerns, stated in past legislation, have been met. On June 10, 2009, the House passed the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, Fiscal Years 2010 and 2011 ( H.R. 2410 ), which contains a provision authorizing the Secretary of State to carry out and expand GPOI programs and activities (Section 1108). Established to train 75,000 international peacekeepers by 2010, GPOI was the George W. Bush Administration's signature initiative to build international peacekeeping capacity. (State Department officials express confidence that the goal of 75,000 peacekeepers-trained will be achieved by early 2010.) The Administration launched the five-year $660 million (in FY2005-FY2009 funds) initiative in mid-2004 as a means to alleviate the perceived shortage worldwide of trained peacekeepers and "gendarmes," as well as to increase available resources to transport and sustain them ("Gendarmes," also known as constabulary police or stability police, are police with a combination o f policing and military skills considered vital to the semi-stable environments of peace operations, where the potential for outbreaks of rioting and other violence creates a need for specially-trained police forces.). While the United States has provided considerable support to implement several peace processes and to support peacekeepers in the field from a variety of budget accounts for well over a decade, until GPOI it had provided relatively little funding to build up foreign military capabilities to perform peacekeeping operations. In plans for GPOI after 2010, State Department officials state that the program's emphasis would shift from direct training to building the capacity of foreign nations to develop their own peacekeeping infrastructure and capabilities. As of the end of January 2009, GPOI funds have supported the training of 54,245 military troops as peacekeepers and of 3,350 military personnel to train others in peacekeeping skills. Of those trained, GPOI reports that as of January 30, 2009, some 46,115 troops from 21 countries were deployed to 18 peacekeeping operations and 1 election observer mission, and another 4,860 troops were in the process of being deployed. In addition, GPOI has supported the training of 1,932 police trainers from 29 countries at the Italian-run Center of Excellence for Stability Police Units (CoESPU) in Vicenza, Italy. In addition to training peacekeepers, GPOI supports a variety of institutions specializing in or contributing to peacekeeping operations. These include 22 peace operations training centers around the world, as well as the African Union and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). GPOI also provides funds for the Transportation Logistics Support Arrangement (TLSA), which has supported troops deploying to several peacekeeping missions, and other GPOI deployment equipment funding has supported troops deploying to some of these and other missions. In total, as of January 30, 2009, GPOI had contributed $65.4 million to provide equipment to and transport troops deployed to seven missions, according to GPOI officials. In total, all GPOI-funded activities helped deploy 46,115 troops from 21 countries to 18 peacekeeping operations and 1 election observer mission, as of January 30, 2009, with an additional 4,860 troops about to deploy at that time. Through FY2008, GPOI funding totaled $374.46 million. GPOI funding for FY2009 totals $105.95 million, plus $3.0 million in State Department International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement (INCLE) funding. (The Bush Administration's FY2009 request called for $106.2 million in peacekeeping operations funds.) With these funds, GPOI has provided for the training of 57,595 peacekeepers and peacekeeping trainers as of January 31, 2009. (For a breakdown of this number by country, see Table 2 , below.) Before mid-2004, the United States provided peacekeeping capacity-building assistance to foreign militaries primarily under two programs, the African Contingency Operations Training and Assistance program (ACOTA) and its predecessor program, and the Enhanced International Peacekeeping Capabilities program (EIPC). Both ACOTA and EPIC have been subsumed under the GPOI budget line. ACOTA is still the term used to refer to the Africa component of GPOI, however, and is implemented by the State Department's Africa Bureau. Overall responsibility for GPOI rests with the State Department Bureau of Political-Military Affairs' Office of Plans, Policy, and Analysis (PM/PPA). (Information about GPOI is available at http://www.state.gov/t/pm/ppa/gpoi .) PM/PPA works closely with DOD offices to plan and carry out the program. Impetus for GPOI came from the Department of Defense (DOD), where officials in the Office of Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict (SO/LIC) worked with the State Department for over a year and a half to develop the proposal. Officials in SO/LIC's section on peacekeeping developed the plan as a means to expand and improve the ACOTA program—with more and better exercises and more equipment—as well as to extend the program beyond Africa to other parts of the world. Policymakers hoped that the availability of peacekeeping training would encourage more countries to participate in peacekeeping operations, enable current donors to provide a greater number of troops, and increase the number of countries which potentially could serve as lead nations, according to some analysts. The GPOI budget is part of the Foreign Operations Appropriations Peacekeeping (PKO) account, also known as the "voluntary" Peacekeeping account, under the Military Assistance rubric. The PKO account funds activities carried out under Section 551 of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, as amended (FAA). Section 551 authorizes the President to provide assistance for peacekeeping operations and other programs to further U.S. national security interests "on such terms and conditions as he may determine." (This provides some flexibility to the President, but is not tantamount to the discretion that he can exercise when funding is provided "notwithstanding any other provision of law.") In his September 21, 2004 address to the opening meeting of the 59 th session of the U.N. General Assembly, President Bush asserted that the world "must create permanent capabilities to respond to future crises." In particular, he pointed to a need for "more effective means to stabilize regions in turmoil, and to halt religious violence and ethnic cleansing." A similar rationale prompted the Clinton Administration to formulate the ACRI training program in 1996 and underlies the current search for new strategies and mechanisms to prevent and control conflicts. To accomplish these ends, the Bush Administration set three major GPOI goals: Train some 75,000 troops worldwide, with an emphasis on Africa, in peacekeeping skills by 2010. Support Italy in establishing a center to train international gendarme (constabulary) forces to participate in peacekeeping operations (see section below); and Foster an international deployment and logistics support system to transport peacekeepers to the field and maintain them there. Through GPOI, the State Department also promotes the exchange of information among G-8 donors on peace operations training and exercises in Africa. This is accomplished through donors meetings which serve as a "clearinghouse" to facilitate coordination. The first of these State Department meetings was held in Washington, D.C. on October 7-8, 2004. The United Kingdom hosted a second meeting in February 2006, the Russian Federation hosted a third in June 2006, Germany hosted a fourth in March 2007, Japan hosted the fifth in April 2008, and Italy is hosting the sixth in April 2009. Through GPOI, the State Department also supports a G8++ Global Clearinghouse information exchange to build peacekeeping capabilities worldwide. The first Global Clearinghouse meetings was held in Washington, D.C., in October 2007, and the second in the United Kingdom in December 2008. For many analysts, a continued effort to improve the peacekeeping skills of African and other military forces is an important step towards controlling devastating conflicts, particularly in Africa. In the mid-1990s, several developed nations provided most of the peacekeepers. The perception that developed nations would not be able to sustain the burden indefinitely, as well as the perception that the interests of those nations in Africa were not sufficient to ensure needed troop commitments there, led international capacity-building efforts to focus on Africa. As of the end of December 2004, shortly after GPOI first started up, almost 25,000 of the nearly 58,000 military personnel who were participating in the current 17 U.N. peacekeeping operations were from the 22 African troop-contributing nations. (African nations provided over half of the military personnel—roughly 24,000 of 47,000—in the seven U.N. peacekeeping operations in Africa.)