The Army is engaged in a bureaucratic brawl with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld over how to organize troops for "nation-building," a growing problem for the military as it settles in for lengthy occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan and possibly other countries.
Rumsfeld wants to shift thousands of civil affairs troops from the Special Operations Command to the regular Army on the theory that the service needs to do better at security and stabilization. This comes as he is pushing other components of the elite Special Operations Command -- such as Navy SEALs and the Army Delta Force -- to focus on aggressive actions against terrorists and other missions.
Officers specializing in civil affairs -- which helps establish local governments in occupied areas, oversees humanitarian assistance and coordinates military activities with aid organizations -- say they oppose the move. They say many officers believe, based in part on their experience in Iraq, that regular combat commanders do not understand their work and do not know how to use them well.
I have been intending to write up a post in reaction to Dana Priest's book The Mission which I recently finished, and also tie in some of the observations made by Major Isiah Wilson in his report on civil-military planning in Iraq. That post, still only half-formed may have to wait indefinitely, with the start of classes soon (the Wilson report is about sixty pages and I don't know when I'll have a chance to sit down with it soon). Until it does materialize, this may serve in lieu of it.
Although Priest talks about the US Army's increasingly frequent service in nation-building, peacekeeping "operations other than war", she doesn't go into great detail about the structure of the military's civil affairs duties — perhaps because that role has often been assumed ad hoc by units deployed to Kosovo and elsewhere. If she mentioned that Civil Affairs was a subcommand of US Special Operations Command, I definitely missed it.
Previously I've thought that one answer to the issue of America's increasingly militarized nation-building mission — a role that, as Nadezhda (and Priest) argues, the military has traditionally been hesitant to embrace as a whole, despite admirable performances by those who serve in these missions — might be to somehow expand the concept of "joint" operations planning to include US civil institutions like State, the Justice Department (why do we train so many foreign soldiers, and so few police?), and so forth. Not having read the full Wilson report yet, I'm still not clear on just how operational war plans are made, but it's my impression that whatever influence these other non-military branches of government have on the campaign occurs more at the strategic (ie., the President and his Cabinet) level than the actual planning of the deployment and order of battle. The result is a situation where, as Wilson describes it (I have gotten this far), the armed forces defines its mission in strictly military terms and assumes that the responsibility for political, economic, and social reconstruction falls to someone else. In other words, Phase IV is somebody else's problem.
Reading this article, now I'm wondering if one good start might not be to go one better on Rumsfeld and actually make Civil Affairs Command its own independent command, with an independent institutional voice at the table alongside the regional CinC, SOCOM, and the others. As Ricks' piece notes, even though Civil Affairs is opposed to being subsumed under the regular army's command,
having civil affairs in Special Operations has never been a great fit, either. "We do not, after all, fit the mold of steely-eyed killers," [an officer] said. "We are supposed to be language and cultural experts."
No matter how much the Bush administration team may dislike it, the nation-building mission is not going away, and we will need a force structure capable of bearing that load. I think the dangers we face in Iraq today show some of the costs of going into "post-modern war" (to borrow Wilson's phrase) without adequate preparation for that Phase IV post-combat mission. Perhaps State under Condi Rice will develop into a strong voice for taking on that role, but I doubt it. Like it or not, given how much State has withered as an instrument of American policy when compared with our military forces, I think there has to be some effort to strengthen the standing of those soldiers devoted to the study of "operations other than war" within the US military if we're to see effects. In this, rather than going too far, I think Rumsfeld may not even be going far enough.
Edit - See also a parallel discussion at Tacitus, a somewhat related proposal on the subject of military reorganization at Belgravia Dispatch, and the Barnett briefing in comments.