bad, bad, bad idea

[winterbadger]

A broad Pentagon directive issued this week orders the U.S. military to be sure, the next time it goes to war, to prepare more thoroughly for picking up the pieces afterward.

More than a year in the making, the directive represents an ambitious attempt to bring about a fundamental, permanent widening in what U.S. troops are trained and equipped to do. Accustomed to focusing primarily on combat operations, U.S. forces under the new order must now give post-conflict stability operations similar priority, which means they must be ready in foreign countries to carry out such tasks as developing political institutions, establishing judicial systems and reviving economic activities.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/30/AR2005113002076.html

I can't easily imagine a more foolish, wrong-headed approach to take. Military forces are military forces. They are not economists, political scientists, aid workers, or jurists. In a pinch, yes, military forces are someimes pressed into such roles temporarily, but we should not be making these into mission roles for our armed forces. The more effort we put into making soldiers into bankers, the less capable they will be at being soldiers. We need to identify agencies within our government who already carry out these functions or that could be tapped to help other nations develop them (the Department of the Treasury, the Department of Justice, the Department of Commerce, working hand in hand with USG and NGO aid agencies and the Department of State). We should not be making this sort of action the focus for our military.

Comments

It's foolish and wrong-headed...

[motherwell.livejournal.com]

...but not for the reasons you cite. The people we send abroad do indeed have the skills needed; it's their "leaders" who need to be educated, so they can plan for post-invasion operations in advance, and allocate the resources needed so the troops can actually do what they know needs doing.

Re: It's foolish and wrong-headed...

[winterbadger]

Well, yes, the planning needs to be done ehre. But, no, the troops do not have thsoe skills, most of them, and any time we spend training them in those skills and exercising them in those skills is time they can't be learning and practicing skills they need to be SOLDIERS.

There are all sorts of people in the USG who can do those thigns, but having the Army and the Navy and the Air Force doing them is just STUPID, because (a) it ignores the people who actually do those things and (b) it makes the troops less effective at being troops.

But, of course, it DOES concnetrate more authority and more power and more responsibility in the hands of the SecDef, and God knows that's what policy out to be all about. :rolleyes:

In the same way that it is is going to take decades for the US to recover from the damage that the Bush adminstration has done to our reputation and our standing in the international community, our allies' trust for us and our credilibity in issues of moral leadership, it's going to take a long time to straighten out the national security structure from the power-grabs of Rumsfeld and the botched "reform" of the intelligence community.

[dwarfrage.livejournal.com]

I remember hearing something on NPR about how the National Guard was filling such useful roles in Iraq. Basically, while the NG doesn't have the technical precision in military matters that the Army does; where else are you going to find a contractor, a roofer, a safety inspector, and an electrician to check and make sure that the work being done rebuilding is up to snuff?

[winterbadger]

But the NG trains as units to perform combat (and other specific military) missions. It doesn't train, nor is it equipped nor supplied to carry out the tasks you describe. Maybe a unit has those people in it maybe it doesn't. It isn't the role of the NG to do those things now. And it shouldn't be in the future. If we're going to keep having a NG (which IMO is a bad idea), then it should be trained to carry out military missions. That's what a military is for.

The NG does train, equip, and fight as combat troops (or other military roles as assigned); it doesn't do those thigns as effectively as the regular Army does as a general rule because, well, it's not a full-time professional military force. It's a part-time force. But if we want to have a deployable infrastructure "force" let's create one under the auspices of and using the expertise of agencies who actually are staffed by people already who know those tasks, instead of diverting our military forces into doing what are not military tasks.

Re: It's foolish and wrong-headed...

[motherwell.livejournal.com]

Militia units, at least, know they may have to do some rebuilding functions in response to natural disaster or other martial-law situations at home, and soldiers bring more skills than killing and destroying to the battlefield. From what I read, US soldiers in Iraq had the skill and the will to do a lot of the rebuilding they found they had to do, but were most constrained by lack of money and manpower. At the very least, reservists bring to the field the skills they use in civilian life, and it's pretty much inevitable that they would end up pooling their skills on the fly to do whatever they find needs to be done in the area they control.

Don't underestimate the skills or adaptability of military units in war zones. Our soldiers cared more about the people they were trying to control than their civilian leaders, and had a better idea of what needed to be done.

I haven't read the article, but offhand, it looks like someone in a suit is trying to "fix" the uniformed services, to cover up the fact that the real problem lies with the suits.

Re: It's foolish and wrong-headed...

[winterbadger]

Don't underestimate the skills or adaptability of military units in war zones.

I don't, but there's a big difference between units doing what they can on an informal basis to improve the situation where they happen to be stationed ont he one hand and on the other giving equal priority to combat operations and nation-building--not just infrastructure rebuilding efforts but the social, political, and legal reconstruction efforts.

Engineer units, military construction units, these can usefully carry out some *physical* rebuilding tasks in the immediate aftermath of a war. But that's not what they exist to do, and the new directive is talking about a LOT more than ad hoc construction jobs. They're talking about creating civil society--voter rolls, censuses, establishing constitutional structures, judicial systems, news media, policing, national systems of medical care, setting up currencies and financial institutions. THIS IS NOT WHAT ARMIES ARE FOR! There are many excellent organizations in the USG, in the nonprofit community, and in the international intergovenmental community (UN, EU, OSCE, etc.) that do these sorts of things. To turn soldiers into people who do these things you (a) impair their ability to act as soldiers and (b) ignore all the organizations that already exist to do these things and who have valuable training, experience, and planning in place and ready to go.

I haven't read the article, but offhand, it looks like someone in a suit is trying to "fix" the uniformed services, to cover up the fact that the real problem lies with the suits.

Two comments and you haven't read the article yet? ;-) Yes, this is an attempt to address what went wrong, but in classic Bush Administration terms it doesn't look at what was done wrong (since, of course, they never do anything wrong) but instead seeks to create new organizations from the ground up to do tasks that existing orginzations could do. And of course the answer is to give more power, authority, and budget (the person in the article who says that only weapons systems cost lots of money is either foolish or disingenuous) to the organizations headed by the most powerful players in the adminstration while ignoring or hindering those organizations not represented by powerful cabinet mebers.

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

I can't easily imagine a more foolish, wrong-headed approach to take.

Give them time; they'll outdo themselves.

But you're right, of course. This kind of nation-building effort requires expertise from many varying groups, and putting the onus for fielding that expertise on the military only serves to dilute its purpose.

Now, we COULD try the novel idea of hiring experts local to the nation we're trying to build, instead of bringing in our own megacorporations that happen to have personal ties to members of the administration...but that's just crazy talk.

Re: It's foolish and wrong-headed...

[motherwell.livejournal.com]

...They're talking about creating civil society--voter rolls, censuses, establishing constitutional structures, judicial systems, news media, policing, national systems of medical care, setting up currencies and financial institutions. THIS IS NOT WHAT ARMIES ARE FOR!

In this case, the army was for conquering and controlling, and all of the tasks you mention are necessary to that end. And since the military were there to do it, and since doing it is necessary to restore order and minimize, if not stop, the killing, they might as well make a start, rather than wait for some supposedly more qualified help while innocent people's needs go unmet. Meatball surgery is better than none at all in the short term; and sometimes, rebuilding whole towns with duct tape is indeed what armies are for.

As for the civilian organizations you mention, sure, they may be better skilled at certain necessary tasks, but bringing them into a military operation in a war zone presents real problems: first, civilians may cost more; and second, such groups may get in the uniforms' way and totally muck up the chain of command at a time when concerted action is of the utmost importance. I'm all in favor of such organizations in the long term, but in the short term, the military can't always wait for the best solution.