Under the rubric of "smart power," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton argues for revitalizing the capabilities of the State Department-getting more specialists into the field and out of the embassies, especially in support of stabilization and reconstruction missions. In her efforts, she is supported by Defense Secretary Gates, who is concerned about the militarization of America's foreign policy, who once stated:
If we are to meet the myriad challenges around the world in the coming decades, this country must strengthen other important elements of national power, both institutionally and financially, and create the capability to integrate and apply all of the elements of national power to problems and challenges abroad.
Gates believes that having more robust and effective civilian capabilities might even decrease the need to have to deploy U.S. armed forces.
Building on the efforts of the last administration, the State Department now has the "Civilian Stabilization Initiative." (CSI) The CSI envisions an "Active Response Corps" of trained civilian personnel who would be full-time employees of the State Department, USAID and other federal agencies and who would be assigned to service with military units. There would also be a "Standby Reserve Corps" made up of federal-government employees who might be asked to serve, as well as a Civilian Reserve Corps-civilians who could be called up for duty.
Yet the numbers of personnel are quite minimal. For instance, the Active Response Corps would only have two hundred fifty members and the Civilian Reserve Corps would number no more than two thousand. As of summer 2008, there were only thirteen positions available in the Active Response Corps-with two vacancies. The Standby Response Corps only numbers some five hundred active and retired FSOs. A congressional research report raised the question as to "whether qualified experts will sign up in sufficient numbers to make the corps an effective replacement for military troops in S & R operations." There remains a major gap between plans and reality; for example, there are currently one thousand two hundred military members in the noncombat zone country of Djibouti engaging in stabilization operations.
One option is to let the trends of the last decade accelerate by turning to the private sector, both nonprofit and commercial, to bridge the gap. Already, nearly half of all humanitarian and assistance funds provided by the United Nations are administered by NGOs. But neither approach may be satisfactory. Contractors can be quite expensive, while NGO agendas may conflict with governmental priorities-and in both cases, the personnel are not government employees. There is also no guarantee that private-sector employees will remain in country to see the mission through to its completion.
But perhaps the State Department, oriented toward diplomacy, is not the best venue these days for a stabilization and reconstruction office. Maybe we need a separate service within the U.S. government, one that would be composed of professionals with training and experience in diplomacy, development, defense and intelligence. This cadre would deploy with military units, be assigned to embassies and embed with sub-national groups. More importantly, such a service would be up front about its conditions of employment-including deployment to failed states or areas with security risks-and so drastically reduce what has been a perennial problem in getting civilians into reconstruction missions in dangerous areas: the argument that "this is not what I signed up for." It would also reduce the current attractiveness of using the military for such missions on the grounds that "soldiers obey orders."
At present, the core mission of the State Department's Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization is "to lead, coordinate and institutionalize U.S. Government civilian capacity to prevent or prepare for post-conflict situations, and to help stabilize and reconstruct societies in transition from conflict or civil strife, so they can reach a sustainable path toward peace, democracy and a market economy." It is a tall order. Having a "Reconstruction and Stabilization Service" might give this office more of an operational capacity. Yet, current and future staffing plans are not sufficient to meet current operational requirements, let alone adding future ones.
This is a direction the Europeans have begun to explore. Faced with the challenge of how best to provide reconstruction assistance to conflict zones within Europe where state capacity was weak (and security was an issue), the European Union created the European Agency for Reconstruction (EAR) in February 2000. In contrast to previous European efforts, particularly in Bosnia during the 1990s-where competing national and EU agencies combined with overlapping and unclear lines of authority to slow down and complicate reconstruction efforts-the EAR was placed in charge of the "nation-building" missions in Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo and Macedonia. Significantly, the EAR was given the ability to recruit its own dedicated staff and personnel who worked directly for the agency (as well as the right to hire its own local contractors). These people were not "drafted" from other agencies and joined the EAR with full knowledge that they would be working in potentially dangerous areas-thus avoiding the "not in my job description" phenomenon.
Assessments of the work of the EAR have been quite positive. The 2001 report of the European Court of Auditors specifically cited the EAR's ability to directly recruit dedicated staff and expert personnel as a major reason for its "good performance." A follow-up report prepared for the European Commission in 2004 noted that the agency and its director had a "clear mandate and centralized responsibilities" which made its work "administratively sound and managerially responsive." One of the reasons for the success of the EAR was that the scope of its mission and activities remained limited and focused. It was not created to duplicate existing aid and development efforts, but, as a 2007 European Parliament report pointed out, to operate "in areas where traditional development assistance cannot be implemented."
There are some limits to the applicability of the EAR model. It has never been a large agency-it has about three hundred full-time staff (not including in-country contractors). Moreover, despite calls from some members of the European Parliament, the EAR's mission was not expanded beyond the Balkans to work in other insecure and dangerous areas of the world such as Afghanistan. At present, even though the 2007 European Parliament report recommended that the EAR be transformed into a permanent, worldwide arm of the EU, such plans do not appear to be afoot.
Nevertheless, the EAR provides a template for bureaucratic organization that could be utilized by a reconstruction and stabilization service. In terms of how to staff and deploy personnel, Russia's Ministry of Emergency Situations (Emercom) offers a model. Established in 1994, Emercom was created out of the remnants of the old Soviet civil-defense apparatus. Much of what Emercom does is duplicated in the United States by the Department of Homeland Security, but there is an international dimension to its work, especially in terms of humanitarian relief and reconstruction efforts. Emercom teams in northern Afghanistan in 2001-02, for instance, delivered food aid, set up mobile hospitals, repaired tunnels and roads and engaged in de-mining operations. Emercom also deployed its air-mobile field hospital to Sri Lanka in the aftermath of the tsunami to provide medical care.
What makes the Emercom model of interest is that it functions as a hybrid civilian-military institution. It is structured along military lines with companies, battalions, regiments and brigades, and has thirty rapid-reaction units ready to be deployed in the event of a disaster or crisis, structured around regional centers. It uses the airbase at Ramenskoye (outside of Moscow) as its base of operations, and has aircraft and equipment that are under its command. Emercom has approximately twenty-three thousand servicemen and sixteen thousand civilian specialists in its employ. However, as per Ministry of Defense guidelines, Emercom is prohibited from engaging in combat operations (including armed peacekeeping efforts) and its personnel are classified as "rescuers" rather than as "soldiers" in the parlance of the Russian government. (Emercom sometimes contrasts its personnel as "peaceful forces" in contrast to the "armed forces" of the Ministry of Defense.)
However, some Emercom personnel do carry small arms when deployed, meaning that the teams do have some self-defense capacity. Moreover, the military background of some of Emercom's personnel has meant that Emercom has been able to work well with the armed forces when both have been deployed on peacekeeping/peacemaking missions. And because Emercom teams function under a quasi-military structure, it means that they can be ordered to deploy wherever they are needed. In the days following the 2008 Russian intervention in South Ossetia, Emercom personnel were already engaged in reconstruction and rehabilitation operations in the region, despite the threat of renewed military conflict.
Emercon's hybrid structure also facilitated the transfer of serving military officers to the new organization, preserving their ranks and pensions-a process which may have special value for any future American stabilization and reconstruction service. At present, the U.S. military is expending a good deal of effort and resources to recruit specialists and train officers to undertake humanitarian and reconstruction missions. While some may seek to return to combat or warfighting operations, the existence of a separate service that would not necessarily require officers or specialists to abandon their military careers might be a way to safeguard their skills and expertise. (There are also other precedents: the British Colonial Office provided for serving military officers who had the "proper qualifications" to be appointed to civilian positions without requiring their resignation from the service. Such personnel were considered to be "half-pay" officers, retaining their commissions but serving as civilians for the duration of their Colonial Office appointments.)
If the United States is going to be engaged in stabilization missions for the foreseeable future, then the status quo is not sustainable. Soldiers and sailors cannot be effective warfighters and stabilizers at the same time, with a gun in one hand and a shovel in another. Nor, despite recent proposals, are sufficient numbers of trained civilian experts going to be raised via an interagency process. As James Dobbins noted in his testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2004,
successive administrations have treated each new mission as if it were the first and, more importantly, as if it were the last. Each time we have sent out new people to face old problems, and seen them make old mistakes. Each time we have dissipated accumulated expertise after an operation has been concluded . . .
He rhetorically asked "to how our nation can perform these unavoidable and important tasks more effectively"? It is time to bite the bullet and accept that a distinct, dedicated service is required if the gap is to be filled.
Derek Reveron and Nikolas K. Gvosdev are national-security studies professors at the Naval War College. Nikolas Gvosdev is also a senior editor at The National Interest. The views expressed in this article are their own.
