[House Hearing, 110 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
[H.A.S.C. No. 110-102]
PROVINCIAL RECONSTRUCTION TEAMS--HISTORICAL AND CURRENT PERSPECTIVES ON
DOCTRINE AND STRATEGY
__________
HEARING
BEFORE THE
OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
HEARING HELD
DECEMBER 5, 2007
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
40-361 PDF WASHINGTON DC: 2008
---------------------------------------------------------------------
For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing
Office Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866)512-1800
DC area (202)512-1800 Fax: (202) 512-2250 Mail Stop SSOP,
Washington, DC 20402-0001
VIC SNYDER, Arkansas, Chairman
JOHN SPRATT, South Carolina W. TODD AKIN, Missouri
LORETTA SANCHEZ, California ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland
ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California WALTER B. JONES, North Carolina
ROBERT ANDREWS, New Jersey JEFF MILLER, Florida
SUSAN A. DAVIS, California PHIL GINGREY, Georgia
JIM COOPER, Tennessee K. MICHAEL CONAWAY, Texas
HANK JOHNSON, Georgia GEOFF DAVIS, Kentucky
JOE SESTAK, Pennsylvania
Mike McErlean, Professional Staff Member
Thomas Hawley, Professional Staff Member
Roger Zakheim, Professional Staff Member
Sasha Rogers, Research Assistant
C O N T E N T S
----------
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS
2007
Page
Hearing:
Wednesday, December 5, 2007, Provincial Reconstruction Teams--
Historical and Current Perspectives on Doctrine and Strategy... 1
Appendix:
Wednesday, December 5, 2007...................................... 37
----------
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2007
PROVINCIAL RECONSTRUCTION TEAMS--HISTORICAL AND CURRENT PERSPECTIVES ON
DOCTRINE AND STRATEGY
STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
Akin, Hon. W. Todd, a Representative from Missouri, Ranking
Member, Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee.............. 3
Snyder, Hon. Vic, a Representative from Arkansas, Chairman,
Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee...................... 1
WITNESSES
Carreau, Bernard T., Senior Research Fellow, Center for
Technology and National Security Policy, National Defense
University..................................................... 4
Hicks, Kathleen H., Senior Fellow, International Security
Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies........ 11
Olson, Brig. Gen. Eric T. ``Rick'' (Ret.), Former Commander,
Combined/Joint Task Force-76, Former Director, National
Coordination Team, U.S. Army................................... 9
Warner, Gen. Volney F. (Ret.), U.S. Army, President and Chief
Executive Officer, V.F. Warner and Associates.................. 7
APPENDIX
Prepared Statements:
Akin, Hon. W. Todd........................................... 43
Carreau, Bernard T........................................... 46
Hicks, Kathleen H............................................ 74
Olson, Brig. Gen. Eric T. ``Rick''........................... 63
Snyder, Hon. Vic............................................. 41
Warner, Gen. Volney F........................................ 53
Documents Submitted for the Record:
[There were no Documents submitted.]
Questions and Answers Submitted for the Record:
[There were no Questions submitted.]
PROVINCIAL RECONSTRUCTION TEAMS--HISTORICAL AND CURRENT PERSPECTIVES ON
DOCTRINE AND STRATEGY
----------
House of Representatives,
Committee on Armed Services,
Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee,
Washington, DC, Wednesday, December 5, 2007.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 2:07 p.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. The hearing will come to order.
Mr. Akin, the ranking member, is en route. He got
temporarily hung up, but he will be here shortly. He said we
could go ahead and begin. When he gets here, we will give him
an opportunity to give his opening statement also.
Welcome to the Subcommittee on Oversight and
Investigations' hearing on Provincial Reconstruction Teams--
PRTs--Historical and Current Perspectives on Doctrine and
Strategy.
The subcommittee is conducting a series of hearings and
briefings on the PRT programs in Afghanistan and Iraq to get a
better understanding of what PRTs are, what they do and the
contribution that they are making in stabilizing Afghanistan
and Iraq. We have used this project as a case study of
interagency operations. In order to emphasize the importance of
interagency operations and to reinforce why our efforts here
are so important, I would like to quote the Secretary of
Defense, Mr. Gates, on his recent remarks on the subject.
Quote, ``One of the most important lessons of the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan is that military success is not sufficient
to win. There is economic development, institution-building and
the rule of law, promoting internal reconciliation, good
governance, providing basic services to the people, training
and equipping indigenous military and police forces, strategic
communications, and more. These, along with security, are
essential ingredients for long-term success. Accomplishing all
of these tasks will be necessary to meet the diverse challenges
I have described.'' That is the end of the quote by Secretary
Gates.
These imperatives cannot be accomplished by military alone.
We need the capabilities of our entire government brought to
bear in support of our current efforts.
The purpose of today's hearing is to put our current
efforts of stabilization and reconstruction in Iraq and
Afghanistan into context where Secretary Gates says, quote,
``Context is important,'' end quote.
The Nation has been here before. Throughout our history we
have experienced the difficulties of transitioning from the use
of force to the task of rebuilding war-torn societies from our
own Civil War to the hot and cold 20th century wars in Europe
and in the Far East and from smaller post-Cold War struggles
such as in the Balkans and in Haiti.
Perhaps the campaigns which most closely resemble efforts
in Iraq and Afghanistan are previous counterinsurgency efforts.
In such cases, we engaged in armed insurgency while attempting
to rebuild the physical and political structures of countries.
Our goal has usually been a stable, peaceful, democratic, and
independent nation state, friendly to the United States and its
neighbors.
Secretary Gates recently cited the Vietnam Civil Operations
Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) effort as an example.
Again, quoting Secretary Gates, ``However uncomfortable it may
be to raise Vietnam all of these years later, the history of
that conflict is instructive. After first pursuing a strategy
based on conventional military firepower, the United States
shifted course and began a comprehensive, integrated program of
pacification, civic action and economic development. It had the
effect of, in the words of General Creighton Abrams, 'putting
all of us on one side and the enemy on the other.' by the time
U.S. troops were pulled out, the CORDS program had helped to
pacify most of the hamlets in South Vietnam. The importance of
deploying civilian expertise has been relearned the hard way
through the effort to staff Provincial Reconstruction Teams
first in Afghanistan and, more recently, in Iraq. The PRTs were
designed to bring in civilians experienced in agriculture,
governance and other aspects of development to work with and
alongside the military to improve the lives of the local
population, a key tenet of any counterinsurgency effort.'' That
is the end of, again, Secretary Gates' quote.
We hope that today's witnesses can help us gain a better
understanding of and perspective on our efforts in Iraq and
Afghanistan. We have brought together practitioners and
scholars who have experienced and/or studied these previous and
current campaigns in great detail. As always, we seek our
witnesses' recommendations on what we should do, what this
Congress should do, to increase the likelihood of the success
of our Nation's efforts both in the ongoing wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan and in the wars of the future.
Our panel of witnesses today includes Mister--is it ``Ber-
nerd'' or ``Ber-nard''?
Mr. Carreau. Bernard.
Dr. Snyder. Bernard, also known as ``Bernie.''
Mr. Carreau. ``Bernie.''
Dr. Snyder. We have Mr. Bernard Carreau, Senior Research
Fellow at the Center for Technology and National Security
Policy at the National Defense University.
General Warner, retired U.S. Army, President and Chief
Executive Officer of V.F. Warner and Associates.
It is my understanding, General Warner, that your bride is
with you today.
General Warner. Yes, she is----
Dr. Snyder. We would like to acknowledge her presence here.
General Warner [continuing]. And older son.
Dr. Snyder. And older son. Good for you.
Brigadier General Rick Olson, U.S. Army, Retired, former
Commander, Combined/Joint Task Force-76 in Afghanistan and
former Director of the National Coordination Team in Iraq.
Our fourth witness is Ms. Kathleen Hicks, Senior Fellow of
the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic
and International Studies.
We appreciate your all being here. Your written statements
will, without objection, be made a part of the record.
I also wanted to introduce a friend of mine, one of my
constituents, Dr. Sharon Williams.
Dr. Williams, if you would not mind standing up so folks
can see you. Wave and say hello.
She is going to be with us for a few minutes. She is from
Little Rock, Arkansas. She has a husband and family and two
lovely little girls back home. She spent six months in
Afghanistan as a veterinarian with the U.S Department of
Agriculture. She has spent seven months as the Ministry Adviser
for Animal Health and Food Safety at the United States
Department of Agriculture in Baghdad. She has been there for
seven months. She came home for Thanksgiving. She spent time in
Arkansas with her little girls and husband, and she is now
heading back tomorrow to complete another five months in Iraq.
Once we finish with all of your opening statements, we will
go to our five-minute rule. The members who were here at the
gavel will go first, followed by other members as they come in.
I also ask, without objection, unanimous consent for Dr.
Charles Boustany to participate in the hearing today after all
of the regular subcommittee members have finished.
We will now go to Mr. Akin for any comments he would like
to make.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Snyder can be found in the
Appendix on page 41.]
STATEMENT OF HON. W. TODD AKIN, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM MISSOURI,
RANKING MEMBER, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE
Mr. Akin. Thank you, Dr. Snyder.
Good afternoon to our witnesses. We appreciate your being
here today.
Today's hearing is this subcommittee's fifth public hearing
on Provincial Reconstruction Teams. Our witnesses will not only
offer their perspectives on the current PRT program but will
put these operations into historic context. The only thing
really new about PRTs is the name. The concept of how an
interagency team comprised of civilian and military personnel
works to extend the reach of the government into regional
provinces and local areas comes with significant historical
precedent.
The most recent and commonly referenced analog to PRTs is
the Civil Operations Revolutionary Development Support, or
CORDS, program the United States employed during Vietnam. The
CORDS program was the interagency response to insurgency during
the Vietnam War. Like the PRTs, CORDS teams are made up of
civilian and military personnel. CORDS teams spread out to the
44 provinces and personnel with the provincial and district
levels embedded with the local government officials.
Most importantly and critical to our efforts in Iraq and
Afghanistan is that many believe the CORDS fulfill the most
fundamental mission of counterinsurgency. Proponents of this
view believe the CORDS program increased the effectiveness of
the local government and security forces by training 900,000
Vietnamese, including 300,000 civil servants. CORDS helped
establish the vitality of the South Vietnamese Government by
providing competitive services and local security. This
marginalized the Viet Cong, and people no longer felt compelled
to turn to the shadow Communist regime.
After the institution of CORDS, a Viet Cong colonel
lamented, last year we could attack the United States forces;
This year we find it difficult to attack even puppet forces. We
failed to win the support of the people and to keep them from
moving back to enemy-controlled areas.
This sentiment is exactly the type of thing we need to hear
from al Qaeda and Taliban operatives fighting in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
Again, thank you all for being witnesses here today. We are
very interested in what you have to say and in particularly the
historic connect and in what we should be learning from our
experiences in the past. Thank you.
Thank you, Dr. Snyder.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Akin can be found in the
Appendix on page 43.]
Dr. Snyder. Thank you, Mr. Akin.
We will put this little clock on there, which I assume you
can see from your side. Now, we will put it on five minutes,
but that is more just for your benefit to know when five
minutes go by. If you have other things you want to get to, you
can feel free to ignore it when the red light comes on.
Mr. Carreau, you are recognized, and then we will just go
down the line to General Warner and then to General Olson and
then to Ms. Hicks.
STATEMENT OF BERNARD T. CARREAU, SENIOR RESEARCH FELLOW, CENTER
FOR TECHNOLOGY AND NATIONAL SECURITY POLICY, NATIONAL DEFENSE
UNIVERSITY
Mr. Carreau. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Snyder, Congressman Akin and distinguished
members, thank you for inviting me here today to discuss
current and historical perspectives on PRTs. I am honored to be
here and with such distinguished fellow panelists.
Today, I want to talk briefly about civil-military and
interagency relations in Vietnam. Although the scale and
historical circumstances of Vietnam differ greatly from those
of Iraq and Afghanistan, some aspects of intergovernmental
relations in Vietnam may offer valuable lessons for today.
Like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Vietnam was a war in
which the United States was itself a belligerent, as opposed to
a third party intervenor. It was a war in which the United
States suffered significant casualties and extended significant
resources, and it was a war which had an enormous impact on our
national security interests and domestic politics.
Turning to the CORDS effort, pacifications efforts in
Vietnam--what might today be called counterinsurgencies or
postwar stability operations--involved returning government
control to a countryside that was infiltrated by Viet Cong
insurgents. It focused on local security efforts but also
included distributing food and medical supplies, agriculture
support, job creation, and land reform.
The Civil Operations and Rural Development Support program
was created in 1967 after years of unsatisfactory attempts at
coordinating the activities of multiple agencies under the U.S
Ambassador's Country Team. President Johnson appointed Robert
Komer to the position of Deputy to General William
Westmoreland, the Commander of Military Assistance Command
Vietnam (MACV). Robert Komer's nickname was ``Blowtorch Bob''
to give you an idea of his forceful and no nonsense
personality. The Deputy Commander carried a three-star rank.
The union of the previously separate civilian and military
pacification efforts into the combined CORDS program resulted
in what may have been the only truly integrated civilian-
military command in U.S. history. The integrated command placed
civilians in charge of military personnel and vice versa. It
also placed military resources, including logistics, transport
and force protection assets, at the disposal of civilians.
Military and civilian units were collocated, often in the same
building at the national, regional, province, and district
levels.
Komer developed a cordial relationship with Westmoreland,
as did Komer's successor, William Colby, with Westmoreland's
successor, General Creighton Abrams. In turn, Generals
Westmoreland and Abrams showed great flexibility and allowed
their civilian deputies considerable leeway in setting
priorities and in allocating resources. By placing almost all
pacification-related programs under a single headquarters and
by investing the single manager with unprecedented access to
resources, Komer had sufficient leverage to force the various
agencies to develop and to implement a nationwide pacification
plan in conjunction with the South Vietnamese Government.
Much of the impetus for reorganizing CORDS came from
President Johnson himself. Johnson viewed pacification in
Vietnam as an extension of his vision for his domestic ``Great
Society'' policies, and began to describe the effort to help
the Vietnamese people as the ``other war.''
I wanted to make just a couple of observations about the
CORDS program and today's PRTs. Of course, the scale of the
pacification of it in Vietnam dwarfed the PRT efforts in both
Iraq and Afghanistan. For example, there were almost 8,000 U.S.
participants in CORDS and as much as 800,000 South Vietnamese
army, national police and local government officials, all of
this against the backdrop of about 500,000 U.S. troops and
400,000 South Vietnamese conventional forces. Compare this to
Afghanistan where there are approximately 30,000 coalition
forces and about 3,000 personnel in the PRTs. There are more
troops, of course, in Iraq, but there are fewer PRT personnel.
The lessons from CORDS have more to do with organizational
structure. Many former participants--State, the United States
Agency for International Development and the military--talk
about the surprising level of cooperation, large amounts of
financial resources available for pacification projects in
Vietnam. They talk about the symbiotic relationship. The
military needed civilian expertise, local governance and job
creation. The civilians needed the military protection, of
course, and their expertise in counterinsurgency operations,
and they needed their lift and force protection abilities.
One point I would make is to compare CORDS with the
original structure in Iraq. In Iraq, originally under the
Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA),
there was a retired three-star general who was appointed to
head up the reconstruction efforts, separate from the military
command, with no access to resources. No matter how competent,
a retired three-star cannot compete for resources and influence
with an active duty four-star general in charge of the entire
operation.
I wanted to make a couple of points also about
nontraditional security assistance, which I know is on today's
agenda and which my fellow panelists will talk more about. I
want to draw a sharp distinction between stabilization,
pacification and counterinsurgency activities in a war zone and
security cooperation arrangements, training equipment activity
and longer term development activities in noncrisis countries.
In my view, it is entirely appropriate for the military to
have the lead on reconstruction activities in a war zone. The
lesson of CORDS in Vietnam is that this structure works better
than having a civilian lead. In Vietnam, pacification had
priority over traditional development assistance, although in
practice on the ground it was often hard to tell the difference
between the two. Everyone agreed that security had to come
before reconstruction.
One example I would cite today as a contrast to that from
Iraq is the example of state-owned enterprises. It is an issue
I know well because when I was in Iraq with Coalition
Provisional Authority (CPA) I was on detail from the Commerce
Department, and my area was private sector development.
There is still disagreement today between the State
Department and the Department of Defense over whether to
rehabilitate state-owned enterprises or to privatize them. It
is my view now, as it was when I was in Baghdad, that the
state-owned enterprises should be rehabilitated where possible
in a war zone to get people back to work and off the streets,
even though of course this view is entirely contrary to
traditional long-term development orthodoxy.
So, in some final concluding remarks, I would say that
unity of command in a war zone is essential, and I say that as
a civilian and as a former civilian participant in one of these
operations. In a major contingency such as Vietnam or Iraq, the
unity of command between military and civilian efforts which
brings along with it the enormous military resources I think is
an imperative element. I think there needs to be a mandatory
control structure. A civil-military chain of command should be
established at the very highest levels of the government
because without top-down direction there will be intense
organizational resistance to the concession of the control of
agency assets to a unified interagency headquarters. There
should be a focus on the local population, which CORDS
incorporated. Counterinsurgency and stabilization activities
require a focus on local populations and on understanding and
in fulfilling their needs. The focus in CORDS was on security
first, then economic well-being.
The final point I would make is that, in these types of
activities in a war zone, we need to encourage host nation
ownership. CORDS was designed to empower the South Vietnamese
Government to provide security and essential services to the
districts and villages. In fact, the ratio of the U.S.
participants was about 1 to 1,000, U.S. to South Vietnamese
participants.
The final point I would make is that the lesson is to build
the local private sector. CORDS was designed to build the
agriculture and economic livelihoods of local villages and
districts rather than as a temporary employment or as a one-
time donor contribution. I will stop there.
I thank the committee for the opportunity to appear before
you today.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Carreau can be found in the
Appendix on page 46.]
Dr. Snyder. Thank you, Mr. Carreau.
Before you begin, General Warner, I want to acknowledge the
loss of your granddaughter, First Lieutenant Laura Margaret
Walker, who died in combat in Afghanistan on August 18th, 2005.
We know that has been a tremendous sacrifice for your family,
and you still have six other members who have served in the
military. We appreciate your service and the service of your
family.
General Warner.
STATEMENT OF GEN. VOLNEY F. WARNER (RET.), U.S. ARMY, PRESIDENT
AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, V.F. WARNER AND ASSOCIATES
General Warner. Thank you.
Well, it has been over 25 years since I have been in the
building, this building, so I appreciate----
Dr. Snyder. It looks about the same, does it not?
General Warner. There are still cakes in the hallway. I
noticed that, but I am honored to be here and to have a chance
to participate.
I was thinking on the way over, since I have not been to
Afghanistan and I have not been to Iraq, the reason for my
appearance had to be my presentation given to the National War
College, and I wanted to in my opening statement just mention
what that was. I think it is related to what happens next,
really, and I believe the committee has been provided the notes
on my presentation given to the National War College. I titled
the presentation Getting Past Iraq and that my greatest
interest was to ensure that we come up with a better solution
to assist future failed states, where U.S. vital interests are
involved, without resorting to the deployment of conventional
military force.
The U.S. cannot resolve most of the instability in the
world militarily. Winning all battles is not excellence.
Excellence is achieving our goal without fighting, and the best
way to win wars is to make them unnecessary.
If there truly is to be a global Islamic movement and our
enemies are extremists, nonstate players using asymmetric
warfare, if that is the case, then the nature of future
conflict, which includes both hard and soft power, is more
political than military. As such, we need to fashion a better
interagency preemptive response. Let us call it
``counterinsurgency,'' commonly referred to as ``COIN.''
How should we proceed?
My thought would be that, first, we need to put together an
overarching national counterinsurgency plan to start the
process. The national plan should be built from the bottom up
by integrating those counterinsurgency plans as coordinated
between the Regional Unified Commanders, called ``Commander in
Chiefs'' (CINCs) in my day--it has changed somewhat recently--
and their ambassador counterparts. Priority should be given to
failed states where a vital U.S. national interest is involved.
The Congress should mandate and fund the soft power agencies of
the U.S. Government to enable them to perform their part of the
interagency task, to include the State Department, the U.S
Agency for International Development, the Central Intelligence
Agency, and a new U.S. information agency, just to name a few.
A new Department of Stability coequal to Defense and State
in authority and funding may be required to manage the efforts
at the national level under the watchful eye of a special
assistant to the President. Having been under the watchful eye
of Komer for about two and a half years, I understand exactly
what that means. If we could find a Komer clone somewhere in
the United States, he would be a welcomed special assistant to
the President to bring the agencies on board in the Washington
region and to backstop the Petraeuses of the world and those
who are out on the ground trying to get the job done.
Once that would be established and the teams would be then
trained, we could have a microcosm country team, PRTs, in terms
of Afghanistan and Iraq. They should be trained and tailored
country by country to support the forward-deployed U.S.
ambassadors and their Military Assistance Advisory Group
Staffs, MAAGS, which were greatly reduced in 1973 and should
once again be augmented so that they can actually do the job
required of them in the countries they find themselves and,
certainly, in working with the local populations in
counterinsurgency efforts at the province level.
Secure, hold and build is a good paradigm. It is very
descriptive of the team activities once deployed. As we have
just heard, that is exactly what happened in the Vietnam. The
objective should be not to impose our political and economic
ideals on the locals but to devise and fund plans supportive of
both their and our interests in the region. Only when it
appears that an advisory effort has failed will the President
be faced with the critical decision of whether to deploy
conventional military force or to withdraw support or to seek
multilateral support.
I thank you for letting me make that pitch.
[The prepared statement of General Warner can be found in
the Appendix on page 53.]
Dr. Snyder. Thank you, General Warner.
General Olson.
STATEMENT OF BRIG. GEN. ERIC T. ``RICK'' OLSON (RET.), FORMER
COMMANDER, COMBINED/JOINT TASK FORCE-76, FORMER DIRECTOR,
NATIONAL COORDINATION TEAM, U.S. ARMY
General Olson. Mr. Chairman, thank you and thanks to the
members. I think the order that we are speaking is fortuitous
because you have gotten a good introduction to the historical
context. I am going to talk a little bit about history that is
more recent, and then Ms. Hicks will talk a little bit about
policy, I am sure, since she has got a good background in that.
My association with PRTs began in Afghanistan where I
served, as the chairman said, as the Combined/Joint Task Force
(CJTF) Commander there, responsible for all U.S. military
operations, and as such I also ran the PRTs. In Afghanistan,
PRTs are run by the military. That is not the case in Iraq.
Then in August 2006, as an official of the Department of State,
I became the Deputy Director of the Iraqi Reconstruction
Management Office and the Director of the National Coordination
Team. So, as a State Department official, I ran all of the PRTs
in Iraq. There were very different effects there, and we can
talk about that more later on if you would like to.
PRTs in Afghanistan were first established by Ambassador
Khalilzad. The first one was in Gardez Province in 2003, about
50 miles south of Kabul. The purpose of these organizations--
and all PRTs are civil-militaries, as you are well aware--was
to serve as the primary interface between the Coalition and
Afghan provincial and local governments, not the national
government but the provincial and local governments, and to
assist them in governing their provinces more effectively and
to deliver essential services to the people.
PRTs in Afghanistan were commanded by military officers.
That is not the case in Iraq. In Iraq, they are not PRT
commanders; they are PRT leaders. Again, there is a difference.
That produces a difference as well. The PRTs in Afghanistan
were initially manned primarily or staffed primarily by
military personnel, overwhelmingly by military personnel. Later
on the State Department and USAID officials entered the fray.
The PRT program in Iraq was instituted in November 2005.
Again, Ambassador Khalilzad is the one who brought it on board.
By that time, he had moved from Afghanistan to Iraq. The first
PRTs there were opened up in Mosul, Kirkuk and then later on in
Baghdad. There were eventually 10 PRTs. That is how many
standing PRTs there are now. There are now 25 PRTs in total.
There are really three types of PRTs. There are the
standing PRTs, which are located within the provinces where
they operate. There are 10 of those in Iraq and about 25--all
of the ones in Afghanistan are standing PRTs.
The next is what is known as a provincial support team.
They exist in Iraq, not in Afghanistan, but these are small
civil-military teams that are located outside of the province
in which they are supposed to operate, and they go back and
forth into the province from some type of hub PRT. Normally,
you will see a PST in an area that does not support from a
security standpoint the actual establishment of a PRT in that
province.
Then there is what is known as the embedded PRT. Those were
started early this year in Iraq. Those PRTs are actually
embedded in brigade combat teams, and those PRTs work for the
brigade commander. It is very similar to the CORDS concept as I
understand it.
I would like to very quickly go over some of the
accomplishments, if you will, the successes of the PRTs and
then areas where they have fallen short or where they have been
challenged. The first area is provincial and local governments
in both Afghanistan and Iraq are functioning. They may not be
what we would all recognize as, you know, the paragon of good
governance, but they are up and they are functioning in each
one of the provinces, and that was not the case before the PRTs
were stood up.
There are reconstruction projects that the PRTs have
started that are having an effect and that are actually making
a difference in the lives of the people.
Third, micro-loans and micro-grants channeled through
Provincial Reconstruction Teams are having a salutary economic
effect, so economic development is occurring as a direct result
of the work that PRTs are doing. PRTs have contributed to the
reconciliation process. This Sunni awakening in Anbar Province
was, in many ways, facilitated by the PRT, then, later on, the
embedded PRTs located in Anbar. Right now, there are four PRT
organizations in Anbar, and they are helping with the
reconciliation process.
Then, finally, cooperation and coordination between
provincial and national governments has been improved through
the efforts of PRTs. PRTs have been directly involved in
taking--take Iraq for example--Iraqi officials to Baghdad and,
in some cases, introducing governors to their ministers, and
that is through the efforts of PRTs working with the military
located in those provinces.
Very quickly, there are some challenges. Obviously, the
demands of the geography in both countries exceed the reach of
the PRTs, and the PRTs are not resourced with transportation
assets to enable them to get out and to really reach into the
provinces in some of the remote areas. Especially in
Afghanistan the geography is very, very tough, and it is hard
to travel in there.
In some of the more unstable provinces of Afghanistan and
Iraq, security restrictions have hindered the ability of PRTs
to do their business. In my personal opinion, some of those
restrictions are artificial. There are civilians who are
subject to much more restrictive security requirements than the
military are. That not only makes it difficult for PRTs to
operate, but it also engenders some hard feelings between the
civilian and the military elements in the PRT.
There is no established proponency for PRTs. Nobody really
owns them. The Department of Defense does not own them. The
Department of State does not really own them. The PRT concept
has no godfather.
Then, finally, considerable lip service notwithstanding,
PRTs are not a resourcing priority. For the agencies tasked to
support them, we had some real difficulties in both Afghanistan
and in Iraq in getting people to man positions in the PRTs,
especially from some of the civilian agencies.
In conclusion, despite the significant challenges being
faced by PRT members--a lot of brave men and women who are out
there on the ground, making a difference--I think that the
value added by PRTs to the operations both in Iraq and
Afghanistan has been understated and, I think, underrecognized.
I also think that PRTs--and the colleagues to my right here
talked about civil-military cooperation at the national level.
I think PRTs can serve as a good model. There are good lessons
learned from PRTs that can be applied to civil-military
relations at other levels.
I thank the committee. I am sorry to run a little bit late.
[The prepared statement of General Olson can be found in
the Appendix on page 63.]
Dr. Snyder. Ms. Hicks.
STATEMENT OF KATHLEEN H. HICKS, SENIOR FELLOW, INTERNATIONAL
SECURITY PROGRAM, CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND INTERNATIONAL
STUDIES
Ms. Hicks. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the
subcommittee.
I am pleased to be here today to discuss the Defense
Department's evolving role in delivering security and
humanitarian assistance. Over the past year, my colleague
Stephen Morrison and I have codirected a pretty unique task
force on nontraditional security assistance that has sought to
understand the evolution of Department of Defense's (DOD's)
role and its international, interagency dynamics. This task
force is co-led by your colleagues, Representatives Robert
Andrews and Mark Kirk, and it formed from a simple, yet
surprisingly unusual concept to bring together experts from the
defense, diplomacy and development sectors to examine military
and civilian roles in U.S. security assistance and development.
As you might imagine, these stakeholders brought a wide range
of experience and expertise to the problem set. The task
force's recommendations, which are scheduled to be released
later this month, reflect a strong majority viewpoint that
spans across each of these sometimes divided domains.
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11th, the U.S.
concept and approach to global security has changed
fundamentally. Weak and failing states, long neglected, have
risen in priority. We understand threats to the United States
can emanate from within states with which the United States is
not at war; importantly, that persistent poverty can be a
significant contributor to those threats. There is now a
strategic imperative to devise multi-decade, integrated
approaches that are preventative in nature. Foundational to
this preventative approach is sustainable overseas partnerships
that build capacity for good governance and security, that
foster economic prosperity and social well-being, and that more
effectively promote community-led development.
Accordingly, we now place a far higher premium on the unity
of effort of our foreign and national security policy
instruments, especially defense, diplomacy and development.
Provincial Reconstruction Teams are emblematic of this trend.
In just a few short years, the Pentagon's role as the
direct provider of foreign assistance has surged. From 2002 to
2005, DOD's share of U.S. official development assistance
increased from 5.6 percent to 21.7 percent. The Defense
Department has assumed an expanding role in counterterrorism,
capacity-building, post-conflict operations, and humanitarian
relief. Beyond implementing traditional military-to-military
programs supported by State Department funds, the DOD has been
granted temporary authority to use directly appropriated funds
both for prevention and for post-conflict response,
concentrated in conflict-ridden, nonpermissive environments
where civilian actors have difficulty operating or where
civilian capacities are weak or absent.
The DOD has also provided billions of reimbursement dollars
to Coalition members, such as Pakistan and Jordan, outside of
the formal, State Department-run economic support funds
process.
Meanwhile, the United States has continued to underresource
the diplomatic and development instruments of its national
power. All of the other panelists have pointed out the staffing
programs and operational capacities of the U.S. Agency for
International Development and the State Department have
continued to stagnate at the very moment in history when
diplomatic and development agencies should be better, not less
well-positioned to advance the United States' new, evolving
global agenda.
By defaulting to the reliance on the military, the United
States is aggravating these existing institutional imbalances.
Compelling reasons exist, as Bernie pointed out, to give the
DOD flexibility to provide foreign assistance in specific
circumscribed crisis situations. Granting more permanent global
authorities, however, does not address the larger structural
problem and must be handled carefully, as it risks undermining
those sustainable, capacity-building and broader U.S. foreign
policy interests.
To unify the U.S. Government's approach to security and
development assistance, the task force intends to make the
following four major recommendations:
First, the executive branch must provide increased budget
transparency to Congress in the form of an integrated resource
picture of U.S. foreign national and homeland security policy.
Wholesale revision of the existing Congressional authorization
of the appropriations structure would require bold leadership
and near unanimous support in Congress, conditions that I do
not believe we will obtain in the near future. Nevertheless,
the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the National
Security Council (NSC) should be required to document more
systematically how the foreign assistance streams for AID,
State, DOD, and other relevant U.S. agencies fit together. Such
transparency would help provide an accurate portrait to
Congress of what the United States is actually spending across
agencies to meet its most pressing national security challenges
as well as to facilitate the creation of benchmarks to assess
progress in meeting these objectives through various
instruments of national power.
Second, Congress should take steps to ensure more effective
and comprehensive oversight of foreign and security assistance
programs across existing committee jurisdictions. One potential
solution much discussed would be the creation of a select
committee on U.S. national security in the Senate and in the
House, but simply improving coordination processes across
existing committees might also bear fruit.
Third, both Congress and the Executive need to elevate the
priority attached to development, placing it on an equal
footing with defense and diplomacy in U.S., foreign and
national security policy. To this end, the task force is going
to call for a significant increase in U.S. official development
assistance and for better integration again of the multiple
streams of development aid.
Finally, to improve the performance of civilian agencies in
conflict prevention and post-conflict response, the task force
will be recommending that the next Administration appoint an
NSC Senior Director For Conflict Prevention and Response to
serve as a locus of interagency coordination on these issues at
the White House level and to work in close concert with OMB. At
the same time, the State Department Office of the Coordinator
for Reconstruction and Stabilization, S/CRS, should be
empowered with a larger multiyear funding stream so that it may
lead contingency planning for the State Department and USAID in
support of the NSC's coordinating efforts. Congress should move
now to fund S/CRS' plans for improving civilian response
capacity, including its Rapid Response Corps and Civilian
Reserve Corps. Congress and the White House should expand the
expeditionary capabilities of other civilian agencies,
particularly USAID's.
Before closing, I would like to very briefly review the
task force's recommendations with respect to PRTs. PRTs are a
potentially promising platform for integrating civilian and
military instruments working in unique and difficult
operational environments. At the same time, PRTs suffer from
important limitations, many of which have been described to you
today or in previous hearings, and we largely echo those. To
maximize the potential PRTs, the task force intends to make the
following recommendations:
Advise the NSC to initiate a governmentwide process to
clarify PRT mandate and doctrine, including agency roles in
ownership; recommend that DOD and its civilian partners conduct
more comprehensive strategic planning for the use of PRTs and
create baseline assessments to identify the needs these teams
should be addressing; recommend expanding the predeployment
training of these interagency teams and other interagency
teams; endorse a streamlining of USAID funds in post-conflict
settings. AID's quick impact project funding is a good start,
but it is insufficient, and many other resourcing streams exist
that must be integrated; call for greater monitoring and
evaluation of the impact of PRT projects, including from
security, governance and development perspectives; advocate the
development of robust civilian response and reserve corps as a
human capital base for future civilian-military teams and
provide them again with attendant training and participation
incentives; and welcome the recent DOD agreement with Non-
Governmental Organizations (NGOs) on rules of the road to guide
their interaction in insecure environments.
I want to conclude by restating what I am sure everyone in
this room believes. Meeting the security challenges of the 21st
century requires the United States to march with a full range
of instruments of national power and influence. Creating a
whole-of-government approach and requiring the executive branch
to explain how its budgets and programs support the unified
national security and foreign aid strategy will substantially
improve the Nation's ability to address the structural roots of
poor governance, instability and extremism in the developing
world.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Hicks can be found in the
Appendix on page 74.]
Dr. Snyder. Thank you all for your testimony.
We have also been joined by Dave Loebsack, who is a member
of the full committee, and without objection, will be allowed
to participate after the other members of the subcommittee have
asked their questions.
Goodbye, Dr. Williams. Good luck to you. See you in
Arkansas.
By the way, she was nodding in response to some of the
things you all were saying about PRT.
You know, this subcommittee, this Oversight Investigations
Subcommittee, is in a bit of a peculiar situation because we
really have had a lot of control over what we can look at, and
you know, when people talk about oversight or investigations,
we think about contracts and cost overruns and all of those
kinds of things, but there has been a lot of enthusiasm on both
sides of the aisle of this subcommittee in looking at the issue
of what is going on on the civilian side of our government
because, in many ways, we see that as maybe the key to our
success today in Iraq and Afghanistan and to our success in the
future in other wars, and I am going to, I guess, carry that
point to the extreme here.
General Warner, in your written statement that we have from
you, which I think is part of the text of your previous speech
you referred to, you talked about the need to have, quote, ``a
vastly empowered, funded and resourced State Department,'' not
Defense Department but State Department, ``that only the
Congress can mandate and make happen,'' was the end of your
quote.
Then, Ms. Hicks, on page one of your statement, you say,
``Meanwhile, the United States has continued to underresource
the diplomatic and development instruments of its national
power of the staffing programs, and operational capacities of
the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S.
Department of State have continued to stagnate at the very
moment in history when diplomatic and development agencies
should be better, not less well-positioned to advance the
United States' new, evolving global agenda.''
Then on page six, Ms. Hicks, of your statement, you ask
``Perhaps the key question of this is how realistic--'' I am
quoting you ``--how realistic is it to expect that robust
civilian capacities will actually emerge and be funded?'' end
of your quote, and you discussed that a little bit.
I think that issue of--we have been spending quite a bit of
time on how that relationship between DOD and the military and
the civilian side should work. I would think that the answer to
your question is, if we come up with a model that seems to
point in the right direction, we will greatly enhance our
ability to get it funded and operational because I think there
is really a lot of concern about where we are going.
I wanted to ask one preliminary question, perhaps starting
with General Warner and General Olson, and any comments the
other two--you need to start the clock on me here. I am sorry--
want to make.
Take a step back, and look just at the military side. As to
the troops that we have in the military today who we are
sending to Iraq and Afghanistan and knowing of the work that
they are doing, the ones that are on almost a daily basis
dealing with Iraq and Afghanistan civilians, is there more that
we could or should be doing to prepare them for success and to
prepare them to avoid mistakes? I am thinking of language
skills, culture skills, those kinds of things.
What should we actually be looking at with regard to our
troops on the ground, the boots on the ground guys, who are
really involved on the fighting side of it? Should we be doing
more with an eye toward these other goals that we have?
General Warner, we will start with you.
General Warner. I think, as to the troop increase that is
forecast and the existing capability of Special Forces,
Rangers, civil affairs, civic acts and psy war, the Army soft-
power components, if you will, are fairly well-attuned.
What they need to do is their military input to what we
have been talking about today, and I think, with the personnel
increase, that some of those, whether they go to Special Forces
or elsewhere, will be able to do that. I think, if you have a
return, though, back to where we were 15, 20 years ago where we
had certain people dual-tracked within the military who
basically could pop in and out of military assistance advisory
groups, be immersed in a particular region and have a regional
orientation and also have language training, that you could
eventually then build a cadre of people who you could call on
when needed to go to Bogota or to go to Lisbon or somewhere
else and who could be used rather than waiting until you have a
problem and then suddenly saying, ``Well, we do not speak the
language, and nobody has been there in 25 years.''
So there are things that can be done. Just from what I have
heard the military say in recent days, I believe that is fairly
underway.
I do not worry about the military's capacity to respond to
what is required of them on this issue. I worry a great deal
about the civilian side as well and about the fact that the
civilian side has a tendency, as they did in Vietnam, to go
mufti, borrow Army, put them in civilian clothes, and then
perform their mission. That is not a good long-term solution to
the problem.
Dr. Snyder. General Olson, any comments?
General Olson. Yes, thank you.
I think you have got to break the answer to that question
down into short-term and long-term. If we are confused about
what we can do right now, I do not think there is a lot of
programmatic help--I agree with General Warner. There is not a
whole lot of programmatic help that they need right now, but I
would like to highlight, really, three things.
First of all, the military is starting to integrate in a
big way into their mission rehearsal exercises, the integration
of soft power with their kinetic operations, and that needs to
be encouraged and probably expanded.
The second thing that I--and I am not familiar with how far
this has gone, but a good ``lessons learned'' process that
takes the lessons that are being learned in Afghanistan and
Iraq right now about dealing with civilians and then the
sharing that, especially with units that are going over there,
I think is important.
Then I am going to underscore what General Warner said. I
think there is work that can be done right now to train key
civilian personnel who are going to Iraq and to Afghanistan and
who are going to work with the military to train them and to
indoctrinate them about military culture or about processes,
systems and that kind of thing. Just a planning process, I
think, is a great example of that.
Longer term--and I will not go on too much about this, but
there are organizational issues. I think especially ground
force formations could be modified to, let us say, capitalize
on the potential of the integration of military and civilian
efforts. It has to do with the manning of headquarters, for
example, and at lower levels as well.
Then there are some real institutional issues that I think
need to be addressed, and that is how do we build into the
professional development system and the military education
system. Enough of this, the impact of soft power. Are we doing
that enough? I think there is certainly room to improve in
those areas. So those would be my comments.
Dr. Snyder. My time is about up.
Ms. Hicks, do you have any comments or Mr. Carreau?
Mr. Carreau. I just wanted to follow up a little bit on
what General Olson just said.
I totally agree. I think that the civilians need to join on
to some of the military structures and capabilities. I think
one of the secrets of the CORDS program is that the civilians
joined in on existing military structures because they are much
larger; they were better resourced; also, they do operational
things that most civilian agencies do not know how to do, like
planning and training. So I think that that sort of thing, as
Mr. Olson was saying, would be extremely important. I think you
need cross-pollination on both sides, but I think that would be
very helpful for this agency.
Dr. Snyder. Thank you.
Mr. Akin for five minutes.
Mr. Akin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Just sort of backing up a little bit, as to the experience
in Vietnam, which is of interest to some of us oldsters who are
kicking around here, did these reconstruction teams do some
good? Apparently, from your testimony, they were doing some
good. If they were doing good, why did we end up where we were?
Were we on the right track and gave up too soon? Is that the
bottom line?
Mr. Carreau. Well, I think it is a difficult question to
answer, and historians will argue over this.
I think what the consensus seems to be is that the program
itself, the CORDS program itself, achieved its limited
objectives, but the patience still died anyway. Remember, CORDS
was set up to defeat the Viet Cong infrastructure, so it was
really about local insurgencies. Local insurgencies were
extracting rents and taxes and land and grown goods from the
local people. The idea was to win over the hearts and minds of
those people. It was never intended to defeat the North
Vietnamese, the conventional army. So what ultimately happened
was it was a combination of the counteroffensive and a lot of
the CORDS programs in all of the little villages that pretty
much was fairly effective in defeating the Viet Cong
insurgency, but it did not stop, you know, the North Vietnamese
conventional army from invading the south.
Mr. Akin. Okay. I guess the other question I had was:
My understanding was that there is quite a lot of
difference between the way these teams work in Afghanistan and
Iraq. What is your impression about what we are doing? Should
they be operating the same in both or is the situation
different enough that they need to be different in the way that
they are focused?
Last of all, if you are trying to build depth, which is
always hard for us politically to try to plan more than just
what dinner is going to be tonight, let alone what language
skills we are going to need five years or ten years down the
path, how would that best be funded? You know, politically and
logically, where would that repository--I remember back in the
Vietnam days that my friend was in the Green Berets, and they
were getting cross-trained in the Czechoslovakian language and,
you know, on how to fix a dog that had its leg shot off and all
kinds of different things, so you had people who were cross-
trained to do a lot of different things. I assume that was
pretty expensive, and to be well prepared in terms of PRTs
would probably be an expensive commitment as well.
So just a few thoughts on that subject. Thank you.
General Olson. I will take a shot at the first part of the
question about Afghanistan compared to Iraq.
The answer is, yes, they are different. I think the
fundamental purposes--it starts right there--are different, and
I think that is appropriate. The purposes are tied to the
respective missions, and they are different.
In Afghanistan, the purpose of those PRTs is more directly
linked to the counterinsurgency effort of winning the hearts
and minds, to use that term. Some people are reluctant to use
it. I think it is a good term. So their focus is on short-term,
high-impact, high-visibility actions, activities and projects
directly in support of a military commander.
In Iraq, the purpose is a little bit different. It is a
little bit longer term, and the purpose of the PRTs in Iraq,
very broadly, is to accomplish capacity-building to rebuild, in
many cases, institutions that will endure over a longer period
of time. Functional----
Mr. Akin. For rebuilding local government or for something
beyond that?
General Olson. Yes, it means local government. It means
rule of law. There are actually five pillars: Local government,
rule of law, economic development--there is one other I am
forgetting--and then public diplomacy. Oh, the infrastructure,
reconstruction of the infrastructure.
Mr. Akin. But in Iraq we are not having road builders and
sewer builders and stuff like that.
General Olson. No, but we are having experts who can advise
where to go to contract for a road builder. We have got experts
who can advise how a government should determine that there is
a requirement for a sewage treatment plant. So it is a little
bit more on the side of the institution building, the longer
term, and a little bit less focused on the short-term, directly
tied to counterinsurgency. There is obviously some slopover.
The last point I would make is that the embedded PRTs are a
little bit different in Iraq. They are, in fact, working
directly for a brigade combat team commander, and they are
focused on his counterinsurgency efforts, and they are also
very successful.
Dr. Snyder. Thank you.
Mrs. Davis for five minutes.
Ms. Davis of California. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you
to all of you for being here.
I wonder if we could just turn for a second to the
international efforts because I had an opportunity over the
break to speak with some of our NATO counterparts, and there
was certainly a lot of frustration about the fact that we
really are not doing a lot of sharing of information or
necessarily learning from one another of the PRT operations. I
wondered if you could speak to that. I think maybe at the
higher levels there is some discussion, but there did not seem
to be--at least it was not getting down to the folks who are
really doing the work.
How should we be organizing that? Even if we did, is that
important? Is that something that we ought to be looking at if
we are engaged in this kind of effort with our partners?
General Olson. First, to talk about Iraq, where my most
recent experience is, there are two Coalition PRTs from Europe.
One is supported by Italy, which is in Di-Qar, and then by the
United Kingdom, which is in Basra.
I think there what you would find is that--you know, you
are always going to find the one PRT member who has got a
complaint along those lines, but there, I think, you would find
that there is a sharing of information, a cross-pollinization,
because there is an organization there that used to be called
the National Coordination Team that is now the Office of
Provincial Affairs. It is specifically designed to coordinate
the efforts of all PRTs, to include the Coalition PRTs.
In Afghanistan, at least while I was there as the CJTF
Commander, there was no like organization that was specifically
focused on running PRTs. It was a chain of command function.
Ms. Davis of California. We are focusing mainly on
Afghanistan.
General Olson. Okay. Then I am not 100 percent current
there, but I will speak for when I was there.
There was no organization that was focused on PRTs and on
coordinating their efforts. It was a chain of command function.
As you know, in Afghanistan the chain of command's focus is
very busy. They are focused on a lot of different things.
Ms. Davis of California. Is that something that we should
be at least trying to address and to understand how we can
best----
General Olson. I think so. I think an organizational
improvement would be to have, in operations like this, a
separate, I will say, headquarters, a military term, where they
are specifically focused on coordinating the efforts and
supporting PRTs. That seemed to work pretty well in Iraq. In
Afghanistan we did not have it. I will admit to you, frankly,
as a CJTF Commander, at times the PRTs were kind of an
afterthought.
Ms. Davis of California. Yes. Yes. I think why this should
be important is partly for moving public opinion and in helping
to see that this is an effort that is succeeding in some ways
and that it is an effort that is important.
You know, what strikes me as well is that there are a lot
us who have had an interest in trying to pursue this question,
and there are a lot of efforts actually going on. I actually
did not know about the task force, and we have talked about
trying to do a number of different things, really, to just
bring Members of Congress up to speed and into the fold so that
we might even see our committees as having more of an
interagency focus, if you will, across jurisdictions--and an
understanding.
I think what I always come back to in some ways is, you
know, why aren't we getting this? Why is it really taking us a
while to get to the point of seeing that the investment,
certainly in this interagency work, is so important? I am just
wondering if you could--you know, why is that? Why are we
struggling with this?
Ms. Hicks. I do have thoughts on that.
My view is that, if you look around this room, you will
see--obviously, a lot of people who have spoken today and I
know a lot of you on this committee are involved in this
interagency working group up here on the House side, but most
people are coming at it from a defense perspective, and it is
very ironic in some ways that it is the defense community, the
well-resourced, large defense community, that feels most
passionate, really, about this issue of interagency reform.
That is not to say there are not parts of the civilian agencies
that feel similarly, but I do not think it is organic there the
way it is on the defense side, and that is a real hurdle to
overcome. I will not say you cannot have reform without it--I
think that would be too pessimistic--but I think you need to
have State and AID, State in particular, start to feel, again,
organically within their own organization that things have got
to change. Without that, you do not have, really, willing
recipients on the civilian side where a lot of the change is
harder to come by. They have got a harder resourcing battle to
make, and they have got no constituency throughout the United
States the way the defense community does. So I think it would
be difficult but important.
Ms. Davis of California. Okay.
Dr. Snyder. We will go to Mr. Sestak, and that will
conclude the folks who were here at the gavel, and then we will
go to Mr. Bartlett.
Mr. Sestak for five minutes.
Mr. Sestak. Thanks, Mr. Chairman.
If I could, maybe, give an observation and then ask your
opinion on it. We will start with you, Ms. Hicks.
To some degree, I have always been taken that the military
has forces, and then there is military force, which of course
we use in war. Military forces have been used at times from
intelligence to logistics to help humanitarian or other self-
efforts. As I have listened to--or if I have not been here, I
have at least perused--testimony on this issue over time, I
have begun to kind of slightly change my mind about our moving
to an interagency process on this, particularly as I think
about, oftentimes, these types of what you call in the military
a ``general's phase four operations'' that often come about at
the end of a conflict where strife is still present or of
concern.
As I step back--and with all due respect to the Army
generals--is there potentially a different model we might
pursue much like in the Marine Corps where they are supposed to
be light, fast, quick, in there, and where they kick open the
door, and then the Army with its half comes in? Might we not
accept the cold, brutal reality of the fact that the DOD has
forces because they are so well-resourced and accept that the,
quote, ``PRTs'' that may be initially helped to stabilize or to
do things should be built around the DOD? They are often there
in strife where we need these. We just do not calmly or quickly
walk into these countries sometimes. Really, the interagency
process is one where it is the Army's, so to speak, coming in
afterwards, built around not trying to have them there
initially. Maybe it is the National Guard with a bunch of armor
that initially starts moving them toward something, because I
am struck, Ms. Hicks, by your saying we do not have any
interagency doctrine and that we need to institutionalize this
and that there is lack of significant resources. Maybe that is
okay, much like we do not tend to live by our doctrines in the
military anyway as the Russians always told us.
So my question is: Would that potentially be a different
model to look at rather than this wonderful interagency thing
that is supposed to come in? Maybe it is this quick corps
presently built around DOD, and then there should be a natural
transition that is ready to go but that kind of comes in rather
than forces this in in an unknowing, strife-worn situation.
Ms. Hicks. I definitely think the right model is that in
the early stages of a conflict, as the security environment is
difficult, you are going to have it be military led. And I
think there is wide recognition that that is the way you have
to go at the problem and then transition into a civilian led.
And of course, I defer to my military colleagues on how they
sense the time is right to make that transition. But having
said that, I think it is very important not to lose sight of
the idea that the military is not always the right face. Even
if you said well, we want to build all the right skills into
the military, we are going to focus on the military, give them
all the right skillsets, which is a good thing to do.
The problem is, if you then come to rely on the military as
your instrument, that is not the face of development in foreign
policy that other countries or other individuals in countries,
populations, want to see in their nation. And it alters the way
our foreign policy then is presented overseas.
Mr. Sestak. But for that quick rapid opening, like the
Tsunami report, our military probably got better play, and I
saw all and purposefully went to see the foreign press, and
gave more of a positive face to our military than we garnered
in Iraq. So I understand the long-term implication as to what
you are saying, but I am talking about opening that door.
Ms. Hicks. I completely agree. In our task force report, as
an example, we look at humanitarian assistance as one of our
core issue areas. And we end up strongly endorsing the way in
which we currently have a civil military division of labor, for
lack of a better term, on humanitarian assistance. The military
can get there faster often, they can bring resources to bear.
And that is a good thing. It is a great public diplomacy
approach, it is a great true humanitarian effort. But in the
long run when you have to transition that into sustainable
development, that is not where the Department of Defense is A,
trained, or B, necessarily the face you want to put forward.
Mr. Sestak. General, comment?
General Olson. I would say that I agree with what Ms. Hicks
said. But I also think that if, in fact, the type of missions
that you are talking about are going to become core missions
for the military, that is going to require some culture
changes. There is a real controversy in the military. I don't
speak for the military, but there is a controversy about
whether or not, you know, whether we do windows, do we do
nation building. Even in the opening phases, some of these
things can amount to nation building.
So if, in fact, the military buys into that, then there are
going to be organizational changes they need to make. And there
is definitely some resistance, as this committee is probably
well aware. And then it flows from there; doctoral changes,
provincial military education changes, equipment changes and on
and on. So though I might agree that this is a good approach,
to do this across the military would take some effort.
Dr. Snyder. Mr. Bartlett for five minutes.
Mr. Bartlett. Thank you for your testimony. A day or two
ago, I was reading a reprint on Early Bird of an op-ed piece. I
forget which newspaper it appeared, which said that Iraq was
the third most corrupt, I forget whether it said country or
government in the world. When I read something like that, I am
always curious who the heck is number one and two, you know.
General Olson. You may not want to know the answer to that
question.
Mr. Bartlett. Yeah, I do want to know the answer. Who is
number one and two? They said that like everybody ought to
know. I thought gee, maybe I just wasn't on the know on this
thing. Who do you think they might have had in mind as number
one and two as one of the most corrupt countries or government
in the world?
General Olson. It might have been Russia.
Ms. Hicks. I think Somalia might be up there.
Mr. Bartlett. Somalia and Russia? Okay. I will check to see
if that is what they had in mind. They said that a third of all
of the money in our grants and contracts in Iraq just disappear
or are stolen. That is about right?
General Olson. My current position is working as the chief
staff of the special inspector general for Iraqi
reconstruction. I am not here in that capacity. But just based
on my general knowledge, that is probably a good figure. It is
a very hard figure to estimate. But about a third is probably
not overstating the problem.
Mr. Bartlett. It just disappears or is stolen. Do we have
an opportunity to help them understand that this is not
productive, that at the end of the day, they will be better off
if they can somehow control this, or do we just have to accept
this as a part of the cost of doing this kind of business?
General Olson. I think some of it is the cost of doing
business in an area where there are tremendous security
challenges in where you have got a government that is not
transparent, that is developing, actually being built in some
cases. But some of it must be addressed. I think Prime Minister
Maliki has made that one of his top priorities. He calls that
the second war, the war against graft and corruption. There are
organizations, the Board of Supreme Audit inside the Iraqi
Government, that is specifically focused on graft and
corruption. So the problem is recognized. It is debatable
whether or not recognition translates to actual action.
Mr. Bartlett. Help me understand the reason for this
problem. In many countries in the world, we have a lot of
corruption simply because they don't pay their public officials
enough. And if they are going to feed their family, they have
got to be blackmailing people and so forth. Is that the case
here? Is this just a way of life in that country, that if you
have a job that is what you do, you steal and so forth?
General Olson. The Iraqi Government has a remarkable record
in terms of budget execution. It is remarkable because of how
poor it is. One thing they can execute, however, is their
operating budget. In other words they pay salaries very well.
So I don't think it is a case of government officials who are
starving on the street. I do believe that there are government
officials in fairly high positions who are corrupt and on the
take. They have been historically in Iraq, and I believe that
continues to be a problem.
And then some of the money disappearing is not necessarily
disappearing into Iraqi pockets. As you well know, Congressman,
there is ample evidence about corruption in fraud, waste and
abuse that is attributable to international entities that are
working in Iraq, some of which are American.
Mr. Bartlett. I am concerned that we not be seen as a
supporter or facilitator of this kind of thing. Is this such an
ingrained practice in their country that it is probably
inevitable and there is darn little we can do about it unless
we plan to stay there for 50 or 100 years?
General Olson. I think you would get varying answers to
that question. There are differences of opinions. I am an
optimist, and I think that the more developed the Iraqi
Government becomes, the more they are supported by the Iraqi
people, the more transparent they become, and the more measures
that are put into place to ensure that they are transparent, I
think that the graft and corruption problem gets better. Let us
face it, they are a Third World nation, and graft and
corruption are a sad fact of life in virtually all Third World
nations.
Mr. Bartlett. I thank you very much. Thank you, Mr.
Chairman.
Dr. Snyder. Thank you, Mr. Bartlett. We will now go to our
two representatives who are not a member of the subcommittee in
the order in which they came. And Dr. Boustany is recognized
for five minutes, and then we will go to Mr. Loebsack.
Dr. Boustany. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate you
extending the courtesy to me. And I want to commend you on this
hearing. This is an excellent hearing. This whole issue of
post-conflict stabilization is something I developed an
interest in about two years ago. I have been reading
extensively on it in books and papers by a council on foreign
relations, some work done by General Nash, General Rupert
Smith's recent book, The Utility of Force, where he talks about
deployment versus employment of force. And what is remarkable
as I go through this, I remember reading Churchill's first book
in the 1890's where he described his deployment in the Swat
Valley where we are currently seeing problems.
And he decried the lack of political expertise on the
ground to complement the military expertise and that they were
constantly trying to quell these rebellions, but yet they
couldn't get long-term stability because of a lack of a
civilian political component. And here we are, we fast forward
and we see a State Department that has 6.5 percent of the
funding that the Department of Defense has. We have currently
about 6,000 foreign service officers worldwide, which puts us
about on par with the United Kingdom today and yet we are a
superpower. And Mr. Carreau's testimony indicated we had 8,000
personnel in Vietnam alone. So we don't seem to learn from
history what we should be doing.
This testimony was excellent. And I think the order of
testimony was just perfect as well. And you pointed out many,
many things that we need to do. And from my reading, what you
have pointed out today corroborates everything I have read. It
is astounding to me that there is all this information out
there in the think tank community, yet Congress is not acting
and our Administration has not really worked in that regard as
well. And so clearly we have got problems in Congress with
stovepiping our committee structure and so forth, which Ms.
Hicks, you offered some recommendations which I think are
excellent.
One of the things that strikes me, I spoke with Barbara
Stevenson starting back in December about PRTs in Iraq. And I
have been talking to her on a regular basis about how is it
going with the different phases. And particularly phase three
with the backfill has been very difficult in mobilizing the
civilian component and having a reserve force. So this is
clearly something that you all addressed and it is something
that needs to be looked at. One question I have for the panel
would be instead of trying to put together ad hoc PRTs, should
we have PRTs or some sort of equivalent put into place that
participate in the scenario planning, contingency planning, so
that we don't get into certain difficulties late into the
crisis, and that we avert a crisis with that type of expertise
and planning and so forth? And I open it up to the panel for
their comment.
Ms. Hicks. I will start. I think from what I understand of
what Ambassador Herbst is attempting to do at the State
Department Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and
Stabilizaiton (S/CRS), that is exactly the plan. And they will
require the Department of Defense's openness to their
participation in their planning process. But also S/CRS needs
much more empowerment to run an interagency planning process as
they are chartered to do for post-conflict and stabilization
issues. But the idea is that you will have, if you follow the
model they are attempting to put in place, a standing civilian
response capability of U.S. Government employees.
And then two tiers beyond that, the last of which is the
civilian reserve corps, which I think most people have heard
because it was in the President's State of the Union Address
that is calling upon--it is a reserve model like the military
has. It calls upon folks in every day life who have skillsets
to provide to be pulled into service when we have more time.
But inherent in that whole model is planning well before you
are actually in a contingency for how you are going to use
these forces. And under the Clinton Administration, there was a
process known as Presidential Decision Directive-56 (PDD-56),
which was both a directive and then it directed a process for
how one plans in peacetime for these events.
There is a follow-on National Security Presidential
Directive (NSPD) in this Administration for the same thing. And
I think inevitably what you really need to move to is that sort
of standing peacetime, if you will, process of planning.
Mr. Carreau. I would just like to follow up on that. I
absolutely totally agree with everything Kathy has said. I
would make a couple of other observations. One about PDD-56
which a lot of folks are looking to as a model. It is an
interesting document. It was written though for peacekeeping
operations. It was, you know, at the time it was the Balkans,
it was Kosovo, Haiti. And the instruction to the PDD-56
actually talks about it wasn't intended to apply to armed
conflict. Again, I draw a sharp distinction between a
peacekeeping operation and a war zone where the U.S. is itself
a belligerent. I think that requires a different level of
planning. But as Kathy said, S/CRS is working on this issue. I
would actually like to see it go maybe even a little bit
further.
And I want to follow up on something that you started with.
The civilians, I believe, do need to be involved in the
planning and it needs to be steady state. Again, I think this
is something that needs to glum on to the military system that
is already there. Civilians with the Combatant Commanders
(COCOMs), this sort of steady state, very top secret planning
that is going on, that is when the civilian agencies need to
get involved.
Mr. Boustany. One thing I thought about----
Dr. Snyder. Charles, your time is expired. Let us go to Mr.
Loebsack and then we will go around again. Mr. Loebsack.
Mr. Loebsack. Thank you Mr. Chair. I will be very brief. I
just have a couple basic questions. And I missed the--and I
apologize for being late and missing some of the testimony. But
in particular, I guess I just want to ask General Olson, in
your testimony you mentioned that on page six the establishment
of measures that reflect true outcomes, that is the actual
impacts that PRT operations have had on achieving large
coalition objectives has been an elusive goal. I am new to the
Congress. I hear a lot about--I am a former educator. I taught
at a small college in Iowa. My wife taught second grade. I
heard a lot about outcomes based education, I heard a lot about
accountability, I heard about that before I got to this office,
I have heard a lot about it since I have been here, I have been
to Iraq a couple of times.
I am very concerned about measures. The military has
developed certain kinds of measures obviously to sort of
indicate to us that as a result of surge, we have seen a
significant decline in violence in Iraq. I get very frustrated
when I read something like this because I really want something
that I can sort of wrap my head around as far as what these
PRTs are accomplishing if anything, especially in Iraq. And I
think I was, when I came I think there was reference to the
sort of economic development, political development, military
success and all the rest. I remember when I first got here, we
had in the Armed Services Committee, the large committee, we
heard from a number of our military folks about sort of the
three-legged stool. And maybe that is what was being referenced
when I came in, I don't know.
Economic development is hugely important obviously. Can you
talk to us about any other sort of more concrete measures, if
there are any, because you have a few examples here of
successes, but it is kind of loosy goosy for me in some ways.
Sorry about the slang.
General Olson. I will use an educational metaphor,
Congressman. You can measure the number of hours that a student
studies, input measures, and make some determinations about how
conscientious a student is, or she is. You can measure how that
student does on tests. The grade or the score that they get on
an exam. That is an output measure. But how do you really
measure whether or not that student is becoming a better
person, better mathematician, better political scientist?
Grades won't do it for you. And so I turn that question back to
you. I would be interested in talking about how you did that.
What I will say is this: We have wrestled really hard with
PRT measures that really mean something. And so good
governance, let us take that as an example, in Iraq. We have,
in fact, reported the number of government officials at local
levels that we have trained. I am not so sure that that is all
that good. Then we went to output measures. How many successful
council meetings did they hold in a given period of time? An
output measure again. Very problematic from all standpoints.
But then we went to things like asking a question what do good
governments really do, can they execute a budget, can they pass
laws, can they stand up entities that we would consider to be
associated with a good local government? And we try to capture
those.
I will tell you that there are some problems with doing
that, as I am sure you are well aware. There is a causality
issue. Does the fact they can execute a budget, is that
directly related to anything that the PRT did or was there some
other factor that is involved? So I would say, I would stand on
my statement that it is still an elusive goal. But I will tell
you it is getting better and better. The last thing I will say
on that is one of the measures I used was getting out there and
seeing what was going on and talking to Iraqis in the streets
and saying, how do you feel about your local government, are
they doing better, are they doing worse? And the other thing I
did is talk to local military commanders. You can think what
you want about this measure, but the military commanders are
impressed with and very much rely upon their PRTs in their
overall effort.
Mr. Loebsack. I appreciate that. And I realize that there
is nothing systematic that is going to come from this any time
soon, in all likelihood. But I get very concerned about sort of
anecdotal evidence and then using that one way or another in
what still is a political argument about whether we ought to
stay in Iraq and for how long and all the rest. So it is just a
concern I have and thank you very much and thank you, Mr.
Chair. I will turn it back.
Dr. Snyder. Thank you, Mr. Loebsack. We will go a second
round if you got the endurance, of course. I want to ask Ms.
Hicks this question because you say both Congress and executive
need to elevate the priority attached to development and place
it on equal footing with defense and diplomacy in U.S. foreign
national security policy, and I agree with that.
What I find, I guess, frustrating right now, if you asked
probably about everyone that is in the Congress what do, you
think is one of the top one, two or three issues, it would be
immigration that concerns the American people. In the view of a
lot of people, that issue will never be solved for this country
until Latin and Central America are economically developed.
That as long as we have this incredible economic engine up here
it is going to draw in people who want to support their
families and do well?
So you would think that kind of development issue would be
part of our answer to immigration. But I think Americans have
gotten pretty frustrated through the years, maybe not
justifiably so with the impact that U.S. development dollars
have on other countries. But I'll ask you one specific question
and you can comment on that if you want.
I have gone back and forth about whether I think that the
answer to this inter-agency deal is like one big Goldwater-
Nichols-type process that you talk about, or more, just a
series of legislative actions, executive actions, that we are
more on the spirit of nudgings on different bills kind of on
down this road that recognizes perhaps this is not just one big
magic bill that's going come up and solve our problems. Where
do you come down on that given that you make some very specific
proposals that would indeed take both legislative and executive
action.
Ms. Hicks. I hope you'll indulge me answering both of
those, because I just returned from Southern Command (SOUTHCOM)
last week.
Dr. Snyder. Maybe it is just my ears, Ms. Hicks, your
microphone----
Ms. Hicks. I just returned last week from SOUTHCOM, and as
you probably know, they are undergoing sort of a transition
there under Admiral Stavridis in trying to raise the profile,
both of Latin America, but also the sort of the mixed smart
power hard and soft power approach that the military is
attempting down there. And they are explicitly actually
attempting to tie the issue of immigration.
So I would just encourage you to speak a little bit to them
about how they are thinking about the importance of development
and creating noncorrupt, nongang-ridden sustainable societies,
not as a military instrument alone, but as part of a whole
approach from the U.S. Government, and how they think that they
can sell that, if you will, because of the immigration link.
So I think you're really on to something there. On your
second question, you know, I think, I tend to think I was
trained as a strategist in the Department of Defense, and I
tend to think in a systems level. And as a systems kind of
person, I prefer to think of it as putting all the solutions
set out there together and understanding the whole concept. I
think there's a lot of value in that.
Having said that, I think the reality is that you have to
make progress piece by piece sometimes, but I don't think the
two are mutually exclusive, I think they are mutually
supporting. I think in the environment we are in today where we
don't have broad-based support for inter-agency reform, or at
least there doesn't appear to be. Where we can make change we
should; there are small specific changes we can make that are
important, particularly the executive branch about its
business, if you will, and the Congress about its business. I
think good leadership on both sides can lead to internal
reforms that really help.
Having said that, I do think at some point there is going
to need to be a holistic look at the national security process,
at the structure we have, at how we train our people and how we
populate our organs of government. And that change is coming.
It is just a matter of when there is openness to it.
Dr. Snyder. Do you have any suggestions on how that
holistic look might come about? We have one oversight
investigation subcommittee, and I think we are the only game in
town right now in terms of the legislative side of things that
is looking at this in any systematic way.
Ms. Hicks. I belong to an organization that has done
several such looks beyond the Goldwater-Nichols effort and I
won't talk more on those. I am also part of what I think some
of you are familiar with the project on national security
reform, which is seeking to gain funds to do just such an
approach.
And we are divided into seven working groups that look
across issues of resource. I lead the process group. We will be
looking at strategy and planning across the inter-agency. There
are groups who are looking at the structural elements and so
forth. Groups that are within that who might look at Congress
and see how Congress might play into this. That effort, again,
it is waiting for funding, it was funded in the appropriations
bill. It was funded on the defense appropriations. We are
waiting to see if the Department of Defense picks that up. I
think some of the reluctance again is that it is all coming on
the defense side. It is the defense community that has been
interested; it is defense who would have to fund it, and there
just doesn't seem to be the same ground swell--there is in the
intelligence world and there is, to some extent, in the
homeland security world, but not in the State and AID world.
Dr. Snyder. Mr. Akin for five minutes.
Mr. Akin. Could you speculate as to why there isn't the
interest or support in the State Department particularly? If I
had to point to places where I would do things differently
having been in Congress now seven years and taking a look at
what's happened in Iraq particularly, I think my, probably I
would want to change things in State more so than things that
the military did, per se. Why is it State doesn't have an
interest in that?
Ms. Hicks. Well, first I wouldn't say that all of State
doesn't have an interest, but I do not think there is again
what I would call a ground swell of support from the bottom up.
And.
Mr. Akin. Is it partly because they are not engaged and
involved and don't see the need as obviously as Defense does? I
mean, Defense has to live with it every day. State has got all
these different places in different countries and they go there
for couple years and then they go to another one. They are not
seeing what is happening, is it that?
Ms. Hicks. No, again, I am really speculating, but I will
give you my thoughts on that. Part of it is that they are very
beleaguered, they are small and they are underfunded. And when
people say you need to change, they take that as not--you need
to change in the sense that we are going to resource you more.
They take it as, oh, great, one more complaint about how we are
not doing not enough with too little. So I think that is part
of the issue.
I also think there is a basic cultural difference. I think
the Defense Department, and actually PRTs are, in some ways, a
good example of this. The culture of the military as I have
observed it over my time at DOD, is to have a very can-do
attitude. If there is a vacuum, they are going to try to fill
that vacuum, very whether the best instrument or not, even
knowing they are not the best instrument. They know there is a
void and it has to be filled, so that is a very leaning forward
attitude, very can-do attitude.
So I think, the same thing is what you are seeing with DOD
on the inter-agency piece, and Secretary Gates' recent speech
was a good example of this; things are broken we need to fix
it, and that is the military way.
My observations on the State Department side are more
cautious. They are just trained differently. They are trained
to find the right tool for the right job. They need to define
what the problem is and then fix the problem. And that is a
very different and more cautious approach that takes longer to
get to the solution set.
Mr. Akin. Anybody else want to speculate?
Mr. Carreau. I would like to offer just a few thoughts. I
agree absolutely with everything Kathy said, and many of us are
looking at these issues. I wrote a case study at the National
Defense University (NDU) on the formation of S/CRS and sort of
the international problems and bureaucratic issues that arose
within State and within other agencies. There was contention
with AID as well.
I agree with Kathy, it is largely an issue of agency
culture. It is how they think, what their core missions are. In
some ways, it is almost an odd thing to ask a diplomat who is
trained to do conflict prevention and to negotiate and to
prevent problems from occurring to plan for post war
stabilization. Obviously, if war or conflict breaks out and you
are a diplomat, something has gone horribly wrong, and it is
just sort of contrary to the way they think. So I think you
have to overcome that cultural barrier first.
General Warner. Just to add one point. State definitely is
not an operational agency. They report on what exists, but they
really don't try and get down at the provincial or district
level and do much about it in X country. I do think, though, as
the ambassador being the direct representative in country X,
that one of the better ways to move forward is to strengthen
this country teams, straighten the mag, strengthen the mission,
so he has more wherewithal to work in the country. Then that
feeds back into the government as a better assessment of what
is needed. In my sense, if you have to deploy conventional
forces into country X then the ambassador of this country team
has failed.
Mr. Akin. I didn't hear any of you say that the thing that
first springs to my mind, but maybe just looking at it more
from a political point of view, I think of State Department as
always a bunch of commies that are working at Foggy Bottom and
everything, and I don't trust them too much. I have a little
bit more confidence in the military, they'll go solve the
problem. I am drawing a caricature to a certain degree. I am
just wondering whether or not the sense that State sort of
perspective in what we should even do in a country may be
different than what we are talking about. So it is maybe beyond
a culture, it is almost a political mindset.
General Olson. It is interesting, just based on my recent
experience, the younger foreign service officers that come into
the field going to what General Warner said, they have this
sort of operational mindset and they jump into these missions
because they believe in them. Some of the more senior foreign
officers keep this whole business a little bit more at arm's
length. I don't think it is because they are not patriots or
they don't agree with the mission. I think it is a combination
of what everybody said here, they see their role differently.
Plus they have not been--they have come up through a system, a
professional development system, an education system.
Mr. Akin. That has not encouraged that.
General Olson. Exactly. It is focused on diplomacy. It is
not focused on stability and security operations.
General Warner. On the other hand, if you look at Vietnam
you have Ambassador Holbrook, Ambassador McManaway, Ambassador
Wisner. There are about eight or nine ambassadors either
currently serving, or recently serving who are 6s and 7s in the
mid 1960's to beginning of the 1970's performing in an
operational capacity and running accords for Ambassador Port.
So it is possible.
Ms. Hicks. I just want to add one very concrete thing,
which is in the military you have a practice of doing lessons
learned after action reports; you have a self-reflective
professional development approach where you come out of the
service periods of time when you are an officer to spend some
time in a think tank or at a war college. And that has a big
impact in how reflective the military is on its own need to
adapt. It makes it, as much as we all decry the lack of
adaptation sometimes, relative to other agencies of government,
it is much more adaptive. You don't have a parallel like that
for State.
Mr. Akin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Snyder. Mrs. Davis for five minutes.
Ms. Davis of California. Thank you. And maybe we can just
continue this conversation. I was watching the General. It
looked like you wanted to say a few things in response to the
State Department role as well. Part of the problem is that
there is a bias against soft power I think. I heard someone say
it should be smart power, not soft power. But there is kind of
that built-in bias. And yet at the same time, it seems like so
much of what we anticipate of our role in the world is based on
that effort. And I don't know, is that a correct assumption?
I mean, because I am hearing that even among our NATO
friends, that they think they don't do civilian very well
either. You know, that somehow we all have to try and find a
better way to use this capacity, which I think we have. We just
haven't utilized it very well. Everything seems to be, at least
from here, we see it as much more DOD centric than probably I
hope that we might see that in the future. Could you comment on
that?
General Warner. I think you have already identified it. The
Army, the Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, they will fill the
gap, they will do the job whatever it is. Even though they may
be a volunteer service and the sergeants didn't really
volunteer to come in and figure out how to move trash, they
want to defend their country, that is the reason they are
there, if they are told to figure out a plan in Baghdad to get
rid of trash, they will do it and they will do it and they will
do it as well as anyone in the world.
Whether you have a big enough army and whether you can
continue to get people to reenlist for that and whether they
are the right structure to do that, that is a completely
different issue. And my feeling is that the soft power, or
smart power, really needs to be shaken a bit to pick up that
mission, take that pressure off the Armed Forces, who really
have too few to do the missions they have now and do it well,
but from another agency, another approach.
Ms. Davis of California. You suggested the department of
stability in your comments.
General Warner. If you have to get the mid level people out
from other care worn bureaucracies in order to permit them to
do a job they know how and will do, then create another
bureaucracy. Not necessarily another homeland defense. I don't
think that mixture is good enough. But I don't think we are
talking about that many people that have to come from the
various agencies or expand aid as the operational arm of the
State Department to be able to do development as we are talking
about. It doesn't take that much. But it does take somebody at
the top to drive it.
Ms. Davis of California. One of the questions I think we
have asked a few times in this committee is where do some of
these individuals come from? And I think part of the answer has
been, well, you know, they are really out there and it is just
a matter of trying to, I think, provide the opportunities
perhaps in some cases, but at least build something that is
sustaining. And it seems to me that one of the things that we
haven't discussed very well, partly because it is a long-term
solution, is how you incentivize young people in school to
think about going into a field which maybe they don't think
State Department, they also aren't thinking military. But they
maybe would think along Peace Corps lines or something. And we
haven't done that. I am just wondering, is it the Peace Corps
model that you think is good? What model out there that we have
utilized or internationally has been utilized that we ought to
be thinking about in a long-term way?
Mr. Carreau. Well, it is a difficult issue, and many of us
have been grappling with this. I think most of us would agree
it is a problem of core mission. When you look at stability
operations, it doesn't belong to anyone. And in my more cynical
moments, I would say that no one really wants it either when
you go around all of the agencies, and that is a problem. And
it hasn't been given. It hasn't necessarily been put on
anyone's plate. The military gets stuck with it.
As General Zinni has said, we have become the stuckee. But
it doesn't mean that they actually want to do it. I think that
there is a lot of movement afoot right now, as Kathy was saying
and General Olson was saying. The President has signed a
national security professional development executive order. And
this idea sort of that you would develop a cadre in all of the
agencies who would specialize in national security issues. And
maybe it is going to be post-war stabilization, maybe it will
be a Katrina type event. But where you need the Department of
Transportation, you need Commerce, you need Justice, you need
Labor to get involved. Mr. Chairman you were asking earlier
what is Congress' role. Many of us have talked to Jim Locker,
who was involved at the time of Goldwater-Nichols I. And that
was complicated enough dealing with just one congressional
committee; two in both Houses.
To do sort of a Goldwater-Nichols II might involve as many
as six or eight committees. But I think at the margins we don't
necessarily need to change that much. If you could create some,
and I don't know what the percentage is, maybe it is two
percent, maybe it is three percent. But if all of the agencies
and if all of the congressional committees could mandate that
all of the domestic agencies, what I call the domestic
agencies, the Commerces and Justices out there, as opposed to
the foreign ops agencies, to have some kind of a national
security focus such that when there is an emergency, when an
Iraq comes along, when an Afghanistan comes along, Commerce,
Justice and Treasury and Labor has some small contingency, and
maybe it is only 100 people, who have been specially trained,
they have exercised with the military, that is their job.
You can't convert USDA into a foreign agriculture
development organization. Obviously you can't do that. But you
can take small portions of it and have them specialize in
agricultural development and overseas contingencies.
General Olson. If I can just, there really are two models.
The one is the one the chairman mentioned about nudging various
legislative pushes. That is certainly one of the models, one of
the courses of action. The other is very much along the lines
of what Bernie was talking about. I think the need is
recognized. I think the basic requirement is what gave rise to
this war czar concept. Now, there is all sorts of--that has
evolved as it has for lots of reasons. But there was a
recognition that somebody needed to be in charge when it came
to integrating the civilian and the military effort. Now, the
problem of a war czar ad hoc, he is not empowered. He is a
great guy, a great military professional. But he cannot make
these things happen. Now, I think there are models.
Governmental models of standing organizations that can kind of
care for the integration of civilian and military effort on a
continuing basis. That is what it is going to take. Because it
is going to take doctrine, it is going to take education, it is
going to take training. And we can't just, all of a sudden, do
that when a crisis breaks out. So the other model is a standing
organization. And there are, you are more familiar than I am
with what they are, but there are models that integrate a
multi-developmental effort in other areas that could serve
perhaps as a model.
Ms. Hicks. The only thing I would add is that we have sort
of evolved a little bit in answering the question, but I want
to stay on the line we are on, which is if you look at the
problems the United States faces as it moves in the future, it
is not just stabilization, they are all complex. Almost all of
them are multi-agency. We are not going to be able--you know,
we can pick and choose particular issues that are so important
that we are going to create an organization, a standing
structure to deal with them, and that is fine. But what we
really need overall is to have a different approach to our
problem sets. We have to understand that organizations need to
be working across them. That we need to have more horizontal
integration approaches. The National Counterterrorism Center
(NCTC) is one example that really, I believe, was not empowered
effectively to do what it was asked to do. But if empowered
appropriately, if able to go above and beyond what the cabinet
agencies can do independently and really break that sort of
what becomes a resource budget lock that the cabinet
secretaries have, then you start to see well, maybe there are
ways to get into that interagency space and empower individuals
in organizations or collective units of people to look at
prioritization across basic missionaries.
And it is very much along the lines of what DOD is looking
at internally in terms of capabilities. Portfolios, for
instance. A whole sort of, you think about that interagency
wide, a portfolio approach to how we look at national security
would be very useful.
Dr. Snyder. Thank you, Mrs. Davis. The issue of the--I
forget who I was talking to. It may have been Mr. Armitage who
we were having a conversation about some of these issues. And
he said it is just real hard from the State Department side.
The word goes out they need 200 people and they have got to
have these specialties, these specialties, these specialties.
And it means when you are pulling them, it leaves work undone
in Uzbekistan and Bulgaria, wherever it is that you are working
on it. And I suspect if we would take what you say, Ms. Hicks,
and General Warner said and others are saying about the under--
pretty dramatically underresourcing of the State Department and
do a little bit of a carrot and a stick, which is we are going
to recognize that and do a fairly dramatic increase in budget,
which will reflect staffing.
But as part of that there has got to be a sense of some of
these people are going to be a bit redundant and they will be
available, don't be surprised if one of your two ag people get
pulled to go someplace else. I would think that that is really
hard to do right now when they are underresourced.
I wanted to ask two final questions. And if Mrs. Davis has
any final questions. The first one, Ms. Hicks, on your upcoming
task force report, you talk about your four main
recommendations. And we talked, I think, about one of them, the
issue of development. So it is the other three I want to at
least touch on. This issue of an NSC senior director for
conflict prevention and response to serve as the locust of
inter-agency coordination on these issues in the White House.
And then you also talk about the importance of having
better congressional oversight and following. It is hard for us
in the Congress to do oversight of NSC. They are not required
to testify. They are Presidential advisors. If that is where
the game is going to be, we might as well say let us put money
into a black box and we don't ever see it until we evaluate
years after what happened to it.
I don't see how that is going to work in terms of practice.
Why are we choosing somebody within the NSC? Now, in defense of
that approach I talked to one former Secretary of State about
this whole issue a few months ago who said we don't need to do
interagency reform, it is supposed to be the NSC. They just
need to do their job. If they would recognize that they are the
ones who should be putting all this together. How is that going
to work when, in fact, it will not be something that we will
have any impact on.
Ms. Hicks. Right. The thought there is that if you have--
basically it takes what is S/CRS's, well, sort of mandate now,
and moves it up to the National Security Council level to give
it higher visibility, to have to the extent that the President
endows that senior director with his confidence or her
confidence and trust, it gives that person an ability to look
all the way across the inter-agency and as you quoted, act as
the NSC ought to act.
But that does not mean that you lose oversight of what it
is seeing. All it says is that the executive branch's
activities need to be coordinated. And to coordinate that that
is the role of the NSC, and it ought to be elevated to an NSC
position. The individual pieces that support that and how they
are put together is still absolutely under the oversight of the
Congress. It is under the oversight of various jurisdictions.
Dr. Snyder. Looking ahead, doesn't that put us, if I
understand what your suggestion is going to be, I recognize
this is one of about three sentences of what I suspect will be
a fairly lengthy discussion, doesn't it put the Congress in a
position to say, well, we have got the person in the State
Department sitting here, I got the person in the DOD sitting
here, and we have got a problem in country, why are you all not
coordinating?
And they both say, well, we did our part, we did what the
NSC asked us to do and we don't hear from NSC. The buck has got
to stop somewhere. I would say it stops at the President. That
is how it operates. But I was thinking we would end up with
some kind of a body that we have more--that there is a trail
that we can follow. You talk about having the big joint
committee or some kind of select committee on U.S. national
security. But we can create all the committees we want to. If
we can't get at the person that you designate as being
ultimately responsible to have to be held accountable for
decisions in that interagency process I am not sure we are
going to accomplish what you are hoping to accomplish by these
changes.
Ms. Hicks. I think the more radical approach again is the
NCTC model. If you wanted to, you could create an organization
that sits in interagency space and that has authority over the
various cabinet agencies to coordinate and to prioritize, if
you will, budgets. It is sort of the drug czar approach, but
taken to an organizational level and placed outside of the
White House. And that is, I think that is a more radical
solution.
You could look at the problem as getting it set up
appropriately so that other agencies do recognize it. The fact
of the matter is today in the system in which we operate there
is only one organization that the foreign policy communities
even sort of recognize as perhaps above them. And that is the
White House. And the fact of the matter is that is the National
Security Council. So it has to come. It has to be the National
Security Council. Again, not just stabilization, but across all
areas that is trying to coordinate and bring these issues
together.
Dr. Snyder. But my concerns are not off the mark about
that?
Ms. Hicks. No. The fact of the matter is if you wanted to
call witnesses, you are right. You would get the rep from the
Defense Department and the rep from the State Department. You
would not get that one view. And they would just tell you what
they are supplying upward.
Dr. Snyder. I wanted to, my final question is very quickly,
the one piece that is sitting out there that potentially
addresses some of these concerns is the President's proposal
for a civilian reserve corps, the money has been appropriated,
the legislation hasn't been moving it, but would you quickly
talk about what you think about that proposal and where it fits
in and do we need to move ahead with it in an expeditious way?
Ms. Hicks. I strongly support it. I think the Congress
needs to move forward in an expeditious way. And frankly it is
not a one-shot issue. There is going to be a need to grow that
capacity beyond what has been requested for this tranche over
time.
General Olson. I support it too. And it is based on
experience. When we went to expand the so-called civilian
surge, expand the PRTs and the number of people serving there,
we were looking for people with specific specialties. And there
is no data bank we could really go to for who was an expert in
this particular area. We were lucky to get Sharon when she came
in as an agricultural expert on veterinary affairs. But if
there were some kind of system as you just described, I think
it would be much easier to get the right type of capabilities
to match requirements.
General Warner. If you don't do it, civilian contractors
will probably fill it.
Mr. Carreau. Yes, I support it as well. With the caveat
that I think it is almost more important to get sort of the
interagency element of government up and running first to make
sure you have proper oversight so that you don't end up with a
Blackwater-type situation where you have contractors running
amuck.
Dr. Snyder. Then that presents a question what does that
mean to have an interagency up and running? And that could be
some years down the line. I don't think we want to wait that
long in doing something. Mrs. Davis, anything further?
Ms. Davis of California. Just to follow up with this
because it is an idea that is out there, it is expensive and
maybe people think that it is pie in the sky a bit. But
something like the civilian academy to mirror our military
academies where you have young people again who study and plan
and do the kind of strategic thinking hopefully that we have in
the military academies and some sharing that goes on. So some
of those folks eventually will take on a major responsibility.
In thinking about these things, is that part of the discussion?
I mean, is that sort of, wow, we will never get there, or do
you think that is realistic, or not necessary, I guess?
General Olson. Military cabinets are focused on
precommissioning development, whereas your idea has excellent
applicability further on down the line. Right now the Army runs
the School of Advanced Military Studies. The Marines have an
equivalent that they call School of Advanced Warfighting (SAW),
SAWS. As a matter of fact, USAID, for the first time, has a
student at the School of Advanced Military Studies. And that is
where the Army anyway learns how to think strategically and do
strategic planning. And now this USAID official is going to be
able to go to an operation, let us say, and plug in very
comfortably with a military planning team, whereas right now
military planning teams stand up, officials from civilian
agencies go there and they are completely lost. They don't
understand the processes. They don't think strategically about
operations like the military guys do.
So I think your idea is right on the mark. I would say bump
it up a level in terms of where these officials are in their
careers and I think you have got a great idea there.
Ms. Davis of California. Ms. Hicks.
Ms. Hicks. I would just add there is this concept of the
national security university, which is more along the lines of
what Rick is pointing to. And the thought there is that you
would bring together sort of maybe in brick and mortar, but
also sort of in a virtual sense a consortium of institutions
where individuals, whether it is the Fire Academy in Emmitsburg
for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) or it is the
Foreign Service Institute for State or it is the National
Defense University, you have these centers of excellence that
can teach these bodies, folks coming from all across the
interagency a common skillset, and at the same time, a diverse
set of issues.
Ms. Davis of California. I appreciate that. I am trying to
get them a little younger, I guess. But just one other quick
question about the asymmetry between civilian and military, Ms.
Hicks, that you have spoken to, and again what can Congress be
doing and seeing that as really it is a budgetary role. You
know, how you share those resources, how do you--any
suggestion?
Ms. Hicks. Well, I think, again, it has to--it is
essentially at its core a cultural and then resource issue. And
I do think you can make the resource the leading edge of the
change. So if you can increase the float, so to speak, for the
foreign service and for the foreign service that are serving
out of USAID that helps tremendously in terms of their ability
to support operations. And then also to go get trained. To go
down and be at the war colleges or other institutions or even
the Foreign Service Institute (FSI). So I think that the
resourcing piece of it is just really bumping up their total
personnel, making sure they have funds for adequate training,
and then starting to think having those organizations be tasked
to think strategically about now that they have these things or
as they are going to get these resources, how they are going to
think strategically about employing them.
General Olson. Can I take 30 seconds? I think it was the
chairman that said it is hard to put resources against
something where there is no real model yet. I think we need to
have the model. I think we need--the model needs to be on the
table. I think also one of the members said that there are a
lot of, there is a lot of energy being put into looking at this
problem. CSIS is doing it. And there are other think tanks and
governmental agencies out there. I think, and I am not sure
exactly the mechanism, but if there were a way to tie these all
together, I think we could come up with something pretty good
for Congress to consider.
I am not proposing another commission or anything exciting
like that. But I think there are ways for Congress to work a
more--to force, let us say, a more collaborative effort here. I
think organizations would be interested in doing that if there
was something to kind of coalesce around it. Right now there
isn't. Everybody is kind of moving in different directions.
Looking at different pieces of it, but it is stitching all the
different pieces together that I think could really help the
overall effort.
Mr. Carreau. I would like to add just a couple of comments.
I totally agree with what my colleagues have said. I spent the
first year at the Pentagon trying to organize the civilian
agencies to send folks to Baghdad and it was one of the most
frustrating years of my life. I think that one of the things I
think that Congress can do, the agencies don't respond because
it is not their core mission. And they really have no reason
to. They are not being graded on it. There is no
accountability, as you mentioned Mr. Chairman. And I think one
thing that Congress could do is give them that accountability.
Give them a modest mandate or authorization to care about the
stability activities. the Department of Agriculture (USDA), the
Foreign Agricultural Service, their mission in life is to sell
U.S. soybeans and corn. And God bless them for it. That is a
national interest that we want to do. But there comes a time
when we are going to need agricultural experts to help out in
Kosovo and in Afghanistan. The same with the Foreign Commercial
Service at Commerce. They are to promote U.S. exports.
But there will be a time when they need to help out to do
business development and private sector development in Iraq.
And until they have that mandate and until someone is put on
the hot seat, someone at the Commerce Department, and asked
what are you doing to support the effort in Iraq as you were
mandated to do, you won't find that kind of an effort.
Ms. Davis of California. Thank you all very much. Thank
you, Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Snyder. Thank you, Mrs. Davis. Thank you all for being
here. Let me just extend you an open invitation to submit any
additional materials as a question for the record right now. So
if you think of something you think would be helpful, please
feel free to send it in. We appreciate you-all's service and we
appreciate your thoughts. Ms. Hicks, we look forward to your
report. We hope we are one of the first on your list to receive
it when it is done. Thank you all. The committee is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 4 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
=======================================================================
A P P E N D I X
December 5, 2007
=======================================================================
=======================================================================
PREPARED STATEMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD
December 5, 2007
=======================================================================
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]