Sounds a lot like “Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated.”

State building with state schools, state roads and state health care curses a society with state control and central planning, for its own good, of course. The purpose of a state, eh “legitimate authority”, is to provide a means of elite control over the people within geographic territories. So that they may be integrated into international systems controlled by the usual suspects. States are archaic political organizations that choke individual liberty, not foster it. The tools of soft tyranny being presented as effective policy should be worrisome to freedom lovers.

Liberty building would be a better goal and you don’t use a gun for that.

I’m only half way through White Man’s Burden, but I am truly

impressed with what I’ve read so far and can’t wait to finish. I want to play

devils advocate on the above post for a minute. In order to accomplish this I

need you to entertain the idea that a foreign military presence can have a

positive impact, if done correctly. That it may provide not only a direct

security service for the poor, but also may enhance the ability for other AID

programs to operate and be effective, essentially acting as an AID multiplier.

I don’t believe labeling our military services as “Planners”

is an accurate categorization. They certainly are organized as top-down

hierarchal organizations, but in fact execute based on agility, feedback and

course correcting, much like “Searchers”

Listed below are some excerpts from the Marine Corps’

Concepts for Unified Action Through Civil-Military

Integration. It describes how the Marine Corps needs to approach working

with NGOs and other Civil organizations to achieve success

in “Stability Operations” “Counter Insurgency”, and generally Nation Building.

Understanding Problems

Without some savvy appreciation

understanding improves with time and exposure to the environment.

Evaluating Progress

Perhaps in an ideal world,

involved. A campaign becomes a journey of experimentation and discovery.

The hypothesis is constantly

and emphases will evolve over time-even adapt outright.

Host Nation Sensitivity

In view of the principle of

sufficient resources and security to it’s people

A quick list of mistakes made by campaign planners in the

past

• Failing

  to revisit the planning assumptions and subjecting them to scrutiny

• Attempting

  to predict or forecast events too far into the future

• Attempting

  to create a complex plan when a simple one will do

Does this really sound like the words of a bureaucratic

planner? This is the ethos of an organization that has learned the value of

institutional learning, pragmatic assessment and creating realistic goals. In

short this is the language of “Searcher”.

Does this document, much like the above mentioned field

manual, contain some lofty, ambiguous, “utopian” language? YES. However, I

think it’s only fair to distinguish between strategic goals, and tactical plans

and missions. In fact, the quotes stated in the above posting are pulled from

the “Foreword” and “Section 1” which is titled “Strategic Context”. This is

exactly where I would expect to see this kind of broad, “Utopian” language.

Moreover, Big Harry Audacious Goals, are not a bad thing for organizations, here are a

few “Utopian” style goals from a few organizations that have figured out how to

execute correctly.

Disney:    “To be the best company in the world for all

fields of family entertainment.”

Amazon:  “Earth’s most customer centric company.”

Google:    “Organize

the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

At the “tip of the spear” Utopian language becomes

executable strategy. “Winning Hearts and Minds” will eventually translate into

building schools, roads, and providing health care.

Thanks for the interesting blog and excellent post.

I am from Uzbekistan. I don’t know if this makes any difference for readers and who have commented. We, namely my government, ‘like’ uniforms as much military people would like in the world. I genuinely believe that fulfillment of orders – whatever the price that is what they are good at. As mentioned by the ’save_the_rustbelt’ below soldiers will do whatever they are sent for. I am not very good at history but I have never heard of a US, or any other, soldier who has been able to spur development of democracy, good will, harmony, participation in countries where they are with their GUNs in their HANDs, I don’t think so.

You might think whatever you like of military invasion and evaluate the success of wars and battles – ruined homes, displaced families, killed children, with any indicator you wish to set but Soldier must do what he is good at maintaining security and safety of people. I think these tasks, including some others i don’t list here, themselves alone, if they are accomplished successfully, a lot. Because, are not security and safety pillars of freedom and democracy?

Let everyone do whatever they are good/better at. And I shall do my part and study.

Prof. Easterly would you mind if I ask you to be my mentor? I realise that we, Uzbekistanies or Central Asians in general, might need different approach for development strategy – no some kind of consensuses or few points fit all. Are we really so different?

Unfortunately, because of historic imbalance in budgeting between DOD and State, and an ensuing lack in civilian capacity, the military has been tasked with missions that should have been completed by competent civilians. FM 3.07 (and FM 3.07.1 on Security Force Assistance, which is really an expanded version of the security sector reform chapter in FM 3.07), along with FM 3.24 (on counter-insurgency), along with the interagency guides on both security sector reform and COIN are the basic doctrinal and policy documents for ongoing efforts in this area. Again, they’re not great but until we figure out a way to deploy teams of civilian advisers to countries we want to help build ministries, oversight bodies, police forces, border forces etc, the military is what we have to work with and if doctrine helps, then that’s better. If you’re interested in that, go check out the work State’s Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization is doing to develop standing and reserve civilian capacity.

To answer a different question, these efforts are mandated by DOD Directive 3000.05 (signed by the SecDef) and the last QDR which mandates that stability operations are on par with combat operations and that doctrine, training, and capacity need to be developed accordingly. That said, go look through Secretary Gates’ statements on this topic and you’ll find he (along with the Joint Chiefs, General Petraus and the other combatant commanders) are some of the biggest advocates for increasing capacity at State and USAID.

Finally, let’s get some facts straight (and I’m going to simplify things a bit). The UN certainly did not attempt state building in Somalia. War resumed and international forces pulled out. The current AU mission there is only a weak attempt to bring some security to the capital. There is a functioning state in Sudan so the UN doesn’t need to build one there (we may not like the state there but you can’t deny it’s entirely functional). In Rwanda, the UN stood by as genocide occurred but nothing close to a peacekeeping mission was deployed and development assistance did play a part in building the new government’s capacity. In DR Congo, elections were held in late 2006, and efforts to build the state are faltering but when has a state ever been built in less than three years (I’m not saying it will, just saying give it some time)? In Liberia and Sierra Leone, there’s no denying that some pretty successful state building has occurred–it needs to be consolidated…

Collier is usually reckoned to be a middle-ground economist sandwiched between Easterly and Sachs, for the major reason –as I understand–that he brings up, by employing massive data analysis over many less-developed countries, practical methods to “save” the bottom countries that have almost been cornered by our globalization. His framework is more “complex” than Sachs’ single foreign aid, more “practical” than that of Easterly who tries to tear down the whole building of development yet fails to point out a new road; he dose not entirely discard the idea of foreign aid, nor does he completely accept it but rather conceive it as an insufficient tool that should be used in time, depending on the actual situation, or assisted by other tools.

The paragraph above is what I learned from the class and some views flooding online, what is your opinion, Prof. Easterly? Before you give me an answer (hope you will), in my mind the primary conflict between you and either Sachs or Collier lies in the will of aiding; they believe help with benign wills can work on wherever help is received, whereas you don’t think so. Hope you could write more of your opinion about Collier’s work, which is relatively less appeared in comparison to your criticism over Sachs. Many thanks in advance.

Yi

Time will tell whether the counter insurgency strategy has worked to build a nation. Buying off leaders for some short term reduction in attacks doesn’t qualify as nation building.

Your list of places where the army has built nations is rather interesting. It seems to me you are taking credit for Japan and Germany rebuilding themselves while they were occupied by the US Army which kept the peace. Peace keeping certainly contributes to nation building, but it is not the same thing. If you don’t have a functional society that has institutions that the people believe in, you wont have nation building. I would cite Haiti as a place where it hasn’t happened yet. And of course there are other places where peace keeping hasn’t lead to nation building–Somalia, Sudan, Congo, Rwanda, etc.

We – the Army – are already doing nation building on a vast scale. So long as our boss tells us to attempt to fix the places we attack/invade/assist, its good for us to have doctrine on how to go about accomplishing that commonly assigned mission.

This is not new. Germany, Japan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, South Korea, Greece, The Philippines are some of the places we’ve already done various forms of nation building.

Finally, the quote LTG Caldwell is almost verbatim what the counter-insurgency strategy has been in Iraq for the past two plus years. And it has worked so well Iraq isn’t in the news anymore.

you are correct and I am certainly not blaming the soldiers. However, I don’t think there is any civilian command that obliges the Army to do nonsensical analysis on what it can do or what others can do.