The following is the text of an email I received today after asking Lieutenant General William Caldwell IV for comment as one of the authors of the United States Army’s Manual with some economic development ideas that I criticized:
Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: FOUO
Dear Dr. Easterly,
LTG Caldwell is currently on personal leave and not regularly receiving
email.
This is a very important topic to him — the manual to which you refer
represents the most widely-collaborated publication the Army has ever
produced. It was written over the course of a year and involved
representation from each of the services, all the other agencies of the
USG, and our allies and partner nations, as well as significant
contributions from the development and humanitarian communities, and the
private sector. The manual is not intended to serve as military
solution to a much broader and more complex problem, but a guide for
military leaders to better understand and execute their appropriate
roles and responsibilities within the framework of national and
international approaches to these operations. While the goals
articulated within the manual may seem optimistic, they represent the
collective contributions of acknowledged experts from a wide range of
fields, many of whom brought decades of field experience to this effort.
The content in the manual — as well as the terms, definitions, and
frameworks — reflects their wisdom, knowledge, and hard-earned
experience.
The manual is certainly not solely a product of the Department of
Defense or the US Army. It is the result of unprecedented collaboration
that, while appearing “utopian” from your perspective, provides a
waypoint from which to navigate the challenges we face now and in the
future. To navigate that path, we relied on a collaborative approach to
best define our own service role within the broad framework articulated
in the manual. While the approach we used to develop the manual was
unique, we believed that this was the most effective was to ensure that
the practitioners in the field had the strongest voice possible and the
end product was shaped with their own words. While the manual will
never be perfect, it has achieved the desired effect of spurring dialog
and discussion on a critical topic — and your contribution to that
dialog is welcome and appreciated.
Best regards,
LTC Steve Leonard
Director, Commander’s Initiatives Group
U.S. Army Combined Arms Center
Fort Leavenworth, KS 66027
7 Comments
fouo stands for “for official use only.” that would suggest the letter’s not intended for publication.
Lieutenant Colonel Leonard gave me permission for publication on this blog. He said FOUA was just standard, but they were expanding their efforts to be transparent and open.
While the Army’s stated “goals” are (probably) all bark and (probably) no bite, I give them credit for realizing how crucial it is to understand how things operate in the places they work. It’s certainly a step in the right direction beyond “Mission Accomplished.” After all, it wasn’t too long ago that an economist would never think to use development and culture in the same sentence. The host of this blog probably had a lot to do with changing that. In fact, White Man’s Burden inspired me to team teach a development course with a cultural anthropologist. Truth be told, WMB was a huge hit with the non-econ students and the anthropologist. Everybody learned new things, and that can’t be bad.
Getting back to the Army, maybe it should work on figuring out how to actually make progress on their new tasks. Who knows? Maybe it now realizes that WMB, not WMD, is a better preoccupation.
“widely-collaborated”
“representation”
“collective contributions”
“unprecedented collaboration”
“collaborative approach”
“dialog”
Well did we all fill out our buzzword bingo cards? This is the same bureau-speak employed by the US Army Corps of Engineers in their “partnering” exercises. The new company line is that if it’s collaborative, it [probably] can’t be wrong (and therefore, we [probably] can’t be blamed for it).
Collaboration between the U.S. military and USAID on relief and development issues has been going on for some time beginning in earnest under the Bush Administration. An increasing role for the military seems envisaged, especially in countries like Afghanistan where the security situaton makes civilian participation more difficult.
There is much to be said about this relationship but it needs to be discussed in full as it represents a real sea change in how the West approaches development assistance.
SS
Wally–
That struck me too. I thought the military was better at achieving results because line authority and responsibility for decisions was clearly defined. If the government wants hand-holding, consultative processes why not just use development NGO’s.
One has to command the US Army/Pentagon/CENTCOM for being welling to “coordinate” as opposed to the previous Administration’s practice of “pre-emptive” strategies on all levels. However, regardless of the level of willingness from the military leadership, someone in the military brass has to come to the realization that the military’s mission in life is not development or nation-building. The military is very good at what it does best: fighting and deterrence. It does it with speed, accuracy and lethal results. No other organizations of significance has the same level of effectiveness when it comes to their core mission—certainly not USAID, the World Bank, the IMF, or the UN, etc.
However, the new Counter-insurgency strategy now being applied to Afghanistan is defined by the military as “10% fighting and 90% non-kinetic”. And enormous amount of resources are now put behind it, including financial but also political. The 90% is meant to be development, governance, political engagement, etc.
My only question here is: If COIN is indeed 90% non-fighting, why is it led by the military brass?
The military is not now equipped, nor would it ever be equipped to become a “development” agency—even those who might be seen as relatively better equipped, have miserably failed at it. And I am sure that ounce this is examined closer by the military brass, they would realize that projecting such a perception is not only harmful to all development efforts but maybe harmful to the very raison d’etre of the army itself.
I agree with Easterly, this is a critical moment. I would also state—to take it just a an additional step further—that the issue of course is that COIN and all related strategies being formulated now and put into practice as we speak (including the “Stability Operations Field Manual”) are poised to become the dominant force in any of our global engagement related to development, military efforts, nations-building, etc. I am sure that this possible overwhelming dominance of the development agenda is neither the military’s intent nor the development communities’ preference. However, I believe it is well on its way.
This is why I would also echo LTC Steve Leonard’s call for critical input from the development community and call for a stronger, deeper—if not an equally powerful—engagement in a highly visible and sustained public debate. Due to the efforts on the military side, I see a possible transformation of what development means and what it will become as we are engaged in Afghanistan and Pakistan and with direct—perhaps permanent—consequences to other poor and unstable regions.
Masood Aziz
Former Diplomat for Afghanistan