The Foreign Service Journal, March 2006

One approach could be to establish a financial incentive for an interagency ready reserve of Foreign Service officers, on call and willing to leave their current assignments on 24 hours’ notice, to serve anywhere for up to one year. Senior management in overseas missions would have to adjust to the possibility that they may lose some of their best offi- cers, and the promotion system cannot be permitted to punish those who answer the call of duty. Training of these officers and joint exercises with the military are essential. When they deploy to a rally point, they must be a team, already known to each other and their military coun- terparts. In addition, one cannot stress enough the value of seasoned administrative officers, controllers and first- rate contracting officers — but they are very hard to attract to a war zone. They are needed to facilitate the startup of a mission, securing and assembling the myr- iad equipment needed — communications, armored transportation, generators, secure lodging and offices, desks, chairs, computers, rations and so forth. Missions-in-a-box need to be prepositioned to be delivered when needed by military or pre-chartered aircraft. Contracting officers are also needed to deal with the Federal Acquisition Regulations. All agencies in Iraq experienced problems using and complying with the FAR, whose requirements delay implementation, increase costs, and are often unworkable in a war zone. Waivers of some FAR provisions helped, but the most effective instrument was the bidding of indefinite- quantity contracts, well in advance of their need. IQCs are competitively bid and enable rapid responses, par- ticularly in dangerous environments where the pool of realistic bidders is very small. However, they were not popular with Congress, and there was pressure to bid every activity anew. In Iraq, USAID’s partner NGOs and contractors deployed rapidly and efficiently. They were consistent- ly able to field qualified personnel who were the sharp end of the spear. Often, they operated where military and official personnel could not. However, NGO and contractor personnel must be trained with the teams with which they will work. The Civilian-Military Equation The Iraq experience also shows that success depends criti- cally on a synergy between the military and civilian profession- als. The military could go places and meet with community lead- ers when we could not. We had financial resources and expertise that they did not; and they had human and security resources that we lacked. When we had a good partnership and understood each other’s equities, we worked together to maximize these complementarities. The recent DOD directive (3000.05, issued in November 2005) raising stability operations to the same level of importance as combat operations should help to make this practice standard. Prior to deployment to Iraq, the 1st CAV had gone out of its way to prepare, investing the time to have key staff sit with the municipal government and basic ser- vice utilities of Austin and Killeen, Texas, to learn how local government and services worked. This facilitated their engagement with the Baghdad city government and utilities, and generally gave them a much better understanding of post-conflict reconstruction and tran- sition than other units. Deploying units have subse- quently requested and received USAID participation in mission-readiness exercises. It is critical that USAID and other civilian agencies not only participate, but do so with highly experienced practitioners of post-con- flict transitions. Having a 1st CAV liaison officer working in the mis- sion was a godsend. It helped us communicate better — we often use mutually exclusive versions of the English language — and enabled better understanding of each other’s mission, operating procedures, limita- tions and strengths. In retrospect, I should have put a civilian liaison in the 1st CAV headquarters, as well. State, DOD and USAID, at a minimum, should second highly-qualified officers to each others’ policy and planning operations in Washington and the field. F O C U S M A R C H 2 0 0 6 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 61 We also found that the military was far more centralized than USAID, and our highly decentralized operations were often hard for the military to comprehend.