The Foreign Service Journal, March 2006

C ulturally and organizationally, the geographic combatant commands are by far the most structured tools with which the United States can wield all the elements of its national power. But despite innovations such as the Joint Interagency Coordination Groups, evidence from Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom demonstrates that true unified action among the interagency construct remains a distant, elusive goal. It is supremely ironic that an example from Vietnam, our only “lost” war, may offer a way out of this paradigm. The pacification program’s capstone organization, Civil Operations and Revolutionary Develop- ment Support, while ultimately unsuccess- ful in its stated mission, offers a lesson in true interagency coordination. Taking the CORDS example one step further, our current geographic combatant commands should be redesigned to break their heavy military orientation. [They should] be transformed into truly intera- gency organizations, under civilian leader- ship, and prepared to conduct the full spec- trum of operations using all elements of national power within their assigned region. Poor Coordination The Joint Experimentation Directorate of Joint Forces Command today defines stability operations as “activities conducted by mili- tary and other government components to establish, re-establish or support a foreign government’s ability to assure rule of law and internal security, to provide basic human services (health care, water, electricity, education).” Forty years ago, something very much like this was called pacification, or “The Other War.” U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Ellsworth Bunker disliked the latter formulation, saying in strikingly modern terms, “To me this is all one war. Everything we do is an aspect of the total effort to achieve our objectives here.” But by January 1967, American pacification efforts in Vietnam were characterized by poor coordi- nation between the military and the numerous civilian agencies involved. The results of this critical component of the overall effort were not impressive. In May 1967, President Lyndon Johnson named a close friend and confidant, Robert Komer, to be a civilian operational deputy to General William Westmoreland, commander of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. The president appointed Komer with ambassadorial rank, and charged him with bringing unity of effort to the entire pacification campaign. Westmoreland and Komer named the new entity “Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support,” and Komer’s title was “Deputy to COMUSMACV for CORDS.” He ranked third at MACV, after Westmoreland’s deputy, General Creighton Abrams. This status gave him direct authority over everyone in his organization and direct access to Westmoreland, with- out having to go through the MACV chief of staff. Komer did not have command authority over military forces, but he was now the sole authority over the entire U.S. pacification effort, “for the first time bring- ing together its civilian and military aspects under unified management and a single chain of command.” A Single Chain of Command Komer appointed new deputy com- manders for pacification in each of the four corps regions, giving them the same command relationship to their respective corps commanders that he had to Westmoreland. These four individuals (usually civilians; one of them was John Paul Vann) “were, in effect, his corps commanders.” Serving under these “Corps DepCORDS” were province senior advisers in each of South Vietnam’s 44 provinces. The PSAs were roughly half military and half civilian, though those in less secure provinces were usually military. They were in charge of fully-integrated military and civilian agency province teams; under them were small, usually four-person, dis- trict teams in each of the 250 districts. The district teams were, again, a mixture of military and civilian agency personnel. CORDS activities varied by province. In more secure areas, they were able to focus on economic development, but security con- F O C U S 70 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A R C H 2 0 0 6 CORDS: A Lesson in True Interagency Cooperation By Mitchell J. Thompson There is no good reason that the commander of a U.S. unified command in the post-9/11 world should be a uniformed military officer.