The Foreign Service Journal, March 2006

cerns and refugee issues were the priorities in contested areas. The allocation of South Vietnamese territorial militia from the MACV J-3 to CORDS gave the latter a meaningful capability to deal with local security issues. The interagency integration at all levels was a most impressive feature of CORDS. In addition to the military, the State Depart- ment, CIA, USAID, U.S. Information Agency and even the White House staff were all rep- resented at all levels in its ranks. Throughout the hierarchy, civilian advisers had military deputies and vice versa. Civilians wrote performance reports on military subordinates, and military officers did the same for Foreign Service officers. South Vietnamese officials were also integrated at every level from MACV to hamlet with their American counterparts. Obviously, CORDS failed to bring about the progress in the paci- fication campaign for which it had been designed. Yet that failure should be attributed not to institutional shortcomings so much as to external causes, including the relatively late date in the overall Vietnam campaign in which it was instituted, and the rapid dwin- dling of U.S. popular support for the war, particularly in the after- math of the 1968 Tet offensive. In terms of organizations and their cultures, CORDS was decades ahead of its time. The CORDS model offers a way out of the current institutional sclerosis, but only as a starting point. 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. Turning the CORDS model on its head, the commanders of geographic commands could be senior civilians with the experience of long and distinguished careers representing key governmental agencies in the National Security Council. The president would nominate them to their new role with full ambassadorial rank, and they would report to the national security adviser. The CORDS Model Interagency synergy would be achieved through deputy-director positions based on the elements of power — DIME (diplomatic, informational, military and economic). Reversing the command relationship in CORDS, the military director would be the current four-star combatant commander. This officer would retain com- mand authority over military forces, and responsibility for planning efforts, albeit with augmentation from the diplomatic, informational and economic directorates. Military billets might be staffed by offi- cers from an “Interagency Officer” career field, proposed by Colonel Harry Tomlin, with the same underlying philosophy as the Army’s foreign area officer field. Diplomatic, informational and economic directors, each with ministerial rank, would come from appropriate Cabinet depart- ments and be responsible for integrating planning with the military within their spheres of expertise, and for coordination and interface with embassy country teams. Interagency intelligence centers, staffed by regional and topical specialists from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, would replace the current Joint Intelligence Centers at the commands. General Peter Pace, USMC, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during an April 2002 briefing when he was vice chairman, rightly credited the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols DOD Reorganization Act for having “forced the military together.” He went on, however, to bemoan the fact that the “jointness” engendered in DOD by Goldwater-Nichols did not extend to the broader interagency con- struct, admitting somewhat plaintively that “I don’t know what it is that will help us force all our agencies together.” The multiagency imperative of the global war on terrorism, the poor interagency coordination in Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom, and the successful historical example of CORDS all indicate that nothing less than a Goldwater-Nichols Act for the inter- agency structure will suffice to meet the challenge. Mitchell J. Thompson (Lieutenant Colonel, USA Ret.) is a civil- ian faculty instructor at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Joint Military Attaché School. While on active duty, he served as a Middle East foreign area officer in a variety of assignments, includ- ing as a military attaché in Israel and Jordan and as an intelligence advisor to Coalition Provisional Authority Administrator L. Paul Bremer in Baghdad. He holds master’s degrees in Middle Eastern studies from the University of Texas at Austin, and in strategic studies from the U.S. Army War College. This article is excerpted with permission from a fully docu- mented study, “Breaking the Proconsulate: A New Design for National Power,” published in Parameters (Winter 2005-2006). The complete study is available at http://carlisle-www.army.mil/ usawc/Parameters/05winter/thompson.pdf.j 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 71 The interagency integration at all levels was a most impressive feature of CORDS.