 |
2009 Summer Seminar Series
Back to 2009 Seminar Series
July 15
Administrator's Forum: Smart Power and Development: Civilian-Military Cooperation
Presenters: Dr. Reuben Brigety, Director of the Sustainable Security Program, Center for American Progress
Ms. Linda Poteat, Director, Disaster Response, InterAction
Colonel Gregory A. Hermsmeyer, United States Air Force, Office of the Secretary of Defense Policy Staff
Opening Remarks: Lisa Chiles, Counselor, USAID
Moderator: Chris Milligan, Acting
Deputy Assistant Administrator, Legislative and Public
Affairs Bureau, USAID
Seminar Summary: R. Brigety | G. Hermsmeyer | L. Poteat
Question and Answer
Seminar Summary
Dr. Reuben Brigety Presentation
Dr. Brigety opened his presentation noting that he spent calendar year 2007 at USAID as the special
assistant to Mike Hess, who is the assistant administrator of DCHA [Bureau for Democracy, Conflict,
and Humanitarian Assistance], which gave him insight into the increasingly complicated world of
military development assistance. Dr. Brigety offered two short stories to illustrate some of the challenges we face.
The first story was of a Council on Foreign Relations presentation given
by a Marine Corps second lieutenant. In the question and answer period that followed,
the Marine was asked if there was anything he wished he had in the second battle of Fallujah
that he hadn’t had. He responded that he wished he’d had “a Peace Corps on steroids.”
What he’d needed most was someone who understood the humanitarian consequences and impact of the battle.
The second story was of a well-drilling operation conducted by a small U.S. Navy Seabee detachment about
100 miles north of the town of Garissa in northeastern Kenya. Despite having drilled to 150 meters
without having found water, the Seabees were going to keep drilling “until they ran out of steel.”
Meanwhile, their Kenyan counterparts had stopped drilling at 30 meters. Even if the Seabees had been
“successful,” they would have provided water to 20 nomadic families “100 miles north of Garissa, five
minutes from the middle of nowhere” at a cost of $125,000, raising the question: Why is that a good use
of taxpayer money? We were there because a humanitarian presence gives us a reason to be among typical
nomadic groups, offering insight into what is happening in the area.
These examples illustrate a morphing that is occurring between that which is strictly military and
that which is strictly development. The morphing is occurring because of the nature of the activities
pursued, the objectives the activities are meant to achieve, and the spectrum of conflict in which
they occur. This work is occurring where there is no immediate conflict, but where there is a specific,
tactical, operational, or strategic objective to improve lives of civilians in the field. We must make
sense of this, theoretically and as a means of guiding our policy, budgets, doctrine, and operations.
A second trend is the debate about reforming U.S. foreign assistance architecture, the doctrine
that guides it, the bureaucracies and budgets that support it, and reforming the oversight mechanism to
make sure we are wise stewards of taxpayer money.
At that intersection of increased involvement of development in military and
foreign assistance reform is a strategic lacuna, and we lack an overarching strategic framework to explain it.
Despite the fact that the United States is the single largest donor of ODA [official development assistance]
in the world, we do not and have not had a document saying how we will strategically spend that
money and how those expenditures both support the objectives outlined in the National Security
Strategy and how it relates to what the military is doing as outlined in the National Military Strategy.
Recently, the Secretary of State announced the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, a process
that will begin to address this.
Dr. Brigety’s Center for American Progress drafted a National Strategy for Global Development
to demonstrate that one could be written, what it should look like, and to put out a document
for discussion. He highlighted several points from the strategy.
The first is that the strategy recognizes that there is no clear, broadly accepted definition of what the purpose of assistance to civilians is; in fact, there are multiple definitions. The strategy attempts to distinguish between them by placing them in three categories:
- fundamental assistance (to improve the lives of civilians),
- instrumental assistance (to improve the lives of civilians to achieve another strategic or tactical end), and
- diplomatic assistance (assistance primarily to governments for a U.S. national diplomatic objective,
which may not improve the lives of civilians).
The distinction between fundamental and instrumental assistance is whether assistance is in the place of the greatest need or in the place of the greatest strategic need.
Recommendations from the National Strategy for Global Development’s executive summary include the need to dramatically increase the number of development professionals, the need to clearly delineate who is responsible for what in the development space in the U.S. government, and the commitment to international, multilateral assistance mechanisms.
In closing, Dr. Brigety noted that it is essential both for fundamental and instrumental assistance that development professionals and their military colleagues have the same flexibility in the spending of funds, and that the assignment of senior development advisors to each of the different combatant commands should be pushed farther so that the next time a commander has to find a way to rebuild essential public services in a city or to organize governance selections, that commander can literally turn to them for this sort of advice. They should, in fact, train together.
Colonel Gregory Hermsmeyer’s Presentation
Colonel Hermsmeyer noted that his views are his own, although he’d try to reflect the Department of
Defense’s position and thinking. His presentation addressed Dr. Brigety’s presentation and paper’s case
for a sustainable security approach, Reuben’s call for a national strategy for global development,
and proposed elements for that strategy. Colonel Hermsmeyer also offered his own thoughts on how
the U.S. government might be able to draft and implement such a strategy.
Sustainable security combines the U.S. national security, human security, and collective
security approaches and offers a more comprehensive framework than the more narrow national
security approach than we’ve traditionally applied. Aid that addresses basic human security needs
through a people-centered approach can be just as powerful as assistance that helps build the military
capacity of our partners. Our national security interests stand a better chance of being addressed
when we meet the human security needs as well as those of the partner state.
Collective security is another important element of a sustainable security approach. Our
nation’s security depends on the capacity of other states to secure their own borders and
the other states within their regions. Traditionally, DoD’s focus has been in building the
capacity of the state and its security apparatus; however we’ve come to recognize the
connection between state security and human security, and nowhere is this linkage made
more clearly than in the emerging discipline of Security Sector Reform, or SSR.
The SSR framework recognizes that an effective, legitimate, and accountable security sector
provides security both to the state and its individual citizens. The SSR applies development
principles, including the imperative to support local or host nation ownership to traditional
security cooperation activities. It also makes clear that security is a shared responsibility
of all U.S. government departments and agencies, but in particular the three Ds: DoD, USAID,
and the Department of State.
The proposal for a national strategy for global development is compelling. Such a strategy could be
derived from the administration’s national security strategy, just like our national defense and
military strategies come from that document. As presented by Dr. Brigety, the types of assistance
to be covered in a national strategy for global development and the objectives of that strategy are
about right, with a couple exceptions.
- First, the distinction between military and civilian assistance categories isn’t as clear as
implied. For example, it’s not clear in which category assistance to nonmilitary security forces or
to the intelligence sector would fit. It’s also not apparent whether strengthening the management
and oversight capacity of the defense ministry would be an example of military assistance or
civilian assistance. A more useful distinction may be one that distinguishes between sectors.
- Second, it is hard to distinguish between fundamental, instrumental, and diplomatic assistance.
Any U.S. foreign assistance includes certain political or military objectives as well as more altruistic
humanitarian ones. Aid provided by a government donor is never completely neutral.
- Finally, state security should be a fourth objective, in addition to national, human, and
collective security. States that are unable to provide for their own security can’t provide
security for their citizens collectively in the region.
Colonel Hermsmeyer offered his thoughts in regard to the elements of the strategy, as proposed
in Dr. Brigety’s paper, that have the greatest DoD-USAID intersection:
- Institutional capacity building is where defense and development may have the most
important linkages. DOD has traditionally focused its capacity-building efforts on training and
equipping. Over the long term, sustainment of those short-term investments depends on whether the
partner has necessary systems and processes. The development strategy should address the need to
promote local ownership and development of security institutions as well as economic and governance institutions.
- Effective governance and accountability are major DoD concerns and the ultimate objective
of our collective security sector reform efforts. An effective, legitimate, and accountable
security sector is one that is more likely to respect human rights and the rule of law and
to facilitate development activities by USAID and its implementing partners.
- Humanitarian and civic assistance is another area with essential defense and development
linkages. DoD has important assets and capabilities that it can bring to bear in disaster response,
as well as civil affairs, engineering, and health units that can help address basic human security
needs. However, USAID has the comparative advantage. DoD’s soon-to-be released guidance message
for DoD humanitarian assistance programs will require that DoD humanitarian assistance projects
be approved at the development mission level and by the senior development advisors at each
combatant command. Assistance in nonpermissive environments is also crucial to success.
Development is key to consolidating and sustaining long-term military gains.
In regard to how the government could draft and implement a national strategy for global development,
Colonel Hermsmeyer noted that a development interagency policy committee already exists. A strategic
planning working group could be reestablished to develop a national strategy for global development
and to leverage DoD’s planning expertise. A Development IPC could also prepare a presidential policy
directive that outlines and defines the roles and responsibilities of each agency.
A development strategy could be more effectively implemented in the field with more flexible and
responsive funding mechanisms and by offering professional development experts development
opportunities. Development officers would not only help improve the development advice that
the military receives, but it will also provide professional development opportunities for
development professionals.
A sustainable security approach is the right one for our current challenges and a national
strategy for global development is an idea whose time has clearly come. Security is a shared
responsibility and sustainable security requires integrated 3-D approaches.
Linda Poteat’s Presentation
Ms. Poteat opened her presentation noting that thinking out what we are trying to accomplish
and where we are trying to get is always a good thing. From the perspective of implementing partners
at the field level and as a U.S. tax payer, the lack of coherence of U.S. government policy at the
field level has been apparent. It can be problematic for those who are working in the field and are
often the face of programs to local civil societies when the mission director and the ambassador
are not on the same page about what needs to happen in a particular country. This coming together
of State and USAID and the military to discuss how we’re going to move forward is a welcomed effort.
Among the things that are important as we move forward is seeing our USG civilian colleagues and
our military colleagues actually training together. It is important to have these discussions, to
figure out what they’re doing and how they do their work, and to discover lexicon problems. We hope
that putting together this development strategy will move forward, and we look forward to providing input.
As we look at a development strategy, it shouldn’t just be development work that government civilian agencies do.
A healthy and stable nation also has a disciplined and accountable police force and a military. To talk about a
development strategy without featuring those components is probably a little irresponsible. For those who
have worked in conflict zones, we help the ministry of health or the ministry of education to provide services
to their folks, but as conflict ends, and we start to move away, if that security element isn’t there, we’ll be
back again and again. We need to look how we might incorporate that into how we look at things. Our military
and other militaries contribute to development work and those sorts of things shouldn’t be ignored or discounted.
Regarding fundamental versus instrumental assistance, Ms. Poteat noted she is not entirely
convinced that there is any such thing as fundamental assistance, except perhaps some of the
programs that OFDA or the State Department’s Bureau for Population, Refugee, and Migration might carry out.
A lot of development assistance is tied to national interest because we are prioritizing the countries that we work with.
Metrics are key. If we are doing this sort of work then we have to measure it. We have to ensure that
any work do has an impact. That’s something where all of us can do a better job. When we’ve tried to
challenge the military to talk to us about how they measure the work they’re doing, they’re often
unable to provide any sort of metrics in the way that you and I as humanitarian development
professionals would look at that. That is something that needs to be taken into consideration as we
look at how to better support USG civilian agencies and bring us onto a more equal playing field.
Regarding recommendations such as that of U.S. government civilian agencies having as much
flexibility with the money that they spend as the military does, we would all welcome that.
We have the challenge of earmarks in Congress. It would be fair to ask that DoD and State
Department and USAID all be held to the same levels of accountability and flexibility. This
congressional issue is something we are going to have to grapple with. Hopefully it is something
we can work on together. We have been grateful to Secretary Gates for saying these things to an
audience that has to hear this message.
Looking at rebuilding USAID, this is a longer discussion. Do we want to rebuild it to
look like it did in Vietnam, or do we want to rebuild it to look as it should in the 21st century? Yes,
it would be nice to have a larger civilian contingent; it would be nice to be able to deploy more people
more quickly in places that are of great concern. But just as you can’t solve a problem by throwing
a great deal of money at it, you also can’t solve a problem by throwing people at it. They have to
be the right people, they have to have the right profile, and you actually have to let them go out
and do the work. Civilian agencies have to reflect on whether they are willing to be risk managers
at the field level or if they are going to remain risk averse. There could be some more flexibility.
When you are trying to recruit a large number of development professionals to go out and try to
help solve a problem, it’s going to be hard to recruit people who are willing to be locked up
tight in a place where they can’t move around. If you have a choice of living in Bangkok with
your family and being a regional manager for an NGO versus doubling up in bunk beds in a hooch
in Kabul, unable to leave the compound or talk to beneficiaries, for someone whose vocation
is development, that’s an easy choice. Those sorts of structures have to be looked at moving forward.
How would we structure a professional civilian development corps? What are the important things
that need to be included in that, is it language training? Is it cultural sensitivity training? Is
it learning how to talk to our military and USDAS and Commerce and Trade colleagues? All of those
things need to be included and for everybody, not just for folks who are going to be deploying next week.
On the nonpermissive environments issue: yes, it’s important to go in fairly soon after a conflict
to help restore services. But one problem with small civilian-military teams going into nonpermissive
environments is not having access to the community or the cultural knowledge you need to be successful.
The success of many programs in these situations has to do with folks having that cultural
background and knowledge and that comes from having national staff. From our perspective,
that’s where the NGOs strength lies in that most of our staff are national staff.
On better cooperation with multilaterals: everyone is supportive of that, and we do need
to be supportive. From our perspective, we’d encourage better engagement with the UN
and other international organizations.
Question and Answer
[abridged]
Question #1: This is really for Dr. Brigety. There’s a fundamental point to which you alluded which is this issue of longer term sustainability, which I don’t see in your document or in what you were saying. If we’re going to come together, cultural context is an important part of the perspective of a lot of USAID development people that you need to understand.
Answer #1:
Dr. Brigety: This distinction between what the military does and what civilians do in the development space is often described in shorthand as short-term versus long-term objectives. I don’t find that to be a particularly helpful construct. It doesn’t get to the root cause or issue of why we are doing this sort of assistance work and where. But I take your point about sustainability. It is something that ought to be considered either in terms of ensuring that the work we’re doing is sustainable in and of itself or having a plan for hand off to something that is more sustainable.
Question #2: One of the findings that has come up in interviews that I’ve done is that military actors who I’ve interviewed have had nothing but respect for the agency and its development expertise, but when I interview people who’ve worked with the military out in the field, the one thing they mention over and over again is the sheer numbers that military brings to the table, in other words often the development voices get lost. I wonder if you could address how this could be changed?
Answer#2:
Colonel Hermsmeyer: I think that is a reality. There are a lot of analogies about how much larger the DoD is than State or USAID. One of our strategies is to put the development face forward and put the development advisors both at the country team level and at the combatant command in that decision making process to ensure that when we do engage in development-like activities in a country that those activities are fully coordinated with the development side and support our short- and long-term development objectives in that country and ultimately apply the development principal of doing no harm. It’s been a process of growing awareness that we need to be in better alignment with the development professionals.
Dr. Brigety: He’s absolutely right. Our development will never be anything close to the size of our military assets. The model then that development experts have to look at is how do you be the leaven in the bread? Two things have to be done to make that happen. First, you have to be present. The other thing is you have to come with flexible, robust finances. Both require congressional action, which goes back to the fundamental point: the center of gravity for this conversation is Congress. Until the American people are convinced that money spent on development is as important as money spent on carrier groups or nuclear weapons, we are not going to be able to move this debate forward.
Question #3: I want to ask Greg a follow-up question. We’ve made progress on developing common indicators between DoD’s development-like work and USAID’s work, but there was a ruling last year from the lawyers saying that DoD should not use its programmatic money for monitoring and evaluation because Congress gives it programmatic money only for programs. Has there been progress in that and what are your plans for more interagency capability for sharing monitoring and evaluation capabilities?
Answer #3:
Colonel Hermsmeyer: On the humanitarian assistance and monitoring and evaluation effort, that’s proceeding afoot. Rand is doing a study for us to develop a handbook for M&E for DoD humanitarian assistance projects.
As far as funding, our lawyers have determined that a change in appropriations language is needed to use our overseas humanitarian development and civic assistance account funds to do metrics and evaluation. We missed the window for this year, but we finally have buy-in from our program managers in DoD that that needs to happen.
As far as interagency collaboration, we are working right now on developing an M&E process that gets at measures of effectiveness. As of yet we don’t have a comprehensive interagency evaluation effort underway. I think this issue is going to be more important until we finally get a coherent process and strategy together to evaluate our impact.
Question #4: The question that I have and the problem that I’m having mirrors my experience working with the USAID mission in East Africa, coordinating with the combined joint task forces out of Djibouti, and that is that the State Department was not usually present at the table or in the room. A further issue is that when the development side remains a small d and subordinate to the State Department, we have some constraints coming to the table, in terms of our presence, in terms of our role, in terms of our authority, in terms of our funds. I would like some comments from any of the panelists who care to comment on the role of the State Department.
Answer #4:
Dr. Brigety: I think the State Department recognizes that problem, and I think that is part of the impetus behind the QDDR. I also agree with your point that in this 3-D construct there’s been a lot more emphasis on the coordination between the development and the defense Ds than there has been about the diplomatic D, as it were. But again, I think this is going to be made up shortly, certainly as this QDDR process continues.
Question/Commentary #5: I want to offer a couple comments. One is that I don’t think you explicitly talked about the Provincial Reconstruction Team model, but on the Provincial Reconstruction Teams we do in fact have USAID development advisors. We also have USAID Afghan staff working on the Provincial Reconstruction Teams alongside their USAID American staff and their State Department and U.S. Department of Agriculture colleagues. I think the civil-military coordination is growing and working better, and there are important lessons learned.
In respect to our being overwhelmed in numbers, there’s no question about it. What that means is that we need to be strategic in terms of how we share our information and how we share our expertise. In my experience, the U.S. military in Afghanistan was not only exceptionally receptive to development assistance feedback from USAID, they were hungry for it. They wanted more and more of it. We need to work together.
Question #6: My question is how do we move that ball forward? I think we have to figure how we can all work together in the sense of talking to everyday people about how this affects them, and how they can get involved, and how we can influence their members of congress that they care. Your thoughts on that?
Answer #6:
Dr. Brigety: One of the things we’re doing at CAP is we’re hosting a series of beyond-the-beltway forums to demonstrate why this is important. Our basic mantra is that when the soccer mom in Tulsa is as comfortable spending $100 million dollars on foreign assistance as she is on spending $150 billion on the defense budget then we’ll know that we won.
Colonel Hermsmeyer: DoD is quite effective at working the Hill. Our size helps, but we also have a well developed and longstanding congressional strategy. In addition to having Secretary Gates make thoughtful and public speeches, it would be helpful to follow up by having our geographic combatant commanders and our field commanders in Afghanistan and Iraq make calls to the House and Senate foreign operations committees and authorizing committees on behalf of increasing the 150 account. We’ve talked about trying to do that through the development IPC or through other venues. I think that’s something that my office would stand ready to help facilitate with our DoD legislative affairs folks on behalf of State and AID.
Question #7: How would the deployed civil affairs teams interact with these tactical development advisors, Dr. Brigety, and where would the Civilian Response Corps fit into this model?
Answer #7:
Dr. Brigety: There are a number of different ways in which Army and Marine Corps CA teams can work with development advisors. Most important is the understanding that, given the current deployment patterns, not every brigade or battalion has access to CA assets. They’re not organic to each of those units, which is why I think it’s important to have that development expertise directly assigned to them.
With regard to the Civilian Response Corps, I understand the point behind the CRC, but to me creating a response corps before you increase your active people doesn’t make sense. The first objective ought to be a dramatic increase in the bottom-line numbers of FSOs both at State and AID, with our internal in-house expertise, and then figuring out how we can augment that with other people.
Question #8: I’d ask Dr. Brigety to comment on my observation that it appears from what you said that there are different purposes for foreign assistance, but the types of foreign assistance that work and that don’t work tend to be more similar. So if there are different purposes, then it certainly argues for greater synergy in planning and certainly an appreciation of what will work and will not work on the ground. Then, on the operational end, it argues for the people that do the actual implementation to have a greater space to operate with perhaps less second guessing and more independence and appreciation of the culture that allows that kind of work to go on.
Answer # 8
Dr. Brigety: I think this question of independence cuts various ways depending on the context in which you are asking the question. I think that these distinctions are easiest when you have very clear distinctions between whether you are in a permissive or nonpermissive environment. And then, what is effective development depends entirely on what the objective of the development is. Is it simply moving the needle on some socioeconomic indicator, which is a first order problem? Or is it, what we call a second order problem, which is not simply whether or not you move the some needle on some socioeconomic indicator, but whether moving that needle actually dips you closer or further away from some other objective that you are trying to reach. And that’s a strategic question that has to be answered at basically every level of programming and planning.
Question #9: My question for you is when you start embedding those development personnel at the brigade level and above, what is the risk of the brigade commander, those colonels taking them away from the actual on the ground lieutenants and captains and, furthermore, training those lieutenants and captains what to do, because it is very easy to get myopic when you are at that level?
Answer #9:
Dr.Brigety: These are people that are integral to your unit so that even when you are back in the States as part of your normal training rotation, there should be modules in which the brigade and battalion development advisors bring all the company commanders together and say, look, today’s lesson is on community-based development. So, if you are ever with your company forward deployed much further away from the headquarters unit and you get tasked with doing X. You have three bags of tricks: 1.) you have the information that you learned at garrison at our last training module; 2.) you can pick up the radio and the tactical development advisor; and 3.) you have your sea bag full of cash to actually do what you learned to do.
Previous USAID Summer Seminars
Notes, Q&A transcripts, handouts, and slides from previous USAID Summer Seminar are available for the following years: 2008, 2006, 2005, 2004 and 2003.
How to Contact Us
Any questions concerning the Summer Seminars should be directed to the 2009 Summer Seminar Planning Team at ksc@usaid.gov
Back to Top ^
|
