Civilians in War Zone need coordinator

Mark Safranski:

President Bush’s fruitless search for a “czar” to resolve poor interagency coordination in the GWOT in Iraq and Afghanistan is an attempt at finding a solution for a problem that has plagued most chief executives. Harry Truman sadly predicted that his successor would soon find that being president was not at all like commanding an army while Ronald Reagan used to joke that in his administration “ the right hand doesn’t know what the far right one is doing”. Given the difficulties in stabilizing Iraq and the resurgence of the Taliban in Pakistan’s frontier provinces and the poor state of American public diplomacy the interagency process is no longer a joking matter. Recent history however points to potential solutions.

In 1983, the United States invaded the island nation of Grenada and overthrew a Cuban-supported radical Communist military junta that had just murdered the Marxist Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and established a shoot-to-kill curfew that threatened the lives of Grenadians and American residents alike. While ultimately successful, America had difficulty in bringing its overwhelming force to bear on the junta’s ragtag Communist militia and a Cuban construction battalion. Each service sought its own objectives in Grenada, inter-service rivalries dominated as each branch of the military fought to gain a share of the glory without regard to the overall good. Incompatible communications equipment made coordination in the field difficult and potentially put U.S. troops at risk for “friendly-fire” casualties. And slowed the progress of the campaign.

Such a dysfunctional situation exists again, except today it is not merely a military problem. The process for executing American foreign policy through various departments, agencies and bureaus is less like the president activating a streamlined network than it is like a farmer attempting to move a herd of unwilling cattle. Changing policies or presidents will not help, except to shift the area or degree of failure without improving the performance. The foreign policy process is becoming unmanageable because the bureaucracy through which the president –any president – must work his foreign policy, was built for an era that is increasingly relegated to history books. A world of iron curtains and checkpoint charlies that ran at the pace of snail mail, telegrams and rotary telephones. That time is gone and it is never coming back; America’s problems today evolve at a much faster velocity.

There is a lesson to be learned here. In the aftermath of Operation Urgent Fury, the Department of Defense took a hard look at itself and committed to reforming the execution of combat operations and so did the U.S. Congress. The Goldwater-Nichols Act “empowered regional Combatant Commanders with command and control responsibility for their geographic area, strengthened the role of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and made joint assignments a prerequisite for selection to general or flag rank”
Secondly, a special operations command was created (SOCOM) to handle the coordination of elite units and thirdly, the services began to preach and practice the philosophy of “jointness” in training, planning and combat. The process took years and faced considerable bureaucratic resistance inside the Pentagon and although much work on “ jointness” remains to be done, the level of coordination in the field today is beyond what could have been imagined by commanders in America’s previous wars.

Unfortunately, when it comes to America’s civilian agencies that critically affect U.S. foreign policy objectives – the State Department, NSC, CIA, USAID, FBI, Treasury, Energy, Commerce, the Federal Reserve –it might as well still be 1983. Or even 1953....

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There is much more. Zafranski, aka Zenpundit provides a much more coherent discussion of the need for a war zone czar than the media did in discussing the Bush proposal. The lack of coordination between agencies who have been important cogs in teh war on terror as a whole has been an impediment for some time and the Pentagon and the military have had to take over many of the functions that should have been done by the civilian agencies. This has in turn been a drain om manpower for a military that should have had more troops to begin with. We are still suffering from the Clinto cuts and the Bush teams failure to add to the forces earlier in the war.