Seed NewsvineContractors Role In Nation Building
Oct 27, 2009 Uncategorized
Thanks to Matt at Feral Jundi for digging this one up. Dr. Thomas Barnett is a former Pentagon analyst and advisor who has some pretty compelling points to make about the U.S. ability (or lack of it) to conduct nation building in our current mindset and configuration. Pay special attention to the area he calls ‘Systems Admin Force’. Hope you enjoy and leave a comment letting me know what you think.
Tags: Barnett, nation building, TED
October 27th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Thanks for posting that Matt and Jake. Dr Barnett has been lecturing on his ideas for years. Everyone with an ounce of sense knows it is where we need to go. The nettlesome problem is how to get there. Grand changes of any type when you look back in history seem like they happen rapidly but when you are living through them they seem to move like a glacier.
October 27th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
marc, i’ve long said that the DoD is running a pace that the DoS simply cannot sustain. we actually have a ‘post conflict’ department in the DoS and USAID but they are not capable of doing the job we’ve asked them to do. partially their fault but mostly it is a very very difficult set of tasks and they have not organized themselves accordingly nor grasped the totality of their role. so, the military ends up trying to pick up the slack but then it ofcourse is not trained, equipped or manned for reconstruction efforts so they fall short of total success despite their genuine efforts. it’s a vicious downward spiral from there.
October 27th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Not to mention the relatively tiny budgets of DOS and USAID Vs the huge budget for DOD. Also Rumsfeld’s many turf grabs from civilian agencies including intelligence agencies hampered the civilian efforts and have yet to be completely unwound. To make matters worse Bush’s decision to put base cronyism ahead of sound policy resulted in the appointment of J Paul Bremer to Viceroy in Iraq squandering the billions of dollars the the civilian side did have,(mostly from Iraqi accounts held in the U.S.), for the post invasion effort.
October 27th, 2009 at 9:43 pm
What I though rang true to me, is that when you take your meat eaters (military/infantry), and ask them to do ‘everything’ in a war zone, then what impact does that have on their war fighting capability?
Barnett made a pretty convincible argument for this. We want our war machine, to be good and conducting war. We want it to be lethal and efficient, and not lessen that lethality and efficiency by tasking it with things that are not really war related.
So it goes back to today’s war, and this COIN-centric strategy that requires protecting the population. The Sys Admin Force, is exactly what the civilian component of the strategy really is. Keep the warfighters fighting actual war, and task everything else to Sys Admin. That keeps the warfighters focused on being really kick ass at destroying things.
What contractors are good at, are covering the grey areas between Sys Admin and the Leviathan forces. Things like convoy, PSD, static security are all areas that we can do, have done, and can continue to do. And all of those activities are pretty essential to the goals of Sys Admin and the Civilian component of the COIN strategy. Someone has to protect those guys and their things….
Of course I am just talking about the small percentage of security contractors. Regular contractors are playing a massive role in today’s war, and they are very much integrated into the Sys Admin force that Barnett is talking about. All 246,000 of us. lol
And to tie this into the latest IPOA conference. Guess who one of the speakers are? None other than Dr. David Kilcullen, the COIN king. COIN is perfect country for contractors, and there is still plenty of meat for the meat eaters to chew on.
I guess the question is, do we want our militaries to look more like NGO’s with weapons, or do we want them to be a lethal war fighting machine?
October 28th, 2009 at 5:38 am
Thanks for posting this; I’m a big fan of the TED Talk series, they’ve got some excellent presentations.
One of the interesting points for me was the fact that so much of “post-conflict” groundwork is invariably laid whilst the ground forces are still operating: Kilcullen and Barnett both have countless examples of that and Matt’s spot on when he refers to it as a “grey area” gap that contractors can fill efficiently and effectively.