By Ann Roosevelt
Stability operations appear to be an idea whose time has come, as a future failing state crisis could see State Department-led civilian groups moving and working alongside Army soldiers under plans to coordinate Army and State Department stability capabilities, officials said.
The Army’s new Field Manual 3.0, released late last month, elevates stability operations alongside the tradition core missions of offensive and defensive operations.
“It’s an evolutionary adaptation, as all good doctrine is, but we anticipate it is going to have a revolutionary impact because it is going to be received by a force that has been doing exactly what’s being talked about in this doctrine for the last three or four years,” Maj. Gen. David Fastabend, director of Strategy, Plans and Policy G3/5/7, said at a briefing March 6.
An important theme of stability operations in FM 3.0 is that it will be “in coordination with other instruments of national power,” working on such tasks as maintaining or reestablishing a secure environment, reconstruction, humanitarian relief–things going on today in Afghanistan and Iraq, he said.
One of those “other instruments of national power” is the State Department, which is seeing the convergence of policy, legislation and funding to build a stability operations capability.
“My office represents mile zero for the civilian response,” Amb. John Herbst, State Department director of the Office of the Coordinator for Stabilization and Reconstruction (S/CRS), said at the Pentagon briefing. “What we’re doing is meant–in certain circumstances, maybe the most important ones–to complement our military in what it’s doing.”
Herbst said personnel from his office and other civilians played a role in the creation of the Army FM 3.0, which is part of the wider Pentagon response to stability operations.
S/CRS is tasked to organize the civilian side of the government for stabilization operations and ensure what civilians do is completely harmonized with what the military does; and secondly, to create a civilian response capability, with the skills and training to deploy in a crisis. Herbst told Congress about this in October.
Administration policy is in place, Herbst said. “To ensure proper organization there’s something called the Interagency Management System (IMS) that will be used in times of stabilization crises.” The IMS is the coordination method for all civilian operations.
The IMS will provide a policy group–the Country Reconstruction and Stabilization Group–including personnel from the State Department, USAID, the Pentagon and other government entities to draw up a plan of operations for stabilization operations and to ensure its implementation.
If there is a military operation, the IMS calls for an Integration Planning Cell (IPC) that will deploy to a military headquarters. “That’s to ensure that the theater-level military and civilian planning is completely in sync,” Herbst said.
U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) supports the effort to build the IMS and IPC, Navy Capt. Timothy Spratto, Unified Action Department Head, J9, JFCOM, told Defense Daily.
Every Combatant Command now has a Joint Interagency Coordination Group (JIACG), which JFCOM helped develop. The JIACG, originating in 2003-2004, works day-to-day with combatant commanders offering the interagency perspective to ongoing planning and familiarizing the military with other government agencies.
This June, a S/CRS-led, U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM)-supported limited objective experiment 08, Unified Action, will be held to examine the civilian government planning effort, Spratto said. It will “test the very premise” of the IPC and JIACG, “what their roles and coordination methods will be,” including as part of the combatant commander’s staff, Spratto said. “What will the JIACG do when the IPC shows up,” he said. “We know it is not a repeat.” The IPC arrives for a specific crisis.
In such a crisis, the IMS calls for deployment of what they call Advance Civilian Teams that would be completely interagency, run in most, but not all cases, by Herbst’s office.
Administration policy is to create three civilian groups that could deploy in stabilization crises: some 250 in an full-time Active Response Corps, 2,000 in a Standby Response Corps, and another 2,000 in a Civilian Reserve Corps, he said.
The Active Response Corps would be actively trained as teams and able to deploy within 48-72 hours of a decision. They would have varied skills such as police, health officials, agronomists, and all types of engineers.
“They can deploy with the military or instead of the military or they can deploy after the military,” Herbst said. “They will also operate with international partners, including soldiers from overseas. They can support a U.N. operation or of an NATO operations. This capability is created first and foremost to make it easier and more efficient for our soldiers to operate in a complex warfare environment.”
The Standby Response Corps would come from the same civilian agencies but have full-time day jobs, he said. A corps of about 2,000 people means “we can effectively deploy between 200 to 500 of these folks in a crisis,” he said.
The Civilian Reserve Corps–mentioned by the president in the 2007 State of the Union message–would be private individuals who sign up for four years, train a few weeks a year be obligated to serve if called up to one year during the four year period.
To pay for this, the State Department Fiscal Year 2009 budget requests $248.6 million to create the three corps, he said. If the funds are approved, the capabilities could be created in about 15-18 months.
“This is a significant capability that would greatly enhance our national security,” he said. “We’ve sent the need for trained and skilled civilians operating as teams in current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and this is a capability that we see using not just on our own but with partners around the world because there’s no question that a principle, if not the principal national security challenge we face over the next generation or two, is the combination of destabilized countries, extremist ideologies and loose weapeons of mass destruction.”
The day of the briefing, Defense Secretary Robert Gates met with House Foreign Affairs Committee members, published reports said, who agree that more government agencies need to provide experts who can deploy in a crisis. Rep. Howard Berman, (D-Calif.), chairman of the committee as of March 11, invited Gates to breakfast, and afterward said the military and diplomacy are not funded equally, thus adding to military efforts. Herbst said the House just passed authorizing legislation for up to $50 million to create a 500- person Civilian Reserve Corps that could be a prototype for the planned corps. The Senate must still pass the legislation. Then it would take about a year to create this corps.
Fastabend said the Army is putting a lot of thought into how to develop its stability operations capability. “We’re going to need a flexible approach that we can dial up and dial down there are studies under way right now, at OSD and Army level try to forecast what we think the requirement might be for advisory-type capability.”
The Army is putting together a Stability Operations Action Plan, and a Stability Operations White Paper to lay out the intellectual underpinnings.
This could lead to organizational change, Fastabend said. “It may very well…”I think there’s a high probability we’ll be prototyping some of these ideas in the future. The question is to what extent?”
International organizations also are thinking about stability operations. March 5, a new United Nations Mediation Standby Team was announced, to help prevent conflict and resolve crises. Complex situations need specialized advice. “These are not places where you go out and begin a negotiation by the seat of your pants, Under-Secretary-General Lynn Pascoe said in a release. Norway is funding the team’s activities for the first year.