An interesting article in City Journal....
"City, Empire, Church, Nation" by Pierre Manent in City Journal
Quote:
We have been modern for several centuries now. We are modern, and we want to be modern; it is a desire that guides the entire life of Western societies. That the will to be modern has been in force for centuries, though, suggests that we have not succeeded in being truly modern--that the end of the process that we thought we saw coming at various moments has always proved illusory, and that 1789, 1917, 1968 , and 1989 were only disappointing steps along a road leading who knows where.
http://www.city-journal.org/
I'm not sure the process is illusory as much as fragile and at times reversible?
On the doctrine stuff--about which I know next to nothing if not less--I am interested in "options" as mentioned above and for two reasons:
1. The military doesn't get to choose and needs to be prepared,
and
2. The intellectual study of "options" countering an insurgency may help us in other ways, lead to other lines of productive inquiry, something like that.
At any rate, FWIW. I don't know, maybe if I were drinking rum I might not be so confused about all of this....
"Counterinsurgency and American Strategy, Past and Future"
Steven Metz, World Politics Review
Quote:
Counterinsurgency is very different. Victory requires not simply defeating an extant enemy, but changing a system. There is seldom a discrete moment at which the United States decides to undertake large-scale counterinsurgency. Involvement is usually gradual and nearly inadvertent until the United States finds itself embroiled in a type of conflict that it never intended to enter. Since successful counterinsurgency entails altering a political and economic system -- and sometimes even a culture -- it requires an integrated, holistic effort. Despite endless panels, commissions, studies, conferences and hand-wringing over the past decade about developing a whole-of-government counterinsurgency capability, this hasn't happened and isn't going to. The State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development do not have the resources to undertake large-scale, protracted counterinsurgency. No part of the U.S. government has a robust, expeditionary capability to help build legal and intelligence systems in alien cultures without a tradition of rule by law.
and
Quote:
In the broadest sense, the U.S. military must find a way to mothball its counterinsurgency capability rather than abandoning it outright. If done with skill, this will enable the United States to revive its counterinsurgency skills if they are needed again.
http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/a...ast-and-future
That's it for me--for now--because it seems that I am becoming some sort of council and blog commenting addict, which is just weird....
Another article/monograph
I don't believe I've posted this upthread, but, if have, my apologies. Interesting reading:
Counterinsurgency: Strategy and The Phoenix of American Capability
http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute....cfm?pubID=333
Especially "in retrospect" and all that....
Where did the term "capacity building" come from?
I've always wondered about the origin of the term "capacity building" and its relation to Thomas Barnett's SysAdmin, Kilcullen's proposed global "CORDS" (via the Counterinsurgency book linked above), etc? From the UN originally?
Quote:
Capacity Building Defined
FM 3-07 (Oct 2008) Stability Operations: "Capacity building is the process of creating an environment that fosters host-nation institutional development, community participation, human resources development, and strengthening managerial systems."
UNDP Definition (circa 1991): "the creation of an enabling environment with appropriate policy and legal frameworks, institutional development, including community participation, human resources development and strengthening of managerial systems; UNDP recognizes that capacity building is a long-term, continuing process, in which all stakeholders participate (ministries, local authorities, nongovernmental organizations and water user groups, professional associations, academics and others."
Ford Foundation Definition (circa 1996): defines "capacity building" as the "process of developing and strengthening the skills, instincts, abilities, processes, and resources that organizations and communities need to survive, adapt, and thrive in the fast-changing world."
http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/call/docs/11-23/ch_2.asp
What was the scholarship or whatever behind the UNDP definition? Anyone know?
I'm just curious, that's all. I like to know where terms come from and the intellectual genesis.
Maybe I should start a new thread?
Quote:
History of Capacity Building
Since the early 1970's, the lead within the UN system for action and thinking on what was then called Institution Building was given to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and it has offered guidance to its staff and member governments. This involved building-up the ability of basic national organisations, in areas such as civil aviation, meteorology, agriculture, health, nutrition to allow them to perform their tasks in the best way possible. All UN specialised agencies were supposed to actively support capacity building in the areas for which they were technically qualified e.g. FAO in the rural sector and agriculture, WHO in health etc, but they achieved mixed results. By 1991 the term had evolved and had transformed into Capacity Building.
UNDP defined Capacity Building as "the creation of an enabling environment with appropriate policy and legal frameworks, institutional development, including community participation (of women in particular), human resources development and strengthening of managerial systems, adding that, UNDP recognizes that capacity building is a long-term, continuing process, in which all stakeholders participate (ministries, local authorities, non-governmental organizations and water user groups, professional associations, academics and others".(citation: UNDP).
http://www.coastalwiki.org/coastalwi...ilding_Concept
Hmmm, did all of this stuff start "embedding" itself in your military doctrine during the 90s, when we started to think about a post Soviet world and our peacekeeping duties as the main purpose of the American Army?
Loaded question, I know, I know. Just wondering how it all "came about".
The Ugly American and Modernization Theory
Quote:
Defying expectations that it would drop into an ocean of public indifference, The Ugly American remained on the New York Times best-seller list for seventy-eight weeks, sold an astonishing four million copies, and was made into a block-buster movie starring Marlon Brando. The ensuing media frenzy put development on a par with the space race and created a new strand of populist internationalism that Senator John F. Kennedy seized to boost his presidential bid. Kennedy sponsored legislation to increase aid to India and announced the existence of an "economic gap" in Asia that was being filled by Soviet aid. In February 1958, Kennedy first met Rostow, and the modernization theorist moved into Kennedy's inner circle of advisers. Kennedy was drawn to the diagnostic precision of the CENIS model, and he adopted its language in his own critiques of foreign aid. The alliance of Rostovian theory and Kennedy-Johnson foreign policy ushered in the golden age ofmodernization theory in the 1960s. George Ball, undersecretary of state from 1961 to 1966, recalled in his memoirs the vogue for development economics in 1961 and "the professors swarming into Washington" who "talked tendentiously of 'self-sustaining growth,' 'social development,' the 'search for nationhood,' 'self-help,' and 'nation building.'"
In the first year of his presidency, Kennedy launched the Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps, Food for Peace, and the Agency for International Development (AID). He declared the 1960s the "Development Decade" and substantially increased the budget for foreign assistance. Modernization theory supplied the design, rationale, and justification for these programs. Stages had called for an expanded foreign aid effort organized exclusively around the development mission. Rostow implied and Kennedy had declared during the campaign that State Department bureaucrats used aid for short-run diplomatic advantage, making the separation of the Agency for International Development from State an essential first step. Likewise, Food for Peace took established agricultural surplus disposal programs and organized them around a develop-mental mission. Rather than dumping the excess produced by federal price supports (or using the surplus to alleviate famine), the program's primary purpose was the generation of "counterpart" funds that could be steered into social overhead investment. At the administration's urging, the United Nations put food assistance on the same basis in its World Food Programme.
The Peace Corps institutionalized a belief (traceable through The Ugly American to Lerner and Redfield) that exposure to modern personalities could induce change. Kennedy announced the Peace Corps during the campaign and asked Rostow and Millikan to draft the proposal. Volunteers were expected to create a catalytic effect by introducing ideas from a higher point on the developmental arc. The Peace Corps sought not specialists but "representative Americans" who could transmit values by example. Theory informed expectations of what volunteers should achieve. Performing their assigned jobs as teachers or agronomists was considered secondary to the task of catalyzing community involvement in a spontaneous project. Many volunteers experienced at first hand the chasm between the theory and reality of development.
http://www.americanforeignrelations....#ixzz2Ap6F7H8U
Has anyone at the Council noted the similarity between The Ugly American and Three Cups of Tea (haven't reviewed this thread in some time, perhaps it's somewhere here already....)
1997 book on Capacity Building
Quote:
The prime purpose of Oxfam and similar development agencies is to assist poor men and women in changing their situation and exercising their right to participate in the development of their societies. However, aid agencies that ignore peoples existing strengths may create dependency, and so make people more vulnerable than before. This book examines the concept of capacity-building and why it is such an integral part of development. It considers specific and practical ways in which NGOs can contribute to enabling people to build on the capacities they already possess, while avoiding undermining such capacities.
"Capacity-Building" reviews the types of social organization with which NGOs might consider working, and the provision of training in a variety of skills and activities, for the people involved and for their organization. The particular importance of using a capacity-building approach in emergency situations, and the dynamic and long-term nature of the process, are emphasized.
http://www.amazon.com/Capacity-Build...acity+building
I am adding this title to the thread because I asked up thread when certain language seemed to become standard, especially in doctrinal writing and thinking.
A lot of current military/stability/development thinking might come from the 90s-era stability assignments and development theory of that period? Around the time of MOOTW?
Well, I don't know. Continue to be intellectually curious about all of this.
Should I start another thread?
This has sort of morphed into a catch-all for international aid criticism but developmental and humanitarian aid seem to be important parts of international peace-keeping so I'll keep at it:
Quote:
Economist William Easterly speaks with Hugh Eakin about the recent militarization of Western foreign aid policy, the dangers of this new "aid imperialism," and the role economists have played in its development.
http://www.nybooks.com/podcasts/issu...ilitarization/
I suppose for intellectual honesty's sake I ought to go dig up articles by critics of the aid critics....
The Ugly American=Three Cups of Tea?
I proposed that the Mortenson book Three Cups of Tea was this generation's The Ugly American upthread but the following is a post with a different view:
Quote:
I feel like I need to explain the background of “ugly American”-ness because, until I read Jon Krakauer’s essay Three Cups of Deceit, Mortenson fit into this mold. (Example: “We need more people like Greg Mortenson and his Central Asia Institute. He uses a budget of only a few million dollars to build hundreds of school. Imagine if the US could send hundreds of Greg Mortensens armed with tens of millions of dollars.”) An American with an inclination toward languages who could seamlessly blend between Pakistan and Afghanistan and America and builds hundreds of schools for several hundred thousand dollars each? Sounds like an “ugly American” to me, in the original, good sense of the phrase.
Unfortunately, it’s likely that Mortenson spends more time telling stories about his “ugly American”-ness then he does “ugly American”-ing. That, in short, is a shame.
So the question becomes, do Mortenson’s actions condemn the idea of “ugly Americans”? Does this mean that philanthropy and development and foreign aid are farces?
Not at all. If anything, good “ugly Americans” keep themselves out of the spotlight, which Mortenson clearly did not. And, more importantly, Mortenson will be replaced. As soon as the fiasco broke, Rye Barcott released his book, It Happened on the Way to War. Then NPR’s Planet Money podcast aired a few shows about their attempts to build a school in Haiti and the lessons they learned. And then the Economist ran an article about new, more intelligent ways to use philanthropic dollars.
http://onviolence.com/?e=450
On the other hand, I'm not sure that the two points are that far off. What does development mean and what is its place within "stabilization" operations, military or civilian? Perhaps the first question is whether to "do" development or not, does it help or hinder progress, however progress is defined?
http://kingsofwar.org.uk/2012/11/flo...longer-useful/