March - April Military Review - Revisiting CORDS: The Need for Unity of Effort to Secure Victory by Major Ross Coffey, US Army.

According to the National Strategy, weekly strat*egy sessions at the highest levels of the U.S. Government ensure that Iraq remains a top priority. At the operational level, the “team in Baghdad—led by Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and General George Casey—works to implement policy on the ground and lay the foundation for long-term success.” Each of the eight pillars have corresponding interagency working groups to coordinate policy, review and assess progress, develop new proposals, and oversee the implementation of existing policies. The multitracked approach (political, security, and economic) to counterinsurgency in Iraq has historical parallels with the Civil operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) program of the Vietnam War era. established in 1967, CORDS partnered civilian and military entities engaged in pacification of Vietnamese rural areas. The program enhanced rural security and local political and economic development and helped defeat the Viet Cong (VC) insurgency. Significantly, CORDS unified the efforts of the pacification entities by establishing unity of command throughout the combined civil-military organization. Lack of unity of effort is perhaps the most signifi*cant impediment to operational-level interagency action today. The victorious conditions the National Strategy describes might be unachievable if the interagency entities present in Iraq do not achieve unity of effort. To help achieve unity of effort, Multi-Force–Iraq (MNF-I) and the nation should consider adopting a CORDS-like approach to ensure integrated action and victory...