Modernization/Development Theory, CORDS, and FM 3-24?

[Madhu]

Steven Metz, World Politics Review

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

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....

[Madhu]

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....

[Madhu]

So I am years and years behind everyone else around here, it seems.

By Gian Gentile
Best Defense counterininsurgency critic

In general terms I would deconstruct the manual as it is now and break the singular link that it has with a certain theory of state building (known as population centric COIN). Once broken up I would then rewrite the doctrine from the ground up with three general parts: 1) would be a counterinsurgency approach centered on post-conflict reconstruction; 2) would be a counterinsurgency approach centered around military action to attack insurgent sources of military power (sometimes referred to as counter-terror or CT), but not linked to an endstate of a rebuilt or newly built nation state; 3) would be a counterinsurgency approach -- perhaps call it COIN light -- that would focus largely on Special Forces with some limited conventional army support conducting Foreign Internal Defense (FID).

The trick with this revised manual would be to present doctrinal alternatives for the U.S. Army when it goes about the countering of insurgencies and conducting stability operations with teeth. The trifecta trick would be to treat these three methods of countering insurgencies as operationally equal; that is to say, we would move away from the dogmatic belief currently held that anytime an insurgency is fought it must be of the population centric (FM 3-24, aka state building) persuasion, and that methods of CT and FID are subsumed within it and hence are seen as "lesser" operations. To reemphasize the key here is operational equality of the respective three.

from Rick's Best Defense (via a SWJ link)

http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts...urgency_manual

[Madhu]

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?

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.

[Madhu]

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".

[TheCurmudgeon]

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?

If I had to guess, it came about as a result of the collapse of Yugoslavia and the wars and interventions that followed. Although the UNDP stuff predates that, so it could be part of the effort to assist newly free post-colonial states.

BTW, the methods used in Bosnia etc. were exactly the methods that the Rumsfeld Defense Department were working hard to avoid during the planning for Iraq. Might be part of the reason we were so far behind the power curve (but only part).

[Madhu]

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....)