Quote Originally Posted by M-A Lagrange View Post
I would 200% agree with that and not only for USA.
But I will also warn you about the effect of a soldier distributing soccer balls and medecine to population and believing this has no bad effects.... Does not mean that civilian action cannot support a military objective. But I believe that military trying to carry civilian actions in war zones is as bad as civilians trying to conduct military operations. Each of us have his area of expertise and sometime it can be melte but keeping the apparences of separation does help both sides.
M-A,

Thank you for your insight. I agree that healthy boundaries between civil and military actors are very important. If professional soldiers become distracted by playing with children, then no one's keeping watch while the bad men approach and everyone loses.

I think an important question is whether we have anything at all precisely resembling a "war zone" between OIF and OEF. In both Iraq, where I spent thirteen months over 2008-2009, and Afghanistan, where I am settling in for a spell, there are no battle lines - only geographic and societal blobs that are less bad and more bad from our various perspectives.

Within those blobs, there are hundreds of thousands of human beings who are in no way involved in taking up arms against "our" side. Each one of them requires some food, some clean water, some adequate shelter...and yet there are others who are actively engaged in killing as many outsiders as possible.

With this scenario in place, the situation obviously demands that we maintain both military and development units in the theater. A simple abandonment of the population's needs will inevitably result in increased hostility toward us. That's the practical application of my "Applied Smart Power" - it is in my own best interest to look out for the interests of those around me. If altruism seems a little too ambiguous, we at least have self interest to fall back on.

What should also be obvious, but isn't effectively put into practice, is the desperate need for unified coordination of all elements with some stake in the game, not just military commanders and civilian chiefs running independent operations according to their very capable, but un-coordinated judgment. Such ops almost always have some detrimental overlap to the best interests of other efforts.