Purely an opinion, but an opinion from one's who's spent a few decades around development projects, and seen a few successes and a lot more failures.
You can't develop someone else's community. Nobody can. You can help the community to develop itself... if you do it very carefully.
There is almost always some sort of economic activity going on in a human environment. As security is established this activity is likely to accelerate. Assisting the economic activity that grows naturally out of an environment is much more effective than trying to introduce some totally new activity that you or some funding agency happens to be enthusiastic about.
Slinging money around often does more harm than good.
One piece of advice I've given to many in the development world, though few listen:
If you see people behaving in a way that makes no sense at all to you, don't assume that they are irrational or stupid. Assume that there is some factor in the picture that you don't see.
My gut reaction to the whole idea is that asking military men to do development work makes about as much sense as asking development workers to fight a war, or asking an engineer to do surgery.
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