Quote Originally Posted by Schmedlap View Post
The part is in bold could be a solution in Iraq or Afghanistan, if there are enough troops to do it. But there are not and were not. So those troops, instead, need to organize the locals to do it themselves. But that is not what the definition is describing.

What was needed, so far as I can tell, is not defined in some existing term, so armed social work enters the vocabulary. It sounds, to me, like armed community organizing. Perhaps that is not the best term, either. Maybe armed social work is better. Maybe both are wrong. Fine. But it's beyond the scope of CA or CMO, imo.
When we were dealing with this in Iraq, it wasn't that CA couldn't do it or that we couldn't handle CMO ourselves, but, like you said, there just weren't enough of them (or us). However, I understand that now most combat arms Army officers being involuntarily mobilized out of the IRR are being re-classed as CA officers. I don't know how they're being utilized down range, but it would seem to me that we should be embedding CA teams at the company level (if not lower). Anyone know if we're doing that now? When I was deployed, we had something like a four-man CA team attached to the battalion. Sometimes.

And then there's also the option of creating a civilian international development expeditionary force through State, but there's a lot of political resistance to that.