Quote Originally Posted by Tom Odom View Post
Ken,

Correct but we went farther than burying it; we made it semi-illegal in many respects. USAID in particular did a major shift away from cooperation with DoD and especially the CIA. In the realm of police training, USAID stepped back and declared "no mas". I was not involved in the central America operations in the 1980s but friends who were said these chainges--especially the self-declared ban on police training--played a large role. In our efforts in Rwanda, we had benefit of an activist Ambassador and an activist chief of staff of USAID, Dick McCall. Dick came out and stayed with us for months at a time. His presence as the number three man did much to motivate the players back in DC in the Nat Sec Council to at least get out of the way if they were not going to get on board.

Best

Tom
Tom,

I think there has been something of a paradigm shift in AID. About three years ago I was contacted by one of their senior staff who said their leadership recognized that they need to get on the team for counterinsurgency and stability operations. They were going to contract me to do a major study for them on how to go about it. I had major surgery then began a sabbatical so wasn't able to follow through, but hopefully someone did.

Their problem is that they have a very different organizational model now than they did in the Vietnam era. Then they had someone like 15K of their own personnel in the field. Now they basically are contract managers since most of the actual work is outsourced.