....The US needs to make far more careful strategic choices between invasion and/or active support of a host government, and efforts to contain a security problem by strengthening neighboring states and the threat within a nation involved.
The US may have to act in some contingencies, and may well have to engage in armed nation building in the future. This briefing suggests that if this is the case, it must never again repeat the massive grand-strategic and strategic failures of the Bush Administration, which has repeated many of the mistakes of the Johnson Administration, and which already seems to rival it as the worst wartime presidency in American history. Any future intervention must recognize from the start the scale of the challenges and risks involved in armed nation building. It must admit the level of resources and time that will probably be required, and it must build on local values and capabilities.
The US will also have to build a level of competence it simply does not have today. Good intentions have never been a substitute for competence, and half-measures have never been a substitute for adequate resources in terms of men, money, and time. The US military will not only have to adapt fully to the challenges of counterinsurgency, it will have to create the capability to carry out active security missions for aid and governance efforts, create the capacity to support embedded aid efforts, and provide soldiers as a substitute for the near certain continued failure of the State Department and civil agencies to develop the skill sets required for many aspects of armed nation building.....
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