Quote Originally Posted by Rex Brynen View Post
I think you're rather making my point for me, Tom--which, as you'll remember, had to do with Marc's understandable concerns about the cost-effectiveness of front-line humanitarian agencies and NGOs. Specifically, after crunching the numbers for one agency's international staff costs (UNRWA), you're suggesting that the might be an extra 2% in staff costs that don't show up in the General Fund budget.

First, I would argue that this hardly changes the big picture. Second, we can hardly assume that international staff are irrelevant to programme delivery (the focus of my initial comment), any more that we can assume that everyone above 03 is irrelevant to the combat operations of the US Army. Third, as I noted before, in giving a quick picture of programme/administrative costs in one UN agency, I lumped a whole series of costs into the administrative side that are actually mission-critical to programme delivery: the transportation pool, comms, security, negotiating supplies of food/medicine/school supplies past the Israelis into Gaza, and so forth.

I would also add that the funding of international staff positions through the Secretariat isn't really creative accounting, since donors are fully aware of it, and it is taken into account in assessment of cost-effectiveness. Moreover, the tendency among donors has been to argue that UNRWA doesn't spend enough on management, and to push for more--not fewer--staff resources in that area.

Now the irony of this discussion (for those who have just joined us!) is that it has nothing to do with Haiti, since UNRWA is the only UN humanitarian agency not active there

Having worked with the military, other national security agencies, and international organizations, I would be hard-pressed to argue that the latter is the most spendthrift of the three. Certainly there are serious problems, which I've argued before in other contexts, and certainly I've encountered wasteful spending and poor programme designs. However, some level of background clutter is inevitable in large institutions, and ought be systematically addressed rather than throwing the humanitarian baby out with the anecdotal bathwater.

Moreover, in the case of humanitarian crisis, I think it is undeniably the case that the lead UN and humanitarian agencies are more cost-effective in delivering assistance than is the military, if one properly costs out the price-per-client or price-per-ton (a point that more than one NGO has made, as they watch $200-800 million C-17s land at PAP). Indeed, there was an OECD study a few years back that looked at the issue in some detail, and came to similar conclusions.. I'll see if I can dig it up.

This, incidentally, is absolutely NOT a criticism of US and Canadian military relief operations in Haiti--as you know, the reason why the military is so costly is precisely because it has the standby ability to do rapid airlift, to move transport in country, has embedded comms, security, logistics, and ISR, etc. There was simply no alternative after the earthquake, and the military has shown speed, dedication, flexibility, and even appropriate amounts of political sensitivity and humility in conducting the mission (as one member of the 82nd comment in the WaPo the other day, "we're like a football team being put in front of a Ping-Pong table. It's a learning curve")

It is inevitably the case that the post-earthquake development of Haiti will be undertaken by the Haitians, in collaboration with international organizations, NGOs, and donors. If there are legitimate concerns about the ineffective use of reconstruction funds--and there certainly are, both in terms of agency inefficiencies and local corruption--let us think about how those can be practically minimized in the timeframes available to us. Those timeframes are pressing: we currently still have hundreds of thousands with inadequate water, sanitation, and shelter (on top of the many Haitians who already lacked these things before the earthquake). We also have the hurricane/flooding season fast approaching. To paraphrase that great sage, Dick Cheney: you go to reconstruction with the aid community you've got.
Rex:

What's important about that (again, be it noted, lowballed) 2% isn't the 2%; it's that it shows they were dishonest in this one particular, which suggests that they were something less than fully forthright in others. And there are further gray areas. How, for example, does the UNRWA account for food aid to the families of the Palestinians who work for them. If they can feed those families because they're paying the workers so little, or if they can pay the workers so little because they're feeding their families, that food arguably belongs under overhead, forex.

No matter; back to Haiti.

Cost effectiveness matters in the long term. it's less important in the short/emergency. Someone on my publishers website, Baen's Bar, asked me why the military was so much more effective in emergencies than civilian agencies. I'll edit this a bit because of different rules for different fora. Note that these are based on my experiences and observations and are not necessarily universal.

*****

1. We have vast and redundant (for peacetime purposes) logistic, administrative and medical infrastructure, equippage, and expertise. None of them have anything remotely comparable, nor even all of them combined.

2. We are trained and fully expect to go into harm's way. An uncertain security situation doesn't mean, "Oh, my, we can't risk..." It means, "Pass out the ammunition and here are your ROE."

3. We are not about feelings and especially not about feeling good about ourselves because we're just so caring and sensitive. We need not waste time, dithering, in endless meetings the purpose of which is to make everyone present feel important and good and caring and sensitive. (Rex, I've been to those meetings. Lots of them.) We have a chain of command, backed up by customs, regulations, and laws. We analyze, give orders, and act.

4. We are pretty fair at intelligence analysis, which is not that different, really, in disaster relief than in a movement to contact. We also have the assets to gather intelligence that civilian agencies lack.

5. We are, legitimately and justifiably, field santitation freaks. We have little problem saying, "If we catch you sh***ing someplace but where we've told you to, it will be hard on you." Civilian agency workers are usually too soft for that.

6. We are much less inclined to do for the refugees than to help and make them do for themselves. This attitude is tacit anathema among most civilian agencies because, after all, how can they feel good and kind and caring and sensitive unless they're doing for. This particular one came home to me over the question of rice issue in Kurdestan. The civilians were insisting we pass out rice that was several times the UNHCR requirement. It took me a while to realize that they were judging the amount based on cooked rice while we were passing out dry rice. A few questions, here and there, and I came to the conclusion that at least the ones in my area (rough center of mass, Mangesh, Iraq) simply couldn't imagine refugees cooking their own food. After all, how do you feel good and kind and caring and sensitive if you make people cook for themselves?

7. Some of us, at least, are perfectly capable of saying, "If I have any trouble out of you lot, or you fail to do the work I assign you, I will cut off your food in a heartbeat." Civilian agencies? That would be almost unthinkable. (Note though, that at least one UNHCR type did back me up on that when the Kurds got...difficult.)

8. We have no vested financial interest in dragging disasters out indefinitely. They do.

That's a fairly complete list, but I make no claim that it's exhaustive.

*****


Cost of a C-17 is about 200 million. It's not the item cost; which is fairly irrelevant since we'd have to have them anyway, or something just like them. It's the operational cost. We could give them to the UN and / or NGOs and they couldn't afford to run them nor to keep them ready to run. (Military equipment will break just sitting there.) We could give the C-17s to them and what would they do with them when there was not an emergency justifying costly aerial resupply? As an aside, and it's very nearly a creative accounting issue, the military counts parts, fuel, sometimes a sort of amortized life/use expectency, and civilian labor where applicable. But we typically don't count military labor, because that also has to be there anyway.

I'd be interested in seeing that OECD study, not because I would expect it to have any validity (the measures you mentioned are fairly irrelevant to the question, the situations being vastly different where C-17s or slower, but much cheaper, surface trans are appropriate) but because of the mindset I anticipate that went into the study beforehand. Indeed, other than to keep someone employed, I wonder why they bothered with the study at all.