Officers With PhDs Advising War Effort

[Bill Moore]

I caught part of a story on NPR this morning about DoS's challenge in finding personnel for OIF, and the failure of the administration to get beyond words on the Civilian Augmentation Corp (something close to this phrase, where the President wants experts in various fields from civil engineering to electrical engineers to volunteer for service). I think it is a great idea, but I can understand why that will take time to implement.

I think our problems in Iraq are largely associated with our legacy industrial age management systems, where every worker, and every organization, has a defined box to work in, you do this and nothing else. You can elevate that to the national level, where we describe the elements of national power as DIME (Diplomatic, Information, Military, and Economic), or possibly emerging doctrine MIDLIFE (Military, Information, Diplomatic, Law Enforcement, Intelligence, Finance, and Economic). What I saw in Iraq at the end of Phase III was that the military leadership largely thought their mission was done, so we went through the painful pregant pause that led to the mess we're in now. Instead of waiting for DoS to step up to the plate, which still hasn't happened, I think we need to get away from the stay in your box management system, and realize that we as the military own responsibility for all the elements of national power (in a situation like Iraq and Afghanistan, where we're starting from scratch after a regime change), until we can outsource it to the appropriate the agency. Bottom line until we can outsource it, we own it. That implies we can't sit on our hands waiting for the other elements of national power to catch up, we need to keep moving forward.

Now when we talk about PhD advisors, we need centers of excellence (groups of experts on DIME and MIDLIFE (far beyond the capabilities of the POLMIL officer) at the appropriate levels in military organizations to facilitate planning and execution of what we're calling phase IV tasks in OIF) for DIME/MIDLIFE.

Now pardon me if I'm pee in your neo-conservative corn flakes, but we need to be prepared to establish other forms of political structures beyond democracies for countries that never experienced democracy. We need to implement a structure that actually fits that society's culture, economic structure, and history. For those that can't let it go, DoS can "encourage" the development of democracy over the next 50 years, "after" that country is "secure" and functioning economically. That means we need political PhD advisors who can bring more to the table than our constitution, they need to understand how to stand up a variety of political systems, so they can advise the military on what we need to do to get the process started under martial law, so when we eventually transition it to another agency, we're already moving the right direction setting the right conditions.