Quote Originally Posted by Bill Moore View Post
Wm, our planning for OIF was the worst I have ever seen. You're absolutely correct that we shouldn't cross the LD if we don't have a feasible plan to make a better peace.

I'm not sure I follow your comments on the country team. Country Team's exist where there are embassies, and some do great work. My point was when you do a regime change, there is no country team in the lead. I may be the only naysayer in this council, but I don't consider OIF a counterinsurgency like El Salvador, Philippines, etc. It is a post war reconstruction project that got off to a slow start, and now has evolved into a state of anarchy. COIN strategy probably won't work.
Bill,
I suggested earlier that we revitalize the country team concept. I was not real clear as to what I meant. Revitalize implies more than just taking an old concept off the shelf and using it again. I am not proposing a return to the status quo country team that I learned about in the early 80's at CGSC.
We are no longer in the kind of world that such a construct supports. A new team structure might not restrict itself to a single country. In fact in light of the globalizing of today, a regional approach is probably even more apropos. At a minimum, it ought to include State, Commerce, Energy, and Defense reps in its management structure. Depending on where and what is being contemplated, other Federal agencies also get pulled into the planning and execution process.
You may very well be correct that the uniformed services own the hands-on work for a large part of the time. That, however, mandates some serious reconsideration of what our AC/RC force mix looks like. It probably also requires that a whole lot more of the Federal civilian workforce be subject to deploying to an AOR.

To bring this back on thread, we need smart people (some of whom may be Ph.D.s) from a wide range of "nation-building" disciplines to be more than just advisors. We need them to be active particiapnts in the planning and execution of any expedition that the US chooses to consider or launch.