Don't disagree about alignment, but the linkage is being made, and the pretext is inherent.
It is actually quite staggering to hear folks comment about "what the government" either should or is going to need to do when, it reality, the government is no more structured or tasked to provide serious regional relief/reconstruction/environmental clean up, than is the military to, say, build schools in Afghanistan...
Ricks wrote yesterday about the Pentagon beginning to come to terms with economic realities (ie, the end of the blank check), and the President spoke of a new (?) concept of national power grounded in the power of the nation's own stability/prosperity (pre-Gulf, and shifting the signal away from foreign entanglements).
But we keep coming back to problems, like Haiti, where the military is shown to be the only tool available.
Pre-war Iraq's army was, in fact, not that unusual in being the entity responsible for bridge reconstruction and other civil works, following a tradition back to the Legions.
As the clock ticks down in Afghanistan, I will find it interesting to watch how the emerging redefinition of the military's role to the US government evolves.
That it is evolving is inherent in the COIN approach (at least, as COIN is advertised)...segue to COIN for America.
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