Quote Originally Posted by Surferbeetle View Post
What percent of active duty staff personnel have spent time working at the city managers office, the water treatment plant, the wastewater treatment plant, the municipality office, the sheriff's department or the county judges office? Out of a 2 year train up is a 40 hour course of instruction on these civilian populace based concerns enough?

Soldiers with professional experience in the concerns of a civilian populace are scattered across the active duty, national guard and reserve side of the force, however one finds a greater concentration in the national guard and reserve side of the house. Identifying and tracking soldiers with these skill sets is possible (ASI's).
Excellent suggestion. I know that we did have a robust and very competent engineer staff, and a less robust and less competent civil affairs staff. I can't vouch for their previous experience in the areas you mentioned, but I do know there were no '40 hour courses of instruction' offered on any of those subjects.

I am talking about division and corps staffs, the operational level (at least in COIN) staffs that form the kernel of Combined/Joint staffs during deployments. These are structured for conventional warfighting, and must be augmented to obtain the kind of skill sets useful in (I'm holding my nose here) poulace-centered operations. This is a problem for several reasons:

1. They are not, in fact, very common in the military, especially at the field grade level.
2. It takes a long time to grow a competent field grade staff officer. You can't just pluck someone from a city manager's office and expect him to be able to add value in the rarefied air of a three- or four-star headquarters. Thus it is rare to find someone with a specialist skill set who is also able to influence planning or decision making at the operational level.
3. Most of these specialists, while excellent engineers, city planners, or policemen, know squat about warfighting or counterinsurgency.
4. Augmentees, by definition, show up too late in the process of preparing for deployment.

So, while it is better to have these guys than not to have them. I don't see them as a silver bullet. The bottom line is we have a system of preparing large headquarters for operations that is basically a carbon copy of the one we used in the 80's and 90's to prepare for conventional war, only with a different scenario and some cultural sensitivity training thrown in. It doesn't work very well. Moreover, our division/corps headquarters are structured for the wars we would prefer to fight, not the one's we are currently fighting, as SecDef might say. Thus we send them off to the combat zone as ad hoc organizations.