Economics and Irregular Warfare

[Surferbeetle]

...having a discussion concerning economics and irregular warfare with your local CA-bubba and/or PRT-bubba. It should help to dispel some common misconceptions about what is possible...

CERP

CALL Handbook 09-27

GTA 90-01-017

USAID

Local Governance Program

Provincial Economic Growth Project/Tijara

National Capacity Development/Tatweer

CERP is a tool for short-term projects to gain short-term advantages for small units and it is also a damage control instrument. It is not, nor should it be, a tool for economic development. If any unit is under the impression that they are disbursing CERP funds as part of a long-term stimulus program, then they either misunderstood their commander's intent or their commander gave them some bad information.

Schmedlap,

Please clarify your point...opinion or fact, and cite your references.

Thanks,

Steve

[Schmedlap]

Schmedlap,

Please clarify your point...opinion or fact, and cite your references.

I guess you could call it highly preferred TTP? It is what we were instructed in 2007 and it jibes with how we used it in 2005 and 2007. As for citing, we did all of our business on SIPR. I don't know if that means it was classified or if that means that we simply did too much business on SIPR. Either way, I cannot cite.

The gist of the reasoning was that CERP only gets you short term gains. Ad hoc projects do not address the underlying causes of economic decay. They only fill gaps in what the community needs. They are good for obtaining goodwill and temporary cooperation. But after you conduct a project, the people are happy for about a week. Then they start asking, "what have you done for us lately?" Therefore, we were instructed to use them for temporary cooperation or to ameliorate genuine need of a community to solve some serious problem. If we needed longer-term cooperation (for example, enough cooperation over a period of months to purge the area of AQI), then we needed to plan projects that would occur in succession, ideally with a bit of overlap, so that as goodwill from the first project leveled off, we would begin another project to sustain that goodwill, and so on.