In Revised USAID Policy, a New Model for Civil-Military Cooperation
23 Jul 2015
By Janine Davidson, Zachary Austin for Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)
This article was external pageoriginally published on 8 July 2015 by external pageDefense in Depth, a blog run by the external pageCouncil on Foreign Relations (CFR).
From stabilization operations in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to humanitarian activities across the globe, today’s military is routinely called on to perform missions removed from the conventional battlefield. In these tasks, the military rarely acts alone; the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is often close at hand. USAID has announced external pagea new policy on cooperating with the Department of Defense (DOD) that is poised to realign their relations with DOD, redefining a partnership critical in managing today’s conflicts.
The policy builds on decades of increasingly complex interactions between the two agencies that became more formal when President Bush’s 2006 National Security Strategy (NSS) assigned development the same importance as diplomacy and defense in what’s become known as the “3D” approach to national security. The Department of State, DOD, and USAID are expected to come together and form “the interagency” to jointly respond to pressing foreign policy issues. The idea gained traction, and has featured prominently in President Obama’s 2010 and 2015 NSS.
Proclaiming “the interagency” as a noun is one thing; implementing it is quite another. The challenge is particularly daunting for USAID: while DOS and DOD are cabinet level organizations with sizable budgets, USAID operates globally with fewer personnel than a single army brigade or air force wing. But this difference in size isn’t the only barrier to effective coordination: Tom Baltazar, a retired Army Civil Affairs Colonel and former director of USAID’s Office of Military Affairs, external pageobserves that “The organizational culture of USAID makes it difficult to operate in the interagency, because they come to it from a position of inferiority.”
This cultural rift is compounded by the civil-military divide between USAID and the DOD. USAID personnel schooled in the 3D approach are often surprised to hear DOD leaders discuss external pageDIMEFIL (Diplomatic, Information, Military, Economic, Financial, Intelligence, and Law Enforcement) the acronym taught at the War Colleges in lieu of 3D to discuss the foundations of national power. Conversely, the idea that a USAID Senior Development Advisor embedded into a Unified Combatant Command can bypass the chain of command to directly advise the Combatant Commander does not always sit well with uniformed men and women accustomed to military hierarchy.
The military is well acquainted with USAID’s Military Liaison Team at the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA). As the lead federal agency responsible for coordinating U.S. disaster relief operations abroad, USAID’s OFDA may request that the military provide capacity for humanitarian assistance—we’ve seen this most recently in external pageNepal. OFDA’s Joint Humanitarian Operations Course (JHOC) has educated 12,000 military personnel over the last nine years on working with USAID in these environments. But these kinds of missions only account for about one fifth of what USAID does according to Dale Skoric, Senior USAID Development Advisor to the Pentagon. How is the military’s role in USAID’s wider development programs managed?
Enter USAID’s Office of Civilian-Military Cooperation (CMC) and their new external pagePolicy on Cooperation with the Department of Defense. Over two-and-a-half years in the making, the policy supplants USAID’s 2008 external pageCivilian Military Cooperation Policy, produced when CMC was still known as the Office of Military Affairs. These semantic changes are important, as CMC Director Beth Cole was quick to assert at the new policy’s launch event external pageon June 18th. The document’s name was adjusted to emphasize that CMC only has the authority to write directives compelling USAID employees to take action, and can’t compel DOD to do the same. The CMC moniker was adopted to external pagebetter portraythe office’s true function: to improve communication, mutual understanding, and cooperation between the Agency and the Department of Defense at the strategic and policymaking levels.
These are the same goals of the new policy—and that’s a seismic shift in perspective for USAID-DOD cooperation away from joint operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and toward a more global outlook on development. Written in the midst of the Iraq surge, the 2008 policy asserted that development would assist with “counterterrorism,” “civil affairs,” “reconstruction,” and “counterinsurgency” operations: these words never appear in the 2015 document. Instead of reacting to violent extremism through instruments like the interagency Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT), the focus is now on deterring and preventing conflicts from arising in the first place through development projects, such as ensuring access to clean water or healthcare and mitigating the impacts of climate change.
The new document walks back from external pagetalking tactics for use on the ground, as the implementation guidelines for the 2008 policy did, to instead outline how USAID defines terms like “cooperation” (there are three levels of it, from communication through cooperation and to all-out collaboration like in a PRT). Establishing this general framework for conversing with DOD on a day-to-day basis in Washington and in the field is crucial. Considering half of those in extreme poverty live in fragile states where military forces are likely to operate, such coordination between USAID and DOD is rapidly becoming “the new normal.”
Several core aspects of USAID doctrine regarding civil-military cooperation have not changed. USAID still sees DOD’s primary role as pursuing “strategic military-to-military” engagement in order to support stable militaries that respect civilian control, the rule of law, and human rights. USAID continues to believe that personnel exchanges and cooperative decision-making structures are the pathways to successful coordination with DOD. However, the Agency does realize that DOD is beginning to take on expanded roles in traditional USAID operating spaces, such as expanding the presence of civil affairs officers who work with civilian populations in many of the countries where USAID works.
What has changed remarkably between the two policies is the terminology associated with these exchanges: a deeper understanding of DOD procedures is evident almost everywhere. Whereas in 2008 USAID expressed a desire to cooperate and jointly craft plans in the most general terms, the 2015 guidelines cite specific documents that USAID personnel should use to cooperate with DOD on at all levels, from units in the field through the country teams to the unified combatant commands to proxies in the Pentagon and the White House. For example, the policy emphasizes sharing of USAID Country Development Collaboration Strategy (CDCS) plans with DOD in draft for the first time, including at the Combatant Command level, so that the military is cognizant of forthcoming USAID development operations. Likewise, combatant commands seek input from the Department of State and USAID when crafting their Theater Campaign Plans (TCPs).
Although both policies share some doctrinal similarities, there are a number of innovations in the new document that reflect USAID’s decision to prioritize mutual understanding and streamlined communication over reams of operational guidelines. Perhaps most crucial is USAID’s new role as a liaison between DOD on the one hand and NGOs or international organizations like the UN who can’t—or won’t—relinquish their neutrality by interacting with the military directly in conflict zones. USAID has to sign off on projects conducted by DOD with allocations from the Overseas Humanitarian, Disaster, and Civil Aid appropriation, allowing the agency a chance to utilize its expertise in program analysis to independently monitor DOD development initiatives.
The policy also suggests that DOD geospatial imagery may be beneficial to USAID to help fill data gaps. Lieutenant Colonel Eric Vetro, EUCOM liaison officer to USAID, discussed at the launch event how in return, USAID and their implementing partners can supplement DOD’ situational awareness by gaining access to areas DOD could never hope to enter, such as Eastern Ukraine. USAID has come a long way from external pagestruggling to divert effective resources to PRTs in Iraq and Afghanistan to being able to share assessments and analysis in order to create a common understanding of a given situation with their military colleagues today.
Even as operations in Afghanistan diminish in scale, opportunities continue for USAID and DOD personnel to interact with one another in environments as diverse as Bangladesh, Colombia, Macedonia, and Niger. To facilitate greater cooperation between USAID and DOD, CMC has launched the external pageDiVE (Development in Vulnerable Environments) program to educate military leaders and service personnel in the same fashion as OFDA’s JHOC course. But there’s a catch; USAID, excluding OFDA, is not authorized to spend its appropriations training military personnel, so CMC is reliant on DOD to provide the funding to support DiVE.
In an ever tightening budgetary environment, there’s a fear that contractions in training, coupled with the retirement of DOD and USAID personnel experienced in liaising between the two groups, will make it more difficult for the two agencies to come together for future operations. Beth Cole summed up the challenge best:
“By the time you land together on the tarmac, it’s too late to start training and cooperating. That has to happen now.”