This is Part 2 of a 3 part article discussing US Special Operations Command' s civil affairs mission, its role in Civil-Military Operations, and the need for this mission in our war against terror. And let there be no misunderstanding...we are at war.
(To read Part 1 see: http://www.gulf1.com/columns/rip/0423.htm)

"No group or nation should mistake America's intentions: We will not rest until terrorist groups of global reach have been found, have been stopped, and have been defeated."
President George W. Bush, November 6, 2001

Part 2 of 3 - The Post-conflict Battlefield

In the current post-conflict situation of Iraq, many critics have voiced their complaints about a lack of planning or foresight to prevent looting, fires, and other damages done by out-of-control Iraqis. I challenge that criticism with this question, "why did the Iraqis loot their own museums if they are so civilized...why do they burn their own government buildings if not to hide the evidence to be found inside...why do they cause such civil disorder if not to draw Americans out in public to become targets for snipers and other Iraqi malcontents who still yearn for Saddam to return from the rubble of his cratered grave?" At the time these acts of vandalism and violence were being done, US forces in Baghdad were still engaged in combat against pockets of enemy resistance.

Personally, I would never order any of my soldiers into harm's way to guard a museum in the middle of a hot fire zone. As a parent, I could never forgive my government if it told me my son died defending pottery. I applaud my President for staying the course and letting the field commanders do their job without interference from the oval office. Reacting to news reports on CNN and creating a "policy du jour" is, thankfully, not a characteristic of President Bush.

Are there any brave and honorable Iraqis left? I ask this because of the bravery of an obscure American bureaucrat. During the War of 1812, the British burned Washington. The Patent Office was spared because Dr. William Thornton, Superintendent of Patents, pleaded with the British Commander not to "burn what would be useful to mankind." Where was the Iraqi museum director during the looting? Why was he not standing guard along with his staff. Surely there were enough guns around Baghdad to equip a force of guards. The reality is that many of the cases were not smashed open, but unlocked with keys...keys that only the staff would have...and many of the objects that were smashed were replicas of the originals. Sadly, many items were priceless and irreplaceable original artifacts symbolic of mankind's quest for civilized life, but like that quest, the real point here is that transition from a fighting force to a security force is not a sharp one. The transition can't be properly defined by a line in the sand. By its very nature, it slowly emerges from the chaos of combat and presents itself as a civilian population in need of orderly administration of public services. It is at this transition point that CMO commences in ernest and brings its unique skills to the battlefield. It is reflected by this quote from an Army field manual:

FM 3-05.40, Civil Affairs Operations "The US military can expect challenges from ever-increasing missions in a civil-military environment. As such, CA [civil affairs] forces offer unique capabilities that not only enhance the mission but also ultimately advance the US political and economic interests."


So how does USSOCOM affect the transition? In order to avoid quoting the better part of Joint Pub 3-57.1, let me turn to Mr. Hersey again. The protagonist in his book was Major Victor Joppolo, an Italian- American assigned to administer the town of Adano in Sicily. In the foreword, he wrote these two separate quotes.

Without men naive enough- or brave enough- to take the nosebleeds, the ideals and principles on which our society is based can never make much headway.

I beg you to get to know this man Joppolo well. We have need of him. He is our future in the world. neither the eloquence of Churchill, nor the humaneness of Roosevelt, no Charter, no four freedoms or fourteen points, no dreamer's diagram so symmetrical and so faultless on paper, no plan, no hope, no treaty-none of these things can guarantee anything. Only men can guarantee, only the behavior of men under pressure, only our Joppolos.

In this war, who is our Joppolo? If you consider that Iraq is the town of Adano, it is retired Army 3 star general Jay Garner. In a recent article, entitled Jay Garner - Our Man in Baghdad, Lisa Hoffman, writing for Scripps Howard News Service, had this to say on April 22, 2003:

"Jay Garner's the right guy," said former Army Gen. Wesley Clark. "He has the experience to do a tough job and make things happen fast."

Born to a Florida orange grove foreman, Garner was the captain of his high-school football team who went on to get a history degree at Florida State University in 1962. Later, he earned a master's degree in public administration from Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.

He has been married to his high-school sweetheart - cheerleader squad captain Connie Kreigh - for 44 years. They have one daughter and two grandchildren. Garner turned 65 on April 15, the day he was mediating the first town meeting of Iraqi leaders in the ancient city of Ur.

After the 1991 Gulf War, Garner led Operation Provide Comfort, the enormous humanitarian effort to aid hundreds of thousands of starving and freezing ethnic Kurds in northern Iraq who had fled their homes after an abortive uprising against Saddam Hussein's army.

Rumsfeld has said it was Garner's skill, compassion and unflappable comportment in managing that crisis that won him his current job in Iraq. Of equal importance, he said, was the respect and appreciation Garner won from the Kurds.

That regard was demonstrated when it came time for Garner to go home in July 1991. More than 1,000 grateful Kurds blocked his way in a spontaneous eruption of thanks. They lifted him on their shoulders and pleaded with him to stay. Instead, Garner was the last American out of Iraq, crossing the river into Turkey after the final U.S. flag was lowered.

If John Hersey was right about a guarantee being only as good as the man behind it (and I think he was), then famed scientist Thomas Henry Huxley must have influenced him a bit. Huxley visited John Hopkins University in 1879 and made this statement as part of his address to the regents and students gathered:

"The one condition of success, your sole safeguard, is the moral worth and intellectual clearness of the individual citizen. Education cannot give these, but it can cherish them and bring them to the front in whatever station of society they are to be found, and the universities ought to be, and may be, the fortresses of the higher life of the nation."

If success in bringing civil order to post-conflict Iraq is conditioned upon the sole safeguard of moral worth and intellectual clearness of the individual citizen, then I have to agree with General Clark, Jay Garner is the man...even if he went to FSU.

How will Jay Garner make this CMO thing happen? After all, he is a retired general, not an active duty officer...and that fact alone is already at odds with the recently published Joint Pub 3-57.1 doctrine. One can not find a passage dealing with a civil administrator running a civil-military operation. However, this is not without precedent as many US Ambassadors and other departments have run civil-military operations involving US forces. Most of those were conducted in the environment called MOOTW (military operations other than war - pronounced moot-wah by the insiders) and not in an environment such as post-conflict Iraq. However, remember Joppolo's admonishment about improvisation...Jay Garner is, above all else, a master of improvisation...and that attitude will filter down through the chain of command to the soldier on the street.

The soldier's attitude of improvising solutions to immediate problems is addressed in Joint Pub 1 by this quote:

JP 1, Joint Warfare of the Armed Forces of the United States "American military forces have a long history of unconditional service in operations that support broad national purposes. From surveying railroad rights-of-way in the 19th century to participating in humanitarian relief efforts for victims of natural disasters in the present, the Armed Forces maintain as their inherent secondary purpose the advancement and production of national interests in MOOTW [military operations other than war]."

Think about that for a second, even if you are not a civil-affairs specialist in the Army, as a member of America's military, your inherent secondary purpose is the advancement of our national interests. And just what are those national interests? General Hugh Shelton, past commander of USSOCOM said this:

General Henry H. Shelton, US Army "During the past decade, the use of America's armed forces in situations around the world has increased dramatically. The overriding lesson from these operations is that we must bring all our resources to bear - our political, diplomatic, military, and economic - if we expect to be successful solving non-military problems, especially those that are rooted in religious, cultural, or ethnic strife."

According to General Shelton, our national interests are solving non-military problems rooted in religious, cultural, or ethnic strife (in addition to being ready to kick ass and take names). Getting people with cultural views different from America's to tolerate our nation and the outrageous behavior of its extreme citizens is no easy task. Thankfully, we have a well disciplined military force that understands its inherent secondary purpose helping bridge that gap.

In order to get this kind of lofty talk detailed down to specific tasks for our soldiers to accomplish on the ground, Joint Pub 3-57.1 provides specific guidance for separate mission areas. These areas are:

(1) Operational Activities. These activities are conducted in conjunction with or part of ongoing operations that have significant engagement value and that support the combatant commander's theater strategy. These activities include routine and continuing operations, not crisis response or episodic activities of an emergent operational nature. Examples could include missions using forces present overseas such as peace operations, foreign humanitarian assistance (FHA), sanctions enforcement, and counterdrug operations.

(2) Security Assistance. This category of engagement activity impacts all levels of the USG as well as those planned by the combatant commanders and executive agents in coordination with the senior military representatives of the US Embassy country teams or, where assigned, security assistance officers. Security assistance activities in the Theater Security Cooperation Plan (TSCP) Activity Annexes include foreign military financing, foreign military sales, international military education and training, enhanced international military education and training, potential direct commercial sales, and Excess Defense Articles program. Security assistance is a significant aspect of the combatant commander's theater strategy. Compelling justification is required for programs that raise contentious security assistance issues. This justification must link the combatant commander's TSCP strategy to prioritized regional objectives defined in the National Security Strategy.

(3) Combined Exercises. This category highlights the nature, scope, and frequency of peacetime exercises designed to support theater, regional, and country objectives. Combined exercises include those sponsored by both the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the combatant commanders. Many of these exercises are CMO, to include road building, school Civil Affairs Planning and Coordination construction, and medical, dental, and veterinarian civic action projects.

(4) Combined Training. This category includes scheduled unit and individual training activities with forces of other nations. It does not include Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff-sponsored and combatant commander-sponsored exercises that are included in the Combined Exercises category. Joint Combined Exchange Training is a special category of combined training that involves US SOF training with the armed/security forces of a friendly foreign country. By law (10 USC 2011), US SOF participating in Joint Combined Exchange Training must be the primary beneficiary of training received during the Joint Combined Exchange Training. Joint Combined Exchange Training is designed to give SOF the opportunity to accomplish mission essential task list training. An additional benefit of a Joint Combined Exchange Training activity is improved interoperability with foreign forces participating in the exercise.

(5) Combined Education. This category includes activities involving the education of foreign defense personnel by US institutions and programs both in the continental United States and overseas. In some cases, the supported combatant commander or executive agent has direct control over the allocation of education quotas.

(6) Military Contacts. This category includes senior defense official and senior officer visits, counterparts visits, ship port visits, participation in defense shows and demonstrations, bilateral and multilateral staff talks, defense cooperation working groups, military-technical working groups, regional conferences, State Partnerships for Peace, and personnel and unit exchange programs. Scheduling of these activities is addressed, as feasible, for the period covered by the TSCP.

(7) Humanitarian and Civic Assistance (HCA). This category includes those planned activities for which specifically allocated HCA funds are requested and planned. They primarily are humanitarian and civic assistance provided in conjunction with military operations and exercises, assistance in the form of transportation of humanitarian relief, and provision of excess nonlethal supplies for HCA purposes. Other forms of HCA, such as demining training, also may be applicable to this category.

(8) Other Engagements. This category consists of engagement activities conducted by the combatant commander or executive agent that do not properly belong in one of the previous categories. Examples include those planned as part of the implementation of the provisions of arms control treaties and other related obligations.

The policy and doctrine writers did a good job updating these areas since 1992, but compare the next few paragraphs of guidance. There is a distinct difference in the lack of emphasis that war time environments have been given compared to those covered in MOOTW. In spite of the recent publication date for Joint Pub 3-57.1, all the coordinating and arguing over doctrine definitions and turf boundaries gave little thought to war time environments as a viable possibility.

c. War. The JFC's need to assume greater authority for CA activities should be reflected in the planning assumptions because certain areas may be devastated and lack self-sufficiency in facilities, services, and manpower as a result of hostilities; US and multinational forces may be required to provide emergency food, clothing, shelter, and medical supplies to civilians. At the same time, identification of CA requirements derived from analysis of both current operational and conflict termination missions may entail any combination of the planning considerations identified above for contingencies or crisis response operations.

(1) During the initial phases of operations, CA play a major role in the handling of dislocated civilians because of the rapid pace of operations, lack of indigenous resources, and limited access to the operational area by NGOs and IOs. The responsibility for movement and handling of dislocated civilians primarily should belong to NGOs and IOs - provided there is security for them to operate safely. CA may play a major role when access to the operational area Civil Affairs Planning and Coordination is limited. The movement and security of dislocated civilians within the operational area will place enormous burdens on the commander if the "right" forces, NGOs, and IOs to handle the situation have not been preplanned.
(2) The international community and international humanitarian law may demand that the military perform many of the functions normally handled by other sources.

What is most important (and what is being ignored by the critics of the post-conflict process) is the last paragraph. US commanders have been given policy guidance about international demands...the military may perform many of the functions normally handled by Iraqi civil servants, NGOs, or IOs. Field commanders have the flexibility and, most importantly, the improvisational skills to make these things happen as quickly as they can. Despite the cacophony of criticism being catcalled from the cheap seats, the performance of our soldiers in Iraq has been nothing short of the most stunningly successful military operation in history...and that includes the current efforts transitioning to full scale CA operations.


Rip Kirby

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