Free Armed Humanitarians by Nathan Hodge Page B

definitely a problem. “We didn’t control much aviation, so when people wanted to get around it wasn’t so easily done,” he told me.

CHAPTER  8
    Wingtips on the Ground
    Sending diplomats and aid experts to Provincial Reconstruction Teams and other war-zone assignments was a good idea, in theory. Civilians had the kind of expertise in governance, state building, and development that few soldiers had. But the State Department and other civilian agencies were even less prepared than the U.S. military for the violent, chaotic situation they faced in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nation building required more manpower than those organizations had on hand, and the larger the mission grew, the more it exposed the shortcomings of the civilian bureaucracy.
    It was tough, unglamorous work, and diplomats were being asked to tackle a completely unfamiliar set of problems. Instead of their traditional responsibilities of reporting back to Washington on the high-level goings-on in foreign capitals, they were becoming involved in the complexities of local and provincial administration. They were overseeing water and sewage repair, trash collection, and rural electrification, all while occasionally being shot at.
    Diplomatic and government agencies had been involved in administering and rebuilding Iraq since the invasion in 2003, but there was still no comprehensive way to organize and mobilize them. Unlike the military, which had realistic predeployment training and predictable rotation cycles, the civilian bureaucracy had a more haphazard approach to sending employees “downrange.” Military units typically trained together before deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan; by contrast, civilians usually arrived as individual replacements on Provincial Reconstruction Teams or in regional embassy offices. This lack of esprit de corps often created unnecessary friction. It was also a question of training. The State Department offered a rigorous area-studies and language training to diplomats going to traditional embassy assignments, but that kind of specialized preparation was nonexistent for nation-building assignments.
    In the summer of 2005, the State Department began planning Provincial Reconstruction Teams for Iraq. The idea was to deploy a Provincial Reconstruction Team in each of Iraq’s eighteen governorates (provinces) as part of a push to extend the central government’s control to Iraq’s regions, something the military desperately wanted. Greg Bates, a retired Marine Corps officer who had worked in Iraq since the days of the Coalition Provisional Authority, was part of the team recruited by the State Department to help jump-start the effort. Bates had wide civilian and military experience in the Middle East. He had worked in naval intelligence, had served a tour with the CPA as a Foreign Service officer, and had worked as a USAID contractor for a local governance program in Iraq. By his third tour in Iraq, as director of operations for the State Department’s Iraq Reconstruction Management Office, a shortfall in civilian personnel had become glaringly obvious. Multi-National Force Iraq, the U.S.-dominated military command, was “screaming to get civilians back in the provinces,” Bates said.
    The aim in Iraq was not to reproduce the Afghanistan experiment. Iraq was much more developed: It had infrastructure, a centralized administration, and a literate population. What it needed most was effective provincial- and national-level government institutions. Planners started work on a new template for civil-military teams in Iraq. Whereas PRT commanders in Afghanistan were almost exclusively military, the Iraq teams would be civilian-led, and they would focus more on governance than on rural development projects. Mentoring Iraqi officials, not building infrastructure, would be the main focus. The catchwords for the program, “capacity building” and “sustainability,” were borrowed