Abstract: The growing integration of the global economy and global society, the appearance of more potent technology, and, widely distributed centrifugal political tendencies, have created a world with a growing number of ungoverned spaces. Some ungoverned spaces half a world away can pose a threat. In response to this development the United States and NATO, like some other countries and organizations, have begun to develop a capacity to conduct operations integrating military and civilian power. In the U.S. this has taken place principally through the creation [at the State Department] of the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS), which was tasked to create a system for organizing the civilian agencies for stability operations and to create a civilian surge capability. The U.S. has managed to develop a modest surge capacity in the form of the Civilian Response Corps. But it has not yet institutionalized a process for managing complex crises. NATO has responded to the same challenge by developing the concept of the Comprehensive Approach. Prior to 2020, within the Alliance, the Comprehensive Approach proceeded slowly because some members of the Alliance have not been sure that NATO should retain the civilian capacity needed for the Comprehensive Approach. NATO has now endorsed the Comprehensive Approach, at both the Bucharest (2008) Lisbon (2010) Summits.
NATO’s decision to intervene in Libya underscores the need for NATO to develop its civilian capacity in order to take full advantage of the Comprehensive Approach. Introduction National security doctrine and institutions develop to meet the challenges that nations face as the international system evolves. The National Security Council in the U.S. Government and NATO itself were created in response to the dangers presented by an aggressive Soviet Union and the Cold War. The post–Cold War world brought new challenges to the fore, challenges that we were slow to grasp. While Cold War rivalries no longer provided fuel to otherwise local conflicts, such conflicts themselves began to attract the attention of the global community. In some cases this attention was too late, for instance in the Rwanda genocide of 1994. But gradually the international community came to see a growing interest in limiting local conflicts, if not preventing them altogether. This is evident in the sharp increase in peacekeeping missions in the past 20 years. Since 1948, the UN has conducted 64 peacekeeping operations. According to the United Nations, of these 46 have been undertaken since 1991 (United Nations, 2011). The danger represented by failed states or ungoverned spaces became evident with Al Qaeda’s attack on the United States on September 11, 2001. Ungoverned spaces are nothing new in history. There have always been places in which no formal government ruled, of places of disorder which threatened neighbors. That is, for example, how Chinese civilization looked at the steppes of eastern Eurasia and the nomads who lived there; and how Byzantine civilization looked at the Pontic steppes north of the Black Sea. September 11, however, suggested something new was afoot. The attack launched from a remote location in Afghanistan suggested that failed or failing states could pose a danger to distant states and regions. It was in response to this danger that the United States began its operation in Afghanistan in 2001. The problems that the United States encountered there and later in Iraq led it to develop the concept of stability operations1, and to create additional institutions needed for such operations. Similar factors encouraged NATO to develop the Comprehensive Approach. The Roots of Global Disorder A number of global trends have produced this disorderly world in which ungoverned spaces half a world away can pose a threat. One component is the interconnectedness of global society in economics, transportation and communication. The creation of the Eurozone and free trade areas is facilitating the movement of goods, services, capital and labor from country to country and region to region. An important consequence of this has been the growth of world trade and of trade as a percentage of global production.2
This means that economic developments in any one region are far more likely to have a global impact today. On the macro level, the American housing bubble of 2008 had an immediate impact on global markets, producing the worst global economic downturn since the Great Depression. On the micro-level, we have seen how an earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Japan earlier this year affected the global availability of automobile parts and the resultant dramatic fall in reported profits for a number of Japanese automotive companies (Valdes-Dapers, 2011). Of equal importance is the ongoing information revolution, which links even the remotest places with the rest of the world. Cell phone use has exploded in Africa and elsewhere. So has satellite television and, of course, the Internet. Now villages in Southern Sudan can learn immediately about major developments in Beijing or Brasilia. Yet just as technology links the global society and economy, it also provides the means to undermine state authority. Seventy years ago the worry was that technology was providing the means for totalitarian states to control completely the lives of their citizens. “Brave New World” and “1984” provided literary visions of such domination. The behavior of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China made this seem all too true. Technology enabled government to monitor and control the activity of its citizens. But the information revolution of the past 30 years pushed history in a different direction. Societies that tried to control everything from above could not compete against societies that gave their citizens the freedom to act, network and organize. This was a point made by market-minded economists like Friedrich Hayek at the height of the Cold War; but it became even more instructive as the information revolution kicked in during the last decades of the 20th century.3 The Cold War ended because one side—the Soviet Union—could not compete with the West and had leadership with the wisdom to realize it. China, the other great Communist power, began to leave at least Marxist economics behind in the late 1970s, as it instituted reforms that provided incentives for individuals to work hard and to innovate. Those reforms have made China the world’s second largest economy, and largest exporter (CIA, 2011). The Political Impact of the Information Revolution By facilitating people-to-people contact, satellite TV, cellphones, the Internet, Facebook, Twitter (and related approaches) have made it far harder for would-be totalitarians to control information. The consequence is that just as global society and the global economy are becoming more connected, political entities are being subjected to centrifugal forces and in some cases are being pulled apart. The Soviet Union imploded and was replaced by 15 new states. Yugoslavia became seven new countries. South Sudan voted in January, 2011 to secede from Sudan. While the European Union (EU) has expanded since the end of the Cold War, its deeper integration has faced a series of setbacks in the past decade. European elites confident of the future of the EU were stunned when the Dutch and even the French voted down referenda on the EU constitution in 2005. The recent debt crises in Greece, Ireland, Italy and Spain are placing strains on the union whose consequences are still unclear, but certainly negative. The information revolution and social media were necessary preconditions for the Arab Spring, which has already led to major change in Tunisia and Egypt. Events are still unfolding in Libya, Syria and Yemen and, to a lesser extent in Bahrain. The furious growth of the global society and economy has also facilitated the rise of Thomas Friedman’s super empowered organizations and individuals (Friedman, 2000). These groups and individuals have found a way to tap into the international economy or international society in a way that gives them outsized influence and power for good or bad. Such organizations include multinational corporations, nongovernmental organizations, terrorist bands, and international criminal syndicates. Such individuals include the people who control these organizations: for example, businessmen and philanthropists like Bill Gates; international terrorists like Ayman Zawahiri; international criminals like Joaquin Guzman, the head of Mexico’s Sinoalo cartel. Failed and Failing States The interconnectedness of the global economy, combined with these centrifugal forces in political life, is creating the problem of failed/failing states or ungoverned spaces. It is worth noting that some people fuss about the term ungoverned spaces because, they correctly point out, no space is truly ungoverned. If there is no formal government in a country, there will be informal arrangements. So, perhaps we should speak of unofficially or informally governed spaces. Whatever term we use, thanks to the trends outlined above, the current world is awash in failed or failing states. Just consult the “Failed States Index” put out by the Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy. The most recent list puts 20 countries in the “Critical” category and another 19 on the “In Danger” Category (Fund for Peace, 2011). To repeat, the world has always known ungoverned or informally governed spaces; and such spaces have always proved dangerous to its neighbors. But in today’s interconnected world, with the destructive power of modern technology, ungoverned spaces a half a world away could prove dangerous. Ungoverned spaces can provide havens for drug traffickers, terrorists, or pirates. September 11 showed that terrorists can launch strikes that kill thousands from distant ungoverned spaces. Add in weapons of mass destruction and that number could be millions. Moreover, in this increasingly interconnected world, multifunctional illicit networks are growing. In ungoverned spaces in Central Asia, East Africa, the Balkans, the tri-border area in South America, terrorists and drug traffickers are making common cause. Drug operations from South America to Europe are setting up shop in West Africa and destabilizing governments. The Continuing Relevance of the Comprehensive Approach This does not mean that all or most failed states require the focused engagement of the United States or NATO. The sheer number of poorly governed states makes that impossible. American and NATO interests are not everywhere at risk. But dangerous threats are likely to emerge in some of these areas. That is why we must continue to develop what NATO calls “the Comprehensive Approach” or what the U.S. Government calls “complex operations” or “stability operations.” The two are essentially similar responses to the problem of failed states. There is growing talk in NATO circles of a need to return to conventional threat analysis or rising power analysis—to move away from the current focus on failed states. There is weariness in the United States as more and increasingly influential voices are calling for the United States to expedite its departure from Iraq and Afghanistan and to give up “nation-building.”
As the analysis above suggests, that would be a mistake. Even if the United States decides that it would like to avoid Afghanistan-like operations in the future, there are other crises associated with ungoverned spaces that it will still have to address. For instance, last year the United States again saw that it does not have the civilian experts and systems to manage the crises that erupt periodically in Haiti. In addition, the past several years have witnessed a growing danger to the United States coming from the ungoverned city streets of northern Mexico. However tired it may be of “nation building,” the United States will need civilian capacity to address the danger of chaosinduced refugee flows from Haiti or drug flows and drug-fuelled violence from Mexico. As for NATO, even as there is increasing talk in Brussels about focusing on great or rising powers, the Alliance has taken over a mission in Libya which, if it is fully successful will likely need a strong peacebuilding component. Developments earlier this year in the Ivory Coast are another reminder that failed states continue to attract European attention.
The Development of Complex Operations in the United States
The problems evident by the fall of 2003 in the American intervention in Iraq provided the impetus for Washington to develop a more rigorous approach to stability operations. The Bush Administration decided at that time that its approach in Iraq had serious liabilities, and in the future it needed to do a much better job running stability operations. All elements of the Iraq operation were supervised by the Pentagon and the coordination of civilian and military activities was weak. To organize the United States better for future complex operations, the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS) was established at the State Department in 2004. National Security Presidential Directive 44, which outlined the scope of the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Development, was issued in December of 2005 (NSPD 2005). To ensure proper support for this mission, the Department of Defense issued Directive 3000.05 in November of 2005 (Department of Defense, 2005). The S/CRS had two tasks: to build a civilian surge capacity for use in stability operations and to organize all civilian efforts across the U.S. Government and to coordinate with the military in such operations (Smith, 2010). Like any new bureaucratic structure, S/CRS faced major birthing pains. Many parts of the interagency bureaucracy tried to limit its role. This was true of U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Justice Department and some of the regional bureaus at the State Department. But by January of 2007, the Office of the Coordinator won interagency agreement on both objectives: 1) to build a surge capacity in the form of a Civilian Response Corps (CRC) of 4250 people, and 2) to create something called the Interagency Management System to coordinate operations (Smith, 2010).
By June of 2008, the Office of the Coordinator had received funding in the IraqAfghan supplemental budget to start building a 600-person CRC. By March of 2009, S/CRS had regular budget funding to build a CRC of over 1,000. The Civilian Response Corps As of December, 2010, the size of the CRC approached 1,200 and there was a budget to build it up to 2,200 (Department of State, 2011). The CRC is composed of people having the functional skills to handle all basic functions of governance. It includes those involved in the rule of law (police, attorneys, judges, corrections officials). It includes economists, public administrators, engineers, city planners. The CRC is made up of personnel from eight agencies of the U.S. Government (USG). It is divided into two parts: an Active component of approximately 150 personnel who do nothing but respond to crises abroad. They can be deployed within 2 or 3 days of a decision. This number will grow to 200. The second part is the Standby component, which currently has over 1,000 members and which will grow to 2,000. They are people whose regular work for the USG does not include stability operations, but who train to be available for larger missions. These people can deploy within one or two months of a decision. The Corps is designed to deploy people with functional skills in teams that include area experts and linguists. The purpose is to adapt the functional skills to the needs of the country or region in crisis. In a crisis, with a Corps of 1,200, the U.S. could deploy as many as 250 continuously. When the Corps has 2,200 members, it would be able to deploy up to 600 continuously. Growing deployments have accompanied a growing CRC. In 2010, the Corps deployed 292 civilians to 28 locations (Department of State, 2011). In the short history of the Office of the Coordinator and the CRC, over 200 people have been deployed to over a dozen countries. Most of these deployments have been in small groups for limited purposes—whether running stabilization projects in Port Au Prince or helping assess the prospects for conflict in Liberia. But it has also put as many as 40 experts on the ground in Afghanistan to help establish inter alia rigorous civilian-military planning in all-American Provincial Reconstruction Teams, at Regional Commands East and South, and at the Embassy in Kabul. In South Sudan, the Office of the Coordinator has been working on a signature operation since March of 2010. It has developed interagency plans to encourage a peaceful and orderly outcome to the referendum on independence in South Sudan last January. As part of its operation it has deployed over 20 people to the field, many to state capitals in South Sudan which had not seen American officials. This is a good example of the civilian expeditionary capacity that the United States is developing. Coordination and Planning While the CRC is making clear progress, efforts to integrate U.S. Government activities in stability operations have been less successful. The Interagency Management
System (IMS) was designed to provide a loose command and control structure for operations. It would have knit together the State Department, USAID, the military and other relevant agencies into a single structure for managing a crisis. It would have also ensured liaison with military commands in the field. The IMS was approved at a high level in the Bush Administration. It was exercised a number of times, including at Southern Command and European Command, but it was never used intentionally in a real world crisis. The Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR)—initiated by Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton initiated in 2009—devoted a great deal of attention to the Office of the Coordinator. The completed QDDR was made public in December of 2010. While it validated much of the Office’s work, it dropped the IMS. Still recognizing the need for coordination, it substituted something called the International Operational Response Framework (IORF). This could be the institutionalization of something like the IMS, but this concept has little substance at present and, if the substance is developed, it will still need to be implemented in a largely hostile bureaucracy. (It is worth noting here that the QDDR also recommended that the S/CRS should become a bureau—which would strengthen its role in the State bureaucracy—and its acronym should henceforth be CRS.) An important question is whether Secretary Clinton implements the QDDR’s recommendations concerning the S/CRS. The QDDR was issued in December of 2010, but as of mid-September of 2011, no steps have been taken toward implementation. This reflects the deliberate decisionmaking style of the Obama administration and the Clinton State Department (Department of State, 2010). If the QDDR’s changes are not put into place in the next few months, it is quite possible that the Office of the Coordinator and the CRC will face the next Presidential term in an uncertain status. Secretary Clinton has already expressed her intention to step down as Secretary of State at the end of President Obama’s current term, even if he wins re-election. The next Secretary of State will have no vested interest in the QDDR. So if Secretary Clinton’s State Department does not enact the proposed changes, enhancing the Office of the Coordinator’s position within the Department and interagency, it is not clear that those changes will be made. Yet even if the QDDR is implemented, it is likely that the USG will continue to have problems truly integrating interagency efforts. American political culture appears to favor ad hoc organization. When a crisis hits, different high level officials make a bid to take responsibility for some part of the action. Decisions are made off the cuff. They reflect the political and bureaucratic balance of power at that moment rather than an orderly use of American assets. A third part of American efforts to run stability operations is the development of a serious planning capacity. The Office of the Coordinator (CRS) has a large planning division with a handful of first-rate planners. It is sending its staff to the Army Staff College to take its Masters course in planning. These graduates are world-class planners. So the planning capacity in CRS will only get stronger. It has also developed two planning courses for every member of the CRC. The purpose is to ensure that all CRC members are at least rudimentary planners. CRS has developed sophisticated plans for USG operations in Haiti, Afghanistan and South Sudan. As the State Department has developed the Office of the Coordinator and the CRC, the Department of Defense has launched the Civilian Expeditionary Workforce. Established in 2008, this program encourages Pentagon civilians to sign up for deployments abroad in support of American troops. Civilians in this program have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in direct support of American troops, but in some instances also providing expertise to local governments. The development of the Civilian Expeditionary Workforce gives the Department of Defense additional civilian capacity for stability operations in case the Civilian Response Corps does not grow beyond the current projected number of 2,200 members. Whole of Global Society The U.S. Government recognizes the need for as broad a partnership as possible to deal with the problem of failed and failing states. This starts of course with whole of government: all relevant parts of the government should contribute to stability operations. But it moves from there to partnership with the private sector—NGOs, businesses—and with other countries and international and regional organizations. There are more than a dozen countries with explicit capacities for dealing with ungoverned space. The U.S. Government is in touch with all of them. The United States also is in regular communication with the UN, the European Union, the World Bank, NATO, the African Union (AU), the Organization of American States (OAS), and the Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) regarding possible cooperation in this field. The United States, Canada and Great Britain launched something called the International Stabilization and Peacebuilding Initiative (ISPI) in the fall of 2009. ISPI is an informal, working-level network of governments and international organizations that have joined together in their commitment to enhancing civilian capacity globally and increasing interoperability among international actors. It is currently comprised of 15 national governments and 6 international organizations. The second ISPI meeting took place at the OSCE in May of 2011. The Comprehensive Approach The Comprehensive Approach (CA), NATO’s answer to the problem of failed and failing states, shares the same essential insights as the U.S. Government concept of complex operations. It recognizes that we live in an era of ungoverned spaces. It recognizes that some ungoverned spaces will pose security dangers for NATO nations. It recognizes that the answer to ungoverned spaces requires a strong civilian surge capacity and the ability to coordinate civilian and military action. It recognizes the importance of planning. It recognizes the need for partnership with other countries and with the private sector.
Of course, NATO’s CA is not identical to the U.S. Government’s work on stability operations. NATO is a multilateral organization that operates on consensus. The relationship between NATO and the EU had exerted and will continue to exert substantial influence on NATO activities in this area. NATO nations that advocate a strong and growing national security role for the EU are reluctant to permit NATO to develop the civilian capacity necessary for stability operations. But what is striking is the steady progress the alliance has made over the past 4 years in developing the CA. Former U.S. Joint Forces Command and Allied Command Transformation was been developing the concept for years, but within the Alliance, it was initially controversial. At the Riga Summit in November of 2006, NATO Heads of State and Government agreed that “Experience in Afghanistan and Kosovo demonstrates that today’s challenges require a comprehensive approach by the international community involving a wide spectrum of civil and military instruments (NATO, 2010). This decision was reaffirmed at the Heads of States and Governments at the April 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest (Windsor-Smith, 2008). Despite these statements from the top, actual steps within NATO to begin considering the development of capacity for a CA came slowly. (This was also true in Washington; it took over 15 months from the issuance of National Security Presidential Directive to get the interagency to agree on the lead role for S/CRS in the development of capacity for conducting stability operations). S/CRS proposed to hold a workshop in Brussels in the summer of 2008 to discuss the Civilian Response Corps and building capacity for dealing with failed states. This proposal was initially controversial and only approved after the Office of the Coordinator promised that the event would be purely “educational”—that is, it was not meant to persuade NATO to develop such a capacity. Not surprisingly, the workshop generated a great deal of interest. One year later—July of 2009—representatives of S/CRS were invited to join a full-day session of NATO Ambassadors and senior staff on how NATO might start to develop capacity in this area. At last December’s Lisbon Summit, the CA was approved, an historic decision. Naturally enough, in its current phase of development, the CA looks somewhat different from the American model. In contrast to the U.S. Civilian Response Corps with a standing core of nearly 150 professionals in the active component, and many more on standby status, NATO is talking about developing national capacities that would then be available to the Alliance. Naturally, this would mean a slower response in a crisis. NATO also must determine when it would be appropriate to use these capacities—not just in what countries or crises, but also when it would how it would fit with possible EU action. This is a political matter that must be addressed directly within NATO and perhaps with the EU. Unless guidelines are set for appropriate NATOcivilian activities, the issue of whether it is NATO or the EU that provide the civilians could further slow down decisions and deployments in any crisis. The real world continues to press upon NATO the need to further develop this still latent capacity. This is no surprise. The global factors promoting instability are still potent. The global economic woes of the past three years are reminders of how we are all linked economically. The role of social media and Al Jazeera in the development and spread of the Arab Spring from Tunisia throughout the Arab world underscores not just how quickly information spreads, but its potential impact on political events. The American strike against Osama bin Laden was not just a great victory in the struggle against terrorism, but, as the contents of his communications become public, a reminder that “super-empowered” Al Qaeda is still developing plans to target the United States and Europe. Al Shabaab’s denial of food deliveries in famine stricken Somalia is a caution that political disorder exacerbates human suffering on a grand scale. Not all crises or most crises require a NATO response; but some do. Civil disturbances in Libya and the prospect of Muammar Qadhafi unleashing his army against the civilian population of Libya prompted NATO action. Led by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron, NATO responded to UN Security Council Resolution 1973 approving a “no-fly” zone over Libya and authorizing all necessary measures to protect civilians in that country. NATO officials have stated repeatedly that their military operations in Libya are only to achieve the two goals set down by the Security Council. As these lines are being written, Libyan opposition forces have entered Tripoli and Qadhafi’s regime is on the ropes. If in post-Qadhafi Libya, the Transition National Council is unable to establish order, a dangerous power vacuum would develop, with, perhaps, only NATO on the scene. While NATO certainly would prefer to hand off responsibility to a more suitable actor—the UN, the African Union, the Arab League or the EU—there may be no takers. NATO may find itself the only actor able to move if things fall apart. However Libya turns out, a similar scenario of widespread public disorder could recur in other locations, from the Balkans, to South Sudan to the Caucasus. To be prepared, NATO needs to develop the civilian capacity required by the Comprehensive Approach; and the United States needs to build further the Civilian Response Corps and institutionalize a system for its use. Conclusions For NATO, this means that clear decisions are needed on the creation of a civilian capacity and its use. For starters, there needs to be a nucleus of civilian experts at NATO Headquarters devoted to this full time. They need the authorities to develop an authoritative roster of experts from all NATO members. NATO members must develop rosters of active professionals who would be willing to deploy in a crisis. Procedures need to be developed to ensure that they are available in a timely way once decisions are taken to engage. To support this NATO must develop the right training to ensure that nationals from different countries are able to work as a team.
All of this is a tall order; but the single most important element is political will. If NATO leadership wants the tools necessary to deal with the types of crises it will be facing, the decision to develop this civilian capacity will follow. And once it does, NATO need not start from scratch in establishing this capacity. Many NATO members—the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, Norway and others—have taken long strides to develop such capacity. Some of this capacity would naturally help establish NATO’s own group of civilian experts. But these countries have also developed training programs and logistical capabilities that NATO could use as it builds up its own capacity. We have already seen NATO evolve from an organization focusing on the Soviet threat to one meeting the out-of-area challenges of the post–Cold War world. Taking the political decisions to develop the capacity to implement the Comprehensive Approach would be the next step in NATO’s evolution as the premier security organization on the planet.
Notes 1. Stability operations represent one category of complex operations. The definition of complex operations has changed over time—sometimes including combat, sometimes excluding it, sometimes encompassing disaster relief, sometimes not, and usually focusing only on missions overseas. For example, the Center for Complex Operations web site (http://ccoportal.org/) states that “stability operations, counterinsurgency and irregular warfare [are] collectively called ‘complex operations.’” Other papers adopt a more expansive definition that includes humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, at home and abroad. This definition has been adapted from Civilian Surge: Key to Complex Operations (Binnendijk and Cronin, 2009). 2. Global trade (the sum of exports and imports) as a percentage of global GDP has risen steadily since 1968, when it was approximately 25 percent until 2008, when it was over 55 percent. See “Trade (percent of GDP) in World” at Trading Economics. Available at www.tradingeconomics.com/world/trade-percent-of-gdp-wb-data-html. Accessed July 13, 2011. 3. However, governments also are learning how to make us of these technologies, and some of the power that initially accrued to citizens is being redressed.
This book integrates papers and discussions from the Second International Transformation Conference in Rome, Italy, on June 22–23, 2011. The conference was hosted by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Defense College and co-sponsored by Allied Command Transformation and the International Transformation Chairs Network. In 2008, NATO agreed to develop and implement a Comprehensive Approach to address international security challenges involving civil and military actors. The growing importance of the Comprehensive Approach in NATO, and complex operations in individual nations, shaped the conference agenda and papers. The papers are grouped in five categories associated with the Comprehensive Approach: Concepts, Policy, and Organization; Technology; Leadership, Management, Education, and Training; Integrated Approaches to Capability Development; and Case Studies. The conference provided valuable insights into how to organize capabilities in support of Comprehensive Approach situations, and it is hoped that this book will help the Alliance as it moves forward in an increasingly complex environment.
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