Proposal Circulates on New Civilian-Military Agency

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Proposal Circulates on New Civilian-Military Agency
Iraq Reconstruction Inspector General Urges Office to Report to State, Defense

As the U.S.’s special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, Stuart Bowen has blown the whistle on millions of dollars worth of waste, fraud and abuse. But one of his final acts in the job will be to address something more fundamental: the way U.S. civilian officials interact with their military counterparts during the complex wars of the future.

Bowen, acting with the institutional power of his government office, SIGIR, is circulating a draft proposal to create a new civilian office for wars like Afghanistan and Iraq that would report jointly to the Departments of State and Defense. In a dramatic departure from the current ad hoc arrangement, where diplomats and aid workers come up with on-the-spot arrangements to liaise with the U.S. military in war zones, Bowen believes that a single agency, which he analogizes to an “international FEMA,” ought to be the single civilian point-of-contact with the military if the United States is to avoid future wartime coordination fiascoes. He calls it, in typical Washington acronym-ese, USOCO –the U.S. Office for Contingency Operations.

Bowen explains that the proposal grew out of seeing millions wasted in Iraq, and tracing the problems back to fundamental weaknesses of coordination and operational management. “As the U.S. reconstruction effort in Iraq demonstrated, when everyone is in charge, no one is in charge,” Bowen writes in a 27-page paper he has passed to the Obama administration about the USOCO proposal that The Washington Independent obtained. The proposal was subject on Monday to a so-called “murderboard” of criticism at the Center for Complex Operations — one of the many ad hoc government institutions that have sprung up since the Afghanistan and Iraq wars to try to compel civilian officials to interact more closely with the military.

more;http://washingtonindependent.com/66183/proposal-circulates-on-new-civilian-military-agency