As reported on Monday, the Pentagon didn’t embrace Stuart Bowen’s proposal to create a new agency — the U.S. Office of Contingency Operations — to help plan and coordinate civilian-military operations in conflict and post-conflict zones and failed states. But that’s not to say that Robert Gates, the secretary More…
Just as the U.S. government’s Iraq reconstruction watchdog formally unveils a proposal to revamp the integration of civilian and military activities in combat zones, opposition from the State Department and the Pentagon threatens to scotch the whole effort.
[Security1]When he testifies Monday before the congressionally created Commission on Wartime More…
Josh Rogin has a great piece about the differences between Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the independence and responsibilities of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Clinton wants to integrate USAID’s development missions with diplomatic and defense efforts, particularly in More…
Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction (SIGIR), released a new report this morning showing a surprising amount of waste on a key reconstruction project in Iraq: rebuilding Baghdad’s looted Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. While the tomb has been “significantly improved by the renovation project,” Bowen’s team More…
InsideDefense has a good story about a bureaucratic change pushed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to resolve a recurrent problem between his department and Foggy Bottom. In a memo called “Shared Responsibility, Pooled Resources,” Gates is proposing to revamp how the U.S. trains foreign partner militaries (“section 1206,” legally speaking) More…
If there were a healthy or coherent relationship between civilian and military efforts in war zones or weak states or post-conflict environments, there wouldn’t be any need for, say, Stuart Bowen to propose a new U.S. Office of Contingency Operations. Instead there’s ad-hoc and personality-driven relationships and operational incoherence. More…
Laura Rozen breaks the news: Rajiv Shah, the Department of Agriculture’s undersecretary for Research, Education and Economics, is going to head the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has gone leaderless since the start of the Obama administration. They’ve got to move fast to get Shah in the post. My More…
Last week I broke the story of a proposal from Stuart Bowen, the inspector general for the Iraq war, to create a new agency for coordinating and directing civilian governance and development activities in war zones. Bowen wants the envisioned agency, known as the U.S. Office for Contingency Operations More…
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