General Jay Garner has arrived in Baghdad, charged with the task of rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure and assembling a government. I was interested to learn that Garner reports to General Franks, and not to any civilian authority. Does the US military really have the knowhow to establish a functional government in Iraq?
Since it seems clear we're going to be reinventing the military now, maybe it's time to add some new capabilities to the US arsenal. I'm thinking of peacekeeping, humanitarian aid, infrastructure replacement/development, and possibly even interim governance.
Yes, some of these capabilities are already present in our armed forces, but breaking them out into a sepcially outfitted fifth corps could have a lot of benefits. For one thing, specializing tends to bring with it increased professionalism and expertise. But just the act of grouping these missions under a different heading would be a signal to the world: the United States takes this stuff as seriously as combat.
OK, I'm not exactly serious about the idea - it's pretty obvious to me that at least some of these functions are the wrong domain altogether for a military force. (A special museum security brigade is not the answer to the looting debacle we saw last week.) But faced with the fact that we've now had two recent wars end in mass confusuion and uncertainty, it might not be such a bad idea to bone up on our postwar military procedure. After all, we're going to be doing a lot of this kind of thing...
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