Civilians Accompanying the Force
Abstract
With the proliferation of "Civilians Accompanying the Force," many legal and ethical issues have begun to plague the Army and the Department of Defense. This particular set of people has evolved because of the proliferation of technology and the need for highly qualified technicians on the battlefield. Civilians Accompanying the Force are individuals with training in high technology who maintain the weapons systems used during armed conflict. These civilians replace the highly trained soldiers who left the military during the drawdown of the 1990s. During that decade the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command's schools came under very large budget cuts, which resulted in new soldiers entering active duty who were not given the same level of technical training, or the same time to train, as their predecessors. This left an undertrained staff of soldiers to learn highly technical skills from an increasingly absent cadre of senior noncommissioned officers. Throughout the last decade, legal and ethical issues regarding civilians on the battlefield have arisen in every contingency operation that included humanitarian operations. The need for a more structured framework for the use of civilians on the battlefield has never been more relevant than today. This paper discusses several areas that are readily apparent as problem areas regarding Government Civilian Employees who support contingency operations. These areas are policy development, deployment preparation, training, and equipment issuance and use. The authors present recommendations based upon personal experience on how best to coordinate and control these issues so that civilians will continue to be value-added to the Warfighter. (8 refs.)
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Apr 07, 2003
- Accession Number
- ADA414597
Entities
People
- K. M. Hoskin
Organizations
- United States Army War College