Filling Irregular Warfare's Interagency Gaps
Abstract
The interagency process is failing in the execution of irregular warfare. Most proposed solutions to this major problem emphasize increasingly complex bureaucratic coordinating mechanisms, increased capacity within agencies ill-suited to the required tasks, or unrealistic calls for intensified senior leader attention and centralized oversight. These solutions also rest upon faulty assumptions that make them unlikely to succeed, given the realities of the key agencies' existing organizational cultures, expertise, resources, and core defining tasks. Likewise, history discounts the "hope" that merely creating more venues for interagency dialogue will generate consensus or effective integration. Instead, any feasible and effective solution must include: (1) providing agencies clear, task-driven strategic-level statements of intent, responsibility, and authority; (2) enabling key agencies to develop relevant expertise at all levels; (3) giving agencies operational control over other-agency personnel to realize true unity of vision and effort; (4) integrating other-agency personnel throughout all combatant commands; and (5) creating interagency service career incentives. Overcoming likely political and practical obstacles will require creating an additional functional combatant command, a Humanitarian Assistance and Development Command, to be led by State or USAID.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Apr 28, 2009
- Accession Number
- ADA508290
Entities
People
- Lewis G. Irwin
Organizations
- United States Army War College