Boot on SysAdmin
In today’s LA Times, Max Boot has an op-ed advocating for the creation of a “Department of Peace… so that we can be better prepared for the aftermath of future military operations.” Other steps Boot advocates include:
[President Bush] needs to re-create the defunct U.S. Information Agency, which was folded into the State Department in 1999, to wage the battle of ideas against Islamist extremists. He needs to create a federal police force, possibly within the U.S. Marshals Service, that can be dispatched to enforce the law in lawless lands. He needs to beef up the “expeditionary” capacity in other civilian branches of government, ranging from the Treasury to the Agriculture Department, so that they can augment the efforts of our soldiers.
And he needs to better integrate the civilian and military branches of government so that they can function more smoothly together than they have in Afghanistan or Iraq. (The Center for Strategic and International Studies has come up with some useful proposals for aligning interagency operations, plans and budgets under a strengthened National Security Council.)
While these thin op-ed recommendations barely scratch the surface (for example, is the U.S. Marshals Service the best place to place a force that could be deployed overseas? Would it have the language skill and cultural knowledge necessary? For that matter, is it a question of enforcing law or is it a question of providing personal security?), they illustrate how OIF has become the forcing function for adapting the federal government to stabilization missions. We’ll see more of this., because as Boot argues “if we’re going to do nation building in the future (and we are - witness calls for intervention in Somalia and Sudan), we have to get it right.”
More on the CCR, this time from Max Boot
The Civilian Reserve Corps has gotten pitched in public again with Max Boot writing about it in today’s Los Angeles Times: As for the Civilian Reserve Corps, the administration has no detailed plans to recruit, train or deploy abroad the…
Trackback by MountainRunner — February 1, 2007 @ 3:29 am