On a similar note to Feinberg’s op-ed the other day, TCS ran a hard-hitting article by James Joyner and John Burgess discussing the challenges created when DoS and stability operations collide.

The entire article is worth reading, especially because it ties in references to topics, like 4GW and Tom Barnett, that are near and dear to the heart of our little corner of the strategic blogspace.

Marine Colonel T.X. Hammes points out that a truism of 4th Generation Warfare is that “if the government is not succeeding, the insurgents are getting stronger.” That means the government and its coalition partners must quickly get a handle on security and ensure that there is a functioning economic infrastructure. In cases like Iraq, where a regime has been toppled, this will mean training and reforming not just police and security forces but also the court and prison system, banking, currency, customs, public health, business regulation, and taxation.

This is all well beyond the capability of even a highly educated military. Much more needs to be done to augment the military force with help from the State Department and other agencies. One model is the PRTs working in Afghanistan and Iraq, which have done this sort of thing on a smaller scale. They combine coalition and local military, indigenous government agencies, and NGOs and deploy them all as a team. By producing concrete improvements, they foster trust which in turn leads to crucial intelligence. As Robert Kaplan puts it in his book Imperial Grunts, they create “influence without the stigma of occupation.”

Joyner and Burgess discuss some of the challenges that reformers need to overcome while addressing this root problem:

The solution will be in a new and very specialized, cross-trained group populated by young, educated, smart, and (mostly) unmarried men and women who will be willing to go into harm’s way with some belief that they will survive it while accomplishing their missions. The issue of incentives to join just a group will be tendentious. The pay scales for combat troops and FSOs are already wide. But uncompensated, there is no logical reason for FSOs to volunteer for jobs that present immediate threats to their lives. Even within State, a cadre that receives supplemental salaries is problematic. This is currently done in special categories such as legal counsel, doctors, etc. Extending the categories, however, is something Congress, the Pentagon, and the unions will want to consider carefully.

I am heartened to see a growing critical mass of experts with professional experience working on the solution set for the seam between war and peace. Whether Joyner and Burgess’s precise vision of a pistol-packing foreign service officer is the right way to go is less important (for now) than the fact that they are part of a movement that recognizes the problem, recognizes the scale of change needed (their comparison to Goldwater-Nichols is particularly apt) and is thinking creatively about solutions. We need to find a way to get these FSO skill sets into the unstable regions where they are needed. Part of the solution needs to be a new perspective on risk. Part of the solution needs to be new security arrangements.

For all our discussion of DoD reform, it may end appearing insignificant compared to the scale of DoS reform for the Long War.

Bill Gertz reports an example of expediency driving threat assessments:

Moves to gut NASIC could also be coming from the National Reconnaissance Office, which has opposed NASIC’s threat analysis of growing space-weapons dangers and sought threat assessments from contractors. The NRO, which builds and operates military spy satellites, has sought to play down the growing threat to its “birds” in space and is now facing the danger that by 2010, China could destroy all low Earth orbit satellites in a series of strikes, effectively blinding the military.

“The NRO prefers [and rewards its contractors] for threats that are in sync their corporate plans,” the official said. “NASIC has been providing threat information to the NRO for over 10 years, and over the last four to five years many of NASIC threat analyses have caused a great deal of anxiety at the NRO.”

Excellent article from WSJ examining oil disruptions in Kirkuk. Lots of connections for John Robb.

The holes help explain why, four years after the U.S. invasion, Iraq hasn’t been able to match its prewar crude production levels of 2.5 million barrels a day. This year, Iraq is averaging 1.9 million barrels, mostly from southern oil fields that haven’t suffered the unrelenting sabotage seen in the North. Kirkuk currently produces 180,000 barrels of oil a day, but under normal conditions it could produce an additional 400,000 barrels a day. At current market prices, that would bring Iraq up to $20 million of revenue a day. Projected over an entire year, this additional income would amount to about one-fifth of Iraq’s current annual budget of $32 billion.

An interesting angle here is that current smugglers may be building upon smuggling networks built by Saddam:

International smuggling of crude was perfected under Mr. Hussein, who sought to bypass export quotas imposed under the United Nations’ oil-for-food program by orchestrating illicit exports to Turkey, Jordan, Syria and across the Persian Gulf. U.S. officials believe that modern-day smugglers may be taking advantage of the old networks.

One sobering fact that particularly struck me: one stretch of the main pipeline used to export oil from northern Iraq only pumped oil for 43 days of the last six months of 2006.

Also, in the first five months of 2007, one pipeline has been broken into 39 times.

Has anyone seen an analysis of how much potential oil production has been lost due to Venezuela’s underinvestment, MEND’s attacks in Nigeria and these disruptions in Iraq? I’d guess that these three regions alone would account for several million barrels per day.