Liveblog of War and Military Operations in the 21st Century: Civil-Military Operations conference at UNC, Day 2 morning session 2

Liveblog of War and Military Operations in the 21st Century: Civil-Military Operations conference at UNC
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Those power plugs...? Can't reach any of them. Didn't bring the longer cord... d'oh!

“What Role, What Problems, for Reserves and Contractors?”
Presenters: Lindsay Cohn, University of Northern Iowa; Deborah Avant, University of California ‐ Irvine
Commentator: Christopher Kinsey, King’s College, London
Moderator: Karen Hagemann, UNC‐Chapel Hill


First up, Cohn, from University of Northern Iowa, with a British accent - talking about reserves
Overall US goal is stabilization of US-friendly world order
stabilize world
assist allies
assist emerging powers

How to do this? Requirements for future operational environments
Deployability:
- Air-and sea-lift
- light forces
- light logistics (can move quickly)
Flexibility:
- less focus on large-scale conventional ops
- more flexible procurement
- more flexible compensation
- wider range of indiv and unit skills: these skills need to be put into place regardless of the debate of whether military *should* be the nation-building force; fact is that it *is* the force
(an aside - mutiple jokes about F22 made, with references to MG Dunlap, USAF, who is here in the audience)
Sustainability:
- sufficient numbers to allow decent rotation policy (do we need more people or better distro of skills)
- rotation policies to allow predictability; centralized control of key capabilities (fewer contractors, more reserves)
- promotion systems that reward stabilization/reconstruction (recognize that we're doing more of this than warfighting
- promote what's out there)
- post-operations care/reintegration for veterans

What role can reserves play?
- Traditionally been a strategic reserve (do what the military does, but enlarge military during HIC)
- Can do a lot of rear-area security / logistics
- Ready reserve ("civilian skills")
- Bridge function between military and society
- These two focus on Nat'l Guard rather than Fed reserve forces
- Homeland defense (policing)
- Disaster relief

She's advocating move of federal reserves from a strategic reserve to a ready reserve
- lack of personnel in key specialties/excess personnel in other specialties
she's talking about reserves being very combat-arms heavy, but the USAR is NOT combat-arms heavy, the cbt arms guys are all in the ARNG; I will certainly call her out on this during Q&A
- inflexible compensation policies
- adverse scheduling incentives - ie, get paid more for 1 day on drill than active duty
- one-size-fits-all training policies
again, claiming that all reservists have same training policies and same kinds of schedules, which is not accurate, especially with the USACAPOC folks
- decentralization of recruiting by centralization of pay & incentives

Civil-military relations
- reserves an effective bridge between active-duty and civilian world
- improving reserves structure will improve employer relations (how to work with employers for scheduling, compensation, etc)
- expose civilians to positive experiences with military personnel
- reservists preferable to contractors (better PR and reserves not competing with contractors for same personnel)

Recommendations
- Focus on supplementing AC with key specialities
- ARNG focused on homeland
Structural issues: pay/recruiting
- local discretion for recruiting/retention bonuses
- pay bands to retain skills
- promotion changes to recognize skills
Structural issues: force structure
- reduce numbers of strat reserve
- increase numbers of specialized skills
- create deployment teams
- emphasize 'education' over 'training' (which she throws out there without bothering to define the difference)
she's thrown in a caveat that she's just throwing ideas out there for discussion... sounds like backpedaling from her ideas as she can see much of the audience is skeptical about a lot of her ideas
Structural issues: Gov't-Business Partnerships
- gov't pays employee portion of employee health plans (Tricare *very* expensive)
- compensation for small business
- personnel and cost-sharing plans with local gov't and businesses for law enforcement, medical, engineering, other emergency personnel

---- tepid applause as we change speakers ----

Deborah Avent now talking about contractors in the war zone

at one point 190k contractors deployed to Iraq, which was more than the number of troops
(though any number from theater is suspect... MNC-I didn't know +/- 5k how many people they had on any given day)

What do contractors do in current war zones?
- Logistics: food, water, fuel, etc
- Security: PSDs, property / site protection, armed and involved in bullets flying
- Reconstruction: training military & police; construction & building
Dec '09 in Iraq, 61k in base support, 11k in security, 8.4k in translation/interpreters, 3.3k in construction (then slide flipped)

What do contractors do more generally, not just war zones
- Support for US/Foreign facilities
- Site security and security plans
- Training of US and foreign forces

Who are the contractors?
Mix of US nationals, local/indigenous nationals, third-country nationals
- graphs showing change in time over years between 06-09 and Iraq / Afghanistan. more locals in Afghanistan than Iraq (by about double)

What are implications of contracting?
- Political responsiveness
- Functional control
- Effectiveness

just looked around the room, and it's not nearly as full as it was first session. I guess two women professors talking about war isn't as sexy as BG McMaster and Tom Ricks telling war stories

Changes in political responsiveness of force
- contractors not subject to normal chains of command and transparency
- Lowers transparency
- less Congressional influence
- less public consent on use of force
contractor force grew by about 150k in 2004, with almost no public discussion
when he asked for an extra 20k troops, (1) he had to ask, and (2) huge uproar over escalation
public tends to be just as sensitive to deaths of contractors as to deaths of soldiers
- discussing a controlled experiment around news coverage that varied subjects of news story between soldiers & private contractors
-- respondents through soldiers motivated by patriotism and contractors by income, as expected
-- people equally sad or angry about either one
-- neither one significantly changed evaluation of war (pro/con)
-- focus group follow-ups noted that monetary motivation not necessarily for large gain, but out of need for money

Functional Control
- improves skill /responsiveness (example of French-speaking contractors to Haiti to assist in training police force)
- impedes integration (KBR contractors lagging behind logistics needs, then became easy targets)
-- PSDs often did great job of protecting their marks, but at a cost to local COIN/hearts & minds efforts
James Gow is sitting next to me, as I stole his seat to get plugged in along the wall; I think he's wondering why I'm on Blogger the whole time

Effectiveness
Issues with logistics - how to support & supply, how do they support & supply the military?
Issues in security - deadly force, risk to those they operate around (perception of US effort, not coordinating with local units)
Issues in reconstruction - need specific skills, crucial for overall mission success but not necessarily for local military success
slide just went up about morale & pay, but headline on is "Pay Disparity and Moral"; given that we're talking about whether or not contractors are a good idea, isn't the "morale - moral" typo *really* important

Social Control
Consistent with mobilization for globalized missions
Inconsistent with normative/legal frameworks (professional norms, laws of war, national laws, military law) - what sorts of control/framework?

Control of violence is most assured when dimensions of control fit together: force meets security needs according to political processes and undergirded by values viewed as legitimate

Contractors intensify trade-offs and tensions in control; tension not bad when undergoing changes

---- Kinsey now commenting ----

Contractors are not new: Washington beat them in the AWI; Nearly cost the Brits the Crimean War
Henry Waxman much like Napoleon in that they both hated contractors, but Napoleon could threaten to have them shot.
Virtually impossible to go to war without contractors these days, but if it's a military-specific task it should be militarized

A whole bunch of discussion about how to identify and exploit particular civilian skill sets within the reserve force and focusing on the skills brought to the table rather than the military rank/specialty of the soldier.
- Kinsey thinks that the US does it better than the UK, but he's wrong. We might have better email, but we frequently have serendipitous discovery of skills in the war zone rather than appropriate pre-packaging.


---- Q&A now, but i'm in queue, will come back in a sec ----
Well, she looked shell-shocked when I pointed out her error (about cbt arms in ARNG vs USAR), so we'll see how she gets to that.

I really want to ask Deborah Avent who the audience was in their contractor news story experiment was. If it was college kids, that's going to skew the results they had than if they were surveying the general population, or all adults, or people who could actually vote, etc, etc....

Congress control of budget gives them control of norms, standards, practices, personnel for the contracts much like they can for the military. If you put in too much control you lose flexibility which is good for contractors.
Also discussion of Shinseki's estimate of numbers of troops needed in Iraq. As an aside... if you add up coalition forces + contractors, do you get close to Shinseki's pre-war number estimate? Someone remind me later to look into that.

She's trying to answer my point, and failed miserably, as she still thinks that there are heavy combat units in the USAR. I'll bet if I ask her to name one, she can't do it. She acknowledged that she might've made it sounds wrong, but failed to acknowledge that she was screwed up.


LUNCHTIME

Links for all conference articles:
GrogNews: Liveblog of War and Military Operations in the 21st Century: Civil-Military Operations conference at UNC
GrogNews: Liveblog of War and Military Operations in the 21st Century: Civil-Military Operations conference at UNC, Day 2 morning sessions
GrogNews: Liveblog of War and Military Operations in the 21st Century: Civil-Military Operations conference at UNC, Day 2 morning session 2


By: Brant