Africa Command has trouble filling key civilian slots

Concerns about Pentagon encroachment on civilian agency missions, a lack of civilian agency resources and incompatible personnel systems are hampering a new military command aimed at promoting security and stability in Africa, witnesses told a House panel on Tuesday.

The Defense Department plans to formally stand up the Africa Command, or Africom, on Sept. 30. The new command differs from the Pentagon's five other headquarters for directing military support and operations worldwide in that key personnel come from civilian agencies.

"Early administration rhetoric envisioned Africom as a transformational experiment providing a whole-of-government interagency approach to U.S. national security strategy," said Rep. John Tierney, D-Mass., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs. "It appears that ambitions for Africom have been scaled back."

Developing an integrated interagency command structure has proved much harder than planners expected, witnesses told the panel. Africa Command's architects originally expected to staff as much as a quarter of the command with experts from the State, Treasury and Agriculture departments, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and other civilian agencies. But that goal proved too ambitious.

"According to State officials this goal was not vetted through civilian agencies and was not realistic because of the resource limitations in civilian agencies," said John Pendleton, director of defense capabilities and management issues at the Government Accountability Office. As a result, Africom reduced its interagency representation to 52 notational interagency positions, or about 4 percent of the staff.

But even that substantially reduced goal will be difficult to achieve. "Personnel systems among federal agencies were incompatible and do not readily facilitate integrating personnel into other agencies, particularly into nonliaison roles," Pendleton said.

Other military commands such as Southern Command, which is focused on South America and has a mission similar to that of Africa Command, rely on advisers from other agencies, usually in short-term assignments. But Africa Command leaders want these outside experts to fill key positions of authority.

By Sept. 30, Defense expects to have only 13 of the 52 interagency command positions, or about 1 percent of the overall staff slots, filled by representatives from non-Defense agencies. Ambassador Mary Carlin Yates, the Africom deputy commander for civil-military activities, said staff positions were being filled through "a deliberate process that is progressing well through the full support of many agencies."

Africa Command's creation represents a shift in Defense Department thinking, said Lauren Ploch, an African affairs analyst at the Congressional Research Service. The command is expected to focus its energy and resources on training and assistance to local militaries so they can better ensure stability and security. "One DoD official suggested that the U.S. government could consider the command a success 'if it keeps American troops out of Africa for the next 50 years,'" Ploch said.

But not everyone shares the Defense Department's enthusiasm for the new whole-of-government command.

"The prospect that Defense will focus less on fighting wars and more on preventing them engenders mixed feelings in some U.S. government circles," Ploch said.

While many officials welcome the military's ability to leverage resources and to organize complex operations, others worry that the military will overestimate its diplomatic role.

"Some argue that the highly unequal allocation of resources between the departments of Defense, State and USAID hinder their ability to act as equal partners and could lead to the militarization of development and diplomacy," Ploch said.

In a speech Tuesday to the U.S. Global Leadership Campaign in Washington, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said those concerns are legitimate, but he emphasized the importance of better cooperation between civilian agencies and the military services.

"Where our government has been able to bring America's civilian and the military assets together to support local partners, there have been promising results," he said, pointing to an effort in the Philippines. There, U.S. Ambassador Kristie Kenney has "overseen a campaign involving multiple agencies working closely with their Philippine counterparts in a synchronized effort that has delegitimized and rolled back extremists in Mindanao," he said.

Worries about "a creeping militarization of some aspects of America's foreign policy," can be assuaged with "the right leadership, adequate funding of civilian agencies, effective coordination on the ground, and a clear understanding of the authorities, roles, and missions of military versus civilian efforts, and how they fit, or in some cases don't fit, together," Gates said.

He added that civilian agencies handling diplomacy and development issues have long been understaffed and underfunded. "Though I cannot pretend to know the right dollar amount," he said, "I do know it's a good deal more than the 1 percent of the federal budget that it is right now."