Iraq: A Civilian Agency Problem?

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner dropped a bomb yesterday at a hearing on the proposed fiscal 2007 defense budget, the Washington Times reports. The real problem in Iraq, Warner charged, is that civilian agencies aren't doing enough to help the U.S. military. "Mr. Warner was airing what has primarily been debated behind closed doors in the Bush administration," the paper reported. "The Pentagon's complaint is that other agencies, such as Justice, State and Treasury, are not always sending over their best people in sufficient numbers and duration to help the Iraqis build democratic institutions such as courts, banks and police."

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Peter Pace said civilian agencies have the same problem the military did two decades ago before the Goldwater-Nichols Act reorganized the services and emphasized joint operations. Here's his quote:

Our system simply at this point in time, just like our system for the military 20 years ago, is not designed to encourage or reward tours of duty between various departments of our government or to reward joint interagency education or to facilitate and reward those who would want to volunteer or be assigned on deployments.

It's tempting to write off the effort to point the finger at civilian agencies as buck-passing at a time when our military efforts to achieve stability in Iraq are clearly not having the effect we'd hoped. And one wonders whether the military could guarantee the security required to allow civil servants to enter Iraq in large numbers. But there's also a great deal of truth to the notion that in this as in many other respects, flexibility and adaptability are simply not the hallmarks of the federal civil service system.