Deploying Civilians

Military service members aren't the only ones stepping up to deploy to hot spots around the world at a moment's notice. With the launch of the Civilian Response Corps yesterday, civilian federal employees such as diplomats, development specialists, public health officials, law enforcement and corrections officers, engineers, economists, lawyers, public administrators and agronomists are officially volunteering to go to countries in crisis.

The Civilian Response Corps is a partnership of the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Agriculture, Commerce, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Justice, and Treasury departments.

In remarks at a ceremony launching the corps, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that rebuilding countries after conflicts "is a mission that civilians must lead. But for too long, our civilians have not had the capacity to lead, and investments were not made to prepare them to lead. As a result, over the past 20 years, over the course of 17 significant stabilization and reconstruction missions in which the United States has been involved, too much of the effort has been borne by our men and women in uniform."

The corps has both an active component, with 250 members, and a standby force of 2,000 federal employees in various fields who are willing to get additional training as needed and deploy overseas.

Even before the official launch of the corps, the State Department has deployed members to Sudan, Chad, Haiti, Lebanon, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Bush administration also wants to recruit 2,000 “reserve” members of the corps from the private sector and state and local governments -- such as police officers, city administrators, and port operators.

Update: I should've noted in the original post that there are some serious hurdles in the way of widespread deployment of civilians overseas. Katherine Peters' story yesterday about the Pentagon's Africa Command being forced to scale back its ambitions of having a quarter of its staff come from civilian agencies is certainly a cautionary tale. So is the State Department's warning to diplomats earlier this year that some of them could be forced to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan if the agency can't drum up enough volunteers for those hardship posts.