Corps Values

The 35,000-strong Army Corps of Engineers is overseeing much of the reconstruction work now taking place in Iraq and Afghanistan. About 2,000 members of the Corps-the majority civilian volunteers-have served in those countries in the past three years. On July 1, Maj. Gen. Carl Strock assumed command of the Corps and became the 51st chief of engineers. Most of Strock's career has been spent in combat engineering units. In March 2003, he deployed to Iraq, where for six months he helped coordinate engineering support to coalition forces in the region. In late July, he discussed his priorities and concerns with several reporters at his office in Washington before departing on a two-week trip to assess the agency's efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Below are some of his comments.

On the Corps' priorities:

Our most important priority right now is the global war on terrorism and our contributions to that. At the top would be the work we're doing in Iraq; almost equally important is Afghanistan. I think our most important work is on infrastructure in both of those countries to allow them to have the kind of quality of life for their people and security mechanisms they need to enhance that quality of life.

We are working in very difficult circumstances, as you know, with the security situation and just the general state of development in both those countries. There are difficulties getting around and communicating. It's a challenging environment, but we're making some real headway.

On progress in Iraq:

Things are going about as well as they can go. We restored production back up to the 2.5 million barrel per day level-that's oil out of the ground. A significant amount of that is being exported. The challenge is, once you get it out of the ground, getting it through the pipeline system to export it and get it to refineries. There is a very definite effort on the part of the enemy to set back any progress we make, to discredit the effort [of the interim government].

When I was there, we were having almost daily successful attacks on the pipeline. Now they're less frequent. Part of that is because we've put in a security apparatus to protect that infrastructure-mainly an Iraqi apparatus. The oil ministry has its own protection force. They have worked out arrangements with local sheiks to protect the infrastructure that runs through their territory. My sense is that things have improved quite a bit, but still it's a very vulnerable system. All you have to do is whack the pipeline in one place and the oil stops flowing to Turkey.

We found that attacks on the power lines were difficult to prevent, and like the oil lines, one cut and the system goes down. We established a system where if [the military] is going to fly from Baghdad to Mosul, we began planning flight routes that overflew power lines so that helicopters would not only appear to be providing security, but could also give us a sense of where lines were down and so forth. This effort to put people along these paths to provide reconnaissance and apparent security helped, and I'm convinced we have more sophisticated mechanisms in place now.

On the slow pace of reconstruction:

Our biggest frustration right now is we've had the supplemental appropriation for about 10 months and we have not seen the level of effort we had hoped to see by this point. One of my [priorities] is to see how we can get this thing jump-started and get some money truly flowing for bricks and mortar and things on the ground. [Some delays] had to do with the difficulty of first identifying the requirements and looking at where the money needs to be spent, setting your priorities and then converting those priorities to deliverable projects. You can't just go out and say, "Fix 100 schools."

There was tremendous urgency to get things done [early on]. Bechtel was turned loose and just started doing things. When you go back today and audit what they did, there will be a tremendous amount of criticism because it wasn't carefully thought through. Right now, I think there's a very risk-averse approach, a very deliberative approach. We're going to make sure, damn sure, we can articulate why it is we're spending resources on this. I think part of it is just the bureaucracy that's kicking in now that's slowing things down. I think you will soon see an increase in both the amount of work being done and the quality of the work and effectiveness. It's a very frustrating process for everybody.

On lessons learned:

The biggest lesson learned is that while we've had some experience in post-conflict operations, we haven't codified that in doctrine very well, particularly the interagency aspect. We simply did not have the kind of doctrine we all could focus on when we got in [to Iraq]. There's a very great effort right now to ensure that we do have a better approach in the future. Had we had a structure and a consensus on how to do that as we brought teams together, it would have been much easier to move in one direction.

A low-level tactical thing was we didn't have a mechanism to do a rapid needs-assessment on the ground. We had a lot of people, well-meaning people, Army civil affairs units, tactical units, teams from the State Department that went in. Everybody was out there. Time and time again, I would have a hospital director say, "OK, you're the sixth person who's done an assessment, but nobody's doing anything." We could have done a much better job of [establishing] a needs-assessment database. We wasted a lot of effort-all well meaning, but we weren't as effective as we could have been had we worked in a more complementary fashion.

The pulling together of [the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance] in February 2003 was a recognition-sort of late in the day-that we needed to do this in a more structured way. I was not involved in the beginning of ORHA, but I watched it from afar and I know that a lot of really good work was done. But there's a time when it transitions from the conceptual to the application where you really see the proof. It's wonderful to talk about a women's rights movement in Baghdad and things like that, but when you get down there and the windows are blown out of your headquarters and there's no power and you can't talk to anybody, the [standard operating procedure] for how to set up a dialogue doesn't do you much good.

Responding to terrorism at home:

In the past, it was hurricanes, floods and earthquakes. Now it's terrorist attacks. We work with [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] to ensure our capacity is appropriate for the world we live in. We recognize that the causes of many of these events might be different, but the consequences of all of them have a lot of consistency. People need housing, water, ice, electricity. It doesn't matter whether it's a building that's been knocked down by an earthquake or a terrorist attack.