Feral Jundi

    This is a joke, right?  I get the impression that Mr. O’Hanlon, like many journalists and authors out there, has completely written out of the dialogue any mention of PMC’s.  It’s as if they have all committed to the idea that security contractors are a bad idea, and that somehow a reworking of the military structure will solve the problems of manpower issues for these types of missions.

    I have news for you guys, kids these days are smart, and a program like this is still the military and it is still serving in a war zone.  How is that different, other than calling it something different?

   Further more, once you put these ‘safe and sane’ troops on the ground in the Congo, and they are confronted with a force of rebels that see an opportunity to go kinetic on this new style western force, what will these forces answer back with?  Will this new peace force answer rebel bullets and bombs, with high velocity love letters and flower bombs?  This kind of thinking is dangerous and idiotic to say the least, and I am highly skeptical.

   Perhaps Mr. O’Hanlon should get some shared reality, and talk to Eeben Barlow of Executive Outcomes about what is required in these countries if we really care to keep some kind of peace?

    The process should be to first end the conflict with a robust and capable fighting force, either PMC or Military, and then follow up with security forces and build up that country’s forces to maintain it’s own order.  Clear, hold, and build is what I think all the cool kids are saying these days as the necessary strategy of dealing with this stuff.

   Rice and company would also be wise to start sweet talking the PMC and PSC industry, and backing us up as a legitimate force for this stuff, or they will continue to pee into the wind.  I just don’t see them getting any more troops for this stuff, and if they really want to get stuff done, then they must turn to contracting.  Besides, the Obama administration has over 246,000 contractors working for him in our current wars–aren’t they good enough for the UN?

    One more thing, before I sign off on this.  The UN would be wise to study Iraq and Afghanistan, and note what it would take to build the perfect contract in order to use contractors for these missions and keep them in check.  I really believe you can set up the correct structure for something like this, and make something that works.  Maybe even bring in a guy like Eeben, and actually talk with a big bad PMC veteran who knows exactly what it would take to be successful in Africa. Bring in guys like Doug Brooks from the IPOA and all the others out there that have been working hard to get this industry on the right track. The UN would have an awesome opportunity to get it right, if they were just open to the possibilities. –Matt

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U.S. Boots On Congo Ground

A New Kind of Force Could Provide Security

By Michael O’HanlonFriday, August 14, 2009

When Hillary Clinton visited eastern Congo this week, she stepped into a land of fairy-tale beauty and incredible potential. I remember vividly the day in 1982 when my incoming “class” of Peace Corps volunteers made the same trip. Eastern Congo may be the most magical place on the planet; I remember thinking it did not even belong on this planet, so surreal were its mountains, lakes, volcanoes, and lush forests and farmland.

Unfortunately, the tragedies and turmoil afflicting this area have no place in this world, either. For much of the time that Mobutu Sese Seko ruled then-Zaire, the eastern region was poor but reasonably stable. Since the early 1990s, however, it has been on a rapid descent. Genocide in Rwanda spilled over the border; the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s own conflicts accelerated, fueled by the region’s mineral wealth; health-care infrastructure disappeared; sexual violence became worse than anywhere else on Earth.

Clinton has taken the first step by calling attention to this region and its terrible problems. But the United States has shown interest in Congo before to little avail. If the situation is to improve, we need to do the one thing that is required above all others — strengthen security, especially in eastern Congo. And by now we should have learned the hard way that there is only one way to do so — by leading through example, with the deployment of at least modest numbers of American troops, to spark a broader strengthening of the current U.N. mission. If the Afghanistan mission was undermanned last year with only 60,000 NATO-led troops in a country of 30 million, how can a U.N. mission of 20,000 address the challenges of Congo and its 60 million people?

Yet how can the U.S. military, so overstretched in strategically crucial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, spare any troops for this type of primarily humanitarian venture? The dilemma is similar to that faced in recent years in Darfur, where we wanted to do something but did not have the forces.

Admittedly, there may not be a solution tomorrow. But by tapping into President Obama’s call for a new spirit of volunteerism and national service, there may be a way to make a difference sometime in 2010. The idea involves a new type of military unit that the Pentagon should propose during its ongoing Quadrennial Defense Review.

For crises like those in Congo and Darfur, the United States should consider a radical innovation in recruiting policy. We should create a peace operations division in the Army with individuals enlisting specifically for this purpose. There would be risks in such a venture, to be sure. But they are manageable and tolerable risks, especially since most such deployments would be legitimated by the United Nations, carried out with partners such as key allies, and backstopped by the U.S. armed forces in worst-case scenarios.

The notion is this: Ask for volunteers to join a peace operations division for two years. They would begin their service with, say, 12 weeks of boot camp and 12 weeks of specialized training and then would be deployable. They would receive the same compensation and health benefits as regular troops, given their age and experience. Out of a division of 15,000 troops, one brigade, or about 3,000 to 4,000 soldiers, could be sustained in the field at a time.

This type of training would be modeled after standard practices in today’s Army and Marine Corps. To be sure, soldiers and Marines in regular units usually go beyond this regimen to have many months of additional practice and exercise before being deployed. But the peace operations units could be led by a cadre of experienced officers and NCOs — perhaps some of whom would be drawn back to military service after leaving (or being booted out because of the obsolete “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy).

The dangers of deploying such units to missions such as the one in Congo, would be real, but the risks would be acceptable. First, those volunteering would understand the risks and accept them. Second, in most civil conflicts such as Congo’s, possible adversarial forces are not sophisticated. Soldiers in the new division would not need to execute complex operations akin to those carried out during the invasion of Iraq or current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. They would largely monitor villages and refugee camps, inspect individuals to make sure they did not have illicit weapons, and call for help if they came under concerted attack. Their jobs could be somewhat dangerous and would require discipline and reasonable knowledge of some basic infantry skills — but they would not be extremely complex. Care would have to be taken in deciding when to deploy this force, but it generally would be, given the scars of recent difficult American experiences in places such as Somalia.

Problems like Congo, Darfur and Somalia tend to get solved only with U.S. leadership. And the United States cannot truly lead on this issue while resisting any role for its own ground forces. It is time to recognize the contradiction of pretending otherwise and get on with a solution.

Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at Brookings, is the author of “Budgeting for Hard Power” and “The Science of War.”

Story here.