Hearing of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee - Reconstruction Teams: A Case For Interagency National Security Reform

Interview

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REP. DAVIS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you to all of you for being here. I'm sorry this has got to be so terribly destroying in that we don't have the benefit of more time with you and I'm going to have to leave for an appointment.

But I want to just briefly Mr. Hess has been talking about the issues that you just raised. Is, one of the things that we know about USAID now is that you're not as well staffed as you were a number of years ago, and that in fact, there are a lot of contracts that you engage in but that we haven't really had the bench, we haven't had the personnel that are trained and there and ready. Is what you were discussing, is that one, what else did you really you need to make that effective and to enable this interagency process to move forward? Is there a need for more USAID, more trained people that can do that so that we don't rely on military when why, why hasn't that worked better I guess, help fill in the gaps for us.

MR. HESS: It's a large, there's a couple of questions I think that you have in there and what are we doing to improve and improve the bench strength. The administrator has submitted I think you've seen it in the '09 request to increase the staffing of USAID and there's a request in the '09 budget as the first step to increase the number of people.

She's already taken the action to increase the staff for the first time above attrition hiring for the first time in I think 10 or 12 years. So she's recognized that effort and we're moving on to hire more people in terms of basic fundamental staffing.

In terms of the interagency, we've been working very closely with CSR at the State Department. We've participated in all the sub BCC and working groups to work better to try this interagency coordination. I personally witnessed this, having served in Iraq in 1991 and Bosnia and Kosovo. We are committed to that interagency coordination. It was one of the reasons why we created the Office of Military Affairs, to ensure that those things happened. We have also worked with DoD very closely on putting senior development advisors with all the geographic combat commands, except for NORTHCOM. So that we could further integrate our planning and coordination and work better and have more successful projects so all of those things kind of work together.

MS. DAVIS: Where do you all see then included in terms of Congress' role here? And is it a budget connection, you know, there's really a disconnect in many ways in terms of what we're saying we need and the way we're actually budgeting. What role do you think Congress should be playing? Should we not engage in a more national security have a different committee that would go across jurisdictions? I mean, do you have a sense of what might be helpful to really task the different agencies to do this differently?

MR. PAVEL: I'll -- I'll start with that. I think if you would have asked us that three or four years ago, yeah, we we'd say reorganize and make things easier, and make it easier for us to deal with. I think we've come to a realization that re-organization's the easy part. It's -- the hard part is the thought process, the culture -- how does one deal with that?

I -- let me talk about some constructive things that we think are really helpful that Congress has done. These hearings, you know, are recognizing the problem. We think that with -- with the SAS we've gotten a certain degree of resonance. And now with the HASC on the issue that the solutions are not found in the Defense Department. We happen to have extremely helpful committees of jurisdiction. They help fund us fairly robustly. We don't see the same mindset necessarily on supporting State activities.

It doesn't seem to us -- and to be able to start to look at national security as I -- I believe that State is in with Justice and some other organizations. And we feel very close to State and to the intelligence community and the military to be able to start to look at them holistically in some sort of method. I'm not sure it's -- it's -- it's any reorganization of any sort but it's an ability and the mechanisms to be able to look across that.

Within DOD we've started to do things to be able to look at virtual budgets so, you know, in another year or so if you want to know what we're doing in stabilization we'll be able to put the equivalent of a major force program together for stabilization or -- or whatever you might want to look at, you know, we'll be able to have the data mechanisms and accounting to be able to start to look at that.

To a certain extent, if the Congress could start to look at what are we doing across national security, we think that would be helpful. Another helpful thing we think Congress has done is given us legislation in this last defense authorization bill to go out and do a study, and to work with a non-profit -- somebody outside of government to look at what some of these inner agency problems are.

This is something that our secretary has got his head into. He's actually changed the -- the contract we're putting out to include -- come up with a quote unquote "a National Security Act of 2009." What -- how would you do it if -- if, you know, 1947 it worked for good for setting up a cold war structure to be able to meet our national security interests. Going forward, what would it look like post 911?

And so while we wouldn't expect anybody to necessarily go out and adopt what they come up with it'll start to generate a conversation. So we think that we're in the stage of the whole government level of starting to do some experimentation. That's why we appreciate the support that we got with Africom. We're going to be having -- Southcom is re-organizing itself bringing in different components inside of the government to be able to do that too. So this is a time we think really of experimentation. I'm personally a little concerned that we would overcompensate in looking at the lessons learned of Afghanistan and Iraq. PRT's work very well there, but we don't have NGO engagement.

Next place we go NGO's could be a much bigger part of the equation. USAID might play a much more significant role then and we might be relying on them more, so we think it's a very broad problem set that we're confronted with in the future. We happen to have two examples right now of a somewhat non-permissible environment but we -- and to think that they're at the more military heavy end of how you meet that problem.

There's other areas where we want to try to go in and make a difference, eliminate un-governed areas where it might be more at the developmental end and the military is just playing a smaller supporting role.

REP. DAVIS: Thank you.

MR. PAVEL: I would just re-enforce two particular points that I just think are critically essential from the Defense Department point of view and one is just funding the needed capacities of the relevant civilian agencies which our secretary has been quite prominent in calling for recently, and then two just looking at things from across traditional boundaries in an integrated -- in an integrated way as much as possible and maybe from as diverse a perspective -- a set of perspectives as possible would really, I think, help to -- to strengthen the -- the different approaches that we are taking and help us develop the capabilities that we need.

REP. DAVIS: Do you want to keep going, Chairman?

REP. SNYDER: Well I was going to let you finish whatever you -- finish.

REP. DAVIS: Oh, it looks like -- would you like to say --

MR. PAVEL: No ma'am, I think you're -- we've hit the points.

I think where we are going with the combatant commands is a step in the right direction and we've been working very closely with our friends in defense to make sure those are properly staffed. And we have people on the Africom planning group and the transition group to make sure that that integration was happening.

And that's how we plan on taking it at the next level. I think Ryan's right, that, you know, that Afghanistan PRT's and Iraq PRT's are good for today but they may not be for the next one. And we work very hard and closely with the lessons learned center out of Ft. Leavenworth and with the Marines lesson learned center in the GIFCOM (ph) -- lesson's learned center to make sure that we're capturing those and how we can work more closely together.

REP. DAVIS: Is that -- are those lessons learned being -- are folks around the table have a diverse perspective or is that mostly Pentagon?

MR. PAVEL: Well right now it's predominantly military and predominantly uniformed military but more and more we're at the table and able to influence. And I -- the T-cap model that I talked about too -- we train military units before they deploy on that -- tactical (component ?) assessment framework. That's important because we know we can't be everywhere on the ground and if we can at least influence the activities in the planning process through that model, that's important. And the Army's looking at that model in particular in putting it into their -- into their doctrine.

So we realize we've got to work across the spectrum. Doctrine, planning, exercises so that before units deploy they know how to work with civilian agencies better. And we're going to keep pushing that pretty hard.

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