Mentoring Host Nation Interagency Operations
by Colonel Gary Anderson
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Governments get in trouble when they don't provide needed services to their populations. Insurgents take advantage of this. The kind of situation is what we tend to be trying to rectify in counterinsurgency (COIN) operations. Insurgents try to make these governments look even worse than they are. Many of the problems that insurgencies pose require interagency solutions; and when we intervene in such situations, we need to remember that we represent an American governmental system that is not always a model of interagency cooperation itself. There were times that I tended to want to echo Casey Stengel's question when he was coaching the lamentable New York Mets -- "doesn't anyone here know how to play this game?" Someone smarter than I remarked a few years ago that -- "if this stuff was rocket science, we'd have won in Iraq years ago." The same can be said of Afghanistan and Libya. This is tough stuff.
In this portion of the series, I'm going to try to outline some successes and failures that I experienced and observed in Iraq -- and derive some potential lessons learned from them. The point that I'll try to make is that the creation of interagency cooperation is hard for us, and we are now expecting a much less mature form of governance to do something that we don't necessarily do well ourselves. This requires hard work and a great deal of patience. Interagency cooperation at any level involves a shared vision and a commitment from all partners. Without that, no organization chart or process diagram, however sophisticated, can succeed.
Download the Full Article: Mentoring Host Nation Interagency Operations
Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps Colonel who served as a Senior Governance Advisor with an embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team in Iraq from 2009-2010.
About the Author(s)
Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps Colonel who has been a civilian advisor in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is an adjunct professor at the George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs.