HSEC 370 Exam 2

After the War: Nation-Building from FDR to George W. Bush

Winning wars and securing the peace are preeminent responsibilities of the U.S. defense and foreign-policy apparatus. In recent decades, the United States' overwhelming military superiority has allowed it to "overawe" or overrun adversaries with comparative ease. Consolidating victory and preventing a renewal of conflict has, by contrast, usually taken more time, energy, and resources than originally foreseen. Few recent efforts of this sort can be regarded as unqualified successes, and one or two must be considered clear failures.

Prevention Federal Interagency Operational Plan (FIOP)

-The scope of the Prevention FIOP is focused on Federal departments and agencies' delivery of Prevention core capabilities to prevent imminent terrorist threats and attacks, including follow-on attacks against the United States. -It specifically includes terrorist attacks using chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or explosive (CBRNE) weapons or materials as well as cyber tools and techniques. -As noted in the National Prevention Framework, Federal departments and agencies remain committed to countering radicalization and recruitment to violent extremist causes, as well as disrupting and thwarting plots in their earliest stages.

No Consensus

A final draft of the PDD was approved by the NSC/DC on July 19, 1993, and, by early August, the contents of the draft were leaked to the Washington Post. In the face of public criticism of the draft policy, the NSC/PC met on September 17 to discuss the draft. The principals were unable to reach a consensus, with U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright supportive of an expanded UN peacekeeping role and Chairman Powell against, Secretary of State Warren Christopher not wishing to advocate any significant changes, Secretary of Defense Aspin supportive in theory but sensitive to the military view, and National Security Advisor Tony Lake worried that the issue of peacekeeping was going to hijack the entire Clinton foreign-policy agenda.

A Successful Failure

Although the Haiti operation achieved all its objectives on schedule and without encountering significant opposition, the mission paid few lasting dividends. Haiti was too dysfunctional a polity to be repaired within the short time that the United States and the rest of the international community were prepared to devote to the task. The American body politic had concluded from the Somali trauma that future military interventions should avoid mission creep, be launched with an exit strategy, and set an early departure deadline. All three lessons were followed in Haiti, and the result was ultimate failure, with the United States and the UN having to intervene again a decade later, in 2004.

Presidential Decision Directive 25

Although the administration was not formally overseeing the Somalia mission at the interagency level, from the beginning of the Clinton administration, a formal review of the larger policy of U.S. participationin UN peacekeeping missions was undertaken. In early February 1993, President Clinton signed Presidential Review Directive (PRD) 13, which directed an interagency study of peace operations. The review was initially conducted by an IWG chaired by NSC staffer Richard Clarke. Participants included representatives from DOS, DoD, JCS, the National Intelligence Council, the U.S. mission to the UN, and the Office of Management and Budget.

Had it Actually Been Implemented...I mean, What Could Go Wrong?

Although the draft NSPD provided a "comprehensive framework for organizing the interagency nation-building process," it was never issued. The Pentagon blocked the document "in the name of preserving the freedom of action of Cabinet officers and keeping civilians out of the contingency planning business." As a result, most of the process lessons that had been developed in the wake of the Clinton administration's experiences in Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia were jettisoned. When it came time for planning for Afghanistan and Iraq, none of the procedures laid out in the draft NSPD was followed.

SO...What WAS Doable?

Another controversy regarding the interagency planning processrevolved around the DOS Future of Iraq Project. Most analysts familiar with the contents of the study dismissed the notion that the project's recommendations constituted an executable plan. Robert Perito, a former DOS official and leading expert on postconflict police work, said, "It was a good idea. It brought the exiles together, a lot of smart people, and its reports were very impressive. But the project never got to the point where things were in place that could be implemented." David Kay read the study and summarized it, saying, "It was unimplementable. It was a series of essays to describe what the future could be. It was not a plan to hand to a task force and say 'go implement.' If it had been carried out it would not have made a difference." Colonel Paul Hughes, who would become Lieutenant General Jay Garner's chief planner, agreed: "While it produced some useful background information it had no chance of really influencing the post-Saddam phase of the war." Upon arriving in Baghdad, Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs and deeply involved with the study, told Ambassador Paul Bremer that the Future of Iraq Project "was never intended as a postwar plan."

George H.W. Bush

As discussed earlier, administrations tend to reflect the personalities of their presidents. In contrast to Roosevelt's administration, which promoted competition, President George H. W. Bush forged an administration that placed a priority on a collegial exchange of ideas, relying on solid analysis and formal decisionmaking. It is routinely cited as the "model of a well-functioning NSC and interagency process." Bush himself had vast executive- and legislative-branch experience prior to assuming the presidency. In addition to eight years as vice president, he had previously been director of the CIA, mission chief in Beijing, and ambassador to the UN. He had also served in Congress, was a former U.S. Navy officer, and had chaired the Republican National Committee. Few presidents, if any, have had as extensive an exposure to national security affairs prior to assuming the presidency. In terms of personality, Bush's cognitive style was almost in the middle of the spectrum. In discussing his views on the role of the cabinet, he noted, "I want them to be frank; I want them to fight hard for their position. And when I make the call, I'd like to have the feeling that they'd be able to support the president." This indicates a certain belief in the importance of competition and argument among advisers.

The Enemy Always Gets a Vote

As the Somalia mission transitioned from the limited-scope, U.S.- dominated force to the wider UN multinational contingent, the newly installed Clinton administration held no formal policy review. The issue of differing U.S. and UN goals was never addressed, and U.S. troops on the ground in Somalia began seizing some of the larger clan weapon caches in support of the wider UN mission. Once UNITAF left Somalia in May, Aidid believed that it was time for him to act, and, on June 5, 1993, his forces attacked and killed 24 Pakistani UN troops patrolling in Mogadishu. In response, both UN and U.S. policy shifted to capturing or killing Aidid, which effectively closed the door to a diplomatic settlement with the clan leader and, as a result, a political settlement for Somalia—not that such a settlement would have been easy to achieve, in any case. Still, top-level decisionmaking remained informal. Soon after Aidid's attack on the Pakistani troops, Chairman Powell brought a proposal to the President to support UNSC Resolution 837,20 directing the arrest of Aidid, despite admitting that there was only a 50-percent chance that the warlord could be captured and only a 25-percent chance that he could be captured alive. Clinton agreed, but there were no detailed discussions of how this policy shift would change U.S. military operations on the ground or how such a shift would support a larger strategy in Somalia. There still was no articulated long-term U.S. strategy for Somalia.

Lessons Learned

In Haiti, five interagency lessons learned were proposed at the Interagency and Political-Military Dimensions of Peace Operations workshop held by NDU: An interagency planning doctrine for complex emergencies is needed. Planning must compensate for organizational and operational differences between civilian and military organizations. Agreement on interagency command-and-control arrangements is needed. Agreement is needed on operational concepts for operations other than war. (MOOTWa) Interagency war games can help work out interagency differences and give agencies exposure to each other. Many of these lessons would be reviewed later and integrated into planning doctrine but not until many of the same lessons were learned again in the U.S. intervention in Bosnia.

Congress Weighs In

By the end of 2002, Congress, like the President, had become frustrated with the slow pace of progress and the lack of a strategy for Afghanistan. In response, it passed the Afghanistan Freedom Support Act, strongly urging the President to designate a coordinator within DOS who would be responsible for the following: designing an overall strategy to advance U.S. interests in Afghanistan ensuring program and policy coordination among U.S. agencies carrying out the policies set forth in the act pursuing Afghanistan-assistance coordination with other countries and international organizations ensuring proper management, implementation, and oversight byagencies responsible for Afghan assistance programs. In response to the Afghanistan Freedom Support Act, the President published a strategy for Afghanistan in February 2003. It was very broad, lacking any operational details or measurable goals. Nor was an official named with adequate authority to perform the coordination tasks outlined by Congress.

Wicked Problems

Cautioning that "policy outcomes result from multiple causes that defy simple summary and easily solution," Allison and Zelikow argue that the outcome of this process is determined by an array of variables including, but not limited to the following: Who plays? (Which officials and advisers will be taking part in any given decision?) What shapes the players' perceptions and preferences? (What are the personality traits, organizational goals, and interests to be advocated?) What determines each player's impact on results? (What are the bargaining advantages of formal authority or responsibility and control over resources or information?) The ability to frame the issue for decisionmaking (and, consequently, who gets to set the terms of the discussion) also hasa significant impact on how the bargaining process will play out.

Hands-Off

Despite Roosevelt's desire throughout much of the war to defer occupation planning, officials in DOS, the Department of War, and the Department of the Treasury knew that advanced planning was necessary. The United States could not wait until Germany or Japan was in allied hands before deciding what their future would be and how it would be achieved. Unfortunately, that planning would be done with little policy direction from the top, of which much would be vague and inconsistent.

Conclusions

Detailed interagency planning was a way to clearly define assumptions, posit likely outcomes, and identify the costs of intervening. Understanding these led to better policy development and decisionmaking at the highest levels of government. Additional lessons included the need for periodic policy review, especially during implementation, when the nature of events in theater may change; the need for an interagency training program to allow planners to better understand the interagency process and the capabilities and limitations of the different agencies that make up the interagency environment; a need for a cadre of planners across the U.S. government ready to respond to future crises; and, finally, a need for interagency coordination at all levels of the mission—from strategic to tactical.

Hmmm...

During a visit to Washington at the end of July 2003, Bremer discovered that the reports he had been sending back to the Pentagon were not being shared with DOS, the CIA, or the White House. He felt that the entire interagency process had broken down. Frank Miller continued to gather information for Condoleezza Rice from the British, from the media, and through various military contacts, but no reporting was coming from Bremer. By August, Rice and Stephen Hadley felt that Rumsfeld had not been as involved with postwar Iraq as he had been with the war plan. Rice told Miller that it was not going well in Iraq and directed him to "[r]econstitute the ESG."

Solid Framework...

Early in the Bush administration, an NSPD was drafted to replace PDD 56. This draft proposed to build on the Clinton structure in a number of constructive ways, including new provisions for contingency warning, advanced planning, prevention, and the development of response options. It established the Contingency Planning Policy Coordinating Committee, whose purpose was to develop "interagency contingency plans for emerging crises with a focus on U.S. objectives, a desired end state, policy options, interagency responsibilities, resource issues, and strategies for various aspects of the operation." It also required an interagency training program "to develop a cadre of professionals capable of planning for complex contingency operations." NSPD "XX" also required a quarterly NSC/DC review to determine whether planning for contingencies should begin.

But...They Had Elections....

Even as Afghanistan's political transition moved forward, however, the security situation was deteriorating. Year after year, the number of terrorist attacks increased, reaching a level three times higher in 2007 than in 2002. The rise in violence was particularly acute between 2005 and 2006. During this period, the number of suicide attacks quadrupled, from 27 to 139; remotely detonated bombings more than doubled, from 783 to 1,677; and armed attacks nearly tripled, from 1,558 to 4,542. Just as the United States and its allies were agreeing to extend ISAF beyond Kabul, the nature of that force's mission began to shift from peacekeeping to counterinsurgency. The resumption of civil war in Afghanistan can be attributed to two fundamental causes. One was the failure of the government of Pakistan to prevent the Taliban and al Qaeda from reorganizing, recruiting, financing, training, and operating out of sanctuaries on its territory. The other was the failure of the United States, the Karzai administration, and the rest of the international community to take advantage of the lull in violence following the 2001 collapse of the Taliban to project government services, including security, into the countryside. As a result, when insurgent groups eventually resumed operations in the south and east of the country, they encountered little in the way of government infrastructure or popular commitment to a regime in Kabul, which had done little to protect their safety or prosperity.

Post-9/11 Nation-Building: Afghanistan and Iraq

George W. Bush ran for president on a platform that clearly opposed heavy U.S. involvement in nation-building. With the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., the U.S. view of the post-Cold War order changed dramatically, and with it, albeit more slowly, so did President Bush's attitude toward such missions. Most on the Bush team had observed the spate of post-Cold War missions from the sidelines and drawn lessons that were at odds with the practices that evolved during the Clinton administration. Following the debacle of Somalia, the disappointing results of his intervention in Haiti, and the slow progress in Bosnia, Clinton had reluctantly abandoned the search for quick exit strategies.

Haiti

Haiti: In December 1990, Haiti had the first "free and fair" elections in its history, choosing as President Jean-Bertrand Aristide by an overwhelming majority. Only nine months later, on September 30, 1991, Aristide was overthrown by a military coup and forced to flee Haiti. The initial U.S. response was to call the coup a "threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States." Clearly, in the mind of President Bush and Secretary of State James Baker, the maintenance of democracy in Haiti was an important, if not vital, national interest. If allowed to stand, Secretary of State Baker believed that it would result in a "chain reaction" through the region. In the wake of "Blackhawk down," Washington was unwilling to risk another such incident in Port-au-Prince. Special envoy Lawrence Pezzullo, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, Chair of the JCS Colin Powell, and CIA director James Woolsey were against the use of force, while administrative hawks included Vice President Al Gore, Secretary of State Warren Christopher, National Security Advisor Tony Lake, and U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright. The majority in Congress was against the use of force in Haiti, with the Senate passing a nonbinding resolution on October 21, 1993, that required prior consultation with Congress before any military intervention in Haiti. Secretary Perry nevertheless ordered DoD to begin interagency planning for a military intervention in Haiti.34 On May 5, 1994, the UNSC tightened sanctions again, banning all but humanitarian imports to Haiti. The United States then convinced most of the countries in the western hemisphere to support military intervention in Haiti in the event that sanctions failed to return Aristide to power. Civilian agencies were unused to detailed planning, and the military was refusing to share its own planning. As a result, this initial attempt at political-military planning had major gaps.

Henry Morgenthau

In August 1944, while traveling to Europe under the guise of studying currency problems in newly liberated France, Harry Dexter White, the chief international economist at the Treasury Department, gave Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau a DOS memo on policy for postwar Germany. Morgenthau believed in collective guilt,feeling that Germany should be punished for the war and that the reparations on Germany after World War I had not gone far enough. White knew that the DOS memo, which was soft on Germany, would enrage Morgenthau.

Can You Legislate Morality? (Germany)

In Germany, the occupation had a strict nonfraternization policy. There had been numerous stories in the U.S. press that senior German prisoners of war had received friendly treatment, and, consequently, the American public was outraged. In response, on June 19, 1945, Eisenhower announced at a Washington press conference "that there could be no fraternization in Germany until the last Nazi criminals had been uprooted." The soldiers joked that they were giving the Germans the opportunity "to see Americans engaged in the most widespread violation of their own laws since Prohibition."

Huntington's "Major Civilizations"

In Huntington's view, intercivilizational conflict manifests itself in two forms: fault line conflicts and core state conflicts. Fault line conflicts are on a local level and occur between adjacent states belonging to different civilizations or within states that are home to populations from different civilizations. Core state conflicts are on a global level between the major states of different civilizations. Core state conflicts can arise out of fault line conflicts when core states become involved. These conflicts may result from a number of causes, such as: relative influence or power (military or economic), discrimination against people from a different civilization, intervention to protect kinsmen in a different civilization, or different values and culture, particularly when one civilization attempts to impose its values on people of a different civilization.

Somalia

In January 1991, Somali dictator Siad Barre fled that country and, by November 1991, Somalia was wracked by open clan warfare. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the International Committee of the Red Cross began reporting on the unfolding humanitarian crisis and, by the summer of 1992, there was a general consensus that somewhere between one-third and two-thirds of the Somali population was in "imminent danger of dying from malnutrition." Somalis were starving, less from a lack of food than from a failure of the distribution system. Food had replaced currency as the source of wealth in Somalia, warring clans hijacked shipments, and relief aid was soon rotting in the port of Mogadishu because a lack of security prevented its safe distribution to those in need.

Or, "The Situation Always has a Vote"

In Japan, in contrast, the occupation of the homeland was effected after the surrender. In a short period, hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops spread across the islands. Chaos was avoided because the Japanese government remained largely intact. Where denazification in Germany had removed 2.5 percent of the population of the U.S. zone from any work but manual labor, in Japan, only 0.29 percent were purged over a two-year period, and of those, 80 percent were military officers. In both cases, the U.S. military wanted to govern through the occupied nation's government. Only in Japan was that possible.

"If you liked Beirut, you'll love Mogadishu."

In July 1992, President Bush read a cable from U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Smith Hempstone, Jr., that eloquently described the situation unfolding on the border between Somalia and Kenya, to which many refugees had fled. President Bush wrote in the margin, "This is a terribly moving situation. Let's do everything we can to help." On August 12, Bush met with his Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and National Security Advisor and decided to airlift food into Kenya and Somalia and provide air transport to a larger contingent of 500 UN peacekeepers. On November 3, President Bush lost his reelection campaign to Bill Clinton; however, he did not sit idly by in the last months of his presidency. On November 20-24, the NSC/DC met daily to discuss options for Somalia, and Ambassador Hempstone wrote another cable that captured in one sentence the challenges of military intervention in Somalia: "If you liked Beirut, you'll love Mogadishu."

Bush to Clinton

In addition to the disintegration of the Soviet Union, German reunification, the Gulf War, and extensive arms-control negotiations, the Bush administration also faced unfolding crises in Somalia, Haiti, and Yugoslavia. However, because the United States had emerged from the Cold War as the lone remaining superpower, other countries looked to it to provide leadership and to intervene, and the United States was willing, in some cases, to take that role, so long as its interests were high enough and the risks were low enough.

Monolithic Nation-Building?

In all eight cases, the style, structure, and process of presidential decisionmaking have affected the mission's outcome. Administrations learned lessons from their own activities that they later applied to their operations. Unfortunately, there has been less carry-forward of expertise from one administration to the next. This monograph suggests remedies to that deficiency, examines how successive presidents and their national security teams have approached the initiation and management of nation-building operations, and identifies best practices for the conduct of such operations in the future.

Skepticism

In carrying out subsequent nation-building operations, his administration had employed overwhelming force, sought the broadest possible multilateral participation in all its efforts, and eventually accepted the need for long-term commitment to societies that it was trying to reform and rebuild. By contrast, even when faced with the need, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, to engage in very large-scale nation-building enterprises, the Bush administration remained wary of long-term entanglements, emphasized economy of force, was skeptical of multilateral institutions, and envisaged a quite limited role for the United States in rebuilding these societies.

Can You Legislate Morality? (Japan)

In contrast, in Japan, MacArthur told an aide, "I wouldn't issue a non-fraternization order for all the tea in China." He was convinced of the beneficial effect of greater contact between Americans and Japanese. Seeing the behavior [that] the ordinary American soldier gave the Japanese, he said, "the opportunity for comparison between the qualities of the old and the new." This difference in fraternization policies illustrates the difference in Washington's influence on each occupation. In response to press criticism, General Marshall prohibited General Clay from relaxing the nonfraternization policy to a more reasonable level, whereas a U.S. lack of interest in the details of the occupation in Japan left MacArthur to run his own show. "Secretary of War Robert Patterson told a friend in July 1946 that MacArthur's administration of Japan was 'the one bright spot in postwar accomplishments [and the] spirit of the War Department was to let [SCAP] alone.'"

Lessons Learned?

In late 2002, President Bush made the controversial decision to place the Pentagon in charge of all civil and military planning for postwar Iraq. Secretary Rumsfeld had proposed that U.S. efforts in postwar Iraq should be run solely by DoD, a proposal that was endorsed by the NSC/PC in October 2002. It was agreed that Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley would draft a directive for the President to sign, formalizing Rumsfeld's move. At the time, neither Secretary of State Powell nor his deputy, Richard Armitage, objected. Despite the concerns of those within the DOS bureaucracy, Powell and Armitage felt that the Pentagon had the money and resources to devote to the postwar mission and therefore was entitled to run it. Thus, for the first time since the end of the German and Japanese occupations, DOS would not oversee the civil aspects of postwar reconstruction.

Fundamental Shift

In late 2003, Khalilzad was sent to Kabul to replace Finn. He brought with him a sharply increased aid budget, which he was able to apply toward the plan's main objectives: working with the Karzai government to balance representation of personnel from all regions in the staffs of central ministries working with the Kabul government to remove and replace unqualified or disloyal governors and local chiefs of police pressuring warlords to turn over tax receipts to the central government, promoting cantonment of heavy weapons under the UN disarmament program, and making deals with the Karzai government supporting the Afghan government's demand that NGO activity henceforth be fully coordinated with Afghan officials at both the national and local levels and that NGOs be held fully accountable to national laws and local officials retraining and upgrading local civil servants and police through extensive new programs at the national and local levels, enabling them to interact lawfully, honestly, and productively with the local populace, businesses, and voluntary groups and organizations. This shift in strategy was nothing short of fundamental. The Pentagon accepted that it had to participate in achieving these political goals in addition to continuing its efforts to hunt terrorists. The interagency team in Kabul had a plan that was jointly developed, that would be jointly executed, and that finally called for measures to strengthen instead of undermine the Afghan central government.

9/11 and Afghanistan

In response to the September 11 attacks, the United States gave the Taliban—the ruling government in Afghanistan—the opportunity to turn over members of the al Qaeda organization. The Taliban refused, and regime change in Afghanistan quickly became the goal of the United States. However, there were no standing contingency plans for action in Afghanistan. In the weeks following, a military plan was quickly developed that relied primarily on covert CIA operatives, military special forces, and U.S. airpower, with the majority of the "boots on the ground" being provided by the Northern Alliance, a loose confederation of militias in opposition to the Taliban. The question of what would come after the Taliban had not been addressed before the war started. Strong pressure to respond quickly to the September 11 attacks and an unwillingness—and, logistically, an inability—to put a large number of U.S. forces on the ground in Afghanistan combined to define and constrain U.S. planning.

Broad Goals

In response, the ad hoc policy review continued, with Secretary of Defense Les Aspin declaring three conditions for a U.S. withdrawal: "First, the security issue in south Mogadishu must be settled. Second, we must make real progress towards taking the heavy weapons out of the hands of the warlords. And third, there must be credible police forces in at least the major population centers." Secretary of State Warren Christopher wrote to UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, expressing the desire to position the remaining U.S. troops in Somalia on ships at sea instead of on the ground in Somalia. In response, Boutros-Ghali wrote that the proposal would return Somalia to civil war and undermine the UN.

The President and His Administration

In terms of personal style, George W. Bush was more outgoing and charismatic than his father but lacked the elder Bush's bureaucratic, legislative, and foreign-policy experience. The younger Bush was generally goal-oriented in his approach to policy, preferring to delegate details to trusted subordinates. His cabinet and staff resembled those of former presidents, such as Truman and Clinton, in that it mixed experienced and forceful Washington insiders, such as Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld, with associates from his time in Texas politics. His cabinet, particularly in his first term, would be the scene of clashes among many of these officials, which the President allowed, up to a point. Bush's cognitive style can thus be characterized by a preference for focusing on themes rather than details. He had confidence in his own efficacy as a manager and leader and a modest tolerance for conflict while placing the highest premium on loyalty.

Huge Surprise

In the course of 2002, President Bush had become increasingly concerned about the slow pace of Afghan reconstruction. The Pentagon and the Vice President's office blamed the lack of progress on mismanagement by DOS and USAID. Those agencies, by contrast, blamed the Pentagon for its refusal to secure the countryside or even permit international peacekeepers to do so. An April 2002 report by the Congressional Research Service found that [t]he Administration has not yet given a detailed indication of what role it envisions for the United States in the political, economic, and social reconstruction of Afghanistan beyond current plans for emergency food and agriculture assistance, assistance in the formation of a new national army, and anti-narcotics aid. With no clearly defined strategy, the civilian side of the implementation could not hope to challenge the military for attention or resources.

Struggling to Find a Foreign Policy Focus

In the early 1990s, the United States struggled to find a foreign policy focus. With the demise of an existential threat to the Western world, was the United States faced with The End of History, or would the next period reflect A Clash of Civilizations (to borrow the titles of two widely cited books of the period)? With the split of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany, challenges that had monopolized U.S. foreign-policy attention for half a century no longer took center stage. Other problems, such as humanitarian crises and ethnic war, which would have previously been viewed through the bipolar lens of the Cold War, became significant foreign-policy issues. Whether they were of vital interest to the United States would be debated throughout the 1990s, but U.S. interventions in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo would dominate the decade's foreign-policy landscape.

Allison and Zelikow

In their revised edition of Allison's seminal work Essence of Decision, Allison and Zelikow argue against the "rational-actor" model of governmental decisionmaking, which posits that a unitary actor—in this case, the executive branch of the U.S. government—calculates the costs and benefits of a particular policy and chooses to implement a course of action that maximizes its strategic goals and objectives. According to this model, analysts can infer a presidential administration's references merely by rigorously examining the policy outcome. Process in decisionmaking is important only inasmuch as accurate information about the costs and benefits of the courses of action under consideration are made available to the decisionmakers—the president and presidential advisers—who are assumed to share a unity of purpose.

Breaking is Easy. Fixing, Not So Much

Initially, General Franks told his commanders that DOS would take the lead in deciding how to rebuild Iraq's political institutions and infrastructure. In the summer of 2002, the JCS informed Franks that he would be in charge of planning for the postwar period. During the fall of 2002, Franks had his ground commander, Lieutenant General David McKiernan, develop a more extended plan for phase IV. McKiernan's staff began a series of war games to test the plan's assumptions and identify potential shortcomings that could be rectified prior to the initiation of hostilities. By the middle of February 2003, his staff concluded that "the campaign would produce conditions at odds with meeting the strategic objectives" established by USCENTCOM. In particular, the "joint campaign was specifically designed to break all control mechanisms of the regime," which called into question the ability to rely on Iraqi institutions in the early part of phase IV.

General of the Army Douglas MacArthur: Asia SME

MacArthur spent his graduation furlough with his parents at Fort Mason, California, where his father, now a major general, was serving as commander of the Department of the Pacific. Afterward, he joined the 3rd Engineer Battalion, which departed for the Philippines in October 1903. MacArthur was sent to Iloilo, where he supervised the construction of a wharf at Camp Jossman. He went on to conduct surveys at Tacloban City, Calbayog City and Cebu City. In November 1903, while working on Guimaras, he was ambushed by a pair of Filipino brigands or guerrillas; he shot and killed both with his pistol. He was promoted to first lieutenant in Manila in April 1904. In October 1905, MacArthur received orders to proceed to Tokyo for appointment as aide-de-camp to his father. They inspected Japanese military bases at Nagasaki, Kobe and Kyoto, then headed to India via Shanghai, Hong Kong, Java and Singapore, reaching Calcutta in January 1906. In India, they visited Madras, Tuticorin, Quetta, Karachi, the Northwest Frontier and the Khyber Pass. They then sailed to China via Bangkok and Saigon, and toured Canton, Tsingtao, Peking, Tientsin, Hankow and Shanghai before returning to Japan in June. In October 1922, MacArthur left West Point and sailed to the Philippines with Louise and her two children, Walter and Louise, to assume command of the Military District of Manila. Interesting: Returning to the U.S., MacArthur took command of the IV Corps Area, based at Fort McPherson in Atlanta, Georgia, on 2 May 1925.[78] However, he encountered southern prejudice because he was the son of a Union Army officer, and requested to be relieved. Upon returning to the U.S., MacArthur received orders to assume command of the Philippine Department. At his desk, he would wear a Japanese ceremonial kimono, cool himself with an oriental fan, and smoke cigarettes in a jeweled cigarette holder. He had already hired a public relations staff to promote his image with the American public, together with a set of ideas he was known to favor, namely: a belief that America needed a strongman leader to deal with the possibility that Communists might lead all of the great masses of unemployed into a revolution; that America's destiny was in the Asia-Pacific region; and a strong hostility to the British Empire. When the Commonwealth of the Philippines achieved semi-independent status in 1935, President of the Philippines Manuel Quezon asked MacArthur to supervise the creation of a Philippine Army. Quezon and MacArthur had been personal friends since the latter's father had been Governor-General of the Philippines, 35 years earlier. With President Roosevelt's approval, MacArthur accepted the assignment. It was agreed that MacArthur would receive the rank of field marshal, with its salary and allowances, in addition to his major general's salary as Military Advisor to the Commonwealth Government of the Philippines.

Germany

Members of Welles's committee assumed a soft position on Germany, believing that Germany would play a critical role in both the reconstruction of Europe and the new world order. They believed that the harsh punishment meted out at Versailles was a contributing factor that led to World War II and wanted to avoid repeating such mistakes. The group agreed on the demand for unconditional surrender, occupation by allied forces, and permanent disarmament. They believed that the punishment of war criminals, denazification, and reeducation of the German people would be critical in the rehabilitation and reintegration of Germany into Europe. Even as early as 1942, planners understood that a stable Germany could help prevent Soviet expansion across Europe. Welles eventually proposed forming a loose German federation of three states with limited, central control measures that would allow the country's integration into the greater European economy.

The Morgenthau Plan

Morgenthau, unhappy with the direction in which U.S. planning was headed and feeling that it did not reflect the desires of the President, a long-time personal friend and neighbor in New York, took it upon himself to take the lead on postwar planning for Germany. Harry Dexter White and a small team at the Treasury Department drafted what would become known as the Morgenthau Plan, though its formal title was the Program to Prevent Germany from Starting a World War III. The plan included such measures as destroying all German heavy industry; giving German equipment, labor, and other resources to victims of Nazi aggression, with the bulk going to the Soviet Union; and shooting Nazi war criminals without trial. At the Quebec Conference, Morgenthau briefed British Prime Minister Winston Churchill on his plan for postwar Germany. Churchill was initially angered by the proposal, stating that "he would not chain himself to a 'dead German.'"

Definition

Nation-building can be defined as the use of armed forces in the aftermath of a conflict to promote an enduring peace and a transition to democracy. Other terms currently in use to describe this process include stabilization and reconstruction, peace-building, and statebuilding. Since 1989, the frequency, duration, and scope of such missions have grown exponentially, with no end in sight, either for the United States or the rest of the international community.

Allies

Other than the UK, no ally contributed forces sufficient to give its government much influence over U.S. policy. Neither did Washington seek to consult neighboring governments about its plans for the future of Iraq, as it had done successfully at the Bonn conference on Afghanistan. The administration was already talking about making Iraq a democratic model for the Middle East, the effect of which could ultimately be similar changes among most of its neighbors. Therefore, this was not a project that was likely to appeal to neighboring regimes. The UN also played a less significant role in Iraq than in Afghanistan, in part due to the controversy associated with the invasion and in part due to the administration's greater desire to shape the postwar environment there.

Who Was Running the Show?

On May 9, 2003, Bremer was officially designated as the President's envoy, reporting through the Secretary of Defense and "empowered with 'all executive, legislative, and judicial functions' in Iraq."85 While Bremer was in Washington preparing to go Iraq, he met with Douglas Feith, who shared with him a draft debaathification order intended for Garner to issue. Bremer asked Feith to wait and let him issue it once he got to Iraq. Bremer recalled that Rumsfeld said that it was to be carried out "even if implementing it causes administrative inconvenience." On May 16, Bremer issued Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) Order Number 1, De-Ba'athification of Iraqi Society. This decree excluded the top four levels of the party membership, which the CPA estimated to be approximately 1 percent of all party members, or 20,000 people, from public employment.

Iraq?

On November 21, 2001, less than a week after the fall of Kabul, President Bush directed Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to update the Iraq war plan. One week later, Rumsfeld told General Tommy Franks, the USCENTCOM commander, to develop such a plan. Over the next 16 months, General Franks's staff produced a series of evolving drafts culminating in OPLAN Cobra II, which obtained presidential approval in January 2003.

"We've Got Time"...20 Years Later, What's the Plan?

On October 12, President Bush expressed the desire to turn the post-Taliban administration of Afghanistan over to the UN. Powell suggested a UN mandate with other military forces, neither U.S. nor Northern Alliance, providing security in Kabul. At an October 15 NSC meeting, President Bush said, "There's been too much discussion of post conflict Afghanistan. We've been at it for a week. We've made a lot of progress, we've got time."

Again, The Situation on the Ground is Fluid

On September 15, President Clinton addressed the nation, explaining that, if the junta did not leave Haiti immediately, the United States would lead a multinational force to forcibly remove it and restore the democratically elected Aristide to power. Jimmy Carter, meeting with the Junta leaders, called Clinton and told him that an agreement had been reached, the invasion was stood down, and the planes returned to their bases. A force was sent in for security. The military forces made a conscious decision from the beginning to not engage in missions that could be construed as nation-building. Once again, the lessons from Somalia applied, and the military was afraid of mission creep. It took the direct order of the commander of USACOM to get U.S. troops on the ground to assist the Haitians in restoring electricity and clean water.

Rumsfeld

Once charged with overall responsibility for both civil and military planning, DoD blocked several efforts to plan across agency lines. Rumsfeld rejected a number of DOS nominees to serve under Garner in the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA). He specifically told Garner that he could not attach Warwick, organizer of the Future of Iraq Project, to his staff. When Garner insisted, Rumsfeld said that he was acting under instructions from a "higher authority."

Post-Cold War Nation-Building: Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo

Over the subsequent 40 years, successive U.S. administrations made few attempts to replicate the early nation-building successes in Germany and Japan. During the Cold War, U.S. policy emphasized containment, deterrence, and maintenance of the status quo. Efforts were made to promote democratic and free-market values but, generally, without the element of compulsion. U.S. military power was employed to preserve the status quo, not to alter it, to manage crises, not to resolve the underlying problems, lest doing so provoke a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union. U.S. interventions in such places as the Dominican Republic, Lebanon, Grenada, and Panama were short lived, undertaken to overthrow unfriendly regimes and reinstall friendly ones rather than bring about fundamental societal transformations.

William J. Clinton

President Clinton was, in some ways, the opposite of President Bush in terms of international relations experience and personal style. In contrast to Bush's wide foreign experience and varied executive branch service, Clinton was a former governor who had focused his campaign on domestic policy. Although his undergraduate degree was in international relations and he studied abroad, Clinton's initial interests and priorities were dominantly domestic. He was articulate and empathetic where Bush was prone to verbal gaffes and appeared to some to be distant. In terms of leadership style, Clinton initially did not delegate as well as Bush. He gave very little formal authority to his first chief of staff, in effect attempting to do the job himself. Clinton was very bright and sought to be intimately involved in the crafting of policy but was still initially more interested in domestic rather than foreign policy. He can be characterized as having a flexible cognitive style characterized by an ability to manage large amounts of information, a sense of his own efficacy in terms of policy detail, and a comfort with conflict among his advisers higher than that of Bush but much lower than that of Roosevelt.

"Presidential Personality"

Presidential personality obviously influences the U.S. government's decisionmaking process in terms of approaches to and the conduct of reconstruction efforts: Each president will have specific preferences for oral or written interactions, different appetites for detail, and varying tolerance for conflict among and with subordinates. In examining the eight cases addressed here, which cover three historical periods, we consider the personal styles of five U.S. presidents, the processes by which they made decisions, and the structures through which these were given effect.

This Is Just an Element

Presidential style and bureaucratic structure are by no means the sole determinants of success in any such endeavor. RAND has also looked at the nature of the societies being reformed, the level of external resources applied to the process, and the content of the policies effected.

When You Have No Guidance, Shoot for the Moon

Roosevelt tasked DOS with postwar planning in late 1941, and one of his personal friends, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, led the initial effort. Welles had been working on postwar planning since 1939, initially focusing on plans for an international organization that would become the United Nations (UN). In early 1942, he formed a postwar planning committee. Welles involved individuals from many agencies and organizations inside and outside the U.S. government, including representatives of the Division of Special Research in DOS, Roosevelt's staff, the Board of Economic Warfare, the Department of Agriculture, the Council on Foreign Relations, U.S. Steel, and the New York Times. He also included key Democrats and Republicans from the House and Senate, as well as Isaiah Bowman, who had earlier served on President Woodrow Wilson's inquiry into postwar issues after World War I. Welles's postwar planning committee was comprised of five subcommittees: political problems, security problems, economic reconstruction, economic policy, and territorial problems.

Policy and the Interwar World

RAND research has explored the various factors that contribute to the success or failure of such missions. First among these is the nature of the society being reformed and of the conflict being terminated. Also important are the quality and quantity of the military and civil assets being brought to bear by external actors. And finally, there is the wisdom and skill with which these resources are applied. It examines, in particular, the manner in which U.S. policy toward post conflict reconstruction has been created and implemented and the effect that these processes have had on mission outcomes, starting with a review of the post-World War II occupations of Germany and Japan. The end of the Cold War brought a second spate of such missions—in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. In the current decade, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have given rise to ongoing operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A Lack of Coordination and Strategy

Responsibility for rebuilding the Afghan army, police, courts, and other governmental institutions was divvied up among a number of donors, with the United States taking the lead with the army, Germany with the police, Italy with the courts, the UK with the counternarcotics effort, and the World Bank with the economy. Various committees were established to coordinate these efforts, but no individual, country, or international organization was assigned responsibility for integrating these national and sectoral efforts into an overall strategy. On January 21, 2002, Japan hosted the International Conference on Reconstruction Assistance to Afghanistan in Tokyo. Donors pledged $5.2 billion over five years to assist in the rebuilding of Afghanistan, of which the U.S. share was an uncharacteristically low 10 percent. A joint team of the Asian Development Bank, the UN Development Programme, and the World Bank assessed that Afghanistan would need at least $10.2 billion in the first five years of reconstruction.

Conclusion

Roosevelt organized his administration such that he would be able to control key decisions himself. He amplified the already competitive interagency environment by positioning his cabinet members against one another, all but destroying any tendency toward coordination and cooperation among departments. He tended to keep his own counsel and leave decisions to the last possible minute to retain maximum control of their outcomes. In light of this lack of top-down guidance, what planning did occur for the postwar period was abundant but somewhat uncoordinated and contradictory. Many high-level policy issues were not resolved in the planning process but were managed during the occupations themselves. The occupations in Germany and Japan unfolded in different ways. The differences were driven by the level of interest in United States—"Europe first" had been the hallmark of U.S. strategy from the beginning of the war—the personalities of the military governors and their priorities for the occupations; the comparative levels of destruction of the occupied territories; and, perhaps most importantly, the requirement to coordinate efforts with allies in Germany and not in Japan. In Germany, all the old national institutions were dismantled and new ones developed only slowly, over a period of years. In Japan, by contrast, all national institutions except the army and navy were kept, continued to function, and were reformed in place. The contrasting nature of the occupations is also reflected in how the occupations transitioned to international integration in Germany and Japan. In Germany, there was a gradual transition from U.S. military control to U.S. civilian control to German sovereignty. In Japan, it was an easier transition from U.S. military control to Japanese sovereignty. Thus, until 1949, Germany had no national government. In Japan, by contrast, nearly all elements of the national government, from the emperor on down, were retained and reformed from within. This process of co-option worked much more rapidly and smoothly than the process of deconstruction and reconstruction of national institutions in Germany. On the other hand, the transformation of Germany into a fully democratic state, reconciled with its neighbors and its own historical responsibilities, was more thoroughgoing than that in Japan.

Roosevelt (FDR)

Roosevelt served at the head of the first modern presidential bureaucracy, but the last presidency to lack a standing interagency organization for dealing with problems of national security. His personal leadership drove broad government efforts coordinated across various agencies. Roosevelt created a competitive environment in his administration. "A little rivalry is stimulating, you know. . . . It keeps everybody going to prove he is a better fellow than the next man. It keeps them honest too." In practice, the balancing of opposites sharpened internal policy debates, but the price paid was that frictions often carried over into program implementation." Roosevelt could thus be characterized as having a very open, free-flowing cognitive style, a strong and well-justified sense of his own efficacy in management, a mastery of policy details, and a very high level of comfort with conflict.

De-baathification

Saddam's regime depended on a highly centralized bureaucracy in which all important decisions were made in Baghdad. It was assumed that the seniormost levels of ministry leadership—the minister and some senior Ba'athist officials—could be removed and replaced without substantially undermining the work of the ministries. The large civil-service staffs in the ministries would keep running under new leadership. As Condoleezza Rice noted, "The concept was that we would defeat the army, but the institutions would hold, everything from ministries to police forces." On March 10, President Bush and his advisers met to review the plans for postwar Iraq. Frank Miller, chair of the ESG, led the briefing. First, he explained, the United States wanted a firm program of debaathification. There were an estimated 1.5 million members of the party; however, only about 25,000, or the top 1 to 2 percent, were active members. These would be barred from government employment in the new Iraq.

If You Want It Badly...

Several factors probably contributed to this rejection. New administrations are often reluctant to simply pick up where their predecessors left off. Second, Condoleezza Rice entered office espousing a more limited role for the NSC than did some of her predecessors. She cut the staff size, shed some functions, and saw her role primarily as an adviser to the President, rather as the conductor of an interagency orchestra. Finally, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld took his prerogatives for the command and control of U.S. military forces very seriously, informing Rice pointedly on one occasion that she was not part of the chain of command.

Truman

Stylistically, Truman was almost the opposite of Roosevelt. Stephen Hess notes, "Harry S. Truman, a tidy man himself, was offended by Roosevelt's freewheeling style as an administrator." Truman instituted a much more formal model of presidential decisionmaking, though not as formal as that of his successor, Eisenhower. He was much more willing to take personal responsibility for potentially unpopular decisions, famously claiming of his Oval Office desk, "The buck stops here." He was much less comfortable with the type of political contestation for which Roosevelt was known, and he also introduced more collegial elements. Truman's cabinet was a mix of old political allies from Missouri and highly effective administrators. He also had a stable of tremendously experienced military leaders from whom to draw: Douglas McArthur, who governed Japan; Dwight D. Eisenhower, who became Army Chief of Staff and later commanded U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in Europe; Omar Bradley, who succeeded Eisenhower as Chief of Staff and later became the first Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Walter Bedell Smith, who headed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); and George Marshall, who became Secretary of State.

The Optimism and the Reality

That afternoon, President Bush directed acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger to go to the UN and present the U.S. plan for Somalia. The U.S. military mission would be limited to security only, while the UN would be responsible for the more complex task of assisting Somalia in reestablishing a government. The UNSC unanimously passed Resolution 794 on December 3, 1992, which authorized "all necessary means to establish as soon as possible a secure environment for humanitarian relief operations." Neither the United States nor the UN defined a long-term strategy for Somalia, and this lack of guidance would result in contradictory actions on the ground in Somalia. President Bush announced the resolution and U.S. deployment on December 4 and claimed that U.S. troops would be out of Somalia by inauguration day. President-elect Clinton supported Bush's decision on Somalia, but no one believed that U.S. troops would be out of Somalia by the end of January. Chairman Powell had the most realistic assessment: that it would take three to six months to establish safe distribution routes before the UN could take over with a smaller number of U.S. forces.

Broad Goals

The 5,000-strong ISAF began to deploy to Kabul in December. It operated under British national, not UN, control. At this point, neither the United States nor the UN wished to take on the responsibility for securing Afghanistan. The UN felt that the task was too demanding for lightly armed UN peacekeepers. The United States preferred to leave Afghan security to the Afghans, though the country lacked both an army and a police force. The UN confined its activities largely to the political sphere, skillfully overseeing the constitutional processes laid-out in the Bonn accords. For the next 18 months, ISAF, under a succession of national commands, functioned independently of the UN, NATO, and the U.S.-led coalition.

Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations

The Clash of Civilizations is a thesis that people's cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world. The American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington argued that future wars would be fought not between countries, but between cultures. It was proposed in a 1992 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, which was then developed in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article titled "The Clash of Civilizations?", in response to his former student Francis Fukuyama's 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. Huntington offers six explanations for why civilizations will clash: Differences among civilizations are too basic in that civilizations are differentiated from each other by history, language, culture, tradition, and, most importantly, religion. These fundamental differences are the product of centuries and the foundations of different civilizations, meaning they will not be gone soon. The world is becoming a smaller place. As a result, interactions across the world are increasing, which intensify "civilization consciousness" and the awareness of differences between civilizations and commonalities within civilizations. Due to economic modernization and social change, people are separated from longstanding local identities. Instead, religion has replaced this gap, which provides a basis for identity and commitment that transcends national boundaries and unites civilizations. The growth of civilization-consciousness is enhanced by the dual role of the West. On the one hand, the West is at a peak of power. At the same time, a return-to-the-roots phenomenon is occurring among non-Western civilizations. A West at the peak of its power confronts non-Western countries that increasingly have the desire, the will and the resources to shape the world in non-Western ways. Cultural characteristics and differences are less mutable and hence less easily compromised and resolved than political and economic ones. Economic regionalism is increasing. Successful economic regionalism will reinforce civilization-consciousness. Economic regionalism may succeed only when it is rooted in a common civilization.

Francis Fukuyama's End of History and the Last Man (1992)

The End of History and the Last Man (1992) is a book of political philosophy by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama which argues that with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy—which occurred after the Cold War (1945-1991) and the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991)—humanity has reached "not just ... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." For the book, which is an expansion of his essay, "The End of History?" (1989), Fukuyama draws upon the philosophies and ideologies of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, who define human history as a linear progression, from one socioeconomic epoch to another. History should be viewed as an evolutionary process. Events still occur at the end of history. Pessimism about humanity's future is warranted because of humanity's inability to control technology. The end of history means liberal democracy is the final form of government for all nations. There can be no progression from liberal democracy to an alternative system.

"Bomb and Hope"

The NSC and the NSC/PC gathered daily in September and October to discuss the war in Afghanistan and the response to 9/11, but no grand strategy was developed. Secretary of State Colin Powell characterized the effort as developing a response, but not a strategy. Bob Woodward wrote that it was "Powell's worst nightmare—bomb and hope." There was little interest at the highest levels of the U.S. government to get into postwar planning. In response to a question about what the United States would do after the fall of the Taliban, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said at a press conference, I don't think [it] leaves us with a responsibility to try to figure out what kind of government that country ought to have. I don't know people who are smart enough to tell other countries the kind of arrangements they ought to have to govern themselves.

Bush Set the Table

The NSC/DC crafted three policy options for the President, which were presented at a November 25 NSC meeting that included the President, National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, Director of Central Intelligence Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, and Chairman of the JCS General Colin Powell. The three policy options developed by the committee were as follows: Status quo plus: Continue to aid and support an increased UN presence U.S. support to an international coalition: Propose an international coalition under UN command and control with U.S. airlift, sealift, logistic, and communication support. U.S. military mission: Send one or more U.S. divisions of ground troops under U.S. command and control into Somalia to provide security for food distribution. Scowcroft and Cheney advocated the third option, to send in a large contingent of U.S. troops. Powell was not a firm supporter of the third option but recommended against the second option. President Bush chose the third option but wanted UN authorization for the use of force and an increase in the number of UN peacekeepers on the ground. Once security was regained, the UN commander would take responsibility for the operation, including the restoration of a working government in Somalia, with a smaller number of U.S. forces remaining in the country under UN command.

Bush's NSC

The NSC/PC was similar to those of the previous two administrations, consisting of the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (as the chair), the Deputy National Security Advisor, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and the President's Chief of Staff. The Secretary of the Treasury was made a regular member of the NSC/PC. However, the Director of Central Intelligence and the Chair of the JCS moved from being regular members to the NSC/PC to attending when necessary. Both the Vice President's Chief of Staff and National Security Advisor had seats on this committee. Conversely, in the George H. W. Bush administration, the Vice President had no representation on NSC committees, and the Clinton administration had only one representative.

Black Hawk Down and the End

The U.S. desire to move away from capturing Aidid was never transmitted to forces in the field, who, when they joined in the hunt for Aidid, had themselves become targets. On October 3, Aidid's forces in Mogadishu killed 18 U.S. soldiers—an event vividly described in Mark Bowden's book Black Hawk Down and later in a film of the same name. Ambassador Oakley, despite intense efforts, was unable to broker an agreement between the clan leaders and, through his willingness to negotiate with Aidid, alienated the UN. U.S. troops began a phased withdrawal, and all troops were removed before the self-imposed March 31 deadline. Other nations followed suit, and UNOSOM ended on March 31, 1995. While the famine in Somalia was averted, the country still has no central government and remains a chaotic, ungoverned nation wracked by clan warfare—the very epitome of a failed state.

Nation-Building

The United States has attempted at least eight significant nation-building operations over the past 60 years, beginning with the occupations of Germany and Japan at the conclusion of World War II. The next major spate of nation-building came at the end of the Cold War, in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Finally, in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks, the United States has found itself similarly involved in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The post-World War II operations were planned under Franklin D. Roosevelt and carried out under Harry Truman. The first post-Cold War operation was initiated by George H. W. Bush; it and three subsequent missions were conducted under William J. Clinton. Yet, perhaps, no president's foreign policy has been more dominated by nation-building than that of George W. Bush.

Post-World War II Nation-Building: Germany and Japan

The transformation of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan into peaceful, prosperous, vibrant democracies remains to this day the gold standard of nation-building. However, if, prior to 1945, one were to have characterized the United States' postwar plans for Germany and Japan as nation-building, the American public and many key U.S. decisionmakers would have responded with alarm. Faced with the practical problems of governing and feeding millions of Germans and Japanese, and with the threat of further Soviet expansion, U.S. policy shifted over time away from harshly punitive measures and toward the reform, reconstruction, and reintegration of these societies into the Western community.

Important Takeaways

The cases of Germany and Japan show that several factors affect U.S. decisionmaking in nation-building. Organizational process and structure have major effects on outcomes. Likewise, personalities and politics, both domestic and international, had a significant impact on how these missions were crafted and executed. The reality on the ground in the nation to be rebuilt cannot be overemphasized as a driver of the success or failure of a mission—or its relative cost. Yet the fact is that the situations encountered by U.S. nation-builders in Germany and Japan were very different, as were some of the policies that followed, but the results were in both cases were remarkably successful— more successful, in fact, than in any subsequent case.

Lack of Strategy

The coalition was coming apart, and the United States tried to shift emphasis from the Aidid hunt back to a political solution to establish a government in Somalia. On August 8, four U.S. soldiers were killed in Mogadishu when their vehicle was blown up. In response, on September 9, the Senate passed a nonbinding resolution directing President Clinton to report U.S. goals and objectives in Somalia to Congress no later than October 15. Three weeks later, the House of Representatives adopted the same nonbinding resolution.

Hmmm...

The collegial environment that marked the NSC of the first Bush and the Clinton administrations was lacking in the younger Bush's administration. This was due, in part, to the heavyweight set of personalities Bush had recruited to counterbalance his own lack of experience. Besides Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz not only possessed immense executive-branch experience, they were also highly motivated, strong personalities. All were older and more experienced than Condoleezza Rice, whose only government experience had been as a junior NSC staffer a decade earlier.

Collegial

The collegial model, as George notes, "attempts to achieve the essential advantages of each of the other two while avoiding their pitfalls." This model encourages the free exchange of ideas, as in the competitive model, but seeks to foster a cooperative rather than competitive relationship among executive-branch agencies. Lateral communication among these agencies is valued nearly as highly as vertical communication within them (and to the president). Pros and Cons: Advantage: This model encourages the free exchange of ideas, as in the competitive model, but seeks to foster a cooperative rather than competitive relationship among executive-branch agencies. Lateral communication among these agencies is valued nearly as highly as vertical communication within them (and to the president). One problem: The close and cooperative relationship among so many of the president's advisers and agencies is susceptible to what Irving Janis has termed groupthink. This condition is one in which ideas, once formulated by a tightly knit group, become so accepted that they become virtually unchangeable. This model is most associated with the George H. W. Bush administration.

Competitive

The competitive model is, in many ways, the opposite of the formalistic. This model is associated with the creation of overlapping or ambiguous lines of authority among executive-branch agencies, limited communication between agencies and advisers, and a willingness of the president to listen to a wide array of opinions presented in an ad hoc fashion by competing advisers. In some cases, the president will also communicate directly with subordinates several levels of hierarchy lower in executive agencies, e.g., at the under secretary or assistant secretary levels. Pros and Cons: One central advantage: competition among subordinates and agencies can spur superior performance and the generation of new ideas. In effect, decisionmaking is the result of a classic marketplace of ideas. Information will also be less distorted by the bureaucratic process if the president reaches several layers down into the bureaucracy while also cultivating outside advisers—the classic "kitchen cabinet" arrangement. Two drawbacks: first is that it can place major demands on the president's time and intellect, as the president is the principal arbiter of the competition and the integrator of the result. The second is that competition among agencies and advisers can degenerate into outright hostility, leading to strained working relationships among key components of the executive branch and possibly resulting in the active sabotage of decisions after they are made. The archetypal example of this model is the Roosevelt administration's decisionmaking process.

The End of the Cold War

The end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union brought new opportunities for the United States. U.S. power was no longer counterbalanced by that of a peer competitor. Multinational military action to preserve international peace and security became feasible, and the UN Security Council (UNSC) began to function as its founders had intended in mandating such missions. But the demand for such operations grew much more quickly than did the supply of national contingents with which to staff them, and calls on U.S. resources soon exceeded the willingness of the public or Congress to make such commitments.

The Product

The eventual outputs of these two planning efforts were JCS 1067, SWNCC 150,26 and JCS 1380.27 The two JCS directives, in effect, took the policy guidance prepared by the Informal Policy Committee on Germany and the SWNCC and translated them into militarily executable orders with significantly more operational details. When Lieutenant General Lucius Clay arrived in Europe in May 1945 as the newly appointed deputy military governor, he had not yet seen JCS 1067. After he read it, he told Hilldring that "Washington apparently did not have clear idea of what conditions were like in Germany and asked to have the directive revised to make it 'flexible and general.'" Hilldring responded that it was better to have something than nothing and that it had been cleverly drafted by Stimson and hisdeputy McCloy to include loopholes. Similarly, Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) General Douglas MacArthur arrived in Japan having not seen the directive that would govern his actions as the military governor of occupied Japan, as it had not yet been approved by the President. He was given a draft of SWNCC 150 when he arrived in Japan on August 30, 1945, and three weeks later, he received the first half of JCS 1380, governing the general and political facets of the occupation. It was not until October 22 that he received the entire directive, which included economic and financial specifications. While General Clay took great liberties in interpreting and implementing JCS 1067, General MacArthur directed his staff to execute JCS 1380 as it was written, accepting it as his own plan. No one in Japan would have believed that MacArthur himself had not written JCS 1380.

Formalistic

The formalistic model is defined by a heavy reliance on hierarchy and staff analysis. In this model, lower-level analysis conducted within the executive branch and integrated through the National Security Council screens and "digests" information for senior policymakers. This process generates specific options that are presented to the president and cabinet-level advisers. This model attempts to downplay conflict through the extensive staff collaboration required, as many issues of contention will have either been resolved or simply incorporated as trade-offs in the various options generated. Pros and Cons: Two Advantages: a highly structured decisionmaking process tends to ensure that the issues are thoroughly analyzed it conserves the president's and senior advisers' time (always in short supply) by involving them principally in the selection, rather than the generation, of options Two Weaknesses: Such a hierarchic and analysis-intensive process requires quite a lot of time. the very process by which information is processed may distort the information and, therefore, the options presented to the president and senior advisers. This model of decisionmaking is most associated with Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon

The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men...

The implementation of JCS 1067 and JCS 1380, the orders to Eisenhower and MacArthur laying out their instructions for the occupation of Germany and Japan, reflected the very different circumstances on the ground in the two countries. In Germany, military government units took over administration of German territory as a carpet unrolling in the wake of the advancing combat troops. Smaller detachments would be responsible for small towns and cities, and larger, more senior detachments would supervise them and be responsible for the German government at the state level. But that carpet, which began unrolling on September 15, 1944, quickly became very thin. By March, more than 150 military government detachments were deployed in Germany. In many small towns, officers merely posted occupation notices and moved on to the next town. These officers were supposed to control German government officials, not govern, but in many cases, there were no officials or any standing government buildings or services. Denazification policies meant that some Germans with the ability and experience to govern were removed.

Implementation

The lack of an integrated civil-military and interagency plan for the postwar phase left the military on the ground in Iraq with primary responsibility for many missions for which it was not well prepared. The 3rd Infantry Division's after-action report describes the situation it experienced upon arriving in Baghdad in April 2003: There was no guidance for restoring order in Baghdad, creating an interim government, hiring government and essential services employees, and ensuring that the judicial system was operational. The result was a power/authority vacuum created by our failure to immediately replace key government institutions. . . . The President announced that our national goal was "regime change." Yet there was no timely plan prepared for the obvious consequences of a regime change.

Mission Creep Aversion

The military incorrectly expected the civilian development experts to be on the ground immediately after the deployment of U.S. troops and money to start flowing in for development projects. Neither expectation was fulfilled. While there were a significant number of official U.S. and international civilians on the ground in Haiti when the military arrived—many international organizations had been operating there for some time and the U.S. embassy remained open throughout the crisis—it took additional time to expand the civilian presence, deploy international police, and initiate significant development projects.

Administrative and Policy Differences: Two Different Situations, or Two Different Implementations?

The pace of implementation was different in Germany and Japan. While the German occupation was accused of foot-dragging, from the beginning in Japan, orders flowed quickly from the SCAP. In Germany, the allied military forces had to be redistributed from the areas that they had taken during combat operations and the zones that had been agreed upon at Yalta; it took nearly two months before the redistribution was completed and SHAEF, the combined command, was dissolved and replaced by U.S. Forces European Theater (USFET) and comparable British and French commands. The occupation in Japan did not have the same level of chaos and was able to make faster progress. In fact, MacArthur was moving so quickly that he got ahead of Washington at one point, announcing on September 17, 1945, that, since the Japanese government had been so helpful to the occupation, the U.S. military could reduce its presence from 500,000 to 200,000 troops in less than six months. Unfortunately, MacArthur had not cleared his estimate with anyone in Washington, and the JCS, DOS, and the White House were angry. All future comments on troop reductions had to be cleared through Washington.

Alexander George

The personal approach of individual presidents to decisionmaking is also critically important to the end results. In Presidential Decisionmaking in Foreign Policy, Alexander George presents three "ideal" presidential approaches to decisionmaking, derived from earlier work by Richard Johnson: the formalistic the competitive the collegial

The Personalities Surrounding a President

The personalities surrounding a president, both in cabinet-level agencies and among White House staff, also affect decisionmaking. Over time, considerable influence has shifted from the cabinet to the White House staff, but powerful cabinet secretaries can nonetheless have significant influence over decisionmaking. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, for example, held considerable sway in presidential decisionmaking concerning almost all aspects of national security—from the deployment of nuclear forces to the Vietnam War. Similarly, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and his National Security Council (NSC) staff also profoundly affected presidential decisionmaking.

Lit Review

The president is both constitutionally and empirically the prime mover of U.S. foreign policy. Executive-branch decisionmaking structure and process has, accordingly, been subjected to considerable scrutiny. For the purposes of this study, two intellectual frameworks were particularly instructive: Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow's governmental politics model of decisionmaking and Alexander George's work on presidential decisionmaking.

Japan

The recommendations for Japan were similar in many respects. The committee prepared position papers on six topics: occupational government, disarmament, internal political problems, disposition of Japanese territory, economic issues, and Japan's role in regional and international security organizations. Welles saw the importance of strong commercial ties with Japan. The committee called for unconditional surrender and for Japan to be stripped of most of its empire, occupied by allied troops, and demilitarized. Japan would then be integrated into the world economy, and its economic viability would be guaranteed through free trade. War Department planning for the postwar period began in earnest when the Civil Affairs Division was established under the leadership of Major General John H. Hilldring on May 4, 1943.

3 Categories of Decisionmaking

The resultant approaches to decisionmaking are categorized by reference to certain archetypal modes, including the formalistic, the competitive, and the collegial. The first approach, often associated with Dwight D. Eisenhower, emphasizes order and hierarchy. The second, epitomized by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, seeks wisdom through the clash of ideas among competing subordinates. The third, identified with George H. W. Bush, encourages greater cooperation among presidential advisers. As these examples suggest, all three models can yield excellent results. They can also, as will become evident, produce quite unsatisfactory outcomes. This monograph examines successful and unsuccessful approaches to decisionmaking in the field of nation-building, with a view to identifying those combinations of style, process, and structure that seem to have worked best.

Prevention Federal Interagency Operational Plan Core Capabilities

The seven Prevention core capabilities are: Planning Public Information and Warning Operational Coordination Forensics and Attribution Intelligence and Information Sharing Interdiction and Disruption Screening, Search, and Detection

Perhaps Most Importantly...

The success of the German and Japanese occupations had much to do with the fact that both countries had been: devastatingly defeated, both governments had surrendered, both economies were highly advanced, and both societies were ethnically homogeneous (in the German case, due in part to Nazi genocide and the large-scale population transfers that accompanied the war's end). Few of these conditions would be met in subsequent U.S. endeavors to reform and rebuild war-torn societies.

Presidents Give a Spin

These three models provide a starting point for the examination and comparison of how presidents structure their decisionmaking processes. However, each president is unique, so the characteristics of an individual president are also critically important. In practice, each president's personality produces a decisionmaking structure that falls somewhere among the archetypes. Harry Truman, for example, was much more formalistic than was his predecessor, Roosevelt, but much less so than his successor, Eisenhower. George H. W. Bush fell somewhere between the formalistic and the collegial models, while Clinton was more a combination of competitive and collegial.

...That's How You'll Get it.

This military chain of command formally runs from the President to the Secretary of Defense to the theater military commanders. It thus also bypasses the Chair of the JCS, despite that officer's nominal role as the President's senior military adviser. In practice, however, the national security adviser and staff had inserted themselves into the process of directing U.S. military operations in several ways during the previous several decades, becoming the core of what Pentagon documents describe, somewhat vaguely, as the "national command authority." In successfully suppressing NSPD XX, Rumsfeld sought to restrict such involvement and minimize oversight of DoD activities by White House staffers. Five years into the Bush administration, in December of 2005, NSPD 44, Management of Interagency Efforts Concerning Reconstruction and Stabilization, was signed.

The Buck Stopped...Where?

This team proved to be difficult to orchestrate, as many participants would simply act unilaterally when so inclined. President Bush conceived of himself as a strong manager, but it would have required considerable effort and great familiarity with the details of policy and the ways of the federal bureaucracy to personally monitor and control the activity of his subordinates. The President failed to make that effort, and he did not empower his staff to do so on his behalf. As a result, according to one observer, his "National Security Council was a system that assumed senior officials would cooperate and share information with their counterparts and which rarely cracked down when they did not."

It Wasn't at the Forefront, But it was There

Through most of the war, although he allowed occupation planning to go forward, Roosevelt did not want to spend his time on the subject. First, he felt that winning the war was more urgent than planning for the peace. Second, he felt that any planning for the occupation would have to be changed, because it would not reflect the realities that would exist at the end of hostilities. Roosevelt told Hull, his Secretary of State, "I dislike making detailed plans for a country we do not yet occupy." Finally, by deferring any decisions on the occupation, he was able to "keep the ultimate power of decision in his own hands."

Structure and Processes

To understand that, it is necessary to examine the structure and processes in President Roosevelt's administration; postwar planning efforts at the U.S. Department of State (DOS), the Department of War, and the Department of the Treasury and the interagency structures that brought those efforts together; the role of allied summits and coordinating agencies in the postwar planning; the implementation of postwar plans through U.S. military governance in both Germany and Japan, including the flow of information from the theater to Washington and subsequent direction from Washington to the theater; and the transition from occupation to the integration of Germany and Japan into the international establishment.

Bosnia and Kosovo

When it came time to plan the Kosovo intervention, the Clinton administration had largely abandoned its post- Somalia fixation on limiting "mission creep," establishing exit strategies, and setting departure deadlines. The UNSC resolution that set up the Kosovo mission made clear that the NATO military would assume responsibility for policing and public order until the UN could deploy enough international civilian police to assume these functions. The mandates for the NATO and UN missions were open ended and remain in effect more than eight years later. Perhaps the most important lesson drawn by the Clinton administration from these experiences was the need for integrated political-military planning, developed through interagency coordination, which would be the keystone of a comprehensive U.S. response. By the time the United States was gearing up for intervention in Kosovo, key players recognized that policy development and detailed interagency planning did not equate to a case of the chicken or the egg. Each process informed the other, and policy development and interagency planning were undertaken as iterative, with several plans drafted to adjust to changing U.S. policies and realities on the ground.

A Formal Framework

U.S. Policy on Reforming Multilateral Peace Operations, was signed by the President after extensive consultations with members of Congress. PDD 25 laid out the following framework to both improve peacekeeping operations and assist U.S. decisionmaking in support of those operations: Support the right operations: Ensure that UN operations that the United States supports or in which it participates meet stringent criteria, including by determining whether the mission is in the United States' interest, whether there is a threat to international peace and security, whether there is a clear mandate, and whether there is a clear objective. Reduce costs: Reduce both the overall cost of UN peacekeeping missions and the U.S. share of those costs. Improve UN capabilities: Improve UN capabilities through enhanced planning, logistics, command and control, public affairs, intelligence, and policing. Clarify policy on command and control of U.S. forces: There should be no change in the previous policy that retains U.S. command of military forces but allows operational control to be shifted to international commanders. Improve U.S. management of peacekeeping operations: DOS and DoD should share responsibility, both policy-wise and financially, for peacekeeping operations. Improve cooperation with Congress: Improve the flow of information and consultation between Congress and the executive branch. For the first time, the United States had a formal framework for approaching the support of and participation in UN peacekeeping operations.

Military Efficiency

USCENTCOM envisaged, following the fall of Baghdad and end of major combat operations, an initial two- to three-month "stabilization" phase, followed by an 18- to 24-month "recovery" phase, during which most U.S. forces would be withdrawn. The intention of these phase IV operations was to make maximum use of Iraqi resources, including the army and police. Indigenous security forces would gradually take over from the United States.

Parameters of Presidents

Whereas Allison and Zelikow emphasize bottom-up influences on the decisionmaking process, George identifies three parameters of presidential personality that affect how a president will structure decisionmaking. The first is cognitive style, which includes mental construct about how the world works, how the individual prefers to receiv information (e.g., written versus oral, formal briefing versus informa conversation), and how much information he or she needs about a subject before being willing to make a decision. The second is a sense of efficacy: an individual's competency in decisionmaking and management tasks. Some presidents, for example, feel very competent "in the weeds" of policy, while others feel less so. The third parameter is orientation toward conflict, both political and interpersonal. Presidents who are very comfortable with partisan politics and personal clashes tend to structure their decisionmaking process very differently from those who shy away from conflict of this sort.

The Easy Path

With the installation of a new Afghan administration, the United States had no formal responsibility for governing Afghanistan but was given great leeway by the fledgling government to carry out military operations throughout the country, hunting the remnants of the Taliban and al Qaeda. With the U.S. focus largely on hunting terrorists, scant U.S. resources were unavailable for other priorities. The first U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Robert Finn, lacked the personnel and facilities to meet Washington's demands on the embassy. In Washington, DOS led the interagency coordination process, but President Bush appointed Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-born American on the NSC, as his personal envoy. As a White House-based official, Khalilzad operated largely independently of DOS. Nor was DOS in any position to oversee DoD activities, something that could be done only from the White House, which was not so inclined.

Douglas Feith, or Why the Military Isn't "The End All-Be All"

Within DoD, Rumsfeld assigned the job of postwar planning to Douglas Feith, his Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. Feith was given the goal of bringing about "unity of effort and unity of leadership for the full range of reconstruction activities that need to be performed in order to say that the mission is over and the troops can leave." Feith himself was known more as an articulate advocate and tenacious bureaucrat than as an administrator. His staff, in any case, had no experience and very little of the capacity needed to organize and run a massive operation of this sort. In response to the allegedly poor work of Feith's Office of Special Plans, General Tommy Franks, who led both the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the Iraq War called Feith "the dumbest f****** guy on the planet".