Regional Reorganization

    I'd like to expand a bit on something Russ brought up in the comments here: organizing our international affairs apparatus by task or region rather than dividing it by function such as diplomacy, security, intelligence, and development.

    Such structures would have several advantages. Regional focus allows for regional expertise, in other words, Information Access Superiority, both because of the greater concentration of specific knowledge, experience, and resources, and because it will be easier and hence faster to communicate relevant information. Focusing on tasks and areas also encourages long term intelligence, for example Human Network Operations both covert, like penetrating an extremist cell, or overt, such as building business partnerships over many years. Our lack of such consistent and established intelligence has been a great burden in current conflicts. But perhaps most importantly, it would recognize and address how most of the problems we face do not have a simple, one-discipline solution.

    Take, for example, the lawless pirate and extremist safe haven of Somalia. Is the problem economic, resulting from the abject poverty and lack of jobs, political, born of fragmented governments, corruption, and a hollow state, or military, caused by marauding warlords and strongmen, criminals and child soldiers? Further, how do you solve this problem? It's too dangerous to develop the area but without a government, revenue, and opportunities, no militarily imposed calm will stick. Progress in Somalia would take the combined effort of currently separate organizations such as USAID, the State Department, CIA, DoD, and many others.

    While such structures seem radical, this is already  considered standard practice in law enforcement, outlined in Sid Heal's primer Sound Doctrine. Sociologists refer to temporary "self-evolving" organizations such as those  used in law enforcement to deal with a crisis (and Somalia, Pakistan, Mexico et al. can certainly be considered crises) as Emerging Multi-Organizational Networks or EMONs. An example would be a hostage situation where the Department of Transportation closes off the premises, the police surround the building, and intelligence is brought in from the state and FBI on the suspects while a negotiator tries to make a deal, a sniper across the street takes aim, and a SWAT team prepares to storm the compound if anything goes wrong.

    Self-evolving means that they essentially will form on their own, though they will be influenced by conscious efforts. Even now, returning to the Somalia example, the organizations listed above must cooperate whenever we want progress in the region. By necessity they form an EMON, but have to face red tape, mistrust, poor communication, and no shared leadership or mission. A formalized Somalia or East Africa Bureau would, on the other hand, have a joint, precise mission and the tools to achieve it. It could send troops to secure an enclave, use aid to build a factory then issue loans and consultants to make sure it takes off. Regional experts would advise the entire operation and identify the obstacles, and, here's the cool part, by doing all this, perform HNO to gain intimate knowledge of local life and community members and soak up gossip, news, and intel. They would need assets in place for years, so if something else comes up in a decade, we would be ready for it.

    Would such an approach be feasible, or are we dreaming? What are the advantages and disadvantages of such an approach?

Alex Olesker

Comments

[Andrew@InsurgentC]

Alex, great post. EMONs are definitely feasible and advantageous given the complexities of the 21st century global security environment.

One possible disadvantage, however, stems from the fact that borders/regions mean less and less these days. The irrelevance of national borders has been discussed ad nauseum (at least on this blog) and I'm worried that too much focus on regional specialization may ignore the fundamentals of globalization. Do transnational threats demand truly transnational responses?

How will the EMON from, say, West Africa, "self-evolve" to communicate effectively/coordinate operations with the EMON from the Levant? I'm not saying it's impossible. Transnational coordination among multiple EMONS is certainly possible given that EMONs form largely on the their own (and it also works similarly across multiple jurisdictions in law enforcement). Will EMONs inherently reflect the transnational nature of the entities they are tasked with monitoring/targeting/destroying?

[Alex Olesker]

I was wondering a little about this myself. I see three approaches here. I mostly focused on a regional focus, which made sense to me as it exploits area expertise, but suffers from the balloon effect- concentrating on one area will just cause criminals and insurgents to move elsewhere.

Task focused, for example, eliminating the Taliban on AQ doesn't suffer from this problem, but, in the case of al Qaeda, for example, this can be broad. The expertise needed to deal with al Qaeda in Pakistan is likely quite different from that needed for AQIM in Algeria. Programs imposed, such as economic or political interventions, are also generally geographically based.

Law enforcement generally uses a crisis driven approach, but for international peacekeeping, the War on Terror, and other such agendas, such a reactive approach seems risky. The goal here is not only to deal with current crises, but also prevent future ones.

Perhaps a mix and match approach, depending on the problem at hand?

[russ greene]

I think we've stumbled upon a persistent problem with organization design, and even categorization in general. To build a foreign policy apparatus, you need to draw lines that divide different organizations on the basis of function, region, task, or whatever.

Problem is, the categories we create are just human constructs. They are simplifications of reality, and not reality itself. By creating new categories, we will not be freeing ourselves from this dilemma, but rather merely changing the dilemma's practical effects. Instead of difficulty of coordinating between intelligence and military, or diplomacy and military, we would find difficulty coordinating between East and West Africa, or Latin America and Middle East (or between the Hezbollah-focused organization and the Al Qaeda-focused one).

It seems that increased coordination and communication across category lines is the only true solution to this problem. This conclusion is not new, however. Off the top of my head, the 9/11 Report concluded the exact same thing, as did the new COIN field manual. And yet, has the problem improved much, if at all?