Empowering citizens Engaging governments Rebuilding communities

“Stabilization and reconstruction missions occur in a range
of circumstances—sometimes in hostile security environments,
sometimes in permissive ones, and sometimes in
environments somewhere in between. The mission to stabilize
and reconstruct a nation is one that civilians must lead.”
— John Negroponte
Following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks
and subsequent US military operations in Afghanistan
and Iraq, traditional relief and development programs,
historically the province of a small group of civilian
and voluntary agencies, expanded dramatically in
scale and scope, touching nearly every government
department, including the US military. Whereas the
primary focus of assistance operations generally had
been centered on providing humanitarian aid, rebuilding
services, and enhancing civil society, the evolving
efforts reached beyond basic relief measures, aiming
to stabilize and rebuild populations during a period of
conflict and, in some instances, while military operations
were ongoing.
At the same time that the US government was expanding
into stabilization operations, American military
leadership, informed by the ongoing wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, was recognizing its own need—and current
structural limitations—in these areas. In 2006, the US
Army and Marine Corps released a new field manual
covering counterinsurgency operations, the first time
in more than two decades that either had addressed
counterinsurgency (COIN) exclusively in a manual. The
primary purpose of the document was to lay out a
blueprint for the military’s approach to a more contemporary
form of warfare, an approach that General David
Petraeus, one of the manual’s chief authors, recognized
as inextricably tied to nonmilitary resources.
A counterinsurgency campaign, Petraeus wrote,
requires soldiers and marines “to employ a mix of
familiar combat tasks and skills more often associated
with nonmilitary agencies” and to be prepared
for “extensive coordination and cooperation with many
intergovernmental, host-nation, and international agencies.”
The second chapter of the manual is devoted
to integrating civilian and military activities, beginning
with a kind of acquiescence to the limits of industrial
might in unstable environments. Military efforts are
necessary to fight insurgents, the manual states, but
they are only effective when integrated into a larger
strategy intended to meet the needs of the local
population and win community support.
Testifying before Congress in 2008, John Negroponte,
the US ambassador to Iraq (2004–05), noted there
had been 17 “significant” stabilization and reconstruction
missions over the preceding 20 years in which
“too much of the effort was borne by our men and
women in uniform.” Negroponte was lobbying for
State Department funding for what would become
the Civilian Response Corps, but the message was
clear—despite greater need, neither the military
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