U.S. military officials do not hope that a new volunteer force will help them win wars. They hope it will prevent wars from starting in the first place.

The Civilian Response Corps, a body of U.S. government employees with vital professional skills, deploys to troubled parts of the world to consult local officials and help develop sagging infrastructures. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice hails the new corps as a means to a more peaceful future.

“In a world as increasingly interconnected as ours, the international state system is only as strong as its weakest links,” Rice says. “We cannot afford another situation like the one that emerged in 2001 in Afghanistan.”

Corps members are now serving in Afghanistan as well as Chad, Iraq, Haiti, Kosovo, Lebanon, and Sudan.

Rice argues that achieving lasting stability in zones that had experienced violence was a job that the military could not do alone; civilian experts have an important role to play.

The corps includes 250 active members who would deploy within 48 hours to the scenes of crises and 2,000 standby members who would be called up as needed. All members hold permanent jobs in other government agencies as doctors, lawyers, engineers, agronomists, police officers, public administrators, and other important roles.

Rice has consistently opposed missions in which military personnel take responsibility for peacekeeping and stabilization. During the 2000 presidential campaign, she sparked fierce denunciations in Europe when she said that then-candidate George W. Bush would remove U.S. troops from Kosovo because, as quoted by Agence France-Presse, “We don’t need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten.” She added that “extended peacekeeping detracts from our readiness for global missions.”

But by 2006, chaos in post-Saddam Iraq convinced General John Abizaid, commander of U.S. Central Command, that combat operations would never succeed without good peacekeeping.

“We need significantly more non-military personnel … with expertise in areas such as economic development, civil affairs, agriculture, and law,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates reiterated the call to Congress for civilian help in a November 2007 speech that expressly asked for a cadre of civilians that would help secure peace.

“We must focus our energies beyond the guns and steel of the military,” he said, adding that he was “for strengthening our capacity to use ‘soft power’ and for better integrating it with ‘hard power.’”

Congress unanimously approved the new corps and gave it a $248 million budget for the 2008 fiscal year.

Ann Vaughan of the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker organization that lobbied for the new corps, sees it as a sound investment.

“This legislation is a critical first step toward changing the way the U.S. engages the world,” she says. — Rick Docksai

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Government

November-December 2008 Vol. 42, No. 6

Civilian Peacekeepers

A new U.S. operation hopes to stop wars before they happen.