• Humanitarian disasters will continue to spur United States involvement in relief operations.

• According to the Pentagon, the increased demand for US military intervention in humanitarian crises is burdening the forces with excessive tempo of operations [OPTEMPO].

• Troops are, in any case, ill-suited to humanitarian operations, and their participation can be counterproductive in situations that so seldom have military solutions.

• The United States Coast Guard provides an ideal conceptual model for a civilian crisis relief corps with the same logistical capability as the Army that could be more effective than troops in crisis relief operations, at less cost.

• A civilian crisis intervention corps would provide a practical supplement to United Nations and non-governmental organizations [NGOs] which are the mainstays in humanitarian disaster relief.

• Sufficient security for civilians could be furnished by subordinate units of military police or light infantry temporarily assigned to guard relief workers as needed.

• The equipment, trained people, infrastructure and overseas funding, as well as an existing government agency to oversee the project, are all readily available to create a civilian organization to intervene in humanitarian catastrophes.

Getting the Military Out of Humanitarian Relief

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The US has been, in effect, using a hammer to pull screws. We have talked endlessly about making that military "hammer" lighter and more adaptable. But, what we need to do is drop the "hammer" and build a "screw driver" to really do the job properly. That means assembling a civilian organization to carry out the non- combat role for the ground forces just as the Coast Guard performs the US Navy's noncombat mission around this nation's coastlines.

SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM

There is a broad consensus that minor ethnic and nationalist conflicts will continue to precipitate humanitarian disasters in the years ahead. The US Mission to the UN has released a study which estimates that 36.2 million people are at risk of malnutrition or starvation in 1997. Even if these estimates are overstated by half, they still portend a great deal of global disorder.

Unless we develop some uncharacteristic callousness toward the plight of those beset by misfortune, the US will continue to become involved in the tragic consequences of this disorder. And, unless there is a dramatic change in US foreign policy, we can expect to see continued use of the military as the operational arm of our interventions. As we have seen from recent experience, this is a policy replete with pitfalls.

"Military Readiness 1997" A report for the House Committee on National Security.

LIMITATIONS OF THE MILITARY

Not only have some military relief interventions failed, like the fiasco in Mogadishu, but also the Army and Air Force have suffered from over-commitment to these types of operations. The recent increases in what the Pentagon calls its "operational tempo" (OPTEMPO) have imposed undue burdens on active duty forces. The Army claims that the average time away from "home station" and family of 138 days each year is excessive and damages readiness. The number of troops deployed to foreign areas other than Germany, South Korea and Panama has doubled in the last decade. Army officials are concerned that "...we may have reached the limit on how small the Army can be and still credibly accomplish assigned missions."

It is doubly disturbing that this situation is being used to inflate military budgets. OPTEMPO figures and readiness problems are routinely cited by the Pentagon to justify keeping more forces than America needs in the post Cold War world. It is pointless to use humanitarian relief missions, which no combat unit was ever designed to execute, to justify keeping unsuitable and costly fighting forces. This "doublespeak" is clearly the best evidence yet for finding a substitute for combat forces.

Even if the US military could sustain the increased tempo of operations, the forces are ill-suited for crisis relief. Humanitarian assistance or peacekeeping missions put them in a double bind. They can be neither too "hard" nor too "soft." If the troops maintain the hard edge necessary to victory in real combat they risk exacerbating the emergency they came to resolve. If the officers enforce moderation and accommodation they risk losing the pugnacity that will, in every case, save lives on a battlefield. Thousands of years of experience in countless bloody battles have taught the modern army leader that a certain aggressiveness --propelled by a confrontational urge to accept nothing but instantaneous compliance -- is required just to survive. Aggressiveness in interpersonal relations combined with a ruthless refusal to tolerate opposition of any kind is inculcated in soldiers because it breeds success in war. General Douglas MacArthur's maxim that, "There is no substitute for victory," lies at the core of this unyielding standard.

In the aftermath of the humanitarian intervention in Haiti, US generals are already expressing reservations about the overly cautious mind set that may have taken hold amongst combat leaders in that setting. There is the ever present concern that young warriors will become what one author calls a "passive deterrent."

Not only are troops out of place in humanitarian disasters but they are much too expensive for the job. Every active military person costs the taxpayer an average of $160,000 per year. By comparison the average cost per Coast Guard position is only $100,000 per year. This agency of the US Department of Transportation has all the logistic wherewithal of a navy. However, because the Coast Guard performs only noncombat roles, it costs only 60% as much. In other words, that 160-thousand-dollar- soldier we might send to the next crisis like Somalia carries with him or her the unnecessary baggage of the enormous costs of such things as nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers and high technology research for weapons of the future. Why not send a 100-thousand- dollar-noncombatant who has all the necessary equipment, training and organization to resolve the emergency just as effectively or perhaps more so? Replacing combat troops with civilians would provide jobs. It could even preserve existing jobs by keeping military bases open for this kind of civilian use.

Billions of dollars are being spent on humanitarian relief in increments of hundreds of millions of dollars by other national governments, UN agencies, nongovernmental organizations [NGOs] and even regional organizations like the European Union [EU]. The EU's contributions quadrupled in 1991 to $900 million while the number of NGOs increased from around 9,000 organizations in 1981 to more than 16,000 in 1990. According to the US Mission to the UN, the total "global emergency aid" for 1995 was $7.1 Billion including $2 Billion from private sources.

Considering the mixed results produced by military interventions, perhaps it is worth considering that these hundreds of millions of dollars might be better spent creating jobs for American civilians in a civilian crisis intervention corps. Such federal employees would not actually become a burden on US tax payers to the extent their operations would be offset by the funds already being spent on international humanitarian activities by organizations like the EU.

The US government need not create an entirely new bureaucracy to incorporate such an operational arm. The Peace Corps already directs operations in over 90 countries around the world and has 16 area recruiting centers in the US. It would be well suited to oversee a crisis relief corps which could be incorporated into the Peace Corps just as the Coast Guard has been merged into the Department of Transportation.

In fact, the rapid creation of a completely civilian organization to intervene overseas -- for humanitarian purposes -- is entirely feasible. While the existing precedent of the US Coast Guard provides a theoretical prototype, the US Army's division support command provides a realistic, practical framework. The Coast Guard, and its early predecessors the Revenue Cutter Service and the US Life-Saving Service, executed the quasi civilian, maritime auxiliary missions of a navy so well that the US Navy has never performed a non-combat role in its entire history. The support commands are the components of an army that make it so completely self-sustaining. Those service support units provide the "logistic wherewithal" that allow troops to operate in isolated areas independent of normal urban services such as water, gasoline, electricity, shelter, hospitals and repair yards. These are precisely the services most needed to support effective humanitarian relief operations.

Using these two models, it is a reasonably straightforward undertaking to design a civilian crisis intervention corps. A body of 3500 to 5000 people could be divided into three functionally related groups of 1000 to 2000 positions. Those groups, in turn, could coordinate the activities of smaller 100 person operational elements which actually do the work. For administration and training, elements such as transport, aviation and maintenance would be assembled in a logistics group while civil affairs teams, translators and medical personnel would be grouped together under the heading of indigenous relations. In the field, these functionally related groupings would cross-assign operational elements to work together in geographical groupings, so that translators, communications teams, engineers and helicopter crews, for instance, could work together on a single project in a given locale. A designated area of responsibility would contain the necessary logistics, engineering, indigenous relations expertise and resources to do the task at hand and support the unit itself.

The heavy equipment used by these operational elements is the key feature distinguishing this organization from the humanitarian agencies now in the field. Engineering earthmoving machinery, heavy-lift helicopters, off-road four-wheel drive vehicles, wreckers, mobile bakeries and water and fuel tankers would be permanently assigned to operational elements in the numbers now present only in military units. In addition, each coordinating group would have its own repair capability, electricity, in-house medical and dental care, independent food service, temporary and semipermanent shelter and intra-organizational radio and wire communications.

Although the NGOs are the mainstays of crisis relief, their relief network has significant shortcomings. The inability to stop organized violence is only the most obvious. While most leading NGOs get to the scene of a disaster first, it takes them some additional time to get operations up to speed. These private sector groups must contract for material resources and services as well as comply with customs, fees, licenses, etc. for basics like transportation. NGOs rely heavily on volunteers and train many workers on-the-job. Large projects requiring engineering expertise and heavy equipment take even longer to arrange in the private sector.

These gaps in the relief network's capabilities are the principal factors that have led the US and other nations to intervene with combat forces. In addition to addressing some obvious security needs, the intervening armed forces bring with them ready-made, portable infrastructure, trained personnel, and the whole panoply of logistic advantages that make it possible for them to be fully capable almost immediately upon arrival. In most cases these advantages have permitted the "Johnny-come- lately" troops to dominate the crisis situations despite the military's inherent ineptitude in the truly humanitarian aspects of crisis relief.

A civilian crisis intervention corps with all the logistic wherewithal of an Army division neatly fills the gaps in NGO capabilities. Such a corps could probably be deployed without the time consuming political haggling that surrounds most military interventions. There would be just as few political obstacles to its timely departure. Thus, a civilian relief organization could land on the scene with the full operational capability of a military unit but minus the latter's often excruciatingly delayed arrival time.

The notion of a self-sustaining civilian corps has great merit on a number of other levels. In addition to being at least 30% less costly, it would be less threatening to distressed nations and much more compatible with United Nations' multilateral efforts.

Unarmed civilians dispersed to a number of locales such as bridge building sites, hospitals, warehouse districts, ports, and airfields have much less adverse impact on the national pride and self-esteem of the indigenous population than uniformed, armed troops. Under these circumstances the indigenous government would receive a great deal of assistance with very little threat to its legitimacy. The presence of civilians does more to allow local governments to take credit for the work being done on behalf of the people.

Those who might be concerned about troops conscientiously following the directions of civilian chiefs should consider that there is already ample precedent for civilians to evaluate military performance in the Pentagon and on the National Security Council. Those official reports can become as decisive in an officer's subsequent promotion potential as any others. The security detachment for a crisis relief operation should be commanded mostly by lieutenant colonels and majors who would be junior in age and equivalent rank to the crisis intervention corps' director and deputies.

Because of the overemphasis on combat forces in past crises, the usefulness of large units of military police has not been fully explored. More heavily armed than civilian police, they are trained in population control and inclined toward prevention of violence rather than participation in it. The record so far clearly indicates that the US infantry heavy weapons, artillery and attack helicopters were not essential to the relief of the situations in Haiti, Somalia and Rwanda. Furthermore, subordination of these service support police units to a civilian authority would not be nearly so controversial as with combat units.

Of course, neither the use of military police nor the subordination of combat troops to civilians would apply to humanitarian crises in the midst of active wars. Particularly in civil wars like Bosnia before 1996, when conventional full time warfare was underway, combat forces may be the only recourse other than the traditional Red Cross functions. However, humanitarian crises frequently emerge in the aftermath of the actual fighting. These are situations where the armed intervention forces need to be replaced by civilians. Too often the military linger too long and hamper the recovery.

The educated and trained people to operate this large inventory of machinery and to interact effectively with a population in crisis would also be readily available. In the last decade military personnel strength has been reduced by approximately 600,000. A large percentage of those leaving the military service support units would be ideal candidates. If only 1% were eligible, available and interested that would still be enough personnel for two emergency relief corps. The significant number of men and women who will be leaving agencies which are continually under the Congressional budget ax, such as the Agency for International Development [AID], the US Information Agency [USIA] and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency [ACDA] would also provide fertile fields for recruitment. If the benefits and retirement annuities that these displaced workers accrued in government service were made transferable, recruitment might well produce still more candidates.

Even real estate and home base infrastructure would be available for similar reasons. There are 97 US military bases already closed or slated for closure and many more smaller facilities that could be available for civilian uses. The proposed civilian crisis relief organization would fit neatly into facilities on most of these bases. Structures such as airfields, maintenance bays, office buildings, barracks, and hospitals will be left behind by demobilized Army, Air Force and Navy units. Such facilities at locations near rail heads and seaports would be ideal permanent stations for each crisis relief corps when it was in the US preparing for service overseas. Some dislocations and job losses that are currently slated to occur because of base closing could be avoided.

If the United States intends to retain its position as a leader in the world community, we must devise effective ways to contain the planet's most recurrent problems. Since humanitarian emergencies are the most intractable of these, we either should do it right, as the saying goes, or we should not do it at all. Doing nothing means sitting in front of CNN watching the horrors of starvation and violence unfold before our eyes night after night. Doing it right means laying down the military hammer we have been using to drive screws and picking up the right tool. The rising chaos amongst crisis stricken populations calls for a new division of labor to replace the Jerry-rigged contraption we now use to assist in humanitarian crises. The enormity of the problem demands the creation of a specialized agency to supplant the under equipped civilian agencies now in the field and to replace the ill-suited, expensive troops who are not trained to do it correctly. Not only would we avoid high military costs, but also we could create new civilian jobs.

LGEN Hughes in congressional testimony earlier this year stated that "From a national security standpoint, the threats facing the United States have diminished in order of magnitude, and we are unlikely to face a global military challenge on the scale of the former Soviet Union for at least the next two decades." He then went on to identify a number of threats which we may have to counter, ironically the application of massive military force such as we have today would not be a suitable strategy. Interestingly one of the threats he did identify was "intra-state conflicts that produce huge refugee flows and humanitarian relief needs." A third world "youth bulge" is anticipated and as it develops these young people will cause civil strife, religious and ethnic violence resulting in national instability if their demands for education, clean water, better health care and improved quality of life are not met by their respective governments. The U.S. should be prepared to cooperate with third world countries in dealing with this kind of threat, but the answer is not U.S. military intervention.