Recognizing the increased relevance of civilian as
well as military expertise, Ammerman identified the
Army Reserve’s Public-Private Partnership Initiative
(P3I) and “informal networks” among his top priorities. P3I provides a means for private sector resources
and Reserve manpower to combine. As Ammerman
mentioned, U.S. Army Reserve training exercises are
already engaging the private sector. Irizarry noted the
establishment of Army Reserve Engagement Cells at
the Combatant Commands, to leverage the Reserve
Component more deliberately and continuously with
Active Component commands.
Lt. Col. Simon, the current director of the USMC
Civil-military operations School, focused primarily on
Civil Information Management (CIM), or more precisely, on MARCIM – the U.S. Marine Corps semantic
wiki for assessment and analysis. MARCIM enables
mobile data collection, and a site for data sharing and
collaboration. The system enables decision support
with visualization (maps, graphs and timelines) and
link analysis. That two of the three papers selected as
finalists in the CA Association essay competition are
on the topic of CIM underscores its importance. But
those papers focus on CIM, in part, because it has yet
to settle upon a working system that truly delivers.
Irizarry also emphasized civil reconnaissance and CA
as “scouts of the civil domain.” He argued for development of a standardized concept, lexicon, and handson training. Writ large, it would be more appropriate
to think about “threat” rather than “enemy” because
often the concern for CA is a non-human foe such
as pestilence or illiteracy. The environment must be
framed “beyond time and space.” (Some added that
what Irizarry may really mean here is the difference
between “threats” and “drivers of conflict,” a term
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