The Fate of the Civilian Surge in a Changing Environment | Page 19

foreign policy objective, called “Peace and Security,”
encompassing civilian agencies’ diplomatic and development efforts to counter national security threats.
Ironically, as R&S has fallen out of fashion in the foreign policy realm, its decline coincides with the emergence of a new generation of interagency coordination
efforts reflecting other Peace and Security concerns,
such as countering violent extremism (CVE), transnational organized crime, atrocities prevention, and
security sector assistance. Officials in the DOD, the
DOS and USAID noted these new focus areas overlap
considerably with what used to be considered R&S
challenges: “The capabilities may have shifted, but
the habit of interagency coordination has remained.”41
Thus, much of the groundwork laid by S/CRS and its
partners has actually survived and migrated toward
these contemporary priorities – albeit without much
deliberate reflection about lessons learned over the
past decade.42
Expanding Civilian Agencies’
Strategic Planning Capacity
Many analysts43 of interagency decision making
highlight the lack of civilian agencies’ strategic planning capability as another major area of weakness
hampering their ability to contribute to stability operations, as well as a key cause of the so-called “mission
creep” by the military into traditionally civilian-led
areas of foreign policy.44 To address this problem, S/
CRS and its partners at JFCOM undertook an intense,
years-long effort to develop an interagency planning
framework to support the three-tiered policy management system described earlier, and to help translate
civilian agencies’ objectives more effectively to mili-

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