The Fate of the Civilian Surge in a Changing Environment | Page 22

For DOD planners, the limited availability of civilian agency personnel creates a challenge for determining the most effective location to integrate their views
into the comparatively massive military planning
processes to maximize their impact. Some geographic
combatant commands, such as the U.S. Africa Command (USAFRICOM), have taken pains to adapt their
theater campaign planning processes to accommodate
civilian agency planners and policy makers. However,
the fact remains that DOD planners must meet their
colleagues more than halfway to ensure their participation in joint planning exercises.
Mobilizing Surge Capacity for Civilian Experts
in Reconstruction and Stabilization
The civilian agencies’ modest progress in deliberate planning, contrasts sharply with the significant
backsliding in crisis response since the demise of the
CRC in 2012. Civilian agencies face four key obstacles:
their own organizational cultures, uneven coverage
across the breadth of capabilities needed to address
R&S challenges, limited personnel capacity, and operational security issues.
From the standpoint of organizational culture, creating and maintaining even a modest civilian surge
capacity exclusively for R&S contingencies has proven difficult for agencies, whose missions gravitate
around managing multiple priorities incrementally
and simultaneously in steady-state operating environments. Thomas S. Szayna and his colleagues at RAND
use an analogy drawn from domestic crisis responders to describe the contrast between civilian foreign
policy agencies and their military counterparts:

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