20 Foreign Aid Reports Agree on Need to Boost Civilian Force
FrontLines - May 2009
In the past two years,
approximately 500 foreign
policy experts—including
members of Congress from
both parties, former Cabinet
secretaries, military and
business leaders, and heads
of NGOs—contributed their
expertise to 20 different
assessments of America’s
foreign assistance systems.
They focused on the need to
strengthen the civilian capacity
to solve problems around the
world as a critical part of the
U.S. national security strategy.
Collectively, the reports come
to more than 2,000 written
pages, a testament to the widely
perceived need to urgently
modernize foreign assistance
and better integrate it into the
nation’s foreign policy.
In March, the Center for
U.S. Global Engagement
released a report on these
reports, summarizing their
recommendations for the Obama
administration and the 111th
Congress.
The Center’s “Putting
‘Smart Power’ to Work: An
Action Agenda for the Obama
Administration and the 111th
Congress” provides a summary
of the 20-odd reports that
largely share a common view
about the need to recalibrate a
foreign policy overly reliant on
the military.
The military itself has
agreed on the need to shift
from military to civilian in aid
programs and has often stressed
the need for America to rebuild
civilian agencies and programs.
Nearly all of the reports
recommend substantial
increases in resources for
civilian programs and staffing.
As three former USAID
Administrators pointed out in
a number of fora, USAID has
roughly half the number of staff
as compared to 1980, during the
height of the Cold War.
Apart from recommending
substantial increases in
funding for USAID and the
State Department, “Putting
‘Smart Power’ to Work”
also identifies other areas of
widespread agreement among
the experts and a number of
actions that the U.S. should
take as part of a new “smart
power” strategy.
Those priorities are:
- Formulate a comprehensive
national security or global
development strategy that
elevates the role of development
and diplomacy alongside defense
- Streamline the U.S. foreign
assistance apparatus to improve
policy and program coherence
and coordination
- Reform congressional
involvement and oversight,
including revamping the Foreign
Assistance Act
- Integrate civilian and military
instruments to deal with weak
and fragile states
- Rebalance authorities for
certain foreign assistance
activities currently under the
Department of Defense to
civilian agencies
- Strengthen U.S. support for
tools of international cooperation.
The Center notes that
President Barack Obama and
secretaries Hillary Rodham
Clinton and Robert Gates have
embraced the bipartisan call for
“smart power” as the central
thrust of their foreign and national
security policy. The Center’s aim
with this “Report on Reports”
is to provide the administration
and Congress with “a roadmap of
consensus and priority action.”
Pursuing a “smart power
strategy” will require a multi-year
effort, the Center says. However,
implementing it is essential to
renew America’s global leadership
role and to help make Americans
more secure and prosperous.
For more on “Putting ‘Smart
Power’ to Work,” see the What
They Are Saying feature on
page 2. ★
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by the Bureau for Legislative and Public Affairs
U.S. Agency for International Development
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