Revisiting the Role of Interagency Coordination in Complex Operations

FeatuReS | 33 American-led interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan are drawing to an end and the political climate inside the Beltway has turned decidedly hostile toward large deployments of U.S. troops and civilians overseas. Consequently, stability operations have dropped off the radar for many analysts and commentators. The policy community that once feverishly tackled questions over how to stabilize foreign countries through the extended deployment of military and civilian capabilities under various labels (most prominently stateor nation-building and/or population-centric counterinsurgency) is shifting its gaze elsewhere. With growing hindsight, the entire endeavor is often declared as flawed from the start.1 In addition to this sense of strategic failure, a drop in political attention now heightens the risk of losing hard-earned insights from these operations. This is therefore a crucial time to evaluate the institutional developments that operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have spurred. This article takes a step back from debates over the strategic validity of stability operations in order to focus on a particular aspect related to their conduct: the coordination of civilian and military organizations within an integrated, or whole-of-government, approach. It does so in full recognition of the fact that whole-of-government terminology nowadays mostly elicits exasperated sighs from governmental officials. The Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns brought the civilian-military nexus into the spotlight within the U.S. interagency community. However, effective cooperation between the Departments of Defense and State (including the U.S. Agency for International Development By ANDReA BARBARA BAUMANN