State and USAID will work with other agencies to continue to build a scalable, flexible, and agile civilian surge capability that can rapidly respond to the range of mission sets in conflict-affected and fragile states. Surge personnel will support initiatives to prevent or prepare for an impending crisis, take steps to mitigate ongoing conflict, ensure long-term stability, and respond to humanitarian needs. Specifically, we will:
• Expand and refine the Civilian Response Corps active and standby capacity1.
The Civilian Response Corps, a pool of qualified, trained, and ready-to deploy civilian professionals, is the heart of our deployable surge capacity. We have initiated a surge “force review” to implement specific changes to the Civilian Response Corps to ensure that we have appropriate people, authorities, operational tools, and deployable models to respond effectively to the range of situations we will face. These likely include a larger number of smaller-scale conflicts and crises where we will not have a sustained large-scale U.S. military presence. We will also study ways to increase our use of multilateral capabilities and local experts. Upon completion of the review, we will present an in-depth two-year plan for changes to strengthen and expand the Civilian Response Corps’ active and standby components and will work with Congress to secure the resources that may be necessary.
1 The Civilian Response Corps, an interagency endeavor, was designed in three components: (i) an Active, in-house,
full-time capacity able to deploy within 48-72 hours, (ii) a Standby capacity made up of experts “on call” from their existing jobs in participating agencies, and (iii) a Reserve that was never developed but was designed to draw on
¾ For the Active component, we will refine skill sets to meet new projected needs
based on crisis and conflict trends and projected scenarios for U.S. responses.
¾ For the Standby component, we will expand the membership and skill sets by:
(i) utilizing available staff and organizational units from across agencies; (ii) developing new incentives for supervisors and standby members; (iii) increas- ing flexibility to provide backfill when the responder is taken out of a position elsewhere in government; (iv) expanding Standby membership, pending legis- lative changes, to include personal services contractors, foreign service nation- als, federal retirees and Peace Corps volunteers; and (v) expanding the number of agencies able to participate.
• Replace the “Civilian Reserve” with a new Expert Corps. Beyond the current Civilian Response Corps, which draws on active U.S. government employees, the United States needs access to deployable experts from outside the government able to hit the ground running in response to crises overseas. Without a corps of such experts, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan we have had to rely on temporary hiring authority to bring on external experts with special skills not readily available within the U.S. government. The reserve component of the Civilian Response Corps was proposed as a mechanism to put more than 2,000 US experts from outside government in reserve service for four years with a required deployment of up to one year. The Reserve was authorized but never funded due to Congressional concerns about projected size and costs.
We will propose replacing the “Civilian Reserve” with a more cost-effective “Expert Corps” consisting of an active roster of technical experts, willing but not obligated to deploy to critical conflict zones. The Expert Corps may include cur- rent temporary hires who have successfully served in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere as well as other civilians with critical skills. We will work closely with Congress to pursue necessary funding and authorities for the new Expert Corps, with a more efficient budget focused on the costs of deploying the corps, rather than maintaining a large reserve. The Expert Corps would also not include earlier deployment requirements or re-employment rights necessary for a reserve. The Expert Corps would be well-suited to smaller-scale complex crises as well as large- scale U.S. operations.
• Deploy State, USAID, civilian response personnel, and personnel from other agencies in task-oriented teams to ensure maximum impact. Our civilian surge
CHAPTER 4 PREVENTING AND RESPONDING TO CRISIS, CONFLICT AND INSTABILITY
must be based around interagency teams tailored to mission circumstances and drawn from appropriate bureaus across State and USAID, the interagency, and the Civilian Response Corps to support embassies with technical, planning, management, and staffing for complex contingencies. These teams will be flexibly deployed to provide services such as:
¾ Embassy augmentation to bolster the Country Team and support manage-
ment, planning, staffing, logistics, and operations to meet the requirements of the mission. Personnel will be deployed at the request of the Chief of Mis- sion with self-sustaining equipment, communications gear, flexible funding and transportation, prepositioned or standardized for easy deployment. For example, following the January 2009 earthquake in Haiti, the Department of State USAID, and other agencies rapidly deployed a range of experts to the Embassy in Port-au-Prince to plan and direct relief and reconstruction efforts.
¾ National governance and economic development expertise to assist local authori-
ties develop political, security, and economic solutions to conflict, extremism, insurgency, and other instability. Our civilians will build institutional capacity and advise authorities on issues such as security, corruption, human rights, reconciliation, and economic growth.
¾ National science and technology expertise to respond to pandemic threats,
seismic, meteorological and climate change threats, or cyber attacks. Our civil- ians will help governments stand up digital platforms for crowd-sourced crisis mapping or emergency communication systems.
Civilian Response Corps member stands with African Union peacekeepers and soldiers from Minni Minawi’s Sudan
Liberation Army faction aboard one of their “technicals” in Umm Baru, North Darfur. He deployed from 2006 to 2008 as part of an effort to stabilize the political, security, and humanitarian crisis and its impact on the people of Darfur.
¾ Community stabilization expertise at the sub-national or local level, which will
build on the successful experiences of provincial reconstruction teams in Iraq and Afghanistan. Community stabilization efforts include designing, synchro- nizing and executing conflict transformation plans; building security, gover- nance, and rule of law institutions; and promoting economic recovery.
¾ Rapid assessments conducted by specialists to provide expert perspectives on
the factors, risks, and opportunities that should be considered or pursued by interagency policy processes charged with developing strategies to prevent mass atrocities and genocide. The federal government already has Disaster Assistance Response Teams responsible for conducting initial assessments that drive U.S. responses to humanitarian emergencies, a similar rapid-response specialized capacity is necessary in order to inform and develop robust inter- agency atrocity prevention strategies.
2. Organizing Embassies and USAID Missions for conflict, crisis and instability