but also in growing ‘Phase 0’ (Shape and Influence)
operations involving theater security cooperation,
“building partnership capacity,” and conflict prevention.”
To which Shafi Saiduddin added in his paper: “In
a resource-constrained national security environment,
preventing future conflicts will be more important
than our ability to dominate a maneuver battlefield.
More importantly, there is a strong reluctance by
policy makers, and the American public, to become
involved in large scale counterinsurgency operations,
limiting our strategic options.” Thus, the economy-offorce impacts of CA become even more important.
Because Civil Affairs, for more than a “Decade of
War,” has been focused almost entirely on tactical level missions, its operational and strategic capabilities
have gone fallow and require restoration. This became
readily apparent as the demand for CA skyrocketed
with the invasion of Iraq. The ad hoc management
of CA through the 1990s was exposed, particularly
as David Gordon put in his paper, despite the long
legacy of CA in military government, “the capabilities required to carry out military government were
shunned and neglected by DoD and the Army at large
until the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq made it terribly clear that history was repeating itself.”
To preserve Civil Affairs as a strategic capability, as Dennis Cahill posed in his paper, CA must be
thought anew – redefined. The creation of the Institute for Military Support to Governance, by the U.S.
Army's Special Operations Center of Excellence, many
agreed, is a step in the right direction in restoring
much-needed functional specialists in order for CA
to conduct its five core tasks represented in the five
logical lines of operations of: Civil Information Man-
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