After its considerable use in the campaigns of 1991,
Civil Affairs became a valued function for theater staff.
Peacekeeping operations used CA extensively, and
frequent call-ups led to consideration of expanding
Active Component (AC) capabilities, as Reserve Component (RC) CA capacity increasingly required reconstitution. By the time the first rotation of Operation
Iraqi Freedom was over, more than half of the qualified
and available Reserve Component CA personnel had
been exhausted. When Operations Enduring Freedom
and Iraqi Freedom became protracted campaigns, DoD
reaped the result of the earlier, massive call-up of RC
CA units – leading DoD to fill resulting gaps first with
RC members of other services, who had neither the
institutional support nor the professional ethos of the
extant CA force structure, and then expanding the AC
CA structure. A 2011 RAND study later found CA the
most utilized career field in the Army Reserve. Experimental staffing models such as billet transfers from
underused specialties to CA could offer a staffing solution to reduce the ratio of deployment-to-“dwell”
time to the DoD goal of one year on active duty in
five years of Reserve service. Even then, CA remained
the busiest career field in the USAR, with deployment
rates far exceeding all other specialties.1
Thus, the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review called
for significantly increasing CA, resulting in first the
95th CA Brigade (grown from the 96th CA Battalion
serving Special Operations) and later adding the
85thCA Brigade as a General Purpose unit. RC CA increased by about one third, Marine Corps CA capacity
more than doubled, and the Navy revived attention
to CA. While the operational environment demanded
CA for the counterterrorist campaigns of the newcen-
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