Civilian agencies operate on the police department model of continuous full employment of resources and have little slack in the system , whereas the military operates more on the fire department model of preparing for a contingency . The different orientations mean that , in reality , unless the United States made a choice to abandon or scale down many of its responsibilities abroad , most of the civilian personnel with [ R & S ] expertise cannot be redeployed for [ those ] contingencies without a damaging impact on current U . S . commitments . 56
The CRC experiment did not function as planned in this environment . Although several civilian agencies 57 contributed to the active and standby components , the delays in authorizing and resourcing the CRC created a mismatch between the supply of crisis responders and the demand among embassies for personnel surge capacity . With the exception of Sudan / South Sudan and Afghanistan , in which dozens of CRC-A deployments occurred in succession , most deployments consisted of one or two advisors fulfilling temporary duty assignments in low-priority conflict-affected countries . Between deployments , these staff often got assigned temporarily to offices at agency headquarters , where they remained “ on call ” for quick deployment . As described by one former CRC-A member interviewed for this report , “ We spent most of our time in limbo , unable to do substantive work in Washington while awaiting field assignments that rarely came .” 58 Eventually , the agency in question renegotiated the term “ crisis response ,” using funding in the account associated with R & S activities to cover the costs of deploying CRC staff to countries unaffected by conflict . The rationale was that ongoing direct-hire staffing shortages in these countries amounted to a crisis . This example
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