The Fate of the Civilian Surge in a Changing Environment | Page 9

bureaucrats alike now avoid the terms “reconstruction” and “stabilization” to describe activities that
address state fragility and transnational threats, given
the disappointing rate of return on costly reconstruction activities and the continuing – even worsening
– instability in areas where the United States and its
partners undertook massive stabilization efforts.5
Despite the understandable reluctance to adopt
nation building as a core foreign policy priority, the
United States cannot afford to ignore national security challenges posed by state fragility. Yet the DOD,
the DOS and USAID all face institutional and political
pressures to abandon collaboration on R&S in favor of
returning to conventional defense, diplomacy and development assistance priorities. Instead, policy makers should use this period of relative peace to reflect
on lessons learned and determine options for improving R&S responses going forward. If not, the United
States risks forgetting these hard lessons learned at
considerable sacrifice, as our nation did after Vietnam.
This paper explores the extent to which civilian
agencies have managed to retain latent R&S capabilities despite the shift in national security policy away
from large-scale stabilization activities. As a USAID
specialist in crisis, stabilization and governance, I was
motivated to pursue this research as a form of mourning what I believed to be an ultimately fruitless effort
at interagency collaboration. Instead, I was surprised
to find a relatively rich – but rapidly attenuating – mix
of interagency authorities, professional relationships,
and persistent communities of practice, some of which
are being reassigned (or at least rebranded) to address
a new generation of challenges related to state fragility and violent extremism. Unfortunately, this process
of retaining and repurposing R&S expertise is taking

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