Oh, my friends- sorry to mislead you... The division may disband this office- but they will certainly find us new jobs somewhere else. You see, the army- how shall I put it- owns me… There are plenty of holes in which to put pegs. No matter your shape. According to Presidential Directive whateverwhatever I’ll be here for 365 days. And after that, we’ll see what happens.
There is so much that is transitory here- offices get stood up and then are morphed into other organizations and then get a name-change and then somebody decides that it’s irrelevant. And then people realize they are doing the same job for a different boss and using a different letterhead.
But, actually some of the changes I’ve mentioned are part of a larger process of improvement that is going on- I was going to wait until it got further developed but I’ll describe what I know thus far. There’s going to be a significant shift in the way State and DoD cooperates on the reconstruction mission- the idea is that cross-coordination will happen at much lower levels in the hierarchy, i.e., the operational and tactical. So far that kind of coordination has mainly only been strategic. It’s an expansion of the initiative that got kicked off this summer, when I started working with a State political officer and the engineers as we worked with the Iraqi local government in choosing rebuilding projects. The idea is that we would work together as a designated unit, not as a loosely coordinated committee. And we’ll expand our mission to deal with other aspects of Iraqi local government- taxation, public ordinances, etc. The problem that I mentioned was that my specific office has a lot of institutional knowledge that will most likely get lost because they’ll disband us before the new initiative will take effect. Luckily, I’m slated for the transition team; but I’m continually concerned that someone somewhere will make a decision that completely affects my life without the slightest amount of input from me. That’s the environment. I serve at the pleasure of the President. And the commissioned officers appointed above me. So help me God. So, help me God.
But a positive possibility is that the general who set up our office in an earlier rotation and made it what it is may get his third star and come back here as the Corps commander- he’s highly regarded as one of the guys who ‘gets government’- that definitely makes an impact all the way down. Combined with the credibility Khalilzad’s been getting here – this bodes well.
But the turnover to another new government is going to be a very tricky thing. Very tricky indeed.
