When President George W. Bush declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq on May 1, 2003, the U.S. government expected and planned for a short, caretaker occupation leading to a quick, clean departure. During the next six months, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), and then the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), came to grips with the fact that, rather than acting as a short-term, caretaker government, it would have to be the government, design and create an Iraqi governmental structure, recruit government leaders (in the case of the Ministry of Defense, an entire ministry), and train...

An authoritative study on the CPA experience remains to be written. However, the basic problems that surfaced with the civilians deployed to the CPA—i.e., the inadequacy of the civilian staff as a staff—are widely acknowledged. The organizational and procedural problems that prevented the deployment of what in colloquial terms might be called the “A-Team” (a group of top-notch experts put together for a specific mission) to Iraq have led to efforts within the U.S. government to deal with the identified shortcomings and to prevent their recurrence. This chapter addresses the shortcomings of the civilian staff deployed in support...

To make recommendations about capabilities that the U.S. government should create, we must first specify the requirements. In Chapter Two, we presented the idea of an A-Team staff and discussed briefly some of the U.S. shortcomings in Iraq in this regard. However, this general articulation of goals is not sufficiently detailed to establish the requirement. In this chapter, we present a framework for considering supply and demand for civilian personnel for staffs in SSTR operations. We begin with the basic question—What is a staff?—and note several other preliminary questions for helping us narrow the scope of the problem....

In Chapters One through Three, we described the purpose for this research, gave a brief overview of the approaches being taken by the United States and the United Kingdom to create the capability to staff SSTR efforts, and presented a framework for considering supply and demand for personnel. We begin this chapter with an overview of the bureaucratic, statutory, and regulatory machinery and processes that are currently in place and that could be used to create such a capability. We then turn to structure and management considerations.

Our interviewees acknowledged that the United States did not send the A-Team to...

How do all of the pieces fit together? Figure 5.1 shows how.¹ In it, we use the OPM Human Capital Assessment and Accountability Framework and the larger SSTR policymaking machinery as guides; building off this model, we make recommendations. These pieces and how they flow into each other or interconnect are illustrated in Figure 5.1.

The policy block in this figure corresponds to national-level policy—specifically, foreign, defense, and SSTR policies, as well as policies on other related topics. Collectively, these policies provide strategic direction to those charged with SSTR planning and operations, for creating the institutional pieces needed to...