Decisive Point Podcast – Ep 4-06 – Andrew Colvin – “The Case for an Army Stability Professional”

The US Army is unprepared to occupy and stabilize territory because it does not adequately educate active-duty officers to do so. One way to professionalize the Army’s ability to carry out military government and stability operations is to develop active-duty functional area officers who can advise commanders and integrate staff planning for these operations. In this episode, author Andrew Colvin analyzes case studies, doctrine, and commentary to envision specialized staff officers with foreign language proficiency, cultural skills, advanced academic abilities, and a strong professional ethic. These officers would enhance the Army’s competence in stabilizing territory to achieve American policy objectives.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss1/13/

Keywords: stability, civil affairs, foreign language, professional studies, military government

Episode Transcript: “The Case for an Army Stability Professional”

Stephanie Crider (Host)

You’re listening to Decisive Point. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

Today I’m talking with Andrew Colvin, an active-duty engineer officer in the commissioned corps of the US Public Health Service and author of the “Case for an Army Stability Professional,” which was published in the Spring 2023 issue of Parameters.

Andrew, thanks so much for joining me today. I’m glad you’re here. Tell me what inspired you to write this article.

Andrew Colvin

So, I wrote this article because of my experiences as a civil affairs and engineer officer in the Army, and it left me convicted that we were missing something very critical to winning our nation’s wars. So, I began my research and discovered that I wasn’t the only one who thought this way, so I’ll start by stating the obvious. War is about exercising power over people and territory. It’s political at its core, but the army really struggles to translate violence into, say, a stable political arrangement that furthers American interests.

And doctor Nadia Schadlow does a great job explaining this in her book War and the Art of Governance. But as an Army, we have words for this concept—stability, operations—in military government. We have doctrine for this concept. We even have recent experience trying to implement this concept. What we don’t have and what we’ve never really had is the right kind of education for leaders who can guide the Army to success.

So, I wrote this paper to propose a solution to this problem, and I want to prepare conventional forces for stability operations during and after large-scale combat. And in a world of finite resources and time, stability operations are never going to get the attention they need from the Army. I recognize that. I think a workable solution is to invest in staff officers—leaders who are selected and educated to advise commanders and integrate staff planning for stability at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war.

Host

You recommend the Army develop stability professionals. Can you expand on that, please?

Colvin

I envision an active-duty functional area, a specialized officer career field to professionalize the Army’s ability to carry out stability operations, and military government. And I use the word “professional” in its highest sense in the Samuel P. Huntington sense of people who serve society as members of a distinct group with skills that require a lifetime of education practice to master. So this person I envision, the stability professional, is defined by three skills. One is their cultural awareness and foreign language abilities. Two is their advanced academic education. And three, is their military ethic and experience. And so I’ll elaborate on each one of those a little bit more.

First, for cultural awareness and foreign language skills, a stability professional practices their profession outside the United States by definition. They need a professional level of cultural awareness and foreign language proficiency. And again, when I say “professional level,” that’s not a buzzword. I have in mind the DoD standards of competence for both culture and language that are contained in DoD I 5160.70. The Interagency Language Roundtable Scale gives us ratings from zero to five. Zero being no skill and five being functionally native. A level three is called “general professional proficiency,” and that’s the minimum proficiency I believe a stability officer needs. And the Army can only get people with this level of proficiency in one of two ways. They either recruit them directly or they send them to spend a year or more in an immersive language education program like the Defense Language Institute.

Next is their academic knowledge. I believe full-time graduate study at a civilian institution is important to a stability officer for a few reasons. Stability operations are some of the army’s most complex and intellectually demanding missions. We’re talking about telling army officers to develop, implement, and manage government functions in a foreign country. That’s hard. And that’s not something most people in the Army know anything about; (it’s) not something any Army training institution is capable of teaching.

Of course, there’s more to it than just sending people to grad school. We need to make sure that the knowledge these officers receive is relevant to the Army’s mission. To do that, I believe the Army should partner with civilian graduate schools that can align officers’ academic studies with the Army’s stability operations tasks. These schools should expose officers to different ways of thinking and solving problems and giving them an intellectual foundation for stability operations. Ideally, this immersive graduate school experience helps officers make connections with leaders in academia and government who are working on peace and stability issues, and those are the kinds of relationships that can help the army pursue unified action in its future stability operations.

Finally, a stability officer’s military experience and ethic is an important part of this stability professional I envision. So-called civilian expertise by itself is not the solution. This is about officers who can apply academic knowledge in a military context. They are active-duty officers with years of military experience who are permanently assigned to conventional army units to manage a staff and advise commanders on stability operations, and these professionals need an ethic. This is especially true for the military. Without an ethic, you’re just a guy with a gun.

One of the things that struck me about the Army’s successful stability military government operations as I researched it through history was that the successful ones all seemed to have officers with this notion of diligent compassion at their center. When you look closely at these successes, the Mexican-American War, World War I, to an extent, and World War II, you find a handful of leaders who go against the conventional military wisdom that says all the Army is supposed to care about is lethality, killing the enemy, and publishing body counts. The successful ones approach the human welfare of civilians as a military necessity, something that they plan for meticulously. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that instability operations when the Army stands for humanity, we tend to be successful—when we don’t, we have a hard time achieving lasting strategic results.

Host

Once we get these stability professionals resourced and trained, what would that look like?

Colvin

It would look like a functional area. So officers in a specialized career field. And they would be assigned at all levels through the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war and command. So you’re talking about brigades, talking about divisions, corps, and combatant commanders. And there is a position for this on staffs already that the S9, G9, or J-9, depending on the echelon. The challenge is manning it in conventional forces and fielding the right people who can be there when a conflict starts because currently most of those in the conventional forces are slated to be staffed by reserve officers, and they’re going to face significant obstacles mobilizing and manning those positions in time for a large-scale combat operation.

Host

You know that there are some arguments against this idea. Will you walk me through them, please?

Colvin

Well, first, there’s the “not my job” argument. Some people say that the Army isn’t supposed to be involved in nation-building wars. My rebuttal is that because the objective of war is to make political change by force, all wars are nation-building wars, whether the US Army likes it or not.

Some say that other US government agencies, principally the State Department and USAID, are the country’s nation builders, and that’s correct in a sense. The 2018 Stabilization Assistance Review reaffirmed the concept that DoD has a supporting, not leading, role in stabilization. But while other government agencies can lead these efforts by implementing policies and programs, the wartime experiences of the United States, going back to our beginning as a nation, shows that the Army is going to have to shoulder a significant share of the burden for setting stable conditions during and after large-scale combat. And if we fail to do that, we’re going to have a bad time.

The second major argument is that “we’ve already got one” argument. There are certainly some people out there who would say the army already has what it needs for stability operations. They’d say, look, we have some active-duty civil affairs people. They get a few days of governance training. We’ve got some reserve civil affairs forces that have civilian jobs, and we’re even standing up a team of experts in the military government program in the reserve. So, we’ve got it covered.

But if you accept my criteria for stability professional, there’s a very simple way to test this claim. Get the commanders of all those units together and ask them to pull out their list of officers that, number one, speak a strategic language at an IR three level or better. Number 2, have a graduate degree that aligns with the Army stability operations, tasks, and, number 3, are permanently assigned on active duty to the staffs of conventional force units. I imagine those lists are not going to be long enough to sustain us in a protracted, large-scale combat operation.

Host

Give us your final thoughts before we go.

Colvin

A theme of my proposal is the importance of education over training. Training is what you do to prepare people to respond to predictable stimuli. You can train people to perform at a high level in very challenging circumstances, like jumping out of airplanes or fighting in urban terrain, but these circumstances and the actions soldiers ought to take are fairly predictable, nonetheless. Education is what enables people to find solutions to problems they’ve never seen before. Education is what soldiers need to prevail in situations that are so complex you cannot possibly train them for it.

Officers doing stability operations with all their political, social, economic, and ethical complexities need the right education to succeed. I believe the concept of the stability professional I’ve laid out here unifies ideas that are fragmented across conventional and special-operations commands and the active-duty and reserve components. I believe it’s important because stability operations should be a whole-of-Army effort. We currently do not have officers with the right skills where they need to be to make those operations.

Host

Thanks so much for sharing your insights on this.

Colvin

Great. Thanks for having me.

Host

Listeners, you can download “The Case for an Army Stability Professional at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters look for volume 53, issue 1.

If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform.

About the author: Lieutenant Andrew B. Colvin, PE, PMP, served on active duty in the US Army for nine years, including multiple assignments as an Engineer and Civil Affairs officer and two deployments to the US Central Command area of responsibility. He is a graduate of the United States Military Academy and is currently on active duty as an Engineer officer in the Commissioned Corps of the US Public Health Service.