It’s arguably the central story of the military during the past decade of war. Soldiers and Marines, trained to kill an enemy, found that to succeed in wars fought among the people, they had to teach themselves to be diplomats and development workers. They needed to address foreigners’ grievances and help them rebuild shattered communities — in some cases, communities the United States itself shattered. Along the way, actual diplomats and the U.S. Agency for International Development workers signed on to military-led reconstruction teams — though never in great numbers — and even anthropologists and contractors enlisted.

Every reporter who’s visited Iraq and Afghanistan has seen this change in action. So it’s all the more surprising — and valuable — that Wall Street Journal reporter and Danger Room alum Nathan Hodge is the first to write a book putting it all in context. Published today, Armed Humanitarians is a fascinating portrait of the hybrid soldier-diplomat-aid worker in all his complexity, and a critical look at what his ascendancy means for a military whose job, at the end of the day, is to kill people. Nathan and I talked over e-mail about his book.

Danger Room: So is the U.S. military in the permanent business of nation building, regardless of what politicians of both parties promise? Or is this all going to look like a momentary craze when we turn, post-Afghanistan, to a sea-and-air based strategy of balancing China, containing North Korea, et cetera?

Nathan Hodge: If there were a theme song for this book, it would have to be the New York Dolls’ “Personality Crisis.” As long as we’ve been involved in the post-9/11 wars, we’ve had this fundamental tension: We have a military, and a defense industry, that are still in many ways organized for war against a conventional adversary — a straight-up and simple fight in which your enemy wears uniforms, and has pieces of equipment that you can count.

But the military — primarily the Army and the Marines — has been handed a different mission, one that blurs the line between military force and development work. And they’ve embraced it, as can-do organizations will. Somewhere along the line, I argue, things got out of whack. The U.S. military isn’t designed primarily for building schools, laying asphalt and digging wells.

I do worry that once the Department of Defense takes over more of these missions, it will be reluctant to part with them. After all, they have the funding and the manpower to do the job, and the civilians didn’t show up last time around. So we’ll end up having both, at massive expense: A military that’s geared for high-end combat, plus a sort of USAID with guns.

DR: If the military is basically in the nation-building game, why don’t we just come out and admit it to ourselves? Why does Max Boot have to constantly eat his post-9/11 quote about aping the self-confident British imperialists, if events have basically vindicated his prescription, at least in the implementation stage?

NH: We’re still a long way from having a class of people in jodhpurs and pith helmets, to borrow Boot’s phrase. For starters, we don’t speak the lingo. I’ve rarely seen the U.S. military interact with the locals without an interpreter. Even Special Operations Command, which is supposed to be the home of culturally savvy operators, can’t seem to come up with enough people with linguistic and regional expertise. Adm. Eric Olson, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, was in Washington last week talking up “Project Lawrence,” the idea of building a cadre of cultural scouts. It strikes me as a bit late in the game.

Deep cultural expertise is more than just a few phrases of Pashto and a hand over the heart. It’s something that takes years, decades. And if we think the main existential threat to the United States comes from militant extremism in places like Afghanistan, Iraq or Somalia, then we need a decades-long investment in real social science research, language studies and higher education, not cheap solutions delivered by contract.

DR: Should we worry that troops lose their skills at traditional military disciplines like maneuvering or shooting as they spend time drinking the proverbial three cups of tea?

NH: On a reporting trip to Fort Riley, Kansas — at the time, the Army’s training base for the advisory mission — I was escorted around base by a very savvy non-commissioned officer. When we heard the sound of firing on the gunnery range, he said “Music to my ears.” The idea was that the Army was getting back to fundamentals, even while training people for this new nation-building mission.

The military does need people who can drink the three cups of tea: Primarily in Special Forces, Civil Affairs, advisory teams and so on. But we’ve thrown plenty of aviators and artillery at that same task, because of the extraordinary size of the commitment. In nation building, I argue, less is usually more.

Want to create a group of people comfortable navigating other cultures? Try doubling the size of the Peace Corps. It’ll cost you next to nothing, in larger budgetary terms. After covering defense, I’m pretty jaded about what a billion dollars can buy.

DR: Your book calls back to the historical lessons that the armed humanitarians learned from Vietnam-era programs like CORDS or brutal counterinsurgencies like Algeria. Should it set off alarm bells that the relevant history here comes largely from failed wars?

NH: Um, yeah.

DR: One of the more interesting sections of the book examines troops handing out cash in Iraq and Afghanistan under the Commander’s Emergency Response Program — quite literally an attempt to buy goodwill with the locals. How much correlation did you find between cash spent in a given area and an increase in security?

NH: Nothing is ever so easy as spreading money around to make people stop shooting at you. Focus on one place, and other communities are left out. They might make enough trouble to get the attention — and the cash — of the U.S. military. And once you started turning on a fire hose of CERP funds, the real problems begin. Commanders were under a lot of pressure to spend down their CERP accounts, meaning that a lot of projects were done with poor oversight — the same school being rebuilt several times, for instance — or the funds were mislaid. You had Civil Affairs majors overseeing spending projects with a “burn rate” of a million dollars a month.

For people in the traditional aid and development community, that sets off huge alarms: You can rarely dump that amount of cash in a community without creating massive potential for graft. And that, with time, can become a funding stream for an insurgency.

DR: After writing this book, what would you advise U.S. diplomats in Iraq, who are about to command a hired army of 5,500 security contractors? Is that situation a time bomb, or has the bureaucracy learned how to get diplomats into an expeditionary mindset and place stricter oversight over the guards?

NH: Companies like Blackwater got all the heat for the conduct of hired guns in Iraq — think Nisour Square. But the State Department, their main customer, got a pass. And that’s the real issue. For starters, we need to ask why we need a supersized diplomatic corps in Iraq, living behind the walls of a Vatican-sized compound. And if we decide that is in our interest, is there any alternative to the VIP model of diplomatic security?

I’ve met plenty of Foreign Service officers who are genuinely interested in the places they work, and who are far from risk-averse. But they are often hemmed in by security restrictions put in place by the higher-ups, especially in the Regional Security Office. If you work in Irbil, a safe part of Iraq, you might have the same restrictions on movement that you have in Baghdad. That makes no sense. It means you can’t get out and do the job. If we’re going to work in these places, we have to accept some risk.

The book, incidentally, was originally titled The Armored Suburban. I wanted to convey the force-protection mentality: the high-profile convoys of armored Suburbans, lights flashing and guns up. It’s possible to get around in dangerous parts of the world without doing that: If you don’t believe me, read a few dispatches by Tim Lynch.

DR: The last time you wrote a book, you and your wife went road-tripping to nuke sites in the American west and even Iran. This one seems a lot more conceptual and policy-oriented. Be honest: Was it less fun to write?

NH: The nuke book was, from the get-go, designed to be fun. This was — if you pardon the Rumsfeldism — a long, hard slog. I wrote a good chunk of it as a freelance journo, so it carried a bit of risk. But I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.

Photo: Staff Sgt. Michael B. Keller/U.S. Air Force

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