Nation Building: An Essential Army Task

Over the last decade national leaders and senior defense officials have backed away from the concept of nation building as a principal task for our military forces. Current military doctrine provides minimal direction or insight into how military forces will be used in an environment requiring the establishment of effective governing mechanisms to ensure long-term stability. However our experience in the aftermath of the Cold War and now in the midst of the War on Terrorism finds United States forces increasingly employed within the regions of failed nations or warring states. These actions are described as smaller-scale contingency (SSC) peacetime support or stability operations. What they have in common is an evolution into long term engagements of U.S. and Allied forces with an uncertain outcome that is dependent on the ability of the states in question to establish their own forms of peaceful governance. The continuing intransigence of these areas could be viewed as strategic ineffectiveness for the United States in its pursuit of national policy objectives. The recently released National Security Strategy calls for the development of stable democratic governments as a strategic end within our sphere of vital interests. Nation building thus becomes an acknowledged requirement to achieve this strategic objective. The Army in nearly all cases is the element of U.S. power that is most capable of establishing the conditions to begin effective nation building efforts within a failed nation or warring states.