Inside Pentagon
The Pentagon is seeking additional funding for a program giving commanders in the field flexibility to finance small-scale, urgent civil and humanitarian needs, but lawmakers have regarded the effort with skepticism and curtailed its use in the past.
Despite suspicions about the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP), Congress has been “willing to fund this program fairly well on the assumption that it works,” Gordon Adams, a professor of U.S. foreign policy at American University in Washington, told Inside the Pentagon.
From lawmakers, to the Pentagon, to civilian agencies, it seems that “everybody loves” this program, Adams said, adding that his guess is “nobody is really going to complain this year” about the fiscal year 2011 budget request for the program.
The Defense Department is requesting a total of $1.3 billion for the initiative ($200 million for Iraq and $1.1 billion for Afghanistan), an 8.3 percent rise for CERP from FY-10’s $1.2 billion.
In last December’s FY-10 Defense Appropriations Act, lawmakers doubled funding compared to the prior year but also trimmed the overall program. The law provided $1.2 billion for CERP, including $1 billion in Afghanistan and $200 million in Iraq. This final amount fell $300 million below the administration’s request, which sought $1.2 billion for Afghanistan and $300 million for Iraq (ITP, Dec. 24, 2009, p7).
The legislation also withheld $500 million of the amount appropriated until the Pentagon provides lawmakers with further information about the program. Congress also demanded that $500 million of the $1.2 billion be withheld pending submission of a “thorough review” of CERP not later than 180 days after the bill becomes law.
Congress, in addition, asked for a separate assessment for Iraq and Afghanistan outlining goals and requirements for CERP money in the coming year, as well as other monthly data and reports.
Still, lawmakers largely view the program as “chump change in the context of the big defense budget and, frankly, the committees are all too willing to simply roll over and say if the COCOMs want it, we should give it to them,” Adams argued. “That becomes even more compelling when you’re dealing with Afghanistan and Iraq, where we’ve got troops deployed forward.”
For commanders in theater, CERP is a “fantastic way not to have to deal with the bureaucracy and the civilian agencies who run assistance programs,” Adams noted.
The funds are “game-changers, inasmuch as they give our troops more flexibility to truly make things happen for the local populace, wherever we are,” said Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen during the Feb. 1 press conference on the budget. “As one junior officer noted, in a counterinsurgency fight, CERP dollars are faster, more precise and more impactful than bullets.”
Mullen told reporters he prefers “even more flexibility in the rules governing the use of these funds.” He said proper accountability is necessary, but added he has seen with his “own eyes the huge difference CERP can make when it is applied to the greatest need and with the greatest speed.”
Civilian agencies are also willing to “accept this flow of funding,” given that they lack their own flexible pool of money, Adams said. CERP is the principle funding source for provincial reconstruction teams, he said, referring to a joint military-civilian effort to improve security, support good governance and enhance provincial development.
The potential for the flexible-funding program to succeed in Afghanistan, where most of the money will be spent, is difficult to gauge, Adams told ITP. The “paper trail and the audit trail” for CERP, he explained, is “not what it should be.” As a result, uncertainty surrounds whether CERP has played a critical role in meeting U.S. military objectives in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said.
Anecdotal evidence, however, suggests some success, notably the creation of town councils and digging of wells, Adams noted.
Yet there are also indications that while program dollars can “buy hearts and minds in the short term,” the Iraqi and Afghan governments cannot sustain projects for a long period and U.S. Agency for International Development funding is “not in a place to back it up” either, he added. -- Fawzia Sheikh
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