We’re trained as infantrymen, but here we are doing civil administration and trying to get the milk factory up and running.

- Captain Stewart Glenn in Fallujah, Iraq

Over at Michael J. Totten’s website he has a piece on the Marines as “Builders of Nations.”  It’s a fascinating read.

This is a subject that I’ve been turning over in my head for a long time now.  Back in WW II we didn’t really have much choice as to who was going to rebuild Germany (and the rest of the Western World).  All the able bodied men of the United States were drafted, so when it came to rebuild Germany (a manly job of course) it was left to the only organization that had all the resources, the Military.

Today however the spread of resources are different.  The military in Iraq holds at least 100,000 men, with about +150.85 million men back in America, yet the 100,000 in Iraq, plus a couple thousand State Department officials, are left to rebuild an entire nation, not including the few more thousand needed to rebuild Afghanistan and other Nations we’ve toppled through out the years.

I’ve always held the notion that if American is going to go on this Nation Building, Freedom Spreading, Justice Establishing tour of the world it needs a robust civilian and military force - in place - to get the job done.  The woes of Iraq only point to this need even more then before, as is expressed in Totten’s article.  Even though the Marines Totten describes are getting by, they are still ill-equipped, both in knowledge and in physical possessions, to get the “rebuilding a nation” job done in a timely and albeit effective manner.  (I should note when I say effective I only mean to say it is not effective to have the Military provide both security and civil administration; it stretches the former, which is already probably the most stressful job on the Planet, to a point where the line on the graph starts to go negative).

We need to come up with an effective force that will take over a population and handedly reinvegorate the populace from it’s previous ways and means into a new form of life that emobodies the self-evident rights of man, namely Life, Liberty, Justice, and the Pursuit of Happiness.  This force should involve education teams, security teams, city building/planning teams, civil service teams (the people who build the roads, power/phone lines, service plants, etc.), and of course the military.  It should be robust and involve all the major sectors of American Life, otherwise you get a few soldiers here and there doing their best to get a country up and running, while in the back of their minds their counting down the days, if not hours and minutes, before they can return home to their families.