After being in Afghanistan for eight years, and Iraq for just under six, it seems that someone has finally come up with a plan to strengthen cooperation between the Pentagon and the Department of State – outgoing Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) Stewart Bowen.

Bowen, whose time in Iraq has allowed him to see problems with reconstruction firsthand, namely contractor fraud to the tune of billions of dollars, has drafted a plan to create a single agency responsible for acting as a link between the military and civilian agencies on the battlefield. The proposed agency – the United States Office for Contingency Operations (USOCO) – is now being discussed by the Pentagon, the State Department and USAID, and Bowen, whose office is being closed in Iraq as part of the operation's drawdown, hopes that his proposal is adopted for reconstruction in Afghanistan, according to the Washington Independent. If all goes to plan, new lines of communication will be open between the Department of Defense, the State Department and USAID in the form of a brand-spankin' new government institution.

The idea seems like a good one, too, as there are thousands of examples of miscommunication in our overseas theaters. One took place in Iraq's Diyala Province, according to SIGIR Deputy Inspector General Ginger Cruz, as the State Department was working to get local Iraqi officials to spend their own taxpayers' money to spray date palms with pesticides. Local politics and tribal differences had been preventing this from happening, which was raising fears that the date harvest would be plundered by insects. Although the State Department was just at the precipice of getting the officials to cooperate, the local U.S. brigade commander decided that he couldn't wait for the local g-men to stop bickering and just sprayed the trees, courtesy of the Pentagon. All that time spent by State to forge Iraqi cooperation and initiative had gone to waste.

Deputy Inspector General Cruz thinks that USOCO, by fostering improved correspondence between  the military and civilian agencies, could be quite useful in preventing such occurrences from happening again. Besides, the Special Inspector General of Iraqi Reconstruction was given a mandate by Congress, she said, to recommend policy improvements. “When we do audits, investigations and quarterly reports,” she explained, “we spend a lot of time analyzing in depth, and our mission is not just to look at a contract and see whether or not it was executed. We also see what is wrong with the system. We view the USOCO proposal as a continuation of the mission that Congress gave us.” A government agency taking the initiative – there's a novel idea.

But is another government agency the right way to go? And doesn't a separate institution designed specifically for “nation building” sort of institutionalize regular war? “You could say the same thing about the Department of Defense,” she said.

Well, DoD would serve its purpose without nation building if Jamaica invaded...

Calling the idea “modest,” Cruz dismissed any fears over the proposal. “We're not talking about something massive. Some of this is being done already.” She added that operations like the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan have been undertaken by the U.S. twelve times since World War II. (Perhaps we don't need a new organization to institutionalize war). Carrying them out without institutional wisdom just isn't cutting it.

“There's rapid turnover and if you don't have a structure, its very hard to improve economy, efficiency and effectiveness. When you've spent $100 billion in the last 8 years in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and its been spent largely by ad hoc organizations that have spent time trying to find systems and processes, its not going to be economic and efficient,” she explained. “You're going to have shortcomings when it comes to outcomes.”