State Department gets major role in peacekeeping.

Concluding that U.S. military forces need outside help in restoring peace after a war, the White House has assigned the role of coordinating civilian and coalition efforts in what is now called stability operations to the State Department.

It is a new and unfamiliar assignment for the department. To get the job done, it has created a small agency headed by an ambassadorial-level coordinator for reconstruction and stabilization to work with all U.S. civilian agencies, United Nations, European Union, NATO. and other allies to help maintain and restore peace and stability.

Established in 2004, the office is just getting started, according to its deputy coordinator for resource management, Christopher Hoh. In early summer, it had a staff of only 39, which were "begged, borrowed and stolen from all over State," he told National Defense. "When you're created in the middle of the fiscal year, you have to do these improvised things."

By 2007, the office plans to have a staff of 80 and a "response corps" of 100 State Department officers trained to deploy to embattled embassies or into combat areas with U.S. military and multilateral peacekeeping forces, Hoh said.

The office intends to solicit temporary volunteers from all over the federal, state and local governments. In the federal sector, for example, volunteers will be sought from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Departments of Defense, Justice, Treasury, Energy, and Health and Human Services, among others. State and local governments will be asked to contribute volunteers to a rapidly deployable reserve force of police officers and first responders.

The office's mission, he explained, is to lead the U.S. government's civilian efforts to prevent conflicts, when possible, and when it is not, to help stabilize and rebuild societies when the fighting stops. Specific objectives are to:

* Develop policy options for those nations and regions of greatest risk and importance.

* Coordinate the deployment of U.S. resources and implementation of programs in cooperation with international and local partners to accelerate the transition from conflict to peace.

* Establish an interagency capability to deploy personnel and resources an immediate surge response to sustain assistance until traditional support mechanisms can operate effectively.

* Improve performance by conducting regular training, planning and exercises similar to those held by military services.

The State Department is counting on substantial support for this new initiative from the Pentagon, and it is getting it, according to Jeffrey Nadaner' deputy assistant defense secretary for stability operations. "We are working with the coordinator's office," he said. "We are enthusiastic partners. We think the advent of that office is a great thing for the U.S. government. The Department of Defense can't do stability operations on its own."

The Pentagon has assigned four liaison officers to the coordinator's office and established advisory positions at the Army's Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, at Carlisle Barracks, Pa., for representatives of the State Department and AID.

The Defense Department proposed transferring $200 million from its 2006 budget to the coordinators office at State. "The reason is really simple," Nadaner said. "That office has the potential of safeguarding the lives of our troops and shortening, maybe even diminishing, the need for military deployments."

Congress rejected that proposal in the 2006 Defense Authorization Act. The House Appropriations Committee in June also turned down a State Department request for a $100 million "Conflict Response Fund" to help pay for coordinator operations, instead, the committee passed a foreign-aid bill that "allows the secretary of state to reprogram and transfer funds" to meet those costs, said Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., chairman of the Appropriations Foreign Operations Subcommittee.

These difficulties in securing funding are just the beginning of the coordinator's fight to get the support it needs to succeed, officials said. The State Department already is overburdened and has few resources to spare, said retired Ambassador Bill Farrand, senior advisor to the Peace Operations Policy Program at George Mason University in Arlington, Va. From 1997 to 2000 he served as a U.S. representative in Bosnia.

"State doesn't have a surge capacity," he said. "People already put in incredibly long hours. The department has a relatively small staff and worldwide responsibilities. It has to maintain relations with 160 nations and the United Nations, which has headquarters in New York, Geneva and Vienna.

"If the coordinator's office is going to succeed at State," Farrand said, "it's going to require strong backing from the secretary."