Turns Out… Development is Hard
Basically the military, and people with a military background, and people with a basically military orientation, have all come to appreciate that civilian economic development is very relevant to the kinds of security issues they are charged with tackling. The problem, however, is that the number of things people have to say about the usefulness of development projects far outpaces the number of things people have to say about particular useful development projects.
Matt is precisely right here. A lot of folks with military backgrounds like to talk about development, but precious few have bothered to wade into the literature to learn about the issue. It turns out that saying, that economic development crucial is not an insight, and saying that we need to invest more in development is not a solution. We don’t know how to promote economic development. We also don’t know how to end corruption or promote good governance. (We also don’t know how to eradicate drugs.) We’re objectively terrible at all of these things. So when you hear the promoters of counter-insurgency talk about development or corruption or governance as key elements of their strategy, you have to realize it is just an empty hand-wave to try to explain away the massive gaps in their strategic concept.
Militarily, we’re good at killing people and breaking things. And if you can’t figure out a way to use your military by killing and breaking, then the odds are you don’t have a military solution to the policy problem you face.
