TCAPF Round Two

The Tactical Conflict and Planning Assessment Framework was developed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and adopted by the Marine Corps a few years ago. It has been folded more and more into predeployment training in hopes it will improve the effectiveness of our projects and activities in Afghanistan. Its actual implementation has been contentious and haphazard: many infantry Marines are not convinced of its utility. As with so many other things related to the difficulties of civilian-military coordination, the onus lies on Civil Affairs to prove all these new programs can help win the fight.

It has been a month and a half since Team 1 went to San Mateo for its first iteration of TCAPF training, and we started this three-day session with mixed feelings. Some of the USAID instructors were the same and they were duplicating much of the content from our previous training. To make matters worse, we lost the most charismatic instructor and he was replaced by a French Canadian. I don't know who exactly plans these things, but they were not thinking about their audience when they deemed a Canuck with an accent a suitable replacement.

As feared, the repetition had its effect almost immediately and most of our team did not engage the instructors. Things were spiced up slightly when the class was divided into two groups that competed against each other for points (which, so far as I could tell, were assigned pretty arbitrarily). Unfortunately this focused the Marines more on accumulating points than learning the material but at least it raised the enthusiasm level.

The first day closed with little being accomplished in the class, but we did learn a little about some of our classmates. Many of the others were from a reserve unit called the 3rd Civil Affairs Group (CAG, pronounced "kag") with CA deployment experience. They were able to bring their personal history into the class and offer different perspectives than the instructors'. As day one dragged on, the atmosphere became increasingly charged with tension between us and 3rd CAG, mostly due to the Canuck's sarcastic sense of humor - case in point: his comment after a silence in response to a question was "Come on! I heard Marine know how to think."

Way to go, Frenchy. What a great example of the charm that wooed the Germans into submission.

Day two moved from collection of information to analysis and then designing solutions to the identified problems. This was mostly review but we began to understand things better the second time around. The basic premise is simple: traditional aid, whether delivered through military or civilian, public or private, has not helped stabilize Afghanistan. For those of you keeping score, that's billions of US tax dollars wasted.

In any case, military commanders have resources at their disposal they will use in their local community. Our job is to use TCAPF to differentiate between needs (existing in endless supply) and sources of instability. To do this, we have to figure out what a significant percentage of the local population identifies as a problem. From there, we screen these priority grievances against a set of principles and what comes out the other end is . . . POOF! The local sources of instability. After that we figure out objectives and ways to measure how successful these efforts are.

All of this sounds common sensical but it hasn't been done consistently across any country we've given aid to, including Afghanistan. Civil Affairs Marines are the ones trained to do this and so we must occupy the role of advisor to those Marines tasked with approving projects, meetings, training programs, and so on. The military has limited time and resources - we rarely look at the opportunity cost of our efforts. After all, who wants to turn down the project building schools or digging wells? These are difficult things to turn down because they appear to benefit the community and (more importantly) they fit into our understanding of helping people.

These things swirled around in my head as we logged in hour after hour of checklists, questions, and matrices. By day three my comments had distinguished me to such an extent the USAID instructors asked me to be another assessor for practical application. Apparently they decided I "got it" and should be used to increase the number of groups. So instead of practicing I ended up grading other Marines as they worked with role players and interpreters (all Afghans here on visas) to develop their TCAPF skills.

Abilities varied widely and did not track with age or experience. Some of the older Marines with deployments to Afghanistan were not very good, and the two best interviewers I saw were corporals under 25. One red-headed female from Georgia came across so genial and friendly the role player answered all her questions despite his orders to the contrary. I suppose it will be somewhat different in country, but what do I know?

Taking stock of the training over the week, I decided this was very helpful. I learned the one thing I had been missing from the last round: perspective. My team should be able to ask the right questions for the right reasons and create a accurate picture of the local community, taking us one step closer to stabilizing the country.