Hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee - Building Partnership Capacity and the Development of the Interagency Process

Hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee - Building Partnership Capacity and the Development of the Interagency Process

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REP. ROB WITTMAN (R-VA): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Madam Secretary, Mr. Secretary, Admiral, thank you for joining us today. We appreciate all of your hard work.

I notice in your efforts to build partnership capacity here that recently there is a developing collaborative effort between the State Department and the U.S. Joint Forces Command in developing some online courseware in supporting integrated operations.

I'd be interested if you'd elaborate a little bit on that, and talk about what may be the goals of this effort. And then, collectively, how would the respective departments measure its effectiveness as going forward and building this capacity?

SEC. RICE: Yes, we are trying to do this, both in online courses and also the Foreign Service Institute has been looking at its curriculum.

I was at Joint Forces Command about two years ago or so, and they had at that time a serving POLAD, as we call them, who was very interested in trying to capture some of the lessons that we were learning from these joint operations.

People tend to think of the PRTs, but you also have to think of what was done in Colombia, what we've done in Mindanao, what we've done in places that are not always on the radar screen. And I think that this course, the development of these courses will be very important.

Now, I would suggest that we'll evaluate them the way that I would evaluate a course if I were at Stanford. (Chuckles.) Are people actually learning from them? There will be student evaluations. I think at some point we're going to have to look back at this entire effort and have outside evaluation of these courses, but I believe this is really a significant improvement in our ability to work with the military.

Yesterday when I was in -- at Maxwell for the very nice honor that they bestowed on me, I said that this is a task of the Department of State learning to work better with the military, and vice versa. And we are getting enough experience now that we're going to have to do a formal evaluation of lessons learned and a formal evaluation of how well we've done.

And here, we are light years behind the military in doing that kind of work, and we're going to have to make it happen.

ADM. MULLEN: I'm very encouraged by it. It's still relatively new. Just in my own experience in command in Naples as a NATO commander at the four-star level, I had a political adviser. I -- literally, I could not have functioned as a commander, wouldn't have done me to go -- it would have done me no good to go to work on any day, had I not had that kind of advice.

But I didn't grow up that way, and we haven't grown up that way. So now, (I'm vetting/embedding ?) it further, there are State Department employees now participating in exercises. All of that is headed in the right direction.

I also just met a -- spent some time with an ambassador-designate who just left as a political adviser to one of our combatant commanders. And his experience there as a POLAD was extraordinary, and he said it will impact his view of how he becomes an ambassador, should he be confirmed, in ways that he hadn't even imagined. And it's planning, and it's the kind of integration and the kind of collaboration that he learned in this job as well.

So it goes both ways. We've got, I think, 50 or 55 military members assigned to the State Department. We need to make sure we reach in and assign them well in the future, and take advantage of that.

So all of that is working, but we're still, I think, in the relatively early stages of where we need to go long-term.

REP. WITTMAN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield the balance of my time.

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