“The hearing will come to order.

    “Good afternoon, and welcome to the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations’ hearing on “Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT’s): Historical and Current Perspectives on Doctrine and Strategy.”

    “The subcommittee has conducted a series of hearings and briefings on the PRT programs in Afghanistan and Iraq to get a better understanding of what PRTs are, what they do, and the contribution that they are making in stabilizing Afghanistan and Iraq.  This project is a case study of interagency operations.

    “In order to emphasize the importance of interagency operations and to reinforce why our efforts here are so important, I’d like to quote the Secretary of Defense from his recent remarks on the subject:

    “One of the most important lessons of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is that military success is not sufficient to win: economic development, institution-building and the rule of law, promoting internal reconciliation, good governance, providing basic services to the people, training and equipping indigenous military and police forces, strategic communications, and more – these, along with security, are essential ingredients for long-term success.  Accomplishing all of these tasks will be necessary to meet the diverse challenges I have described.”

    “These imperatives cannot be accomplished by military alone; we need the capabilities of our entire government brought to bear in support of our current efforts.

    “The purpose of today’s hearing is to put our current efforts of stabilization and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan into context, for as Secretary Gates says: “…context is important”.  The nation has been here before; throughout our history we have experienced the difficulties of transitioning from the use of force to the task of rebuilding war torn societies – from our own Civil War, to the hot and cold 20th Century wars in Europe and the Far East, and smaller post-cold war struggles such as in the Balkans and Haiti.

    “Perhaps the campaigns which most closely resemble our current efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan are previous counterinsurgency efforts.  In such cases, we engaged an armed insurgency while attempting to rebuild the physical and political structures of countries.  Our goal has usually been a stable, peaceful, democratic, and independent nation-state friendly to the United States and its neighbors.  Secretary Gates recently cited the Vietnam CORDS effort as an example:

    “However uncomfortable it may be to raise Vietnam all these years later, the history of that conflict is instructive.  After first pursuing a strategy based on conventional military firepower, the United States shifted course and began a comprehensive, integrated program of pacification, civic action and economic development….It had the effect of, in the words of General Creighton Abrams, putting all of us on one side the enemy on the other.  By the time U.S. troops were pulled out, the CORDS program had helped pacify most of the hamlets in South Vietnam.  The importance of deploying civilian expertise has been relearned, the hard way, through the efforts of staffed provincial reconstruction teams, first in Afghanistan and more recently in Iraq.  The PRTs were designed to bring in civilians experienced in agriculture, governance and other aspects of development to work with and alongside the military to improve the lives of the local population, a key tenet of any counterinsurgency effort.”

    “We hope that today’s witnesses can help us gain a better understanding of and perspective on our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have brought together practitioners and scholars who have experienced and/or studied these previous and current campaigns in great detail.  As always, we seek our witnesses’ recommendations on what we should do to increase the likelihood of the success of our nation’s efforts.

    “Our panel of witnesses today includes: 

• Mr. Bernard Carreau
Senior Research Fellow
Center for Technology and National Security Policy
National Defense University

• General Volney F. Warner, US Army (Ret.)
President and Chief Executive Officer
V.F. Warner and Associates

• Brigadier General Rick Olson, US Army (Ret.)
Former Commander of Combined/Joint Task Force-76 in Afghanistan
Former Director of the National Coordination Team in Iraq

• Ms. Kathleen Hicks
Senior Fellow, International Security Program
Center for Strategic and International Studies

    “Welcome to all of you and thank you for being here.  After Mr. Akin’s opening remarks, I’ll turn to each of you for a brief opening statement.  Without objection, your prepared statements will be made part of the record.”