Read an Excerpt

The decade-anniversary Iraq war dialogue paid little attention to the failure of our civilian government institutions to generate positive benefit from foreign aid spending on economic development. Significant focus was placed on the failures of early military strategy after initial combat operations, the lack of sustained security in post-combat Iraq and Afghanistan. On religious sectarian causes of conflict. On ethnic causes of conflict. On failed leadership by newly elected government officials struggling to implement democracy in broken, war-ravaged societies.   

But little to no emphasis is placed on the impact of our civilian foreign aid institutions, the organizations dedicated to establishing the basis for a better life once the bullets stop flying. The effect of these institutions on the lack of success of these critical national security missions has largely been subsumed in the rush to associate failure with security, ethnic, and religious causes.    

While we may hold our civilian bureaucracy in contempt here at home, we have had no problem continually channeling billions of dollars to civilian bureaucracies working overseas to provide post-conflict economic development. Just as at home, those civilian institutions have not succeeded in their missions – leaving military force as the only effective tool of foreign policy, with an outcome of lost American lives, broken societies with disaffected embittered populations, and untold financial debt that will burden future generations for years to come.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

This is the unlikely story of a group of business leaders who encountered the civilian federal bureaucracy at war, and were asked to step in and reverse failed American post-combat economic policy in Iraq. First focused on restoring employment to Iraq’s workforce, and reducing the sympathies of everyday Iraqis with a growing insurgency and ever-increasing violence,  we encountered the bureaucracy at its most intransigent – at home and overseas – in a journey that would go on for five long years, and expand to encompass similar but unique efforts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Sudan, and Rwanda.

Reporting directly to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, this unorthodox organization of business volunteers would eventually include hundreds of men and women operating outside of the restrictive security imposed upon all other American civilian organizations, embedded with our military forces in areas of open armed conflict, and eventually independently working in conflict zones.   

Before our work would be complete, we would witness firsthand the horror of war, and the courage of our armed forces against near-impossible circumstances trying to restore stability to communities falling into open civil conflict among religious sects and tribes in the absence of hope for a better future, while our bureaucracy failed to provide needed civilian support.