(Marine Corps Times) Backtalk: Iraq’s way out

Iraq’s way out
By Thomas P.M. Barnett

America’s military, faced with a future of small wars and lengthy postconflict nation-building efforts, desperately seeks to understand the logical boundaries between where its work should end and that of the private sector should begin. Gen. James Mattis likes to say that “Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!” are your primary counterinsurgency tool, and he’s right.

But what constitutes the fastest route to that goal? Historically, America’s foreign aid approach has been to get economic activity brewing inside a country and then link it to the global economy — a deliberately slow catch-up strategy that aims for a downstream connect-up.

But what if it makes more sense to reverse that sequence? Once baseline security is achieved, why not focus on connecting to the global economy first to attract foreign investment, and then let that money drive the internal development process? Why not let the global economy tell that virgin market what it should sell, instead of having that country guess on its own?

Since 2007, my small company, Enterra Solutions, has performed development work in Kurdish Iraq. We don’t focus on getting old businesses up and running. Instead, we try to generate the network connectivity required for Kurds to conduct business transactions with the outside world — e.g., transportation, telecoms, banking, business and investment exchanges, and utilities.

This pioneering work is a proof of concept for something we call Development-in-a-Box. Once templated here, we plan to sell such upgrades as a repeatable solution throughout developing regions, partnering with some of the world’s largest system integrators, utility providers, dealer-brokers, logistical firms and the like.


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