One of the greatest challenges facing the United States military in Iraq and Afghanistan today is the creation of social, political, and economic stability while simultaneously engaging in combat operations against irregular forces. In July 2008, the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff published Joint Publication 3-57, Civil-Military Operations, the purpose of which was to establish a “joint doctrine for the planning and conduct of civil-military operations (CMO) by joint forces…” “At the strategic level, CMO focus is on larger and long-term global or regional issues such as reconstruction, economic development, and stability… Across the full range of military operations, CMO are a primary military instrument to synchronize military and nonmilitary instruments of national power, particularly in support of stability, counterinsurgency and other operations dealing with asymmetric and irregular threats.”

Civil-Military Operations are not new to the US experience at war and timely historical examples can be seen when looking at the period immediately following the Second World War to include CMO in the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Latin America. CMO became an essential component of the global US strategy of containing communism and manifested in numerous limited wars in support of that policy of containment. This conference will discuss some of these historical examples of CMO as well as the strategic, operational, and tactical applications and implications of CMO for Iraq and Afghanistan and in the Global War on Terror today.

Additional information will be posted to this page as it becomes available