Financing the fight—from the front

Air Force Comptroller, Jan, 2004 by Gary Minor

I'm back from my deployment to Iraq as the first Comptroller of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) under LtGen (R) Jay Garner, and then the Office of Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) under Ambassador Paul Bremer. In hindsight it seems like just a blip in time, but while there it was the longest three months of my life. Despite all we went through with respect to uncertainty, unchartered territory, security issues, poor living conditions, and significant hurdles, it will always remain the most challenging, rewarding, and memorable duty of my career. With all the focus on training and preparation for deployments in our career field, nothing could have completely prepared me in advance for what we were about to embark upon. Actually, that's not entirely true. I was prepared to react to what lay ahead due to years of officership and leadership training, but no blueprint existed for addressing the technical issues and challenges that I was about to face as Comptroller. It was truly a mission never accomplished before in history, and we in the Comptroller shop were right on the leading edge of forging new ground.

ORHAs initial core team of about 180 military and civilians from DoD, State Department, US Agency for International Development (USAID), Treasury, and other agencies assembled quickly at the Pentagon during February 2003. The war hadn't started, but appeared imminent, and we were to be the post-war provisional Iraqi government. The full magnitude of the tasking was unknown, but we began planning as best we could within our range of assumptions. President Bush had turned to the Department of Defense as the lead agency instead of the Department of State. Typically, the Secretary of State would have taken the helm with USAID as the primary execution arm. The Secretary of Defense in turn appointed retired Lt General Jay Garner as the director of ORHA. The Coalition support staff (C-Staff) was primarily military with Colonels heading up each cell. As C-8, I was the first Comptroller of ORHA. The mission side of the organization consisted of three activities that became known as pillars: Humanitarian Assistance, Reconstruction, and Civil Administration. The former Iraqi government was made up of 23 ministries that centrally governed the country. These ministries extended from the national level in Baghdad, down to 18 regional governates, and then down to local offices throughout the country. ORHA was organized to represent these 23 ministries with personnel from the Reconstruction and Civil Administration pillars. One of these ministries was the Ministry of Finance. As Comptroller, I was not technically the Minister of Finance; this position was held by an individual from Treasury. But as time went on, C-8 became the central focus for anything dealing with money.

The organizational chart on the next page shows the initial structure of our group headed by Jay Garner. The lighter boxes depict organizations made up of mostly military personnel, the darker three boxes were mostly civilian personnel (State, USAID, Treasury). Of course the leadership changed in mid-May when Paul Bremer arrived to replace Jay Garner, and the organization's name changed from ORHA to CPA.

The Early Days

When I arrived at the Pentagon in late February, the FY03 Supplemental was still with OSD and ORHAs piece was work in progress. Our funding was being cash-flowed through OSDs Washington Headquarters Service (WHS) account, which essentially funds the Pentagon's operations. This was done as a matter of convenience at the time since no Service had yet been named as Executive Agent. When we left the Pentagon on 17 March, ORHAs operations support budget was estimated at $146M. This was to pay for all life support costs for a team estimated to grow to 350 people and a variety of contracts in support of additional operational costs such as interpreters/translators, indigenous media start-up costs, seed money for demobilizing and retraining the military, hiring Iraqi expatriates, and hiring a number of subject matter experts. Our requirements grew from this estimate almost daily. The estimated size of our organization grew from the initial 350 to nearly 2,000, and other contract costs and programs materialized that weren't forecasted in a Supplemental that was developed before the war ever started. It was not possible to accurately forecast our requirements that early in the process for a mission that hadn't before been undertaken, and due to the unknowns we would face regarding the post-war conditions in Iraq. Of course that's not unusual in our business of financing the fight. New requirements develop, and we source the shortfall. The unique challenges came from the unanticipated mission that lay ahead.

We departed for Kuwait City two days before the war started and remained there until 24 April when LtGen McKiernen, the Coalition Forces Land Component Commander, declared Iraq a permissive environment. But then, I'm not sure it really ever fully achieved that status in reality. The time in Kuwait was spent planning how we would establish the interim government and provide humanitarian assistance, relief, and reconstruction efforts to the Iraqi people. The thought at the time was that our group would be there only three or four months after which time we'd turn governance over to an Interim Iraqi Authority.