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To paraphrase J. Robert Oppenheimer and Gen. James Mattis, some 64 years later, the United States learns again and again that it cannot achieve its political ends with coercion alone and with more investment in soft power like humanitarian aid and diplomacy, less is needed for war.
Last month, reduction-in-force notices pinged into email inboxes throughout the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration at the U.S. Department of State. When the dust settled, pursuant to the department’s reorganization plan, 168 people — 75 percent of the bureau’s staff — were gone. These firings followed the earlier dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development and, with it, the robust architecture of its Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance. While roughly four dozen of the latter’s staff found limited-term appointments in State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration for a meager natural disaster response capacity, the moves nonetheless saw U.S. government humanitarians cut by a staggering 94 percent — from 1,600 to 100 people. With this, all staff tasked with humanitarian civil-military coordination, along with all offices offering regional humanitarian expertise, were abolished.
The gutting of U.S. government humanitarianism leaves the Department of Defense with the hefty burden of assisting civilian populations affected by U.S. military operations abroad. This burden mostly includes the critical task of coordinating and de-conflicting with and between local humanitarians and armed actors in future potential conflict zones — like Taiwan or the Korean peninsula. To address this challenge, the Department of Defense, in cooperation with what remains of the State Department, should adopt a two-pronged humanitarian civil-military strategy. First, embed humanitarian advisors at all geographic combatant commands as well as Special Operations Command. Second, establish a headquarters civil-military humanitarian coordination team at the Joint Staff. These two steps could substantially improve the department’s ability to plan and execute a U.S. government humanitarian response.
A Self-Inflicted Wound
Humanitarian assistance saves lives and advances U.S. national interests by influencing public perceptions of the United States and its values. By degrading the State Department’s humanitarian assistance capability, the U.S. government has ceded its ability to provide basic needs — food, water, and medicine, among other things — for civilians caught up in armed conflicts. Making matters worse, the reduction-in-force of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, has taken place as the Defense Department has shuttered a center devoted to mitigating harm to civilians in war. These moves could make it much harder for the United States to protect non-combatants and minimize collateral damage during military operations.
Imposing another responsibility on the U.S. military through the inability to even coordinate humanitarian assistance would compound the challenge facing the Department of Defense. Where the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance previously could field disaster assistance response teams alongside deployed U.S. servicemembers — backed by the formerly 1,300-person strong organization for reach-back support — current disaster response capacity patently cannot fulfill these needs for the Defense Department. And while splashy, media-friendly announcements may demonstrate limited, symbolic support, without supporting coordination capacity for sustained humanitarian impact, remaining U.S. government capacity simply will not suffice when conflict erupts.
The Impact of Humanitarian Devastation on Military Operations
As recent conflicts have demonstrated, unanticipated humanitarian dynamics — especially mass displacement — can upend logistics and imperil operations if not accounted for in advance. In early 2022, video after video of Ukrainian roads packed with fleeing civilians illustrated a reality often overlooked in post-mortems of Russia’s early failures: Ukrainian armed forces had to sustain logistics amid disruptive, large-scale displacement. That they managed to do so — despite limited resources and intense combat — should not obscure the scale of the challenge. For U.S. planners, the lesson is clear: Military operations should account for the likelihood of large groups of fleeing civilians, especially in densely populated theaters.
The Gaza war, and its immense public scrutiny, adds another layer of complexity to humanitarian dynamics. Mass evacuation orders, allegations of systematic civilian harm, denial of entry to humanitarian assistance, and reported famine have provoked scathing criticism of Israeli policy. And despite Chinese diplomats condemning Israeli restrictions on humanitarian access, Beijing could cite those very restrictions as precedent to justify its own actions in a future Taiwan conflict. Should China opt to blockade the island — either as an opening gambit or fallback after a failed amphibious assault — it could cast such a move as weapons and explosives inspections, portraying any U.S. effort to break it as reckless escalation. Accusations of hypocrisy would come easy, and China could cite Israeli policy toward Gaza as precedent in response to international criticism.
Beyond the humanitarian dynamics of Ukraine and Gaza, a Taiwan scenario presents uniquely grim challenges. The island nation is one of the most densely populated places on earth, with its population concentrated along a narrow western plain. In a cross-Strait conflict, China could weaponize that population by unilaterally designating key military corridors as evacuation routes, targeting civilian areas, and funneling displaced civilians into the path of U.S. and Taiwanese forces. The resulting congestion — abandoned vehicles, panicked movement, and blocked supply lines — could disrupt maneuver and logistics operations. Moreover, maritime evacuations across the Luzon Strait could force U.S. naval forces into a dilemma: rescue civilians under fire or leave them adrift, expecting that Chinese forces or information operations would likely exploit either choice. Meanwhile, refugee flows into Japan’s Sakishima Islands — already strained by limited evacuation capacity — could further mask Chinese surveillance of and complicate U.S. marines’ expeditionary operations.
Unlike Ukraine, Taiwan cannot use overland resupply routes from friendly neighbors. It would depend entirely on contested sea lanes for both military sustainment and basic sustenance, crucial during a protracted conflict. Displacement-induced bottlenecks in ports like Kaohsiung and Anping could paralyze resupply operations from the outset of a conflict.
Of course, Taiwan is not the only densely populated hot spot where conflict could erupt. Renewed fighting on the Korean peninsula would present similarly daunting humanitarian complications. Seoul, home to over nine million people, sits within artillery range of North Korea. Roads clogged with displaced civilians and overwhelmed evacuation routes could grind ground maneuver and resupply to a halt. Existing U.S. civil-military coordination structures would be hard-pressed to handle either a Taiwan or Korea conflict — let alone both simultaneously.
No amount of planning can guarantee that U.S. adversaries won’t succeed at using displaced civilian populations as a part of military strategy. But proactive mitigation is nonetheless possible. Civil-military coordination with Taiwan could pre-designate safe zones and direct evacuations away from military corridors. Joint planning with Japan could ease pressure on forward-deployed U.S. marines in the Ryukyu arc. Humanitarian rescue contingencies in the Luzon Strait could be built into U.S. Navy planning. And diplomatic groundwork at U.N. and humanitarian hubs in New York and Geneva could blunt Chinese efforts to frame a Taiwan intervention as its own humanitarian operation. But each of these efforts depends on humanitarian civil-military coordination capacity that the U.S. government has dismantled. Without a dedicated cadre of humanitarian civil-military planners, these challenges will be seen too late — if at all.
Interagency Humanitarian Response Coordination
How can the Department of Defense prepare for the humanitarian dynamics in future wars? Previously, regional and civil-military experts from both the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance and State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration engaged regularly with defense officials and servicemembers — through daily or weekly coordination meetings, military exercises, and special engagements — to the extent that even pre-decimation staffing could cope with the immensity of the Department of Defense. In my former role, I heard first-hand how East Asia Population, Refugees, and Migration experts supported the Pacific Sentry and Morning Calm exercises with Indo-Pacific Command. Similarly, I witnessed Middle East specialists engage with Central Command on intractable humanitarian and security challenges during Operation Inherent Resolve. The Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance embedded humanitarian advisors in the geographic combatant commands and deployed dedicated civil-military affairs coordinators on their, now defunct, disaster assistance response teams.
However, what remains of this architecture is woefully inadequate to meet the demands of the Defense Department — just a handful of seasonal advisors for addressing humanitarian challenges caused by natural disasters like hurricanes and typhoons. Without any interagency partner to predict these effects, let alone one to call upon to coordinate with humanitarian actors and mitigate the staffing drain, the ability for the Department of Defense to manage potential combat scenarios and their humanitarian dynamics is greatly degraded. Rather, interagency institutional capacity to forecast, dissect, and mitigate the effects of conflict-induced population displacement and humanitarian devastation is virtually nonexistent under the now prevailing model. The United States paid an excruciating price for its failure to foresee the worst-case scenario during the Afghanistan evacuation as 13 servicemembers were killed in an attack. In a high-end conflict with a peer adversary, the cost could be unthinkable. A considered approach to coordinating U.S. military operations with humanitarian actors is correspondingly essential.
Salvaging Humanitarian Civil-Military Coordination
Whatever form future U.S. government humanitarianism takes, the Department of Defense should be able to coordinate with humanitarian actors and mitigate the effects of civilian suffering and displacement. Given the risks to U.S. military success and long-term U.S. interests that the callous weaponization of human suffering poses, this calls for two urgent changes.
First, humanitarian advisors should be assigned to all geographic combatant commands as well as Special Operations Command. This would provide overlapping global coverage for forecasting and mitigating humanitarian responses in a range of conventional and unconventional military operations. Embedded advisors could coordinate with partner and allied national disaster and civil defense agencies, non-governmental humanitarian actors, and any remaining, deployable U.S. government humanitarians in a wartime contingency, all while enhancing peacetime exercises and planning by integrating humanitarian considerations. Cultivating relations with humanitarian actors is crucial for rapid-onset wartime contingencies, calling for coordinators to be located as close to potential conflict zones as possible — at the headquarters of the geographic and Special Operations Commands. When mass civilian displacement occurs, effective coordination between U.S. forces and local actors will be essential to quickly and safely move civilians out of harm’s way.
Second, a centralized, purpose-built humanitarian civil-military team should be established at the Joint Staff to conduct interagency coordination, guide the worldwide staff at the combatant commands, and participate in Department of Defense exercises and planning. Assigning this team to the Joint Staff enables it to maintain operational focus while being within arm’s reach of defense policy input ad hoc. If incipient changes to the State Department hold, responsibility for this team will ultimately fall to the Department of Defense with the dissolution of the U.S. Agency for International Development. This team would provide worldwide coordination of contingency planning, humanitarian advising, and liaise with the architecture of U.S. government, international, and non-profit humanitarian actors.
Even with these two initiatives, the loss of regionally focused U.S. government humanitarian staff will be acutely felt long-term. Understanding regional dynamics and how populations might become weaponized requires substantial local expertise. And crucial humanitarian actors are often national and local non-governmental organizations, civil defense organizations, and relief agencies, such as the Taiwanese Red Cross and the Tzu Chi Foundation. Embedded advisors and a single humanitarian civil-military team simply cannot replicate the longstanding, established relationships and deep regional expertise of dedicated staff. And though limited civil-military staff are essential to help prepare the U.S. military for contingencies, those situations may quickly overwhelm the capacity of this staff without strong, institutional support from humanitarians at the State Department — the very support that has been decimated.
Effective preparation for war demands robust and deliberate institutional capacity. Contingency plans and informed military decision-making processes similarly require time, expertise, and devoted public servants. At a minimum, the Department of Defense should take the two steps advocated here to prepare for the inevitable humanitarian exigencies of future war. The price of failing to do so — a price all too likely to be borne by civilians and U.S. servicemembers — will likely result in yet more lessons to be learned.
Michael C. Loftus is a humanitarian policy expert and doctoral student at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies, where he focuses on the strategic implications of humanitarian response in great power conflict. Until recently at the U.S. Department of State, he helped lead the U.S. humanitarian response and the protection of civilians in Gaza, Ukraine, and the evacuation from Afghanistan.
Image: 2nd Lt. Yasmeen Joachim Jordan via DVIDS
