Pondering the end of nation building.

• Author: Fenster, Herbert L.
• Position: Government Contracting Insights

* In a speech delivered Aug. 15, presidential candidate Donald Trump made the following statement: "If I become president, the era of nation building will be brought to a very swift and decisive end."

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For the defense industry, the statement requires a closer look. What is "nation building?" And what are the potential implications for contractors if this comes to pass? It also might be appropriate to determine what "era" the statement was referring to and whether industry has been a part of the nation building activity.

It's fair to say that within the Defense Department, the term "nation building" has not enjoyed any particular popularity since it--and the function--was employed by the War Department at the conclusion of World War II. Remarkably perhaps, the rebuilding of the two enemies, Germany and Japan, was readily considered part of the function of "occupation" and the enormous success of the effort in both of those nations made an everlasting change in both their fates and the fate of the world at large. But it is unfortunately necessary to remember that nation building in those instances was an integral part of "occupation."

Like it or not, it is also fair to say that nation building has been a component of nearly every major military engagement the United States has undertaken since the War Department became the Department of Defense in 1949. It was a material part of the restoration and advancement of the South Korean economy during and after those war years and for some succeeding decades. Nation building, largely unseen and surely unappreciated, was a component of the presence of the Defense Department in Vietnam for a full decade. The contribution to infrastructure made by the Defense Department, the Corps of Engineers/Navy and the now-forgotten industry joint venture "RMBJ"--Raymond, Morrison-Knudson, Brown & Root and JA Jones--enabled the rapid redevelopment of South Vietnam after withdrawal.

By the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003, it had become essential to the foundational thinking within the department that "nation building" is a term tied at the hip to another term that has been struggling for survival for the last five decades--"stability operations." By November 2005, the struggle within the building to recognize, plan for, and execute "StabOps" and to accord it the human and material assets that it needs had led then Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon R. England to issue DoD Directive 3000.05...