Buying Victory: Money as a Weapon on the Battlefields of Today and Tomorrow
Jonathan Bate and Duncan Walker | July 3, 2018
In April 2003, two US Army sergeants in Baghdad stumbled upon a hidden stash containing $650 million in uncirculated US $100 bills, likely stockpiled by senior Iraqi officials. This lucky find became the genesis for the Commander’s Emergency Relief Program (CERP), which provided billions of dollars to tactical units in Iraq to meet urgent humanitarian relief and reconstruction needs at the local level. Within four years, this accidentally funded program had enabled over eighteen thousand projects in twenty broad categories ranging from condolence payments to hospital repair to entrepreneurial micro-grants. Due to its popularity with ground commanders, Congress reinforced the program by allocating additional funding for Iraq as well as expanding the program to Afghanistan.
Prior to CERP, the US Army did not have a formal mechanism for placing military development funds directly into soldiers’ hands. The program thus fundamentally transformed the way the military viewed and employed money; with CERP, money became a “weapons system,†and stacks of cash were “ammunition.†This new tactic fulfilled an important need in modern warfare—to achieve stability by means other than combat. However, CERP turned out to not be the “magic bullet†the military hoped it would be. Enabled by the broad latitude afforded to commanders and an “engineering mindset,†the program quickly drifted away from short-term relief projects toward larger infrastructure projects. Further, many commanders began to measure success by the amount of money spent under the logic that if “big†is good then “bigger†is better.
https://mwi.usma.edu/buying-victory-money-weapon-battlefields-today-tomorrow/
