You can’t be a Washington national-security journalist — and you certainly can’t have covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — without hearing a variation on the following: The inter-agency process is broken… The military has done its part, and now the civilians have to do theirs… The relationship between the military and the civilians might be good here, downrange, but the Departments and agencies back in Washington just don’t communicate. And you’ve also heard about the proposed-and-never-quite-realized solutions: A Goldwater-Nichols for the inter-agency… An online space where civilians can interact and coordinate with the military… A State Department office for stability operations… A civilian’s field manual for stability operations. And, again, it always seems to fall short.

In a very surprising move, Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, thinks he has a solution. After tracing back millions in Iraq contractor fraud to disorganized civilian management and ad hoc civilian-military relationships in complex wars like Iraq and Afghanistan — a mantra of those who’ve wanted for years to reform “interagency” operations — Bowen has approached the Obama administration with an idea to create a new office to staff, coordinate and manage all civilian functions in war zones, reporting jointly to State and the Pentagon. He calls it USOCO, the US Office for Contingency Operations. And it’s the subject of my piece this morning for the Washington Independent.

“With an ad hoc structure, you lack the formalized approach that you need to be able integrate those [civilian] capabilities with military power,” said Lt. Col. Steve Leonard, who wrote the Army’s field manual on stability operations, in an interview. “It’s the lack of that bureaucratic structure we’re all used to that makes it so difficult to point a finger, say ‘I need this,’ and get a response.”

Bowen believes the USOCO could play that bureaucratic role. It would “solve the unity of command problems encountered in Iraq and Afghanistan with respect to relief and reconstruction operations,” his paper reads, by creating a “permanent, fully accountable, empowered interagency management office.” It would take “full responsibility for managing the relief and reconstruction component” of a future war and would report jointly to both State and the Pentagon. With “total accountability for” the relief and reconstruction budget, it would manage all personnel used for such an operation “except for any uniformed personnel normally answerable to the combatant commander and Foreign Service personnel answerable to the Chief of Mission,” the deputy to the ambassador in a U.S. embassy.

Daunting task. And I remember a few years ago, my friend Justin Logan at the Cato Institute co-wrote a paper with his colleague Steve Preble about a sort of antecedent to this office, the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization. Justin and Steve considered the office to be a sort of U.S. colonial bureau, and warned that creating an institutional capacity for nation building would help erode the necessary political constraints against pursuing an imperial foreign policy. I admit that as much as I respect Logan and Preble for thinking in such institutional terms, S/CRS was always too much of a backwater to pull off what they were talking about: underfunded by Congress; never thinking about becoming operational; ironically, bad at coordinating with outsiders. But maybe what Justin and Steve were talking about is coming to pass with USOCO.

I don’t know. It’s worth thinking about. And as much as part of me wonders if USOCO is a sort of incompetence dodge, substituting increased capability for clearer strategic thought about the wisdom of these sorts of operations, the fact is that we’re in them, and there’s a massive imbalance between the military-civilian workload right now. USOCO is an institutional fix for a thorny problem. I spend a fair amount of time covering efforts to rebalance the current civilian/military scale in national security, and I find that the short-term fixes really do fail, and fail with real and awful consequences. Not marshaling this capability is no guarantee against policymakers not getting the U.S. into these sorts of wars, but it is a guarantee that when we get into them, they go disastrously. If not USOCO; then what?