U.S. Civil Affairs Reservists Died Underequipped

Army Capt. Benjamin Sklaver

High numbers of U.S. Civil Affairs soldiers, sent into Afghanistan and Iraq to win the hearts and minds of locals by helping restore electricity, build water systems and spread good will, were met with a deadly fate due to lack of protective combat gear and training, according to the findings of an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity.

photo right: Army Captain Benjamin Sklaver was killed in Afghanistan when his Civil Affairs Unit was ambushed by a suicide bomber.

Though the Civil Affairs soldiers tasked with nation building make up only about five percent of the U.S. Army's reserve forces, they accounted for 23 percent of the combat fatalities among reservists in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Center for Public Integrity stated in releasing its report today.

During most of the tenure of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command also lacked the soldiers to do the job successfully and disguised its weaknesses by keeping "ghosts" on the books, the Center said citing Internal Army documents, memos and interviews with former officers.

The hundreds of "ghost" soldiers on the Civil Affairs rosters were actually reservists who couldn't perform their duties in the combat zone due to a variety of reasons such as physical ailments or lack of mandatory training. Their names of the books made the Civil Affairs command look like it had more human resources to deploy than it did.

Meanwhile, the Generals in the field faced with an insufficient number of Civil Affairs units to draw from, sent reservists into harm's way without training, hardened armored vehicles, protective plates for their armored vests and machine guns, the Center stated.

The Center called the Civil Affairs units "the stepchild" in a vast military campaign in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"Although a mere fraction of the troops are dedicated to civil affairs, they have been deployed without proper training and equipment to hostile territory to carry out heroic efforts against difficult odds and they are killed far out of proportion to their numbers," the Center for Public Integrity found.

Read the full report by Center for Public Integrity