The Repurpose the Military Initiative (RMI):
A call to re-allocate 15% of military troops and spending toward helping to implement the UN Sustainable Development Goals by building civilian infrastructure, delivering disaster relief services, and providing human and environmental security where it’s needed most.
Is humanity making the best possible use of the millions of highly trained, tough, disciplined and capable people wearing national military uniforms around the world?
The answer, if we take a broad view, is no, not if we want to optimize our militaries’ constructive impact on human security. Our collective safety and security will be greatly enhanced if we re-allocate a substantial and growing proportion of our troops and military budgets to regional Peace Engineering Corps (rPECs), composed of integrated multi-nation teams of re-purposed and retrained soldiers dedicated to constructive peace-building projects. By participating in multi-nation rPECs, soldiers and officers from neighbouring countries will experience each other as friends and colleagues, rather than as rivals or potential enemies. The best way toward enduring peace is to turn your perceived adversary into your friend.
Imagine, for example, an East African Peace Engineering Corps, composed of soldiers from all of the region’s national armies. Or an African Union Peace Engineering Corps, tasked with rebuilding water, energy, transport and medical systems services in war-shattered regions after the guns fall silent, providing the material basis for renewed hope. Or an integrated multi-nation European Peace Engineering Corps, deployed to help partner militaries in Africa build core infrastructure in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
These regional engineering corps can be deployed as civilian infrastructure construction, environmental regeneration, and disaster response emergency relief crews in tough places where their help is needed most.
Likewise, in peacetime, national Peace Engineering Corps (PECs) can be set up as permanent units within their national armed forces — a Kenyan PEC, an Ethiopian PEC, a Senegalese PEC, a Malian PEC, an Algerian PEC, a Zimbabwean PEC — and these specially trained and equipped Corps can help develop their nations and build the basis for peace and prosperity by building infrastructure in cooperation with civilian agencies: Water and sewage systems. Solar power systems. Medical clinics. Bridges and harbours.
National PECs can help restore productivity to the land by planting forests on degraded lands, or improve food security by teaching farmers to use modern drip-irrigation equipment and providing drought-resistant seeds via agricultural extension programmes.
And when necessary, PEC units can serve as first responders when natural disasters strike — droughts, floods, fires, earthquakes, landslides, or contagious disease outbreaks. In fact, most armies already have a first-responder role; setting up PEC units with special training relevant to these duties would simply improve an army’s overall readiness and specialised capabilities to enable them to respond quickly and effectively to natural disasters and emergencies.
Assigning these duties to armies is a good fit with their basic structure — and with their core duty of serving and strengthening their State and their people. Armies are, in essence, enormous logistics organisations composed of many well-coordinated teams of disciplined and capable men and women. They have the staff, equipment, and organisational structure to tackle big projects and get them done. And in the developing world especially, there’s a lot to do!
The good news: Military personnel I’ve spoken to about the prospect of forming PECs get it — and they love it. I’ve discussed the prospect of forming a European Peace Engineering Corps with the commanding general of one of Europe’s largest nations; with retired generals; with captains and corporals. I’ve discussed it with African peace and security intellectuals and statesmen. I’ve discussed it with countless civilians. I routinely encounter enthusiasm, tempered with thoughtful comments about how to set about organising a Corps in such a way that it complements, rather than hinders, civilian development agency and private-sector work.
It isn’t within the purview of military staffs to decide whether or not a Peace Engineering Corps will be set up — that’s for parliaments and Cabinets to decide — but it will be their job to set up the institutional capabilities and training systems, organise the logistics, motivate the troops, and carry out the work assigned. It’s very good to know they’ll be onside — and gladly so.
It makes sense that our soldiers are enthusiastic about the idea of PECs: In most countries, most of the time, peace prevails, thanks to the mere existence of strong national armies, which deters the formation of non-state militias or armed conflicts. It would be good for soldiers’ sense of contribution, and for their own professional and personal development, to have actively useful work to do during peacetime, in addition to providing the necessary service of deterrence against armed incursions.
And there is so much to be done. Even where peace prevails, it can be deepened and strengthened by improving human and environmental security through provision of better civilian infrastructure and services.
Soldiers recognise that their profession can be given greater meaning, honour, and purpose by extending the mission to encompass peace-building work guided by the spirit of the Sustainable Development Goals. That’s why their eyes light up and their voices resonate with enthusiasm when I ask them to contribute ideas on how PECs could be set up, and what projects PECs could be tasked with. Soldiers on PEC duty, building peace and prosperity, delivering human and environmental security, are the heroes we need in our time.
Repurpose the Military Initiative (RMI) proposes to model regional and national Peace Engineering Corps loosely on existing uniformed construction and emergency services corps — for example:
- The US Army Corps of Engineers and its 37,000 strong corps of skilled professional technicians and engineers; or
- The Technisches Hilfswerk, or Technical Aid Group, Germany’s 39,000 strong volunteer disaster relief corps.
PECs will be especially important for delivering core infrastructure and services in failed or failing states; in regions trying to recover from war; in areas hit by catastrophic natural disasters (something that will become much more common as the global climate continues to destabilise), and in any other regions where human or environmental insecurity prevails— especially in places where it’s too difficult or dangerous for civilian development workers to safely operate.
Yet it isn’t only in post-conflict regions where PECs will be useful. In all developing countries, there is so much catching-up to do in terms of basic infrastructure development that there is no risk that PECs will take civilian jobs away by delivering infrastructure. On the contrary: Infrastructure is built in layers. Before a city can develop a suite of modern industries, it needs reliable electricity, water, and transport systems. Before a degraded landscape’s forests, farms, and wildlife reserves can be restored to productivity, the land needs contouring to retain rainwater, renewed plant cover to provide shade and habitat, and sound enforcement of conservation laws.
The SDGs were unanimously agreed by all the world’s nations in a UN General Assembly vote in 2015. Implementing them successfully under tough field conditions — in places like South Sudan or parts of the Sahel, or other post-conflict regions — will be difficult. Doing difficult and dangerous work under tough conditions is exactly the sort of challenge that people who join militaries sign up for. That’s why repurposing substantial parts of our militaries to work on implementing the SDGs is a good fit for our times.
In many cases, it will make sense to repurpose soldiers to infrastructure development work even in regions which aren’t unstable. India, for example, has an enormous army — 1.2 million men and women on active duty, and nearly a million reservists in addition. Why not allocate, say, a third of Indian soldiers to much-needed civilian infrastructure construction projects, with the rest maintaining readiness to respond to any sudden military incursions on the country’s borders?
Assigning military units to peace-building deployments doesn’t mean permanently disarming them. Under normal circumstances, PEC units will be unarmed. Yet soldiers assigned to PECs will have received regular basic training under arms, as well as specialised training in civilian technical skills and advanced training in civilian-military cooperation (CIMIC).
If necessary, when armed conflict breaks out (e.g. due to an ethnic or sectarian conflict within an African or Near Eastern country), soldiers from national PECs can be recalled for regular armed military service at a moment’s notice.
Advanced CIMIC training will be necessary to ensure PEC units interact and work respectfully and harmoniously with civilian populations and agencies. PEC units could make domestic insurrections less likely by improving the relationship between the country’s army and its civilian populations. And if armed conflicts do occur, PEC units could play a useful role in addressing the reasons for the conflicts and negotiating an end to them. The business of specially trained PEC units will be to wage peace effectively.
Setting up Peace Engineering Corps doesn’t mean ending the existing mission of militaries — it means adding to it. The existing mission is about maintaining the sovereignty of the State which a national military serves, and it has two necessary and legitimate components:
- Maintain the State’s monopoly on organised violence, by maintaining a disciplined armed force loyal to the State and its legitimate governors, sufficient in strength that it can deter (and if necessary defeat) any armed uprisings or insurgencies by non-State militias that might attempt to seize power or destabilise the State.
- Maintain an armed force sufficient to deter invasions by armed forces from other countries.
These two core duties of armed forces will remain in place. What is being proposed here is to extend the armed forces’ mission to encompass a third core duty:
3. Actively wage peace. Advance human and environmental security, peace and prosperity by developing the nation’s infrastructure, regenerating its environment, and providing rapid emergency response services when help is needed— in short: help deliver on the UN Sustainable Development Goals where help is needed most.
Returning to the example of India: India’s overall security will be enhanced, not weakened, if an Indian Peace Engineering Corps is deployed to improve the nation’s infrastructure, and with it, India’s prosperity and social stability. India is paying the salaries of its uniformed personnel in any case. Why not expand the repertoire of responsibilities to include building human and environmental security in non-military domains, with the selection of projects guided by the UN SDGs?
Orconsider the case of Europe: Suppose Europe were initially to re-allocate, over a period of five years, some 15 percent of Europe’s soldiers and military budgets to a European Peace Engineering Corps (EuroPEC). 85 percent of Europe’s soldiers would remain on regular military duty, ready to repel a sudden unexpected attack by any hostile nation, implausible though such an attack may be.
The remaining 15 percent could, in a military emergency, be recalled to Europe on a few days’ notice, from their deployments building solar desalination plants on Europe’s Mediterranean islands, for example, or from their overseas roles as technical advisors helping other regional Peace Engineering Corps build solar farms or water treatment systems in Africa or Southwest Asia, or establishing civil-military cooperation (CIMIC) training institutes with and for partner militaries in those regions.
Soldiers assigned to PEC units will still be soldiers — indeed, in addition to permanent re-deployment of 15% of soldiers to a Peace Engineering Corps, armies could develop systems for rotating regular-army soldiers through PEC deployments as a normal component of soldiers’ careers. Among many other benefits, the soldiers involved will improve their qualifications and skills for useful post-military careers. The experience of working in PEC units will change the troops’ experience of soldiering — even their self-concept, their understanding of what their role in society is. It will change from a focus on getting ready to wage war to a focus on actively waging peace.
Under particularly difficult conditions in failed or failing states — the examples of South Sudan or parts of Somalia come to mind — unarmed PEC soldiers working in units repurposed for civilian infrastructure construction duties will have to be protected by regular armed troops tasked with guarding PEC personnel and equipment against attacks by warlords, terrorists, or criminal gangs.
The proposal on the table is not to remove soldiers from armies — it’s to expand the remit of armies to engage in peace-building by helping deliver human and environmental security where these are grievously lacking.
The first key step is to set up PECs as specialist units organised and trained specifically for that purpose, with advanced training in civilian-military cooperation skills as well as in specialist technical skills suitable for the unit’s assigned task (e.g. building water systems, or fighting forest fires, or managing large-scale afforestation projects in cooperation with civilian agencies and populations).
Initiating the organisation of regional Peace Engineering Corps will depend on a single country’s political and military leadership taking first-mover steps, committing resources, and bringing neighbouring countries into a new, hands-on peace-building alliance.
I suspect that whichever nation — and whichever leader — takes the first step to organise a multinational regional Peace Engineering Corps, and demonstrates leadership in what may become a decisive turn away from maintaining militaries as instruments of mass destruction, transforming them into instruments of mass construction instead, will be remembered and honoured for generations to come.
From my home base near Berlin, I’ve begun reaching out to European political and military leaders to ask them to cooperatively organise a European PEC. If European leaders accept this invitation, then within a few years, we’ll see troops from a European Peace Engineering Corps working to build civilian infrastructure where it’s needed most, whether in Europe, or as technical advisors in the context of inter-regional cooperations in Africa or Asia. Perhaps five or ten years from now, EuroPEC troops will be working side-by-side with troops from an African Union Peace Engineering Corps, building clean energy or water systems where they’re needed most.
Regional PECs can be organised as Coalitions of the Willing. There’s no need to insist that every national military in Europe join a European PEC from the get-go, for example. Nor is there any need to insist that a NAfriPEC, a North African regional PEC, must include participation by every country in North Africa from the get-go. A pragmatic, flexible, and gradual approach is warranted, designed to demonstrate progress a step at a time.
Let’s not wait. If there is a delay in achieving agreements to set up regional PECs, national armies in Africa, Europe, South America, South Asia, or the Pacific can go ahead and set up national PECs, and invite neighbours to join in later. There is no reason to delay, and plenty of good reasons to act with dispatch.
Are we ready to honour our commitment to the 2030 SDGs, and help stem poverty, insecurity, and population dislocations at their root by building the infrastructure for prosperity and regeneration where it’s needed most? Are we ready to take ourselves seriously as responsible actors in the international community?
Then let’s offer re-assignment to some of the brave, tough and capable men and women already wearing in uniform and on the public payroll, and offer them new roles within the military in which they’ll be able to make an immediate and powerful positive difference in people’s lives, giving help directly where their help is really needed.
Getting there from here will entail a lot of organising work, both at elite levels and grassroots levels. The wheels of policy tend to turn slowly, no matter how sensible the proposal on the table.
Politicians and military leaders must first be made familiar and comfortable with Repurpose the Military Initiative and the PEC concept. Experts and advisors must be drawn into detailed discussions on how best to organise and deploy each regional Peace Engineering Corps for SDG-consistent development projects.
Citizens and soldiers must be invited to express their personal support and engagement for RMI, and encouraged to let their elected representatives know that they’ll receive applause from their electorate, not opprobrium, for coming on-side with RMI. All this will take time.
But it will come. The time is right, and early discussions have shown that the support is there. People get it.
Almost certainly, RMI will be a boon to military recruiters. In many countries in Europe with volunteer armies, recruiters are having a difficult time finding willing and qualified recruits. If you’re a young man or woman in Germany, for example, it’s not clear what sense of inspiring or noble purpose there might be in joining the Bundeswehr only to spend your time preparing for a disastrous war with — whom, exactly? Russia? Been there, done that. We don’t want to go there again.
If however Bundeswehr soldiers spend a growing amount of their time building peace rather than preparing for war, helping communities on the ground where help is needed most, learning useful technical skills that transfer extremely well to subsequent civilian careers, then the Bundeswehr recruiter’s job might suddenly get a good deal easier.
As we stand up a global network of regional Peace Engineering Corps, we’ll be changing the meaning and purpose of soldiering. All the more so because 15% is just the beginning. In the medium term, we can imagine shifting 30% or even 60% of European soldiers’ time and effort toward implementing the SDGs—giving service to their countries and communities by building peace and human security, rather than preparing for pointless, disastrous Eurasian wars nobody wants to fight. Again, these repurposed soldiers will still be soldiers, with basic training at arms — if necessary, they can be recalled to service under arms at a moment’s notice.
Peace emerges easily when we take the time to make friends with our neighbours. We’ve made a good start on building cross-border friendships in Europe since the guns of the second world war fell silent. We’ve learned that working together in common enterprise, building civilian infrastructure together, waging peace on each other, is much safer, kinder, and more consistent with general prosperity than is building weapons, launching wars, and destroying each others’ infrastructure.
For those leaders of European countries who have long understood this, it will be a natural step to join together to form a European Peace Engineering Corps. And obviously, it’s profoundly in Europe’s geostrategic interest to help ensure the infrastructural basis for stability and prosperity gets built in currently unstable regions in Africa and South Asia — and to help armies in those regions build strong CIMIC skills and harmonious relationships between armies and civilian populations.
That’s why I’m optimistic that in due course, after the Repurpose the Military Initiative has been introduced into elite policy discourse in Europe, it will find support and eventual acceptance — although it won’t happen overnight. Even though RMI is clearly consistent with core European interests, the fact that so many institutional players are involved in any collective European decision means that it usually takes years for any major shift in policy to crystallize and find implementation.
Africa may move more quickly. It may be that a far-seeing and energetic leader such as Rwanda’s Paul Kagame or Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed, rather than a European leader, may take the first steps to stand up a Peace Engineering Corps in his region. Leaders like Ahmed and Kagame have shown a refreshing willingness to take bold steps, to the great benefit of their nations and of Africa. It could well emerge that first-mover leadership on Peace Engineering Corps will come from Africa rather than Europe.
We’ll need many hands joined in common purpose to approach our nations’ political leaders with an invitation for civilians, politicians and soldiers to join together across borders in taking steps on the long journey to redefining soldiering as a profession focused on building peace.
Real security for every nation will emerge when the profession of soldiering adopts and institutionalises building human and environmental security as an expansion of the military mission, equal in priority with its ancient mission of securing the realm through force of arms.
