ARTICLE: "Shoes, Sheep and Pools: Using money as a weapon, the Army spent $2.8 billion to rebuild Iraq," by Dana Hedgpeth and Sarah Cohen, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 18-24 August 2008, p. 6.

Description of Commander's Emergency Response Program--SysAdmin on the fly.

Steve and I are scheduling to sit down with some people in the Department of the Army's policy side to discuss what we're doing with DiB in Kurdish Iraq. They want to know what comes after the CERP money dries up.

By the article's description, the lessons learned with CERP are similar to ones we've learned: you want something to work, connect it to enough local stakeholders.

Two other notes: the money spent gets mostly spent as the surge/COIN combo starts to work across 2007; and we spent $500k on one glass factory that never opened.

Both data points fit our experience too: security is key, and this ain't about opening dead factories but attracting FDI that wants its own factories.