Here's the editorial in the NYT today noting this amazing USAID contract offering:

December 3, 2005
Editorial

Iraq Fixer, No Exp. Needed, $1B-up

Anyone who caught a glimpse of President Bush's speech on Iraq this week - delivered from an elaborately decorated stage confidently plastered with "Plan for Victory" placards - may have thought the administration believes that a detailed victory plan is in place. But there's still work to be done, especially if you're in the business of blue-sky consulting.

As the president's speech was being headlined, a far quieter government announcement from the Agency for International Development, the main pipeline for Iraq reconstruction, was offering a $1-billion-plus opportunity for interested parties to dream up "design and implementation" plans for stabilizing 10 "Strategic Cities" considered "critical to the defeat of the Insurgency in Iraq" . . .

Go here for the rest: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/03/opinion/03sat2.html.

Not a good sign this deep in the process, but reflective of a growing U.S. Government realization of the need for what I call the Development-in-a-Box process.

The templating, as Enterra likes to say, is just beginning.

But the government needs to be real on this: just hiring some firm to try and nail this all on its own is a bit too monolithic. We need the matrix, as Steve DeAngelis likes to say. We need marketplace competition and the culling of best practices. We have a host of different NATO countries leading the Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan, bringing a variety of approaches. In that marketplace, the best practices can be derived and templated for future use. That's more matrix-like, but hiring one big firm to do it all? Sounds scary and rife for abuse. Even ten firms at $100m each is hard to imagine, but that's at least spreading the risk some.

A process that bears watching, but good to see the attempt and the strategic realization behind it.