I was in the .mil until right before 9/11, like I got my final honorable discharge papers in dec 2000. So I'm older, but not totally ancient (like, say, my grandfather who flew B-17s and B-24s in WWII). And I also have a cousin who did peace corps time in one of the South African townships in the early 80s. My cousin and I are, um, kind of different in outlook, lifestyle, equipment, training, attitude... The fundamental problem is sending the army to do the peace corps job. Even worse, the same army that did the "pacification".
A simple analogy is if you ordered a navy destroyer crew and my army ordnance company to swap jobs, it end up as a hilariously ineffective reality TV show (Hmm, this might actually lure in viewers...). Something even more extreme like assigning an infantry platoon to peace corps work is going to be even more of an epic fail.
There is another interesting issue that the peace corps is not supposed to accomplish any major long term changes. So if they had a mission there, with the same results, they'd be considered to be doing "great". The S.A. township my cousin served in, remains a morass of poverty and crime and ignorance, maybe a little better than it would otherwise be, but no one has any crazy illusions that his 2 year term or whatever it was would result in the township turning into "leave it to beaver"-ville. On the other hand its considered a military disaster to spend decades basically accomplishing nothing. So you need a perspective change. For a bunch of soldiers doing someone else's job, they're about as successful as the correct set of workers would be.
Interestingly to the best of my knowledge the peace corps still considers hand chalk to be appropriate technology. If you want to do nationbuilding you send in guys with chalkboards and excellent native language skills and maybe some special technical skills (or maybe not).
A simple analogy is if you ordered a navy destroyer crew and my army ordnance company to swap jobs, it end up as a hilariously ineffective reality TV show (Hmm, this might actually lure in viewers...). Something even more extreme like assigning an infantry platoon to peace corps work is going to be even more of an epic fail.
There is another interesting issue that the peace corps is not supposed to accomplish any major long term changes. So if they had a mission there, with the same results, they'd be considered to be doing "great". The S.A. township my cousin served in, remains a morass of poverty and crime and ignorance, maybe a little better than it would otherwise be, but no one has any crazy illusions that his 2 year term or whatever it was would result in the township turning into "leave it to beaver"-ville. On the other hand its considered a military disaster to spend decades basically accomplishing nothing. So you need a perspective change. For a bunch of soldiers doing someone else's job, they're about as successful as the correct set of workers would be.
Interestingly to the best of my knowledge the peace corps still considers hand chalk to be appropriate technology. If you want to do nationbuilding you send in guys with chalkboards and excellent native language skills and maybe some special technical skills (or maybe not).