To get a sense of what “complex operations” are, one need look no further than the kind of wars the U.S. fights when it intervenes overseas today. Unlike the total wars of the past, in which the U.S. military battled the national army of an enemy state, today’s struggles for security, stabilization, peace-building, reconstruction, and development in the most fragile states around the world are engaged by several different departments of the U.S. government. That’s it in a nutshell. But clearly, describing it is far easier that doing it.

When you listen to how the best minds that are thinking about and actually implementing complex operations describe them, it’s obvious that carrying out these missions – the most vital in American foreign policy – is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Everyone understands that today’s operations must be interagency and “whole of government” efforts. But the nature of the country’s Cold War-era foreign policy institutions makes that next to impossible.

That was driven home last Tuesday afternoon at the National Defense University in Washington, where many of those best minds gathered for a conference organized by the Center for Complex Operations (CCO), a government think tank made up of professionals from the Department of Defense, Department of State, and U.S. Agency for International Development. The most interesting panel included Gen. H.R. McMaster, who commanded the 3rd Armored Calvary Division in Iraq, and Dr. David Kilcullen, author of “The Accidental Guerilla” and one of the architects of the “surge” strategy in Iraq. In many ways, the CCO is at the forefront of thinking about the “how” of current and future American interventions. As one veteran of operations in Iraq and East Africa said before the talks got underway, “At this point, what operations are not complex?”

At the heart of the challenge is, in bureaucratic parlance, “the interagency.” Put simply, before the different factions of the U.S. foreign policy apparatus can even talk about cooperation, they first have to figure out how to talk. Only once they’ve forged a familiar lexicon – something that has by no means entirely happened – can communication give way to education about the ways different departments plan operations, handle contingencies, and measure success (not to mention retool strategies along the way). As if that weren’t enough of a challenge, most complex operations take part in a coalition context, so “the interagency” often means not only coordinating within the U.S. government, but also with multilateral bodies, like the U.N. Department of Peacekeeping Operations or NATO.

One immediate problem is that the process assumes that the various departments are actually interested in cooperating with each other. But even a cursory glance at current attitudes reveals several wrinkles. In recent years, many inside the Pentagon have expressed unease, to put it mildly, about soldiers doing state-building. The State Department, for its part, has problems shipping its civilians into battle, though it has been doing so when it can. And it remains very much an open question for USAID if working with soldiers compromises humanitarian spaces, and furthermore, whether foreign assistance ought to even be part of the U.S.’s national security agenda.

Despite these institutional challenges, as American interventions have grown more “complex” in the last two decades, departments and agencies have, in fact, cooperated on an ad hoc basis. But whatever they learned had often been forgotten by the next time they were called upon to do so again. The main reason has to do with the clean slate of civilian appointees that takes over with each new presidential administration, preventing institutional memory. For instance, missions in the 1990s in Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia actually prepared the country for the war in Kosovo to an almost unprecedented degree. However, when President George W. Bush came into office, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others threw out all that accumulated knowledge. The result was disastrous: bungled invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Wise to the tune, President Barack Obama kept Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on for partly this reason. But there is no such institutional mechanism to maintain continuity past future elections.

Further complicating matters, civilian departments have more difficulty filling posts in war zones than does Defense, which can send its soldiers overseas at will. Then there is simply the matter of funding. Comparing the resources of the Pentagon to that of State and USAID is like dropping a tank on one side of a scale, and a diplomat holding a 50-lb. bag of rice on the other. (Over the past 30 years combined, State has gotten by on less than 4 percent of the budget that has gone to Defense.) In the end, despite all the planning, lessons learned, and efforts toward cooperation, the bottom line is still very much the bottom line: Nobody else has the money that the Pentagon does.

But as even the Pentagon now willingly concedes, the problems of Iraq or Afghanistan cannot be solved by the military alone. Nonetheless, years into these conflicts, the “whole of government” approach that everyone seems to laud so vociferously is still but a hobbled mess of uncoordinated efforts by various actors, each with their own funding and planning structures, not to mention varying means for evaluating success. That raises the question of whether the challenge of complex operations isn’t more of a bureaucratic pathology, consistently aggravated by the disconnect between the missions and the means. With the prospect of future “expeditionary missions” always a possibility – whether in Somalia for nation-building, in Haiti to respond to a natural disaster, or in some other state far from policymakers’ radar at the moment – one hopes that the American foreign policy apparatus will find a way to integrate the lessons learned from today’s complex operations across the interagency spectrum. Because as one panel member hauntingly put it, in complex operations, “every lesson learned is a life.”