WASHINGTON, Feb. 19 — The Pentagon and State Department have worked out a deal to send a small number of military personnel and Defense Department civilians to Iraq for several months until Foreign Service officers and State Department contract workers with specialized skills can fill those jobs, senior officials said Monday.
The internal administration discussions over filling the posts had exposed tensions between the military and civilian agencies over how to share responsibilities in carrying out President Bush’s new strategy for stabilizing and rebuilding Iraq — in particular, how to fill hazardous positions in new provincial reconstruction teams.
The State Department had asked the Pentagon to come up with military personnel or civilians to fill about one-third of the 350 new State Department jobs in Iraq. While the numbers involved are relatively small, the debate raised larger issues of whether the government was properly organized to carry out a long-term occupation of a country like Iraq.
The State Department’s written request for military personnel to fill some of the positions temporarily, received in late January, was met with frustration by a number of senior Pentagon officials and military officers.
But last week, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates agreed to the State Department request. About 120 military personnel or Pentagon civilians will fill the jobs for up to four months, according to three senior officials who were briefed on the discussions.
The officials said the stopgap measure would give the State Department time to identify Foreign Service officers to serve in political and economic development jobs in Iraq and to use new Congressional financing to hire people with technical skills that are not routinely part of diplomatic missions overseas.
The officials said the jobs included industrial development specialists, public health advisers, engineers, veterinarians, agricultural experts and lawyers who specialize in creating or enhancing judicial institutions.
While those skills are not a standard part of the diplomatic corps, they are found among active duty military and reserve personnel. It is those people who will be asked to step in temporarily.
“We are moving forward to try and fill many if not all of those positions, and can certainly manage it for 60, 90 or 120 days,” a senior Defense Department official said.
Another senior Pentagon official said, “Rather than waiting for the funding and contracting process, we want to push the envelope to get the provincial reconstruction teams running as rapidly as we can.”
Mr. Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have not publicly discussed the specifics of the agreement. But they met at the State Department last week, and Ms. Rice spoke in positive terms of cooperation between the departments.
“This is one of several meetings that the secretary and I have been holding and will continue to hold on major issues that Defense and State are confronting together in the global war on terror,” Ms. Rice said at the time. “It gives us a chance to get the people who are really responsible for managing these issues on a day-to-day basis together with us to solve the problems that we face and to take advantage of the opportunity.”
The president’s new strategy calls for the State Department to step up its efforts in Iraq, by doubling to 20 the number of provincial reconstruction teams. That increase would be in tandem with the deployment of 21,500 more troops to Baghdad and Anbar Province to the west.
“We need to put more energy into government at lower levels, at the provincial level and, in some cases, at the municipal level,” a senior Defense Department official said.
Another official said the additional provincial reconstruction teams, to be managed by State Department personnel, would not focus on “brick and mortar” construction, but on “trying to reconstruct governmental capacity — the ability for the Iraqi government at all levels to effectively deliver services.”
The State Department-run reconstruction teams will rely on military personnel for security and to escort convoys, Pentagon and State Department officials said. Striking a balance between assigning troops to day-to-day combat missions versus providing security for nonmilitary efforts has caused some tensions in the past.
At the core of the debate is a clash of cultures, civilian and military, and assessments of the mission. Many in the military have said that while administration officials routinely speak of the United States as “a nation at war,” by far the bulk of the mission is being carried by those in uniform, while the rest of the government is not on a similar war footing.
But across the civilian agencies, which have only a fraction of the Pentagon’s personnel and budget, government workers say the question is whether a few hundred unarmed civilians spread across Iraq can make a significant difference in promoting democracy and reconstruction in the middle of a war zone, when more than 130,000 troops are not succeeding in that task.