One of the most important State Department operations in Iraq is the collection of Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) sprinkled across the country's provinces. These teams bear the burden of reconstructing and developing all aspects of Iraqi society. I'm understandably most familiar with the Baghdad PRT, covering the city and its outlying areas that constitute Baghdad province.
The Baghdad PRT -- and I have no reason to believe the others are different -- is made up of the following components: Rule of Law, Governance, USAID, Infrastructure (two for Baghdad because city/province), Economics, and Project Planning (engineers, etc.).
I've spent some time with the Rule of Law folks; it's a hard and tough slog getting courts up and running, regularizing the police, and dealing with detainees. Forgetting security for second, the logistics of the operation are almost imponderable; after decades of neglect, there's a sudden need to train and equip police and judicial investigators, investigative judges (more on how the Iraqi judiciary works later), and auxiliary resources (such as crime labs).
The PRTs also liaise with smaller PRTs which are embedded with the military brigades responsible for a given area (and hence called Embedded PRTs, or EPRTs). This is State's equivalent to the military's "surge," and it is starting, slowly but surely, to pay dividends.
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Sounds like you have to deal with a lot of red-tape. That's typical of organizations (including governments)that get a kick out of using aconyms and words that don't exist...like "regularizing".... You probably should have picked another field. Maybe it's not too late. Reconsider. The military means violence - no other way to conduct warfare - and anyone who choses violence as their means has no choice but to use lying as their principle. It's not a good place to be.
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