CARLISLE, Pa. -- In a cubicle at the U.S. Army War College at Carlisle Barracks the other day, a retired colonel was poring over microfiche copies of the writings of Maj. Gen. Frederick Funston, looking for ideas that could help American soldiers stabilize Iraq.

Funston is a military hero who won the Medal of Honor in 1899 while fighting a Muslim insurrection in the Philippines. For eight months in 1914, he was military governor of Vera Cruz, Mexico, after the first U.S. intervention in the Mexican Civil War, and he was widely regarded as having done a terrific job under extremely difficult circumstances.

So now, nearly a century later, a former Special Forces officer named Bill Flavin is browsing Funston's accounts at the War College in search of lessons in how to pacify a country plagued by guerrilla war.

	Carlisle site has storied past The U.S. Army War College at Carlisle Barracks looks like the campus of a small New England college built around a military parade ground. There has been a military post at the barracks location since the French and Indian War, when the British established a base there. The oldest building is a powder magazine built by Hessian prisoners of war captured by Gen. George Washington in his raid on Trenton in December 1776. The stone building was the only one that survived when Confederate Gen. J.E.B. Stuart burned the post a few days before the battle of Gettysburg in 1863. In 1879, the War Department transferred Carlisle Barracks to the Interior Department, which established a school for Indians there. Among the students was the famous athlete Jim Thorpe. In 1918 the War Department reasserted control, and Carlisle Barracks became home to the Army's Medical Field Service School. In 1951, four years after the Medical Field Service School was transferred to San Antonio, Carlisle Barracks became home to the U.S. Army War College. The War College had been established in 1903 by the then Secretary of War, Elihu Root. The War College originally was located in Washington, D.C.

"He had a very similar challenge," Flavin said. "Mexicans [were told by rebel leaders] not to cooperate with the Americans and tried to assassinate those who did."

The War College's Peacekeeping Institute, where Flavin is one of a handful of experts, survived an assassination of its own earlier this year. It now has rebounded, and then some and will nearly double in size over the next year.

The institute was established in 1993 by then-Army chief of staff Gen. Gordon Sullivan when he asked his aides where in the Army he could go for expertise on peacekeeping and was told there was no such place. But to save money and get more active duty officers serving with troops in the field, the Army announced in January that the Peacekeeping Institute would shut down -- despite ongoing U.S. peacekeeping operations in Kosovo and Afghanistan and, at the time, a looming war in Iraq.

"The war college was told it had to cut 64 slots, and our 10 were among them," said Col. Michael Dooley, acting director of the Peacekeeping Institute.

The Army said the decision was less about money than about the pressing need for the military personnel assigned to the institute. The institute's director, Col. George Oliver, was sent to Iraq to help in reconstruction efforts.

Critics figured that the decision had more to do with the distaste for U.S. "nation-building" frequently expressed by President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Lorelei Kelly, a senior associate at the Henry L. Stimson Center, called the institute "a post-Cold War orphan, regarded with suspicion from the left for being a child of the military and scorned by the right for having the word 'peace' in its name."

At any rate, the announcement that the Peacekeeping Institute would close outraged many on Capitol Hill and among the non-government organizations with which the institute had worked.

Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D.-Calif., and Republicans James Leach of Iowa and Todd Platts of Pennsylvania, who represents the district where the War College is located, successfully inserted an amendment in the defense authorization bill for 2004 to keep the institute open.

The heat from Congress and NGOs prompted the Army to have second thoughts.

Among those grateful for the reprieve is Roy Williams, who met the Peacekeeping Institute's first director, Col. Karl Farris, at a camp for Rwandan refugees in 1994 when he was working for the International Rescue Committee. Williams subsequently has taken part in functions at the institute several times.

"[The Peacekeeping Institute] fills a unique gap," said Williams, who now runs the Center for Humanitarian Cooperation. "It has the advantage of being a neutral interlocutor [between NGOs and the military] on humanitarian issues."

The institute also has a new name, to reflect its broadened mission. It now is known as the Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute. "Stability operations" is what the Army calls the shadowy period between the end of major combat and the time when there's enough peace to keep. The Army calls its current activities in Iraq and Afghanistan "stability operations," whereas Kosovo -- where there is little violence and no organized resistance -- is considered a "peacekeeping" mission.

The institute also will expand beyond the Army to include representatives from the State Department, the Agency for International Development, the Marine Corps, and a foreign military service.

The challenge of stability operations is how to rebuild, or build, a nation's civic institutions and economic infrastructure while fighting a low-grade guerrilla war. The institute's faculty will reflect the breadth of the task, with experts on international law, civil affairs, psychological operations, military police, special operations and infrastructure rehabilitation.

The United States has conducted stability operations more often than many Americans may realize: in Mexico, the Philippines, Haiti, Nicaragua, the South after the Civil War, and in Germany, Japan and South Korea after World War II.

Flavin and other researchers comb historical accounts and after-action reviews from units serving in or just returned from Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo for evidence of what works and what doesn't.

The single most important factor, Dooley said, is cultural awareness.

"The critical thing is to prevent misunderstandings in critical situations that can arise at checkpoints or in house searches or neighborhood sweeps," Dooley said. "You've got to prepare our soldiers for the kind of stressful situations they are likely to encounter on a day-to-day basis."

The primary missions of the peacekeeping institute are to study and compile the lessons learned from stability operations past and present; to advise senior Army leaders on the conduct of stability operations; and to educate the next generation of Army leaders on the importance of stability operations and how to conduct them.

The institute also performs an important networking function by bringing Army leaders together with people from the United Nations, civilian agencies of the federal government and leaders of international aid organizations at two major and several smaller conferences each year.

"It helps a lot if a combatant commander is already acquainted with the people with whom he'll have to work on a peacekeeping mission," Dooley said.

The networking function was much on Sullivan's mind when he decided to create the Peacekeeping Institute, and to put it in Carlisle.

"I wanted to create a means to be able to bring in people from New York and Washington to share expertise on the intricacies of peacekeeping," said Sullivan, who now heads the Association of the U.S. Army, a semi-official lobbying group whose membership includes active-duty and retired soldiers and defense contractors.

This year, the institute staff probably will learn as much about peacekeeping from its students as it will teach them. Of the 340 officers enrolled in the current War College class, 57 have served in Iraq, Afghanistan or both.

War College students typically are colonels on their way to becoming generals. Most are Army officers, but officers from other services and from some foreign militaries also attend. Canadian Maj. Gen. Lewis Mackenzie, for instance, former commander of U.N. peacekeepers in Bosnia, studied there before the Peacekeeping Institute was founded.