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217: Gretchen Peters, Winning Against Global Networks (Part I)
Manage episode 472386733 series 3455869
Content provided by Civil Affairs Association. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Civil Affairs Association or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.
Please join me in welcoming Gretchen Peters, one of the best counter-network people I know.
Gretchen came in to discuss the current challenges with targeting kingpins and criminal organizations
and how she maps and targets a network to ensure that the leaders get prosecuted and that the arrests also collapse the criminal organization.
With our adversaries using criminal networks to forward their foreign policy goals, I felt this would be a pertinent discussion on how the US should respond. This is a two-part episode, so let's get started.
---
One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.
We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations.
To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com
or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org
---
Great news!
Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at:
https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/
---
Special Thanks to Jazz…venue for the sample of Paris Jazz Lounge. Retrieved from https://youtube.com/shorts/E2i8w6cdQR8?si=UqceqAb1c3oeElTy
---
228 episodes
ShareManage episode 472386733 series 3455869
Content provided by Civil Affairs Association. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Civil Affairs Association or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.
Please join me in welcoming Gretchen Peters, one of the best counter-network people I know.
Gretchen came in to discuss the current challenges with targeting kingpins and criminal organizations
and how she maps and targets a network to ensure that the leaders get prosecuted and that the arrests also collapse the criminal organization.
With our adversaries using criminal networks to forward their foreign policy goals, I felt this would be a pertinent discussion on how the US should respond. This is a two-part episode, so let's get started.
---
One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.
We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations.
To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com
or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org
---
Great news!
Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at:
https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/
---
Special Thanks to Jazz…venue for the sample of Paris Jazz Lounge. Retrieved from https://youtube.com/shorts/E2i8w6cdQR8?si=UqceqAb1c3oeElTy
---
228 episodes
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One CA Podcast
1 229: James Turner on Information Operations in Competition - Part II 22:51
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Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedWelcome to the One CA Podcast. This week, Brian Hancock returns to finish his interview with Colonel James Turner about information operations and influence in strategic competition. This is the second of a two-part episode. To hear part I, check out last week's episode. --- One CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association. and brings in current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www.civilaffairsassoc.org -- Great news Feedspot,the podcast industry ranking system, rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10shows on foreign policy. Check it out at: https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/ -- Special Thanks to Morning Light Music for a sample of Fun and Exciting from the playlist Summer Background Music. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/vFe5N7bvXXI?si=2Gsn9EuRp_rptDRh…
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One CA Podcast
1 228: Stephanie DeRiso on Cultural Support Teams 27:44
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Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedToday, Danny Joseph interviewed Stephanie DeRiso about her work with cultural support teams and her transition to civil affairs. --- One CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact theshow, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up onthe Civil Affairs Association website at www.civilaffairsassoc.org --- Great news! Feedspot, thepodcast industry ranking system, rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10shows on foreign policy. Check it out at: https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/ --- Special Thanks to Meditation Melodies for the Sample of Tropical Summer. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7pt4FSViC8…
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One CA Podcast
1 227: Boyan Pancevski, Russia's war with the West (Part II) 21:19
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Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedPlease welcome Bojan Pancevski, the Wall Street Journal's chief European political correspondent, who covers European and global affairs. This is a two-part series. I interview Bojan in Part I, and Mariah Yager from SMA interviews him in Part II. We discuss how the Russian war in Ukraine has spilled over into clandestine operations in Europe, resulting in a shadow war of espionage and sabotage between Russia and the West. --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation'speople and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www.civilaffairsassoc.org --- Great news! Feedspot, thepodcast industry ranking system, rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10shows on foreign policy. Check it out at: https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/ --- Special thanks toMorning Light Music for the sample of Summer Background. Retrieved fromhttps://youtu.be/FBHEF1nxbi0?si=r7DLKQA1Ch3t9C8q…
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One CA Podcast
1 226: Bojan Pancevski, Russia's war with the West (Part I) 20:40
20:40 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked20:40
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedPlease welcome Bojan Pancevski, the Wall Street Journal's Chief European Political Correspondent, who covers European and global affairs. This is a two-part series. I interview Bojan in Part I, and Mariah Yager from SMA interviews him in Part II. We discuss how the Russian war in Ukraine has spilled over into clandestine operations in Europe, resulting in a shadow war of espionage and sabotage between Russia and the West. --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation'speople and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www.civilaffairsassoc.org --- Great news! Feedspot, thepodcast industry ranking system, rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10shows on foreign policy. Check it out at: https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/ --- Special thanks toMorning Light Music for the sample of Summer Background. Retrieved fromhttps://youtu.be/FBHEF1nxbi0?si=r7DLKQA1Ch3t9C8q…
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One CA Podcast
Today, Rob Boudreau interviews 1st CAG G-9 OIC LtCol. Chris Bridger (who recently left for a new billet) and G-9 Chief GySgt Brian Schultz discuss their experience working in Civil Affairs. Enjoy. One CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www.civilaffairsassoc.org --- Great news! Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system, rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at: https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/ --- Special Thanks to Louis Bacalov for a sample of Ricatto Alla Malla. Retrieved fromhttps://youtu.be/XSJN1R29mHE?si=nGPBcD-J7XM4BEFZ…
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One CA Podcast
1 224: Jon Shaffner, South American governance and security 19:38
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Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedToday we welcome Retired Col Jon Shaffner, now with Liberty Alliance. I first met Jon when he was an army strategist assigned to the Army chief of public affairs as their plans chief. Jon is working with Liberty Alliance to help expand their work in South America. So, let's get started. --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www.civilaffairsassoc.org --- Great news! Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system, rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at: https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/ --- Special Thanks to bushinside for the sample of Upbeat Background Music Instrumental "Dance ＆ Electronic." Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MzdQLTBPPo…
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One CA Podcast
1 223: Giancarlo Newsome on Innovation in Civil Affairs 30:20
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Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedWelcome to ONE CA Podcast. Today, Brian Hancock hosts Giancarlo Newsome, an Army Reserve Civil Affairs officer, to explore innovation in diplomacy, including using a hybrid financial equity approach to partner-nation projects, technology acquisition, and improving civil affairs reach with partner nations. --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www.civilaffairsassoc.org --- Great news! Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system, rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at: https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/…
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One CA Podcast
1 222: Why Should We Care about the Indo-Pacific 28:20
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Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedToday, we welcome retired colonel Ray Powell and retired Foreign Service Officer Jim Carouso to discuss their new show, "Why Should We Care about the Indo-Pacific?" The show is on YouTube and multiple podcast platforms. I bring them on to discuss their experiences in the Indo-Pacific and their new role in speaking and hosting on foreign policy. So, let's get started. To check out the show, here is the YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6TMufYaMcN5pmi1Xkf_g1g --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org --- Special Thanks to JPVG Ambience for the sample of Puerto Rico Latin Jazz. Retrieved from: https://youtu.be/PcYe8V075_4?si=JfG0XgBB6gJa6ODr…
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One CA Podcast
Welcome to One CA Podcast. This week, Assad Raza hosts John Nonemaker and Amanda Smolinski from Veterans Without Orders, a non-profit that recruits veteran Civil Affairs servicemembers to work in humanitarian assistance programs worldwide. Information on Veterans Without Orders: Website: https://veteranswithoutorders.org/ Contact: john@veteranswithoutorders .org --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org --- Great news! Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at: https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/ --- Music: Special thanks to SYAH IW for a sample of Seventeen, April shower. Retrieved from https://youtube.com/watch?v=VaX1ggLTlwo&si=WHxLcsfzmOgfaZ_4…
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One CA Podcast
1 220: Ali Maisam Nazary: The Taliban Resistance Movement 22:50
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Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedWelcome to One CA Podcast. Today we welcome Ali Maisam Nazary, who represents the Afghan resistance forces to the United States. We talk about how the resistance is structured, updates from Afghanistan and what a post-resistance Afghanistan would look like. --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org --- Great news! Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at: https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/ --- Special thanks to Royalty Free Music for a sample of Dawali Festival Music. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/BqIvkuLjxhk?si=ggMrmDEXRSIQoRpp…
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One CA Podcast
Please welcome Lieutenant Nick Dubaz, the G39 Director of the Southern European Task Force, Africa. Nick oversees Civil Affairs teams working across the continent to help U.S. Embassies build positive relations with partner nations' people and leaders. --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org --- Great news! Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at: https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/ --- Music: Special Thanks to the site "Relaxing jazz piano" for the sample from Warm March Jazz Music. Retrieved from: https://youtu.be/m7WiikpM0J0?si=Ow6IiDktAqe6jykV…
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One CA Podcast
1 218: Gretchen Peters, Winning Against Global Networks (Part II) 20:49
20:49 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked20:49
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedPlease join me in welcoming Gretchen Peters, one of the best counter-network people I know. Gretchen came in to discuss the current challenges with targeting kingpins and criminal organizations and how she maps and targets a network to ensure that the leaders get prosecuted and that the arrests also collapse the criminal organization. With our adversaries using criminal networks to forward their foreign policy goals, I felt this would be a pertinent discussion on how the US should respond. This is a two-part episode, so let's get started. --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org --- Great news! Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at: https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/ --- Special Thanks to Jazz…venue for the sample of Paris Jazz Lounge. Retrieved from https://youtube.com/shorts/E2i8w6cdQR8?si=UqceqAb1c3oeElTy ---…
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One CA Podcast
1 217: Gretchen Peters, Winning Against Global Networks (Part I) 21:06
21:06 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked21:06
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedPlease join me in welcoming Gretchen Peters, one of the best counter-network people I know. Gretchen came in to discuss the current challenges with targeting kingpins and criminal organizations and how she maps and targets a network to ensure that the leaders get prosecuted and that the arrests also collapse the criminal organization. With our adversaries using criminal networks to forward their foreign policy goals, I felt this would be a pertinent discussion on how the US should respond. This is a two-part episode, so let's get started. --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org --- Great news! Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at: https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/ --- Special Thanks to Jazz…venue for the sample of Paris Jazz Lounge. Retrieved from https://youtube.com/shorts/E2i8w6cdQR8?si=UqceqAb1c3oeElTy ---…
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One CA Podcast
1 216: Mic Mulroy: Fogbow and Veteran Humanitarian NGOs 20:46
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Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedToday, we welcome Mick Mulroy to discuss Fogbow, his new humanitarian NGO, and their work in Gaza, Sudan, and Syria. We also discuss the growing number of veteran humanitarian organizations getting involved in some of the most distressed places on Earth. --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org --- Great news! Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at: https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/ --- Special Thanks to Businside for the sample of Upbeat Background Music - Dance and Electronic Music. Retrieved from: https://youtu.be/1MzdQLTBPPo?si=6cJR4qPYoJUaohh3 --- Rough transcript: 00:00:05 Open Welcome to the 1CA podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail dot com. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes. Today, we welcome Mick Mulroy to discuss Fogbow, his new humanitarian NGO, and their work in Gaza, Sudan, and Syria. We also discuss the growing number of veteran humanitarian organizations getting involved in some of the most distressed places on Earth. So let's get started. 00:00:57 MIC MULROY I've been to Syria several times, but I haven't been there recently and not since all of the Assad regime. So we are looking at the potential for what we as a group who supports humanitarian efforts can do in Syria. 00:01:11 JACK GAINES I hope Syria straightens out. The new government actually does build out something representative for the population and the economy, that it becomes more centrist. I have a lot of hope. I think we all should, 00:01:21 MIC MULROY have a lot of hope. I think we all should, right? It's a good thing, obviously, that Assad's... gone. I mean, hundreds of thousands of deaths are on his hands. So certainly a good thing. The question is whether the incoming crowd who took government control by force are going to be the reformers they say they are, or are they going to go back to their roots? I think the verdict is still out. We should all hope that's the case. I think the incoming or now the team that's in place is a bit more skeptical than the last. You can tell by whether they call them Jelani or Al -Shirar. That's the first indicator when I was doing my rounds on both the Hill Congress and the Trump team. I think there's criticism on just how inclusive they're going to be. But we should all hope that that is the case and that there's an election soon rather than the four years that I think they've been saying. But certainly when it comes to sections that are more related to Assad. They should be reconsidered, and we should look at what we're doing there long term. With the SDF during the defeat of ISIS, the crisis, if we pull out precipitously, both for our partners, the SDF and for the counterterrorism effort, but also our strategy against Iran and Russia to a certain extent, which right now, I think everybody would stay on their backside, especially when it comes to Syria. But when it comes to humanitarian assistance, there is a dire need, for sure. And I think that is something that a lot of groups are looking at, how they can contribute to the rebuilding of Syria and the promotion of a stable country that looks more inward. Their own people vice becoming a client state to actors don't have best interests Syrians like Russia. 00:03:10 JACK GAINES And it's interesting that with their change of government and Lebanon being able to form a government because Hezbollah has their fingers out of the pie right now. I see it as a real strategic opportunity because if Lebanon can get on its foot, Syria can get on its feet, there could be a whole sea change of policy in that region to where Iran's behaviors are balanced, Russia's behavior are balanced, the nations down there can actually rebuild and have a more stable government and a healthier international relationship. I agree with you, 00:03:40 MIC MULROY I agree with you, Derek. I think this is a very big opportunity for the United States. I use boxing analogies because I used to box. I used to coach boxing in the Marine Corps. This is a point where you see your opponent on the ropes, right? You don't back up. You go in and try to end the fight. I know we're not going to end the fight or the competition between us and Russia, but Ayoun is a partner, obviously the former commander of Lebanese Armed Forces. We have supported them for a long period of time. They were a very effective partner with us, and he was the head of it. So that's a huge opportunity right there. Iran, I think, has many strategic mistakes, and they realize that now, and they've seen it both in their major losses with leadership across the board, their capability, and of course in Syria. I mean, their corridor to fund and supply groups like Hamas and Hezbollah has been cut off, and they just don't have the platform that they have. And I think we should capitalize on that. Our policy should be... The promotion of U .S. interests, part of that, I believe, I don't know if we're going to today, is the promotion of democracy and human rights. But certainly, this is an opportunity to do both, our strategic interests and promotion of democratic values. 00:04:55 JACK GAINES With Fog Bow, you have a pretty heady team. Some folks that I've recognized from other efforts, some new. Ambassador Smith is awesome. Roger Thompson, you've got a lot of great people here. 00:05:06 MIC MULROY of great people here. 00:05:08 JACK GAINES By name only. 00:05:08 MIC MULROY name only. 00:05:10 JACK GAINES Well, Chris, he'd be right there with him. 00:05:11 MIC MULROY be right there with him. Yeah, so FABO is primarily veterans, but we have our humanitarian. And the skills that we have that I think are additive to the whole endeavor, which are air delivery. We've done that in Sudan. We've done maritime delivery in Gaza. We know Austere Logistics. We're a very small company, but we really focused on doing that. And that's why I said Roger's the MVP, right? So we have a lot of former SOF folks. We have a lot of... former special operations veterans, whose skill includes all the delivery and the planning and kind of figuring out hard problems where there's no easy solution. But Roger's done Marine Infantry, but he was also a Marine Logistics Officer. So that's why I say he's the MVP, because that's what we do essentially is logistics. Our mission accomplished, it's food delivered, people in need. 00:06:03 JACK GAINES Right. I've had a couple people on talk about the Triton Pier. Some of the challenges with prepping in Cyprus for it, putting the peer out, getting as much aid as possible out, and how the thing broke up. But similar to that, Fogbo seems to be focused on some of the harder areas to reach with aid. It's not a typical aid organization. You go into very restrictive areas that have real security challenges, and you help make sure that humanitarian effort arrives. so that people can continue to survive until conflicts, until crisis or disasters are resolved. That's a tough space to work in. And that's why we get requested to come in. 00:06:42 MIC MULROY to work in. And that's why we get requested to come in. When it comes to the pier, I would say this. We, Sam Mundy, Ricard General, you probably saw on the site, we briefed the last administration several times on the idea of bringing in aid. The Ameritimese, they came up with the JLOPS, the Joint Logistics on the Shore system. To be frank, we didn't think it was the best. Because of the sea states at the time, it could have been done a different way. But we're Americans, and by God, if the U .S. military is going to push up here from Virginia to Gaza, we're going to support it out of pocket. There's not a whole lot of countries that do something. In the United States, it did something, and it might not have been perfect, but it did still over 33 ,000 tons of food into Gaza when it's needed. So that's done, and we're still working to build facilities that can assist the storage of... Critical food aid, medical aid. For NGOs. The other point on how difficult, just to give you a highlight, in Sudan there was a very substantial population that got cut off from ground delivery of food because of that. Primarily the rainy season cut off the roads and the fighting, of course. They were out of food. And all it took was somebody who could come in there and deliver food via air in a very tightly controlled area because of the conflict. And that's where we fit in. That's de -conflicting battle space and airdrops, austere environments. That's what not just people in Fogbo, but that's what the U .S. military is pretty damn good at. So that's what we did for three months, and I think we did a lot of good. And now the situation has changed. It can get ground to leverage. But that's just an example of what we're doing. We're also looking to expand in others. And it's certainly not just about us. There's a lot of groups doing this out there. And if they see a need for our skill set, Give us a call. 00:08:35 JACK GAINES And I'll put it on the show notes as well. I'm sure this must be an adrenaline rush for a lot of the veterans to actually be out in the mix delivering humanitarian supplies, which is a great reward for the skills that a lot of people have. What kind of feedback have you gotten from your logistics teams, your pilots, your air crew, about what it's like to work for the organization? It really comes down to a mission, 00:08:56 MIC MULROY It really comes down to a mission, right? So we're all there because of mission, which is to enable humanitarian operations. We are a private company. That's why it's really incumbent on us to assist NGOs that are out there doing great work. I think the most feedback I've gotten is actually taking the skills that they learned over 20, sometimes 30 years, in our case, the U .S. military, a lot of it in conflict, and do something like this. So it's, and myself included, have really taken this mission on as important as any mission I've ever had. And that's what I hear. But of course, it isn't about us. I mean, there's other groups that are doing this, and there's certainly other groups that can do this, that get veterans that are really looking for something other than your standard jobs. This is an area where they can really have an impact really quick. 00:09:50 JACK GAINES The reason I bring it up is that I had Scott Mann on, and one of the things he really challenged with, we're all cause -based in the military. We work to a cause. We have a bigger thing we're trying to reach. And people get out. Some go to church, some start a business, some start a pizzeria or a workout joint. But some just struggle with trying to find that sense of cause and how they place it, what they can do with it. And his challenge was it drove him to suicide because he couldn't find his place in life after getting out of the military. And so that's why he looked into other things like acting and writing books and lectures and veterans of care programs. Veterans Without Orders, who does water delivery, because I want to show veterans that there are opportunities out there. We can apply that sense of cause to make a difference so that they don't feel like they're alone in this world. When I was talking to the Veterans Without Orders folks, what they found is being on the ground, a lot of the NGOs were surprised at how fast and efficient they were. They went to Haiti and some of the World Food Program folks were like, wow, how long have you guys been working together? It seems like you've been friends for years. And he's like, no, actually, We had a phone call for 20 minutes, landed, met, got on it. But we just have a common language. We understand what each other's doing. We know we're both here for the right reasons. And you just build that instant trust in order to do a mission. And that's what I assume you guys are seeing there as well. I worked pretty closely with him on the Afghan evacuation. 00:11:15 MIC MULROY I worked pretty closely with him on the Afghan evacuation. My group was called Dunkirk. We weren't a Team America Elite. We also did a lot with Scott. Because that was such a cause near and dear to their heart, that was the first. foray into humanitarian work. And I think that's stuck with a lot of them. And we're seeing a lot of that continue around the world where veterans say, oh, we can really do something here. I think that's great. 00:11:41 JACK GAINES With Kabul on the midst of collapsing, I saw a lot of veterans rallying together to figure out how to get private logistics in there, getting buses, getting private planes. One thing that I bumped into was a lot of NGOs that were desperately trying to get help because they had people that were working with aid and with state and with the military that were not represented on those lists that needed to get out of there because they were part of the cigar report or they were part of distribution and the Taliban knew who they were and they were going to come after them. My part was just plugging those NGOs in with veterans who had logistics, who had access to help them get some of those folks out. But I did notice that... Once people got involved, it's just almost like there was a light came on and said, oh, I don't have to wait for the U .S. government to order me to do something. I can actually go make a difference. I can take my skills and help be a part of the whole foreign policy scheme and actually do stuff. I can do it without having to be a part of aid o…
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One CA Podcast
1 215: Ismael Lopez on OHDACA and Humanitarian Relief (Part II) 23:06
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Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedWelcome to the One CA Podcast. Today, Brian Hancock interviewed Ismael Lopez about OHDACA and Humanitarian Relief and his experiences as a Marine Civil Affairs Officer. Brian's profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-j-hancock/ Ismael's profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ishrlopez/ Transcript available below. --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org --- Great news! Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at: https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/ --- Special Thanks to the creators of Jazz & Bossa Cafe for the sample of Positive March Music. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHeCxa0rMQ4 --- Transcript: 00:00:10 BRIAN HANCOCK Welcome to One Civil Affairs Podcast. I'm Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hancock, and I will be your host for this session. Today we have with us Major Ishmael Lopez to discuss civil affairs and the ongoing relief effort in the Gaza Strip. Let's talk a little bit more about that training piece. Part of readiness is being able to do your job. The Marine is an expeditionary force, perhaps becoming even more expeditionary with the expeditionary advanced base operations. construct, the chief of the Navy signed off on. So very interesting training opportunities for the fleet right now. And you mentioned Balakatan and some of those other exercise type missions that you've done. 00:00:53 BRIAN HANCOCK And I know you've probably done Marine Corps Warfighting exercise and mentioned JRTC. But what are some of these other missions you've done? You've talked about a dock up. A dock up is joined at the hip with humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, HADR. The Navy has a huge role in HADR for just a whole bunch of reasons. Has your detachment participated in any HADR missions? Is that another training opportunity that you have with your Marines in detachment? 00:01:21 ISMAEL LOPEZ We as a detachment have not. However, I do have individual Marines who have participated in HADR missions. Not a whole lot of experience, but there's some resident within the detachment. And to your point, there is huge training opportunity there for understanding how to integrate into an HADR response specific to DOD's role in supporting the State Department. We do have the opportunities for training with USAID, but that's all classroom. And we try to get as much exposure to that as possible. But as far as real-world HADR scenarios where we're able to integrate with the State Department and even into a joint task force or a multinational task force, it is very limited. I know that that is being discussed for future iterations of Balakatan specifically to have a HADR response, which makes sense, right? Because Balakatan is becoming a massive multinational exercise that features activities across the spectrum of military operations. Once that piece of it is integrated, then it's truly a well -thought -out, deliberate exercise on how to integrate HADR, whereas right now it's sort of sprinkled on top. The Marines, sailors, and even the Army, civil affairs practitioners that are supporting, are supporting steady -state engineering projects. And I think that's a missed opportunity because there's so much more that we can provide than project management. And there are opportunities there, but... If I'm a commander sitting on top of a joint task force, that's not where I would place those assets because it's going to happen. They're not caught off guard and they understand, okay, where is the USAID person that I need to be linked up with? Who do I need to be syncing up with? Again, looking for those opportunities. 00:03:22 BRIAN HANCOCK opportunities. I hear you. I know you've done a fair amount of work in South America with all the attention on ACOM and sometimes UCOM. I don't think we talk enough about, I think there are many opportunities in South America to do great things. And if we take a look at the Tierra del Fuego with all the earthquakes and the volcanoes and the things happening there and climate change and disasters, there seems to me more disasters, which is going to increase the chance that our government is temporarily overwhelmed and might have to issue a diplomatic cable and request assistance. For us in Title X, that's probably just some of our unique capabilities like rotary wing, pull up a nuclear ship and just start giving power to a large area. There's amazing things that we can do. And I know that there are disasters happening in South American countries, which tend to be a little more fragile. Do we have those opportunities? Is that something that we just haven't mapped out? How would we go about helping our South American brothers? 00:04:25 ISMAEL LOPEZ struggle with this because like you, I see the opportunities that are down there and they're plentiful. I worked down at the embassy in Bogotá, Colombia for three years during my FAO tour. And while I was there, I was a counter -narcotics maritime operations planner. So really fancy title for managing Section 333 funding programming. But our partners in that region are all about working with us. training with us, opening up their countries for us to train. They want to fight with us. In Colombia, we were trying to organize an additional exercise outside of the standard unit toss that goes on in South America. So as we started trying to test, does this concept work? What are going to be some of the challenges? What does it look like for closing ship to shore in a contestant environment? Colombia has amazing terrain that is very similar to that that you will find in the first island chain, surprisingly. A lot of people wouldn't know that, but it's there. So when you consider distance and cost associated with being able to provide realistic training that mimics the future fight, you have it in the same hemisphere. The challenge is, the NDS calls out very specifically, services, your priority is... UCOM. Your priority is AFRICOM. Your priority is CENTCOM. Your priority is writ large is Indopaycom. We'll focus on that. And so that automatically causes the services to look elsewhere rather than looking down south. And so that means that resources, manpower, etc. are going to get pulled to support efforts down there because it's not called out specifically in the NDS. And now it's being focused on other parts of the world. Fortunately, Marine Forces Reserve has shifted from trying to compete with the active component to adding relevancy by focusing on developing those opportunities in Latin America. I know the Army does a lot with the TSOCs down there, but more can be done and should be done, in my opinion. I think the relevancy is there and transferable to other parts of the globe. It's just getting past the, hey, I understood that this document calls this out. but there are opportunities here that align to what we're trying to get after in the NDS. And the other piece of that too is when you consider if we're having assets down there, it reduces the number of available resources that can respond to contingencies. And I think that's part of that equation. 00:07:09 BRIAN HANCOCK I think so. It's really not a bridge too far from our existing mental models. The energy may be in PayCon, but at the same time, you're still going to JRTC. Is that the Deep Pacific? No, not at all. But there's still value in that training. If you can go to Columbia and move through similar islands, have similar river problem sets, similar terrain problem sets, and get that experience at a fraction of the cost of going to the Deep Pacific, that's not something we should overlook. And we can't ignore the fact that there's increasing levels of adversary activity in South America, I don't think we should take that for granted. And doing these mill to mill and working together side by side on various projects, there's nothing but good stuff there. So I'm hopeful that we may in the future put a little bit more energy into that theater. 00:08:02 ISMAEL LOPEZ Yeah. And the one last piece of it I think that we take for granted is the belief that our partners in the Western Hemisphere are going to stay aligned to us. because we have those shared values. But when you have our competitors knocking on the door and saying, hey, we want to train with you. We want to provide you money. We want to do all these things. And we're taking for granted that relationship. It's only going to last so much longer before the number of partners that we have on there are going to be very limited. Yeah. 00:08:33 BRIAN HANCOCK You know, it kind of reminds me of the Sims game. I don't know if you've played this. But there's a relationship meter. And if you want to have positive relationships with another avatar in this simulation, you have to interact with them. You have to do that fairly regularly because over time, that relationship meter decays. Relationships aren't static like that. They're usually moving forward or they're sliding backwards. And if we're not in that game and we have hungry competitors, we can see where that could go. Let's talk about some of your work as a foreign area officer. That's a very coveted job for civil affairs and folks who think they may have a future intent to work for Department of State. A lot of folks don't get there. What did you do as a foreign area officer, and how do you get involved in that kind of work? 00:09:25 ISMAEL LOPEZ For the Marine Corps, I was actually able to use my experience as a civil affairs officer to springboard. into becoming a Latin America FAO. So in the Marines, we have two different ways of becoming a foreign area officer. There is the experience track, which is the one I fell into. And then the other one is a study track. So either route, you have solicitation for candidates, individuals who have experiences overseas, working specifically on the civ. side of the house, not necessarily the mill -to -mill piece, right? Because we're looking at international relations, foreign relations, etc. And then you have the study track, which is you get selected, you get sent to Monterey to earn a master's degree in international relations. Then they send you to the language school, DLI, for a language, and you get assigned a region. And then you get sent either to combatant command to work as a desk officer. or you get sent to a country overseas and you're going to work out at the embassy. So for me, I was able to parlay my experiences as a civil affairs officer, and then the board selected me as a Latin America foreign area officer. And what that did was that it opened me up to that role in the embassy. So my wife's active duty Air Force, and she's also a Latin America foreign area officer. She got sent to Naval Postgraduate School, earned her master's. Didn't have to go to DLI because she already spoke Spanish. And then she got orders to the embassy in Columbia. Family and I obviously went along. And as we were doing our introduction with the scout chief, she mentions my husband's a civil affairs officer and a FAO. And his eyes just lit up. He's like, we haven't had a Marine sitting in the naval mission for the Section 333 program in quite some time because we just don't have them. Part of the challenge is the cost associated with bringing one down. But since I was already there, in his eyes, he was getting two fails for the price of one. So because I had that, I was able to meet the requirement for the billet. And then I was able to serve as the program manager for the Section 333 program for roughly three years. 00:11:38 BRIAN HANCOCK Well done. And what an exciting mission. If I was younger, I'd want to run off there too and do something like that. I mean, my Spanish needs to be a little bit better, but I know I could brush it up. Hey, let's talk about the... Very difficult situation in Gaza right now. I don't think we can approach that with anything but sympathy for all involved. Certainly there's great suffering there by many different parties. And I know you were one of those folks who raised his hand and said, hey, I will help with some of that Gaza relief and did that mission, at least for some time. Can you tell me a little bit about your experience with the Gaza relief mission? And are you comfortable sharing any lessons learned from your time? 00:12:20 ISMAEL LOPEZ Yeah, so it was very interesting when the Gaza relief mission kicked off for several reasons, right? The challenge there, very, very dynamic event, very tragic event. And then on one hand, we have to support our ally in Israel. But on the other hand, great suffering occurring to the people in Gaza as a result of the mission out there. So the struggle within DOD at the time was, what should we do from an ATA perspective to help those that are suffering in Gaza? So when we look at it from within DSCA, we were really waiting for inputs from OSD and even the NSC as to what is an appropriate humanitarian aid response. One that's not going to undermine our partner. But at the same time, sending a strong message to the people in Gaza and the international community that the United States is not going to sit idly by while people are suffering. So it's a very delicate balance that had to be found. So from an access property standpoint, I was looking into what could we do and how close could we get to provide items from the inventory that could provide life -saving support or even just support for those that are being displaced. into neighboring countries. What ended up happening was we, DSCA, specifically the humanitarian aid and the humanitarian demining division, was ordered to reallocate all the ODACA funding that had already been provided to the combative commands and used to support the Gaza relief missions, specifically the maritime bridge. So we had to deliver the bad news to the combative commands, like, hey, Any money that you have not obligated at this point, we have to pull. You were going to utilize that specifically for this mission. Concurrently, we had…
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One CA Podcast
1 214: Ismael Lopez on OHDACA and Humanitarian Relief (Part I) 21:37
21:37 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked21:37
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedWelcome to the One CA Podcast. Today, Brian Hancock interviewed Ismael Lopez about OHDACA and Humanitarian Relief and his experiences as a Marine Civil Affairs Officer. Brian's profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-j-hancock/ Ismael's profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ishrlopez/ Transcript available below. --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org --- Great news! Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at: https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/ --- Special Thanks to the creators of Jazz & Bossa Cafe for the sample of Positive March Music. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHeCxa0rMQ4 --- Transcript: 00:00:05 BRIAN HANCOCK Welcome to One Civil Affairs Podcast. I'm Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hancock, and I will be your host for this session. Today we have with us Major Ismael Lopez to discuss civil affairs, special missions, and the ongoing relief effort in the Gaza Strip. Mr. Lopez is the Excess Property Program Manager for the Defense Security Cooperation Agency. He's also a major in the United States Marine Corps Reserve. where he serves as the Latin American Foreign Area Officer and Detachment Commander with the 1st Civil Affairs Group. At DSCA, he oversees ODACA -funded Humanitarian Assistance, HA, supporting disaster relief and capacity -building efforts in over 28 countries, including the responses in the Afghanistan refugee crisis, the Ukrainian crisis, and humanitarian support to Gaza. In his expanded role, he acts as a liaison for civil affairs, focusing on training, project continuity, and aligning civil affairs efforts with strategic goals. 00:01:09 BRIAN HANCOCK With over 15 years of experience in security cooperation, Mr. Lopez has supported humanitarian assistance operations globally, including key relief efforts following Hurricanes Irma, Maria, and Iota. Major Lopez, welcome to the show. 00:01:25 ISMAEL LOPEZ Thank you, Brian. 00:01:26 BRIAN HANCOCK Boy, you've been busy. 00:01:27 ISMAEL LOPEZ I certainly have. Unfortunately, I've been really busy to do the things that I love. 00:01:32 BRIAN HANCOCK Now, let's talk a little bit about this mysterious full -time job that you do, the excess property manager for a defense security cooperation agency. Security cooperation being one of the three most important missions in the world, in my opinion. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do as the excess property manager? And if you're in the business of giving away property, how do I sign up for this? 00:01:54 ISMAEL LOPEZ What's funny is that, as you mentioned that, There is a running joke down at the Southcom HA office where they say, if you need a new refrigerator, Ish is the guy to call. Basically, what I do in a nutshell is I work with the combat commands and all the way down to the country teams to identify partners, to provide them non -lethal excess property in an effort to achieve very specific objectives in the country. What the program does is it'll take items that are basically pretty much brand new to a little bit of wear and tear, which we can refurbish in our warehouses. And then we issue them out or we donate them to the partner with the intention of meeting a very specific objective in that country. So aside from that, I also support DOD humanitarian aid efforts for any initiatives that are... utilizing the overseas humanitarian disaster and civic aid. So in a nutshell, that's pretty much what I do. And yeah, if you need a fridge, if you need a microwave, if there is an effect that could be achieved by me donating it to you, sure. 00:03:06 BRIAN HANCOCK We're expanding NATO a little bit. And many of the NATO countries, about 32 of them, they're putting a little bit more money into defense these days for a wide variety of reasons. And if they decide they want to send up a new office somewhere in Poland or something like that, How would they go about saying, hey, all those esks and chairs and things that you have in Dermo, we'd like some of that. And who pays the shipping? 00:03:29 ISMAEL LOPEZ The folks sitting in NATO would have to work with ODC and Poland first. They will validate that requirement, then submit it on up to UCOM. UCOM will have their lawyers look at it. And then from there, it will make its way up to DSCA for execution. Now, what pays for all this is the Odaka appropriations that gets earmarked from the Odaka budget that provides transportation for this program. So the program comes at no cost. It's all funded exclusively through the Odaka appropriation. 00:04:05 BRIAN HANCOCK Awesome. Let me talk a little bit more about that and ask you a few questions. Odaka is kind of a hidden gem that a number of us in the civil affairs community know about. Many other people don't, and you can definitely achieve effects with this, especially in competition, which is something that we're, I think, as a joint combined army, really struggling with, is how we get after having those influence and deterrence effects in the competition phase. ODACA is one of those tools that's available to us. It's the Overseas Humanitarian Disaster and Civic Aid Fund. Now, I have very limited experience with that program. Can you tell the audience a little bit more about the ODACA creation, how large it is, what it usually funds? 00:04:54 ISMAEL LOPEZ Yeah, absolutely. I'm able to see it from two perspectives, right? I'm able to see this from my seat at DSCA and then my seat in the reserve component as a civil affairs officer, where to your earlier point, ODACA is a bit of this hidden gem and it could be leveraged to help. achieving effects in the competition phase, but where there are issues is the lack of understanding of what you can and cannot do with the appropriation or how you can actually link it to creating those effects. And I get that because rewind the clock back to 2013 when I first delved into civil affairs, one of the metrics that are utilized to determine our success in country is How many projects can you nominate or how many projects did you complete? So then when you're aiming to achieve or hit that metric, you're not necessarily looking at the linkage. You're almost betting on that someone will create that linkage for you that you're providing the activity in support of. So Odaka, generally speaking, we're looking at about $26 to $30 million a year. But then that money... gets divvied up across the combatant commands and is prioritized based off of national defense strategy. So if it's called out very specifically country X or region Y is the priority when it comes to DoD humanitarian aid efforts, then preponderance of that money will be earmarked for that country or that region globally. Once you pull the thread on that, then there's different tiers. for the countries that are located in that combatant command or in that region of the world, and we're able to allocate money for those countries as well. Where it gets tricky is that what will factor into it is how proactive and how thorough the ODCs and the SCOs are with executing those HA projects and then the end -use monitoring piece of it. So their requirements are tied to these project nominations. The country team, the HA managers, the civil affairs teams that are assigned to or are deployed in that country are not providing the feedback necessary to determine the return on investment. Then the following year, what could end up happening is this country is a priority, but what we're not able to tell Congress is, are we actually achieving the effects that we're desiring in that country or in that region? And if we can't answer that with tangible metrics, then that will factor into a reduction of ODACA funding for the following year. Recently, in Indo -PACOM, the focus has been very heavy on the mill -to -mill engagement piece. What is starting to catch up now is the sieve mill piece. And so we have money allocated, but they're sort of playing catch up with the rest of the COCOMs as it pertains to. getting those funds and then executing projects and us being able to sustain them over an extended period of time. 00:08:01 BRIAN HANCOCK Yeah, it is a challenging problem set. One of the taskers that we get annually here in our command is to measure the strategic effect of DACA projects, which are largely tactical, in a bunch of different countries. and were given one week. Now you've got a rotational force here of about 15 civil affairs folks of various persuasions. Maybe a couple of them can be dedicated to that task. They had nothing to do with the inception of these projects. They were not part of the construction. They saw none of the... assessment or staff estimate documents related to them. All they saw was probably, if they're lucky, the proposal that went into the website to get them. And they don't have time to do extensive interviews or measurement. And it's pretty tricky to take something very tactical and then indicate not as an MOP you completed the project, but as an MOE it actually influenced the local populace towards U .S. and NATO objectives. That is a very tough thing to do mathematically, especially without the data, documents, and time to be able to do that. 00:09:18 ISMAEL LOPEZ is a 00:09:28 BRIAN HANCOCK What is the standard that is accepted by the panel who's controlling those funding and appropriations? What realistically do you have to prove? 00:09:39 ISMAEL LOPEZ So this has been a challenge for several years now. I saw it firsthand. As a civil affairs team leader in the South Com AOR, where I deployed to support a very specific commander, but as a, hey, by the way, while you're down there, there's these products that were funded several years ago. Do you mind taking a look? No context behind it. I can't do pre and post surveys on the local populace because I don't know what it was or what the baseline was prior to the construction or the completion. And then now. So it was very arbitrary. It was very much, yeah, it's good. Is the government still funding it? Sure. Are they employing people that are maintaining it? Sure. And I think back then, 2013, 2014 timeframe, I think the blanket answer to all that was, we're countering Russia, China. And so as long as you were saying that, then it was all gravy. And we've obviously have evolved from that to we're now tying these very tactical actions. to operational objectives, right? So are we supporting CoCom LOEs? And if we're supporting CoCom LOEs at the minimum, we understand that we should be integrated into strategic objectives, right? Because the LOEs are derived from those strategic documents. And we've gotten to that point, but now where we are able or unable to get that data or the metrics. really falls on the lack of funding to do it. So the easy button is, well, you have your security cooperation professionals that are assigned to the embassies. They should be. They can do that. Yeah. But the reality is all embassies, regardless of the size, they are overextended and under -resourced. So they're always dealing with VIP visitors. They're dealing with taskings from the State Department. They have their steady state activities they have to be supporting, and they're falling in on, let's just say, 30 projects over the last three years. And, oh, by the way, all these assessments need to be done, but your TDY funds are X. And there's no way of doing it. So then it trickles down to, hey, do we have any civil affairs teams coming downrange? Can they support? And I think we've gotten to a bit of a sweet spot. is this mutual understanding that civil affairs teams in country, as long as they're not being detracted from their main mission, are able to provide some sort of support in conducting those surveys and assessments. However, it's still not the right answer because they're falling in on rudimentary information, background information, and it's still very much from their perspective. At DSCA, we have increased our budget for AM &E purposes to help country teams that are in the red, so to speak, when it comes to conducting these assessments, especially countries that are a priority where we understand, hey, we need to continue engaging on the HA side of things and not the MIL side of things. So we need to get as close to valid or reality as we can. So we have contractors now that are assigned to the combat commands, folks within my office that can. be requested to go out and support. And again, we're working across the command and commands to see as appropriate where we can support. So a lot of work still has to be done there. But again, looking back to 10 years ago, even five years ago, I think across the board, DOD has gotten significantly better at providing metrics to validate activities vice. simply stating we're countering Russia and China and we're going to call it good. 00:13:35 BRIAN HANCOCK As they should. All of these projects should be tied to a line of effort, tied to a strategic effect that's in line both with the COCOM and the chief of mission. And then you would need a way to measure them at a granular level and then aggregate them to measure progress against a line of effort aligned to strategic intent. I don't think that framework has been built. I hope we eventually get there. If you ask some of the SCAs in the embassy, at best, they're going to give you anecdotal information. So there's a lot of things that we would have to do. And if we send a civil affairs team, depending on their training and background, that can be more or less successful. Now, you're probably tracking that in the Army side of civil affairs, we've built that 38 golf program where I can have an engineer with 20 years of experience. It seems to me that's the guy we should be attaching. to a civil affairs team to go do one of these assessments. What do you think? 00:14:33 ISMAEL LOPEZ I completely agree with that. And that's 100 % a step in the right direction. O…
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One CA Podcast
1 213: Colleen Ryan on OSCE and European Border Security 24:51
24:51 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked24:51
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedToday, we welcome Colleen Ryan from OSCE, border training and management. We brought her on today to discuss the current challenges of border security in Europe. --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org --- Great news! Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at: https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/ --- Special thanks to the site "Rockstar Beats" for the sample of Taylor Seift "Midnight." Retrieved from: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXyd0iAdUYUWN7ifYYoqymNqJsaE0vEDC&si=-Vp6gUuRpqpHq66D --- Transcript: 00:00:04 Introduction Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting@gmail.com. Or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www.civilaffairsassos.org. I'll have those in the show notes. 00:00:39 Colleen Ryan My name is Colleen Ryan. I'm currently the Border Advisor to the OSC in Vienna. I'm seconded by the United States. So I do need to make it clear that I'm not speaking on behalf of the OSC or on the broader political or organizational context right now. I'm specifically focusing on my work and my experiences. Wow. You're seconded? What does that mean? Yeah, I'm essentially loaned out by the U .S. to the OSCE to serve in this role. They pay my salary. 00:01:13 Jack Nice. How did you get nominated? Where do you normally work? 00:01:15 COLLEEN RYAN In a past life, I was a police officer back in the U .S. before transitioning to working internationally. So I came to find out about OSCE and opportunities while I was doing my master's back in the States. And then I just ended up applying for the special monitoring mission to Ukraine. So I was out there as a monitoring officer up until Russia's full -scale invasion. And then went back during the war with a non -governmental organization working on humanitarian protection in the South. And then made my way to this current role. That's great. So you've been part of living history in a way. Yeah, to be out in Donetsk up until a couple days before the invasion. Working with border guards all across Europe and the changing security landscape has been an interesting role so far. 00:02:04 JACK GAINES So you've lived what soldiers call the moment before. There's a feel in the air, and it makes you edgy, it makes you a little twitchy, because you know that you're about to go down with an enemy. And so did you get that sense? Did you get that feel that things were coming close in Donetsk? 00:02:23 COLLEEN RYAN We were there at the time to monitor the Minsk agreements, which was a ceasefire at the time. It wasn't until when the U .S. evacuated all U .S. personnel that you started to realize that, you know, it may actually happen. 00:02:36 JACK GAINES Right. And so your current position is now training the border guards of Ukraine. 00:02:44 COLLEEN RYAN Yes, I manage a project that trains border guards across the OSCE, specifically on detecting porch documents and imposters. So if it's a forged passport presented at the airport or at the road crossing or for the train, we train the border guards, whether it's from Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria, Albania. So it really depends on the needs of OSC participating states in this realm. It's obviously a field that requires recurrent training because travel documents like passports are constantly updated. that national authorities can stay ahead of forgers. So it is something that we have to continue training on. And with the current war against Ukraine, they have the most need. They're one of the bigger border services in Europe. And then just the need in terms of half their border guard is currently engaged in combat operations, while you have the rest who are working to secure their western and southern borders and the surge in western and southern border crossings with the closure of Ukraine's airspace. You know, all of that contributes to an ongoing need for these skills and updated training on detecting passport forgeries and detecting imposters. And then you see that on the flip side with Moldova, they've seen a surge in the border crossings because a lot evacuated from Ukraine into Moldova. A lot of humanitarian NGOs and other people now fly into Kijanel to go to Ukraine. And so they've seen just a huge... spike in terms of the number of travel documents and also diversity in terms of different countries, different types of documents. And so that's why we've also been training Moldovan border police as well. 00:04:29 JACK GAINES Sure. So you're there to teach them how to spot forged documents, but is there also a follow on either by that nation's foreign affairs office or their law enforcement that tries to find the forger and remove them? 00:04:43 COLLEEN RYAN Yeah, there is very likely follow on. in terms of criminal investigations when they find forged documents or if they identify an imposter. But our project primarily focuses on those who are working on the first line and second line document checks to just spot the person posing as someone else. And then we do some work with the forensic experts after the fact to make sure that they've got that next level of training as part of their investigations. But primarily it's focusing on the first and second line officers. 00:05:14 JACK GAINES I'm sure they see all kinds of crazy stuff. Everything from the amateur glue stick to people who actually have passport printer creating forged documents. 00:05:24 COLLEEN RYAN Yeah, it's sad and it's also really interesting, the surge in the use of artificial intelligence and seeing the ways that they're incorporating things like morphing into the passport to their forgeries where two people can now travel on one passport using morphing images and things like that. It really just shows how quickly this field in terms of document forgeries is evolving and how much border services are struggling to keep up and to maintain their training so they can spot these techniques. Right, which is why they're starting to put chips and other special films that have a radio signature and stuff like that. 00:05:53 JACK GAINES they're starting to put chips and other special films that have a radio signature and stuff like that. You could print it, but to actually find those films or chips that have that radio signature has got to be a lot tougher. 00:06:08 COLLEEN RYAN Yeah, and a lot of it is just down to, like, Order guards are under a lot of stress and pressure and they don't have much time to spot the fakes. They're getting crushed by people. Yeah. So a lot of it is just making sure that they can spot some of these easier to identify orgery trends and to make a quicker decision before it gets to the point of really having to do an in -depth examination of the document. 00:06:32 JACK GAINES Yeah, I would imagine that you would see forgery trends because people would be going to the same forger and they would be doing similar patterns until that turned away. 00:06:41 COLLEEN RYAN Yeah. 00:06:41 JACK GAINES And what's it like working with all these different border guards from different countries? I mean, everyone has got to be a little different, but the same. 00:06:49 COLLEEN RYAN For me, it's interesting because I'm one of the few who has worked in policing, worked in this operational arena, kind of understands a lot of what they've done. And so you kind of speak the same language. It's interesting to hear from them, like what they view as their biggest security challenges and what their biggest day -to -day challenges are in terms of their work life. Because you see common trends across a lot of the services. A lot of them can be underpaid and that contributes to staff turnover. And so then that means you go back to a country to do more training because you have new staffs. But then to see how a country's security... You know, their perspective in terms of their biggest border security threats in Albania, where I trained in June, might be different from Bulgaria, where I trained last month. But, you know, it's still the commonalities of document forgeries, imposters, making sure your airports are secure and things like that. So I like talking with the border guards, such a different perspective across each country. Right. 00:07:51 JACK GAINES I think that's really helpful that you have a law enforcement background. helps break that ice. 00:07:58 COLLEEN RYAN I understand the perspective, but we're really just there to help and to fill the gaps that their service might not have the time or the funding to provide additional training because they've got the whole spectrum of border security issues to deal with within their service. And so that's where our organization or other international organizations doing these types of projects come in is just fill the gaps and help them develop their capacity. Especially with some other countries we train for where Frontex, maybe they're not working in that country. So then we can help supplement other EU or Frontex or IOM or UN initiatives and help to harmonize border security standards across Europe, South Caucasus, Central Asia. 00:08:45 JACK GAINES I don't want to just keep circling around Ukraine. Is there any stories you have from some of the other countries you worked with? What's your favorite beer hall story on those? 00:08:53 COLLEEN RYAN Yeah, I mean, most of my stories are with Ukraine because I've trained Ukraine so much. So I'm happy to talk about that. Yeah, I feel very fortunate so far in the last year and a half to have trained almost 50 Ukraine border guards. And I was able to go to meet with their administration and their main forensic center in June to do a needs assessment to see how we could keep supporting. to make sure we weren't duplicating efforts from other international organizations or other bilateral initiatives there because we do know it's a crowded space there. 00:09:28 JACK GAINES I'm sure talking to them, you could figure out pretty quickly what those border guards needed, even if they were getting training from two or three organizations, if they weren't hitting it on the head. Yeah. And what was nice for us is we were able to actually shadow them on their train from out west as entered from. 00:09:38 COLLEEN RYAN was nice for us is we were able to actually shadow them on their train from out west as entered from. Shamashil, Poland, and went to Lviv. And so we got to board on the Ukrainian side and just seeing what they're dealing with in terms of doing document checks aboard the trains now and the different challenges they have with that as opposed to what it would be like to check a document at the airport. It's a very different perspective and it gives you insights on things like lighting and being able to see different security features in the passport. With the lighting on the train and the time of day when they're doing the document check, the technical equipment that they have aboard and that may not be connecting to the cell tower or have service as the train moves. And so it gives you a different perspective to actually be there and see it instead of just hearing about it over a Zoom call or in a sterile training environment. And so then building on that. We've been able to take some of those lessons learned and put them into our training where we're encouraging them and reminding them to say, hey, how would you see this in different types of light settings, running different types of simulations, so it more accurately reflects the conditions that they'll be doing the document checks in. So what's coming up next? 00:10:57 JACK GAINES What's the future of training? Do you have anything interesting coming up that you want to promote? 00:11:02 COLLEEN RYAN Yes, through the rest of the year, we have a couple more study visits. And these are important because they help the border guards to learn from other counterparts. They will look through how this country that they're visiting manages their forgery desk at an airport or in their border service. And it really helps with networking and sharing more information in terms of what they're seeing in terms of detecting trends or alerts on forged documents. We've got a couple of study visits coming up next week. I'll be in Madrid with another group from Ukraine. The following week, I'll be with Albania and Milan. And then a week after that, I'll be in Dublin, Ireland with forensic experts from Ukraine's border service to round out the year. So it's a busy stretch right now. That's very cool. 00:11:50 JACK GAINES Do these multinational engagements, do they ever end up with countries with border guards doing a bilateral agreement on border protection? Or do they ever work on... building something like Eurogest, where if they find a forger from multiple countries, they'll work together to try to find out where the route is. Is that multinational cooperation starting to build, or have you seen it? 00:12:14 COLLEEN RYAN On a smaller level with us, we do see that. So at the operational level with these border guards, even in -country, being able to message colleagues around their own country. Or the experts that do our trainings are active document experts serving in their border service. So now they've got another resource, say, if we're using experts from Spain or the Netherlands or UK or Italy, then these trainees now have another resource to flag potenti…
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One CA Podcast
1 212: Christopher Meyer on PRC strategic corruption and political warfare (Part II) 21:37
21:37 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked21:37
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedToday, Sam Cooper, founder of the news outlet The Bureau, guest hosts Christopher Meyer, a former U.S. official and China expert during the Bush One and Two Administrations. Meyer currently serves as the head of the U.S. Micronesia Council and founded Wide Fountain, a platform for in-depth geopolitical analysis. In this the second of a two-part episode, Sam and Christopher discuss PRC strategic corruption and political warfare. So, let's get started. Sam Cooper's The Bureau: https://www.thebureau.news/ Christopher Meyer's Wide Fountain platform: https://widefountain.substack.com/ --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association a and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org --- Great news! Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at: https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/ --- Special thanks to Cozy Ambience for a sample of "February Cafe Jazz - Instrumental Bossa Nova Music for Work, Study and Relax - Background Music" retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmq8Ht-sNwQ --- Today, Sam Cooper, founder of the news outlet The Bureau, guest hosts Christopher Meyer, a former U.S. official and China expert during the Bush One and Two Administrations. Meyer currently serves as the head of the U.S. Micronesia Council and founded Wide Fountain, a platform for in-depth geopolitical analysis. In this the first of a two-part episode, Sam and Christopher discuss PRC strategic corruption and political warfare. So, let's get started. Sam Cooper's The Bureau: https://www.thebureau.news/ Christopher Meyer's Wide Fountain platform: https://widefountain.substack.com/ --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association a and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org --- Special thanks to Cozy Ambience for a sample of "February Cafe Jazz - Instrumental Bossa Nova Music for Work, Study and Relax - Background Music" retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmq8Ht-sNwQ --- Transcript 00:00:01 Introduction Welcome to the One CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. One CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting@gmail.com. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www.civilaffairsassoc.org. I'll have those in the show notes. Today we welcome Sam Cooper, founder of the news outlet The Bureau, as he interviews Christopher Meyer, a former U.S. 00:00:44 SAM COOPER official and China expert during the Bush I and II administrations. Meyer currently serves as the head of the U.S. Micronesia Council and is the founder of Wide Fountain. a platform for in -depth geopolitical analysis. This is the first of a two -part episode. Sam and Christopher discuss PRC strategic corruption and political warfare. So let's get started. 00:01:07 SAM COOPER Today I'm excited to introduce Chris Myers. Chris is a longtime China expert and former U .S. government diplomatic and economic issues officer, and he explains how military intelligence and influence networks embedded deeply with organized crime are a central feature of the global strategy employed by the families that really are running communist China. And when I say that, we're going to discuss your research on the family of Xi Jinping, the Xi family, and you call it the Yezi clique. But first, tell our viewers your background in getting into China and your career. 00:01:46 CHRISTOPHER MEYER Thank you very much, Sam. I started a keen interest in China when I was 16. And I read the history of the opium wars and I was outraged. And I decided I wanted a career to be involved in business and diplomacy between the U .S. and China. And then as an undergrad student, I did research on the special economic zones. This was in the early 80s and the special economic zones were just announced. And my research led me to see the geopolitical aspects. There were some. across from Macau, across from Hong Kong, and across from Taiwan. So I sort of had an eye to that. And then I did business. I was, for five years, I was with a Fortune 500 company. And I had the opportunity to do some business in Xiaomon. And I saw some things that set off alarm bells in my mind. And I kind of filed that. And I had some experiences that informed my research later. I worked in the government in Bush 1 and Bush 2. I was involved in Indo -Pacific affairs. really helping American companies do business in the region, and then became a consultant to part of the government that administered our territories in the Pacific. So I saw some things there that, again, set off alarm bells in my mind. And in 2016, I happened to cross an old colleague who kind of gave me some more information. And basically from 2016 until 2022, I conducted a lot of independent research. I decided I wanted to know exactly what was going on because proxies in the region seemed emboldened to take on the U .S. And they didn't have a government portfolio, but they acted like they did. And so my research sort of started in Micronesia. I had the great opportunity to come across your book. You totally informed. parts of what I was looking at and kind of put the spotlight on what happened in Canada. And I kind of worked the two sides to the middle and conducted most recently research that kind of takes us from Mao Zedong's death until the 90s. And I believe that there was a click. I call it the yes, she click. There were scores to settle. There were powerful families that were on the cusp of greatness or recognition for all their good work, and they were purged. And it led some individuals to become extremely militant in their conduct of political warfare against the U .S. So that sort of sets the table for what we might be talking about. 00:04:28 SAM COOPER Yeah. So to get into this, let's start with the Ye family. They're mysterious, but for experts, they're very clearly a clan that has tremendous kingmaking power in China. So maybe let's start with who they are and then bridge into how they connect with Xi's father. 00:04:46 CHRISTOPHER MEYER So the patriarch, Lie Jianying, was literally the kingmaker of Mao Zedong. He came from Guangdong province, and he was involved in the very earliest movements of the Communist Party in China. And he fled one of those, I think it was the Guangzhou uprising, with Zhou Enlai, and they escaped to Hong Kong. So Ye Jianying is one of the original revolutionaries in China, and he had the title of Marshal Ye. And when he crossed paths with Mao Zedong, he was actually the aide -de -camp to a very powerful Communist Party operator out of Beijing who had an army of tens of thousands. And he rolled up to Mao and his very small group of long marchers and said, follow us, we're going to Sichuan province. And Mao was like, no, I don't think that's a safe bet. The locals are going to tear you up. And Ye Jianying kind of heard a truth in Mao and he deserted this powerful general and with him brought the code books. So Mao gets Ye Jianying and the code books and he's able to communicate with the Comintern. And lo and behold, that general did get wiped out in Sichuan. He returned to Mao's base. With a few thousand troops from then, Mao became the most powerful leader in the communist ecosystem. So Ye Jianying had a very high regard for Mao. Mao called him the savior of the Communist Party and the Communist Revolution. And so fast forward it right through the revolution. Ye gets a very top position as the party secretary for Guangdong province, the largest and economically most powerful province in the country. And Mao wants to conduct his land reform in Guangdong, just as he does everywhere. And it's a violent thing where landowners are hunted down and put to death. Yeah, because he was a native Cantonese, understood that the landowners in Guangdong were not of the same ilk as those throughout China. They actually worked the lands. They had a very cooperative relationship with labor. And he tried to resist. But Mao forced Lin Biao into Guangdong. And Ye lost his government role. And if he hadn't been in the military, he would have been completely out of power. But because he had a military portfolio, he was able to stay on the peripheries. And he was actually part of the small group that brought down the Gang of Four and ended the Cultural Revolution. So Ye Jianying went through the Mao Zedong grinder, but he did it so early in the 50s that he was able to... maintain power and have it going forward. Another Long March hero was Xi Jinping's father, Xi Zhong Chun. And his claim to fame in the Communist Party was he maintained security over the area where Mao was camped in Yan 'an. And he was able to provide Mao and his group with enough security that they could camp there through a winter and survive. Not only that, but he negotiated and he conducted diplomacy with the tribesmen in the Northwest, in Qinghai, in Xinjiang, and in Tibet. And he was loved. And he got a lot of rebels and insurgents among these minority populations to join the Communist Party. And Mao gave him great profs for that and referred to him as one of the heroes of the Three Kingdoms period. brilliant statesman who was able to ingratiate with the minorities and make them part of the Chinese nation. Unfortunately, though, Xi Jinping's father, Xi Zhongchun, he was purged, but he was purged later. He was purged in 1962. And from Xi Jinping's age nine until he was 25, Xi Jinping's father was under arrest. Without trial, it was just the culture revolution. He was under arrest because his office published a book that was deemed not flattering to Mao Zedong. Basically, he was promoting some thought within the Communist Party that Mao didn't like. So Xi's father is in jail from 62 to 78. And because Ye Senior and Xi Zhongchun had a relationship, Ye Jianying kind of became a godfather of sorts for Xi Jinping. Xi was sent to work in the countryside and he escaped and he tried to get back to Beijing and it wasn't safe for him to be reunited with his family. And Ye intervened. And Ye made sure that Xi joined the Communist Party, even though these tragedies were all around him, and made sure that he got the semblance of an education, although he really never did. He was a guide for Xi Jinping throughout his younger years. in place of his father. 00:10:02 Sam Cooper Before we continue how those families dovetail together, can you describe in China's political economy, what is the power of Marshal Ye? 00:10:13 CHRISTOPHER MEYER So in the 50s, he was jettisoned out of the political arena. His main work was in the PLA. He was a marshal and he became minister of defense in China. And he was responsible for procurement. And to sort of give you a sense, when the Korean War started, the United Nations put a blockade on trade with China because they were arming the North Korean army. Marshal Yeh was responsible for making sure that supplies got to North Korea. And that was a big role that he fulfilled. And his sons kind of brought that along. So it's curious because Marshal Yeh was one of the most powerful stars in the communist lineup, but he was also a minority. He was from Guangdong and he was a Haka Chinese. So some people would say that Haka Chinese within China, there's a lid sometimes on their ability to move up. And so perhaps he was never considered for the echelon, but he did arise very high. But in some ways, and his sons adopted this even more so, they had to become very combative. in their political dealings. But no doubt about it, Marshal Yeh had a chance to handle huge volumes of military supplies, and there was an opportunity to skim and generate great wealth, which probably was the case. The way that Marshal Yeh fulfilled the supply chains for the North Korean army was through organized crime. And it just happened that two of The individuals, Henry Falk and Stanley Ho, were also Hakka Chinese. And they became the kingpins of organized crime in Hong Kong and Macau. Both of them are on record as saying they made their fortunes supplying the Korean War. 00:12:15 SAM COOPER Right. So people that read my book are very familiar with Stanley Ho, according to U .S. government intelligence. the absolute king of Chinese international mafia with connectivity to casinos, banking, political influence operations in Canada, triad leadership in Canada. So I think we've set the table for the 90s in Guangdong, Fujian. Xi Jinping is now starting to come on the scene politically there. The Ye family, who were partners essentially of Xi's father. had a little bit of a godfather eye on Xi's movements within the party. We can say that they're the power behind a throne that they want to see continue to rise. So can you take us into the 90s, the sort of Stanley Ho connectivity to Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and how that combines the Hong Kong tycoons slash triad leaders with the communist powers in Fujian? 00:13:21 CHRISTOPHER MEYER Yes. Mao passed away in 78. Deng Xiaoping came to power. And Deng was all about economic reform and catching up to the West. So in southern China, Fujian and Guangdong province, Deng looked to Ye Jenying and his sons. His sons were in their 30s now. And he also looked to Xi Zhongshan. Xi Zhongshan became party secretary for Guangdong province. in the early 80s. And Deng kind of put toget…
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One CA Podcast
1 211: Christopher Meyer on PRC strategic corruption and political warfare (Part I) 21:04
21:04 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked21:04
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedToday, Sam Cooper, founder of the news outlet The Bureau, guest hosts Christopher Meyer, a former U.S. official and China expert during the Bush One and Two Administrations. Meyer currently serves as the head of the U.S. Micronesia Council and founded Wide Fountain, a platform for in-depth geopolitical analysis. In this the first of a two-part episode, Sam and Christopher discuss PRC strategic corruption and political warfare. So, let's get started. Sam Cooper's The Bureau: https://www.thebureau.news/ Christopher Meyer's Wide Fountain platform: https://widefountain.substack.com/ --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association a and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org --- Great news! Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at: https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/ --- Special thanks to Cozy Ambience for a sample of "February Cafe Jazz - Instrumental Bossa Nova Music for Work, Study and Relax - Background Music" retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmq8Ht-sNwQ --- Transcript 00:00:01 Introduction Welcome to the One CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. One CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting@gmail.com. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www.civilaffairsassoc.org. I'll have those in the show notes. Today we welcome Sam Cooper, founder of the news outlet The Bureau, as he interviews Christopher Meyer, a former U.S. 00:00:44 SAM COOPER official and China expert during the Bush I and II administrations. Meyer currently serves as the head of the U.S. Micronesia Council and is the founder of Wide Fountain. a platform for in -depth geopolitical analysis. This is the first of a two -part episode. Sam and Christopher discuss PRC strategic corruption and political warfare. So let's get started. 00:01:07 SAM COOPER Today I'm excited to introduce Chris Myers. Chris is a longtime China expert and former U .S. government diplomatic and economic issues officer, and he explains how military intelligence and influence networks embedded deeply with organized crime are a central feature of the global strategy employed by the families that really are running communist China. And when I say that, we're going to discuss your research on the family of Xi Jinping, the Xi family, and you call it the Yezi clique. But first, tell our viewers your background in getting into China and your career. 00:01:46 CHRISTOPHER MEYER Thank you very much, Sam. I started a keen interest in China when I was 16. And I read the history of the opium wars and I was outraged. And I decided I wanted a career to be involved in business and diplomacy between the U .S. and China. And then as an undergrad student, I did research on the special economic zones. This was in the early 80s and the special economic zones were just announced. And my research led me to see the geopolitical aspects. There were some. across from Macau, across from Hong Kong, and across from Taiwan. So I sort of had an eye to that. And then I did business. I was, for five years, I was with a Fortune 500 company. And I had the opportunity to do some business in Xiaomon. And I saw some things that set off alarm bells in my mind. And I kind of filed that. And I had some experiences that informed my research later. I worked in the government in Bush 1 and Bush 2. I was involved in Indo -Pacific affairs. really helping American companies do business in the region, and then became a consultant to part of the government that administered our territories in the Pacific. So I saw some things there that, again, set off alarm bells in my mind. And in 2016, I happened to cross an old colleague who kind of gave me some more information. And basically from 2016 until 2022, I conducted a lot of independent research. I decided I wanted to know exactly what was going on because proxies in the region seemed emboldened to take on the U .S. And they didn't have a government portfolio, but they acted like they did. And so my research sort of started in Micronesia. I had the great opportunity to come across your book. You totally informed. parts of what I was looking at and kind of put the spotlight on what happened in Canada. And I kind of worked the two sides to the middle and conducted most recently research that kind of takes us from Mao Zedong's death until the 90s. And I believe that there was a click. I call it the yes, she click. There were scores to settle. There were powerful families that were on the cusp of greatness or recognition for all their good work, and they were purged. And it led some individuals to become extremely militant in their conduct of political warfare against the U .S. So that sort of sets the table for what we might be talking about. 00:04:28 SAM COOPER Yeah. So to get into this, let's start with the Ye family. They're mysterious, but for experts, they're very clearly a clan that has tremendous kingmaking power in China. So maybe let's start with who they are and then bridge into how they connect with Xi's father. 00:04:46 CHRISTOPHER MEYER So the patriarch, Lie Jianying, was literally the kingmaker of Mao Zedong. He came from Guangdong province, and he was involved in the very earliest movements of the Communist Party in China. And he fled one of those, I think it was the Guangzhou uprising, with Zhou Enlai, and they escaped to Hong Kong. So Ye Jianying is one of the original revolutionaries in China, and he had the title of Marshal Ye. And when he crossed paths with Mao Zedong, he was actually the aide -de -camp to a very powerful Communist Party operator out of Beijing who had an army of tens of thousands. And he rolled up to Mao and his very small group of long marchers and said, follow us, we're going to Sichuan province. And Mao was like, no, I don't think that's a safe bet. The locals are going to tear you up. And Ye Jianying kind of heard a truth in Mao and he deserted this powerful general and with him brought the code books. So Mao gets Ye Jianying and the code books and he's able to communicate with the Comintern. And lo and behold, that general did get wiped out in Sichuan. He returned to Mao's base. With a few thousand troops from then, Mao became the most powerful leader in the communist ecosystem. So Ye Jianying had a very high regard for Mao. Mao called him the savior of the Communist Party and the Communist Revolution. And so fast forward it right through the revolution. Ye gets a very top position as the party secretary for Guangdong province, the largest and economically most powerful province in the country. And Mao wants to conduct his land reform in Guangdong, just as he does everywhere. And it's a violent thing where landowners are hunted down and put to death. Yeah, because he was a native Cantonese, understood that the landowners in Guangdong were not of the same ilk as those throughout China. They actually worked the lands. They had a very cooperative relationship with labor. And he tried to resist. But Mao forced Lin Biao into Guangdong. And Ye lost his government role. And if he hadn't been in the military, he would have been completely out of power. But because he had a military portfolio, he was able to stay on the peripheries. And he was actually part of the small group that brought down the Gang of Four and ended the Cultural Revolution. So Ye Jianying went through the Mao Zedong grinder, but he did it so early in the 50s that he was able to... maintain power and have it going forward. Another Long March hero was Xi Jinping's father, Xi Zhong Chun. And his claim to fame in the Communist Party was he maintained security over the area where Mao was camped in Yan 'an. And he was able to provide Mao and his group with enough security that they could camp there through a winter and survive. Not only that, but he negotiated and he conducted diplomacy with the tribesmen in the Northwest, in Qinghai, in Xinjiang, and in Tibet. And he was loved. And he got a lot of rebels and insurgents among these minority populations to join the Communist Party. And Mao gave him great profs for that and referred to him as one of the heroes of the Three Kingdoms period. brilliant statesman who was able to ingratiate with the minorities and make them part of the Chinese nation. Unfortunately, though, Xi Jinping's father, Xi Zhongchun, he was purged, but he was purged later. He was purged in 1962. And from Xi Jinping's age nine until he was 25, Xi Jinping's father was under arrest. Without trial, it was just the culture revolution. He was under arrest because his office published a book that was deemed not flattering to Mao Zedong. Basically, he was promoting some thought within the Communist Party that Mao didn't like. So Xi's father is in jail from 62 to 78. And because Ye Senior and Xi Zhongchun had a relationship, Ye Jianying kind of became a godfather of sorts for Xi Jinping. Xi was sent to work in the countryside and he escaped and he tried to get back to Beijing and it wasn't safe for him to be reunited with his family. And Ye intervened. And Ye made sure that Xi joined the Communist Party, even though these tragedies were all around him, and made sure that he got the semblance of an education, although he really never did. He was a guide for Xi Jinping throughout his younger years. in place of his father. 00:10:02 Sam Cooper Before we continue how those families dovetail together, can you describe in China's political economy, what is the power of Marshal Ye? 00:10:13 CHRISTOPHER MEYER So in the 50s, he was jettisoned out of the political arena. His main work was in the PLA. He was a marshal and he became minister of defense in China. And he was responsible for procurement. And to sort of give you a sense, when the Korean War started, the United Nations put a blockade on trade with China because they were arming the North Korean army. Marshal Yeh was responsible for making sure that supplies got to North Korea. And that was a big role that he fulfilled. And his sons kind of brought that along. So it's curious because Marshal Yeh was one of the most powerful stars in the communist lineup, but he was also a minority. He was from Guangdong and he was a Haka Chinese. So some people would say that Haka Chinese within China, there's a lid sometimes on their ability to move up. And so perhaps he was never considered for the echelon, but he did arise very high. But in some ways, and his sons adopted this even more so, they had to become very combative. in their political dealings. But no doubt about it, Marshal Yeh had a chance to handle huge volumes of military supplies, and there was an opportunity to skim and generate great wealth, which probably was the case. The way that Marshal Yeh fulfilled the supply chains for the North Korean army was through organized crime. And it just happened that two of The individuals, Henry Falk and Stanley Ho, were also Hakka Chinese. And they became the kingpins of organized crime in Hong Kong and Macau. Both of them are on record as saying they made their fortunes supplying the Korean War. 00:12:15 SAM COOPER Right. So people that read my book are very familiar with Stanley Ho, according to U .S. government intelligence. the absolute king of Chinese international mafia with connectivity to casinos, banking, political influence operations in Canada, triad leadership in Canada. So I think we've set the table for the 90s in Guangdong, Fujian. Xi Jinping is now starting to come on the scene politically there. The Ye family, who were partners essentially of Xi's father. had a little bit of a godfather eye on Xi's movements within the party. We can say that they're the power behind a throne that they want to see continue to rise. So can you take us into the 90s, the sort of Stanley Ho connectivity to Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and how that combines the Hong Kong tycoons slash triad leaders with the communist powers in Fujian? 00:13:21 CHRISTOPHER MEYER Yes. Mao passed away in 78. Deng Xiaoping came to power. And Deng was all about economic reform and catching up to the West. So in southern China, Fujian and Guangdong province, Deng looked to Ye Jenying and his sons. His sons were in their 30s now. And he also looked to Xi Zhongshan. Xi Zhongshan became party secretary for Guangdong province. in the early 80s. And Deng kind of put together this group. The Ye's and the Xi's were family friends. They celebrated Chinese holidays together. The Xi's were northern Chinese, but they kind of encamped in Guangdong province after a certain amount of time. And that's where Xi's father retired. But in Guangdong, the son of Ye, his name was Ye Xuanping. Basically, he was mayor of Guangzhou and the governor of Guangdong. And very quickly, he was referred to as the emperor of the south. So in the 80s, he was running Guangdong province. And he became so powerful that the CCP sought to have him step down. And he actually threatened to withhold tax to Beijing from the province of Guangdong unless they negotiated with him. He wanted a vice chair of the CPPCC, the Chinese People's Political Consultative Committee. And he wants to be a vice governor of the CPPCC. And he wanted to be allowed to maintain his power base in Guangdong. And this is a rare case where the CCP actually deferred to these wishes. Just to get him out of running the most powerful province in China, they said okay. So he goes over the CPPCC. And he takes with him the kingpins of organized crime in Hong Kong and Macau. Stanley Ho never had a position, but Henry Falk and the other top lieutenants in these organized crime entities all wound up on the CPPCC. And to give you a sense of like, what was some of the magic Stanley Ho had when he won the monopoly on gaming in Macau? He devised this VIP room conc…
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One CA Podcast
1 210: Andreas Eckel on NATO Civil Military Cooperation 25:28
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Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedWelcome to the One CA Podcast. I'm your host, Jack Gaines. Today, Colonel Andreas Eckel, commander of the NATO CIMIC Center of Excellence, joins us to discuss the center's work to prepare the alliance for future crises or disasters. So, let's get started. --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www.civilaffairsassoc.org --- Great news! Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at: https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/ --- Special thanks to Jan Křtitel Novák, Jimmy McHugh, and Dorothy Fields for the original version of Diga Diga Do, which aired in 1928 and was then performed by Duke Ellington. Ellington's version can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3aJ_9IAIjQ&t=1s --- Transcript 00:00:05 JACK GAINES Welcome to the One CA podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. Today, Colonel Andreas Echel, commander of the NATO Civic Center of Excellence, joins us to discuss the center's work to prepare the alliance for future crisis and disasters. So let's get started. 00:00:19 ANDREAS ECKEL What we need to understand a little bit better, and I think that was a very brutal lesson we identified in Afghanistan and in Mali as well, is that military functions in different societies. very, very differently. We have an idea how military looks like and how it works. It might work more the Italian style or the German style or the US style. But basically, I think we have a common set of ideas how military works. And military works completely different in Mali than in Afghanistan than in Germany. And that is based on different societies. So how do we figure that out? It's a very good question. If I had a quick and sharp answer to that one, I think I would be the winner of the $1 million question. There are some ingredients to tackle that problem. And one of the ingredients is to understand the environment a little bit better. And that leads to civil military cooperation. The one centerpiece of civil military cooperation is to understand the environment better. to nest military activities in the civil environment in a better way. It creates more converging effects and creates less harm to the civil population. And I think the next thing is you need to have long -lasting relationships. Relationship that is built up, that's great. If it lasts one year, that's great. And if you just end it then, Basically, you have achieved almost nothing. So long -lasting relationships and to understand the civil environment better. And we have to understand that we are not the ivory tower of knowledge. What do we know? What does the military know about Mali and Afghanistan? Basically nothing. We have to be more and better in contact with the civil organizations, with academia, with knowledge centers. that are engaged in those areas since 20, 30, 40, 50 years. And we have to be in a dialogue with them and have to extract their knowledge about the key civil factors and have to integrate that better in military considerations. 00:02:32 JACK GAINES So you have to be a diplomat in two directions because you've got to be reaching out to the partner nation like Mali, working with her counterparts there. You have to be a diplomat with partner agencies within the government and academia, as you were saying, or else you're going to miss a step. So you really have to work your way across the spectrum. 00:02:52 ANDREAS ECKEL Yeah, I like your picture of being a diplomat because exactly as you mentioned, it's a diplomat in both ways, but you have to be a translator as well. So civil environment, civil actors, civil counterparts speak a different language than we. And we really have to make sure that what they say. is understood by the military and what the military means properly translated in how the civilians understand it. 00:03:17 JACK GAINES You know, and that's a good point because I've seen civil affairs civic officers come in and try to brief leadership on certain issues. And if it wasn't absolutely clear and in the language that that matter knew, they usually were dismissed and it wasn't as effective an operation because of it. 00:03:34 ANDREAS ECKEL And by the way, at the beginning of my career in the military function of CIMIC, it happened to me too. So one of my first appearance of the stage briefing the commander about some civil factors was a complete disaster because I underestimated how many minutes I only have to bring over some key messages to the commander. So I talked too long and did not come to the point. And I think that's the point where the CCOE is really in a responsibility. We have to provide in our courses the overview, the background, and we provide expertise and challenge them with tasks to apply the expertise. But at the very end of every course, we tell them, hey, CIMIC is important, and it is important to understand the environment, and it is important to integrate civil factors and military considerations. However, when you are confronted with decision makers, Your product needs to be crisp and sharp. If you provide a product to your commander, which exceeds three pages, then you can throw it in the dustbin. By the way, one page is better than three pages. And I think simakers have the tendency, and I include myself specifically into that one, to speak too long and to explain too long and not to come to the point. And if at the end of your statement there is no so what and what's next, well, then don't say anything. That's better. 00:05:08 JACK GAINES Well, for this podcast, I appreciate you speaking too much. That's a good thing. But I also understand it's a challenge, but once you get used to it, I think it's super, super helpful. 00:05:19 ANDREAS ECKEL helpful. What we both concluded coming to the point should not be mixed up with not doing your analysis. Only because you have two minutes to brief your commander about a major actor that will impact his operation. doesn't mean that your analysis should only be two minutes. So you have to provide the analysis for an in -depth briefing, if required, to integrate that knowledge and your assessment in the staff work of the other branches. So it needs to be both a very in -depth, precise analysis and assessment. And then it is your time on the stage. The light will shine on you for two minutes. That's it. 00:05:59 JACK GAINES That brings up a story on my side. sent one of my pitch decks to a former boss. And he took it, he read it, and then he read all of the sources that I had put in the back. And so he knew the subject just as well as I did when we met. And I was like, holy cow. Yes, it's important to do good research before you put together your summary because you never know how deep somebody's going to dive into an issue. And if you've done bad research and they catch it, you're done. So one of the things that... Being that diplomat, both to the military and to other government bodies. One thing that I found at the Strategic Foresight Conference, and it was in your report as well, is that SIMIC needs clarification of capabilities in peace and crisis. And what feedback I got from meetings was that not all militaries have a strong relationship with their public. That's a big concern because if a military doesn't have the trust. When you get to a crisis or a disaster, you've got to really overcome a lot in order just to provide aid and support. 00:07:07 ANDREAS ECKEL Yeah, that's a crucial point. I have two takes on that. The first one is we have nations that do allow, on the very lowest tactical level, the interaction between military and the civil world. But it is a question of being honest to ourselves. That is not applicable in all countries. Our countries in the alliance are very restrictive interaction with civil environment, with civil authorities, at least on the lower tactical level. And that brings me to my second point. It's a national responsibility. So when we talk about CIMIC as a military function, then we have to look at it from two sides. One is NATO CIMIC is embedded in a NATO command structure, NATO force structure. However, NATO is operating. on the soil of sovereign nations. So we promote and stimulate that nations build up, maintain, and integrate a kind of simic capability. We call that domestic simic. We made a proposal for what domestic simic is. However, nations are completely free to fill that skeleton with their structures. They can call it a domestic simic. They can call it territorial forces. They can call it Homeland Defense Forces. It doesn't matter how they fill in that skeleton as long as they do provide civil factor integration, as long as they execute civil -military interaction. And for the Alliance as a whole to plan and prepare and conduct successful operations, we need to plug in to the national simic domains and the domestic simic domains. And we have to do that. via the national military structures. So what we do in deterrence and defense -related scenarios is a little bit differing from what we have done in international crisis management in the past. When CIMIC teams from the alliance or whatever security force was implemented in that, we very often did the civil -military interaction with civil partners on the ground by ourselves without using any layer in between us. But when we do that now as NATO in Germany and Poland, Lithuania, Romania, and we have to plug into their military structures and via them with the civil actors on the ground. And nations consider that very differently. So there are nations that say, hey, great that you're in. Please feel free to speak to our civil organizations by yourself. It would be nice if you inform us afterwards. Everything's great. The nations are more restrictive and say, hey, guys. a ministry, whenever you talk to an organization, whenever you talk to civil partners, please do that via us and ask us first. So there is a variety of how nations would like to have that executed, and we as Symmakers have to adapt. 00:10:08 JACK GAINES Right. What I've seen is that disaster relief and crisis coordination between the military and the civil governments is fairly good, but I'm not seeing the emotional side as much. What I mean is, We just had the Marine Corps Marathon. And people all crossed D .C. and around the country came. They ran their 24 miles. These kind of military events where people go, they see some type of form of patriotism, honor guards at sporting events or marathons or the military band performing on the park plots. Those things make a difference. And I don't know if that was also included in your... Have you seen anything like that? 00:10:55 ANDREAS ECKEL In the last years, when we talked about the use of military assets in our nations, it was to overcome disasters. It was to provide military assistance to civil organizations to overcome flooding, fires, or whatever. But the situation has changed a little bit. And now it is not so much about military assistance in case of man -made big disasters. It's more about civil defense. It's more about stimulating the civil support to military operations and the mutual support in case of crisis and war. And I think that notion is quite new to many European countries. In Germany, it was... support of the military to the civil authorities in case of disasters. But when you look into Sweden, Norway, and Finland, they have since decades a kind of total defense strategy. They have a DNA about that the whole of the nation needs to be ready to defend the nation. And that starts already when you go into your cellar. Is there water? Is there food? Are there batteries? And when you do that in Finland, Sweden, Norway, the answer is yes, there is food and there is water. And I was quite astonished. A couple of years ago, I had a NATO course in Helsinki. At that time, when Helsinki was still a NATO partner and not a NATO nation. And it was an exported course from NATO School of Ammergau. And during the weekend, we had the opportunity to visit Helsinki. And we... came across a protection infrastructure was located to protect the civilians. And the lady asked us, do you have an idea for how many citizens of Helsinki we have shelter? And I said, well, 50%. And she was smiling and she was collecting all the numbers. And then she came up and said, for every citizen in Helsinki, there is shelter. And that's the difference. A regularly trained system of civil defense. And military defense working hand in hand. I think that makes a difference. And I see that coming up in Europe. And again, I would like to use the example of Germany. Since the last couple of years, a lot of more effort has been put into the training and the exchange of information and the exercising of those structures. And I think we are getting there. The point is... When you have dismantled those structures, those strategies since 1990, because our enemy was disappearing, never disappeared. He was just dormant and has been woken up a couple of years ago. But to reinstall that, reactivate that, revitalize that, that takes years and years. So we are at the beginning. I'm a very optimistic person. I strongly hope that we are getting to a point quick enough that when The Russian beer is looking again to Europe when he has solved his problem in Ukraine, that we are ready at that point. And there are substantial measurements that we need to be ready latest in four to five years. And CIMIC plays a role in that because your armed forces can be as good as possible when the civil environment is vulnerable and stays vulnerable and is not able to absorb shocks and to compensate the shocks at a better level after the shock. then you will lose the conflict. That's crystal clear. Even in that time in 2023, where it seemed, at least for some time, that the Ukrainians have regained the initiative, the Russians did attack the civil infrastructure, the energy infrastructure, the transport infrastructure, the health infrastructure. And they were still winning at that battlefield, although they had massive casualties on the fighting battlefield. And I think where Ukraine will run into massive problems this…
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One CA Podcast
1 209: Kurt Dykstra and Joshua Weikart on joining Civil Affairs 35:12
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Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedIn this episode Brian Hancock talks with Kurt Dykstra and Joshua Weikart to discuss the 38 Golf Program, the Functional Specialty Team Construct, and the recent Functional Specialty Team Symposium. Major Dykstra and Captain Weikert, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Wonderful to be here. --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in current or former military personnel, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with the people and leadership of a partner nation. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org --- Great news! Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at: https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/ --- Special thanks to Art Music for a sample from the song "January | Instrumental Background Music." Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E0orz_C33I --- Transcript 00:00:03 INTRODUCTION Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www.civilaffairsassoc.org. I'll have those in the show notes. 00:00:39 BRIAN HANCOCK I'm Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hancock, and I will be your host for this session. Today, we have with us Major Kurt Dykstra and Joshua Weikert and Joshua Weikert and Captain Joshua Weikert to discuss the 38 golf program and the recent Functional Specialty Team Symposium. Major Dykstra and Captain Weikert, welcome to the show. Thanks very much. Wonderful to be here. Thank you, sir. 00:01:26 BRIAN HANCOCK A quick disclaimer while we're here that the remarks of myself and the participants are solely ours. All right, gentlemen, let's jump into it. From the beginning, what attracted you to U.S. Army civil affairs? Well, I can start that answer. So I'm a bit older, as you might have gathered from my bio. 00:01:43 KURT DYKSTRA a bit older, as you might have gathered from my bio. And at various points in my adult life, I had thought about entering into military service. And for one reason or another, It just didn't happen. And it was always a great regret in my life that I had not served and saw it as something that I wish I would have done. And then about four or so years ago, I got a call from a friend of a friend who at the time was a major who was recruiting for this new golf program. And we really didn't know each other, but we sort of had moved in similar circles and knew the same people and those sorts of things. And my wife and I were hiking the Appalachian Trail and I was having breakfast one morning and got a phone call from Colonel Koinga, as he retells the story, I think within an hour or two, I said something like, sounds good to me, let's do it. Of course, I did talk with my wife and those sorts of things, but that's my pathway in and a bit unique perhaps, but I think a story that has some resonance with many of the other gulfs, particularly those who were not prior service, that this was fulfilling an opportunity that they had, that they had wished that they had taken earlier, which was to serve the country through the military. 00:02:51 BRIAN HANCOCK the country through the military. Well, first of all, Kurt, you're not that old. You look very young and healthy to me. And so you're doing something right. So good for you. I'm thrilled that you have chosen to give both the Army and civil affairs a chance. We definitely need the type of skills that you bring to the table. Now, let me turn to you, Captain Weicker. Tell me a little bit about your journey getting here. Well, I was a prior service soldier. 00:03:16 JOSHUA WEIKERT prior service soldier. Also being the pre -law advisor at my university, I had a pre -law student who was interested in the Army JAG program. And she had asked me to look into direct commissioning programs in the Army in general, knowing that I was a veteran and had some experience in this area. And I stumbled across the 38 Gulf page on the Army Talent Management website. And it was such an immediately obvious fit because I teach politics, but I also do politics. I work for the House of Representatives. And for that matter, when I go out looking for faculty members to hire, I like looking for people who are practitioners as well as being scholars. And this really dovetailed very nicely into that model. And it struck me as something with a very clear need. It also struck me as something that, especially as we think about lessons learned from Iraq and Afghanistan and 20 years of deployments, that this was an area where the Army could really bone up its skills and get more into capacity building both within our formations and also the places where we operate. So it struck me as something that was both important and extremely interesting. 00:04:13 BRIAN HANCOCK Well, very glad that you're here. The background that you both have in politics and helping. do governance on an almost daily basis. It makes me wonder, how would we train something like transitional governance? This is one of our core capabilities. I don't know if the program does things like that. I think there's a big future for us in this area. And both of you have the background to help us move in that direction. Well, in the early 2000s, 00:04:44 JOSHUA WEIKERT the DOD had... conducted a review of all the civil administration and civil affairs tasks that were out there that the Army engages in. And they came up with a list of something like 1 ,400 different tasks. And they combed through this list and started identifying things that are not currently met. So where are the areas where the Army needs help? And out of that derived these 18 skill identifiers within the 38 Gulf program, covering a broad range of civil skills. And these include things like... finance, education, and border security, and law, regulation, and policy, and this cultural heritage and property protection. And the goal of the program is essentially to enhance a commander's ability to operate in a stable civil environment, to foresee and address any likely challenges that should crop up, so that commanders can focus on accomplishing their primary image. 00:05:33 KURT DYKSTRA AND JOSHUA WEIKERT Yeah, if I might jump in a little bit on that as well, either read the book or see the movie Monuments Men, then that gives you a little bit of a sense. In World War II, The U .S. were heading across Western Europe. They needed help to identify certain things, whether it's art, whether it's the significance of structures. And those are skills that the Army just didn't have. So the George Clooney's of the world, who at the time were art historians and museum curators, were brought into the Army's orbit to assist in those tasks. And that's kind of the history of the program that goes way back when, and then it was recently restarted in many ways and broadened as Captain Weigert. has been describing. So in some ways, I describe our role as consultants with specific civilian side expertise that the Army simply does not have to assist the Army to be able to do things that it otherwise might not be able to do. So we get called upon to assist in some of those areas that are more specialized than what the Army generally might have. And in other ways, like other civil affairs officers, you know, we're kind of the Army's diplomatic corps. So it's really those combinations, but the Gulf program specifically brings a very specific and in -depth civilian skill set to be used for Army purposes. 00:06:47 BRIAN HANCOCK set to be used for Army purposes. It sounds a little bit similar to some of the specialists we have with surgeons and lawyers, but also different at the same time. When we were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, we definitely could have used these capabilities in all of these special functional areas. The Department of State tries their best to fill that gap, but the reality is that they're a relatively small organization that isn't necessarily equipped to go to non -permissive environments for extended periods of time. So for transitional governments, I think the heavy lift tends to fall on the military, and you really can't rebuild a government without trying to rebuild the economy and those other threads that tie into that tapestry. I'm very excited for the future with you guys on board. One of the initial challenges is that there wasn't necessarily a clear career progression through every rank for these soldiers. They couldn't follow the 38 Alpha career progression. Has that been relooked at? We do have a quasi -path through your military education. 00:07:57 JOSHUA WEIKERT a quasi -path through your military education. We do not yet have a basic officer leadership course, though we are currently piggybacking on Medical Services Bullock down here at Fort Sam. which is actually where they both are right now. But my understanding is that a 38 golf at CA Bullock course is in development, and I volunteered some of my time doing some of the course materials for that. And of course, we do have the civil affairs captain's course as well as an option. Beyond that, I'm not certain at all. But for Major Dykstra, if he has more information on that. 00:08:26 KURT DYKSTRA AND JOSHUA WEIKERT Much of this has been like jazz. There's been a certain underlying beat that's there, and there's a lot of improvisation that happens along the way. And Captain Weikert is exactly correct that we do DCC largely with the JAG DCC. And then we sort of peg on BOLIC, either AG or AMED, and AMED seems to be the preferred course right now. And to me, this is an area for improvement. We've gone through two school experiences without having any sort of direct training for what it is that we do. And that feels to me like an area that we can improve upon. And I think that is in process, as Captain Weikert mentioned with. With large organizations, particularly the U.S. Army, all that sort of thing takes time. Yeah, it does. But I do think that as the program matures, as there are more people within it for longer periods of time, a lot of the questions about career path and specifics along those lines, frankly, either be worked out by doctrine or they'll be worked out by the process of having people going through these programs and through the ranks and getting OERs and those kinds of things. So I'm not as concerned about that. A ladder piece is what I think that it would be beneficial for the golf program to have better formal education laid out sooner as we see with most other MOCs. 00:09:37 BRIAN HANCOCK other MOCs. It makes sense to me. It is clever, though, to piggyback on a professional MOS. Many reservists have a similar challenge who aren't 38 golfs because a lot of the professional military education that we funnel through. is geared towards combat arms. And of course, for reserve soldiers, what we do is largely support. But in terms of professional military education, understanding some of these other professions like medicine and pieces of logistics and information operations, professional military education historically has not been geared to advance the tradecraft of those individuals. So I think there's a larger movement within the Army at large, though, to create more specialized training. Unlike the Marine Corps, where they have fewer MOSs and folks have to be a little bit more of a generalist, the fact that we have so many specialty MOSs in the Army, I think, lends itself to the ability to stand up individual branches that can run its own training. And within the functional specialties of the 38 golf program, you might even need an entire course dedicated. to each of those functional areas because they're really quite different. 38 golfs are contained within the functional specialty team construct, like the building where they live within a civil affairs unit. Some folks tend to conflate the 38 golf program with the functional specialty team, not the same. But let's take it a step further. Since the functional specialty team which houses the 38 golf program is a military unit, It, of course, has non -commissioned officers in it as well as officers. Three of us happen to be officers, but non -commissioned officers are very important for us to get things done in the Army. What right now is the role of the non -commissioned officer within functional specialty teams? And gentlemen, where do you see that going? Go ahead, Captain Martin. I think that's exactly right. 00:11:40 JOSHUA WEIKERT right. And in addition, the just traditional roles that NCOs play in almost any unit in formation in terms of like training plan development and... upward input and things like that. I think the role of NCOs is all the more valuable and important in an FXFB section that includes a significant number of direct commission officers. You need that reinforcing experience even more in that set. And also, as we found out at the symposium in April, many of we had NCOs in attendance, and many of these NCOs are themselves fairly accomplished within their careers on the civilian side. So they have SI. contributions to make as well. So they're an essential part of this formation. 00:12:19 KURT DYKSTRA AND JOSHUA WEIKERT Yeah. One of our NCOs was a lawyer of 35 plus years, had done really remarkable things in the civilian side. So the idea that I, as a newly commissioned officer, would come in as the experienced person on the civilian side and he was more experienced on the Army side was true on the one hand, but it also was so much more than that because his civilian expertise was also first rate and really quite impressive. 00:12:41 BRIAN HANCOCK first rate and really quite impressive. That's amazing. And I don't know if the functional specialty teams will select for that type of talent. It certainly exists, at least within the Army Reserve. We're very skill -rich. That is exciting to me. Now, prior to the establishment of the 38 golf program, who was ma…
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1 208: Grant Newsham on the Japan Defense Forces and PRC threat (Part II) 27:14
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Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedToday, we welcome Sam Cooper, an author and journalist based in Ottawa. He came in to talk about his reporting on PRC political and economic warfare, its impact on Canada and the United States, and how those tools are being used worldwide, including Taiwan, to undermine the rule of law and each nation's sovereignty. This episode goes fast and has a lot of great information on how China sets conditions for winning without fighting. The One CA Podcast is here to inspire anyone interested in working in US foreign relations. - Often called the last three feet of diplomacy. We bring in practitioners from all walks of foreign service including the military, diplomacy, nongovernmental, development, and field agents to talk about their experiences and work. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail (dot) com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org --- Great news! Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at: https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/ --- Special Thanks to Cafe Music BGM channel and their release, "Hip Hop Jazz & Smooth Jazz Instrumental." Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5yTtDZZiHg ----Transcript---- Transcript: 00:00:00 JACK GAINES Today, we welcome Sam Cooper, author and journalist based out of Ottawa. He came in to talk about his reporting on PRC political and economic warfare and its impact on Canada and the United States and how those tools are being used around the world, including Taiwan, to undermine the rule of law and each nation's sovereignty. This episode goes fast and has a lot of great information on how China sets conditions for winning without fighting. So, let's get started. 00:00:27 SAM COOPER In the course of reporting, I discovered the compound of Tiger Yuan, an individual that was directly investigated in this Chinese underground banking story, had the most weapons in Western Canada, if not across Canada, for a citizen. And so, when my sources said this person is or was PLA, this person has connectivity to the highest levels of organized crime. And this person is very politically connected, and their activity outside of organized crime appears to be directing Chinese state -friendly people what to do in Western Canada. That's when I really started to dig into and understand the Chinese interference story, starting on the West Coast and then moving across. Literally, I started reporting from Ottawa. That's when I got into the political side of it. 00:01:20 JACK GAINES So how many weapons are you talking about? And are you talking about small arms, large arms, tactical, technicals? What was it that you were able to find? 00:01:29 SAM COOPER I'll start with the big picture. I was directed to a compound in Chilliwack, British Columbia. This is very near the United States -Washington state border. It's just outside of Vancouver, and it was a compound of tremendous luxury. In an underground massive parking lot, there were about 80 luxury vehicles. that indicated huge-scale money laundering. There were American military jeeps and vintage machine guns. There was a fire truck. There was a diesel-type rig. There's Ferraris. And so, I was told that this person has vaults of restricted firearms. So, we're talking tactical weapons that you hold against your shoulder and extend your arm out as far as it can. 00:02:16 JACK GAINES Yeah, long guns. 00:02:17 SAM COOPER Right. Long guns. These are military-style weapons. I can't say they're AK -47s or Noriko. He didn't let you in there to mark all the numbers and he didn't give you the inventory sheets. 00:02:24 JACK GAINES let you in there to mark all the numbers and he didn't give you the inventory sheets. 00:02:29 SAM COOPER He didn't give me the inventory sheets, but Canada has to keep a log of the weapons out there as best as it can. And in an open-source photo, you've got a gangster sort of standing downstairs beside a luxury car with a, I believe it was sort of a burp gun. And then in the back corner, you could see an open door with just a room stacked with weapons. You could literally see a vintage machine gun, one of those ones that would have a sort of stand so you can shoot out of a trench, maybe back in the 50s or 60s. And my sources said, we know that this person has the largest cache of restricted and unrestricted weapons in Western Canada. As I wrote in Willful Blindness, this is... Chapo Guzman -style wealth in a Canadian property, and it makes no sense. 00:03:19 JACK GAINES Well, it sounds like this person is a hub for gun running and money and probably drugs. Because if he's got storehouses for weapons, that means he can rotate them out for criminal groups that are moving through the area so that no one really gets tied to a weapon if there's ever a crime committed. But it also sounds like they've got connections 00:03:47 SAM COOPER Yeah. Well, I would say you nailed everything in your question. And to unpack that, on the organized crime side, the information is this person is literally a revered hero from the People's Liberation Army. It's not that China did well in their border assault on Vietnam. They did pretty badly. But this person, Tiger Yuan, is glorified in various Chinese language documents. military veteran, is assessed by Canadian federal police to be in charge of gangs. He would be a person that is handling Chinese mafia in Canada and giving them directions to meet some of the Chinese Communist Party's political objectives. 00:04:30 JACK GAINES So, he's a kingpin. 00:04:31 SAM COOPER He's a kingpin, an intelligence handler involved in organized crime at the highest level and also with the capacity to direct these high -level triads. I think we're talking about what's known as the company. This is elite China -based triads that are active running weapons and drugs sentinel around the world and yet have connections at the highest level to military and intelligence and political figures for the parties. So yes, the type of person involved in trade -based money laundering, the ability to send weapons in and out of Canada, the ability to collect weapons from... Chinese visitors who happen to buy guns in Canada and then want to get rid of them. As you said, this military veteran can be a node to move them. I'm told through police sources; this person is suspected to be involved in the Chinese police station activity. So, as you know, that would include what was exposed by the FBI in New York, where we have purported community associations that are actually running these illegal... 00:05:38 JACK GAINES Community police stations in other countries. 00:05:41 SAM COOPER Exactly. And these would be used to harass dissidents, to go after Xi Jinping's so -called fox hunt targets. So, Tiger Yuan would be central to that. He would be central to meeting with Chinese language journalists. And I'm told giving them directions or coaching on the type of reporting they should be doing. He would be central to types of... fundraising activities that could blend legitimate business with illegitimate business and have those monies go into Canada's political system. Well, 00:06:17 JACK GAINES after reading your book, Willful Blindness, one thing came to me, and that is that it looks like China has successfully mixed profiteering and foreign policy so that they can successfully tie the profits from narcotics to influence and persuasion in countries to achieve their foreign policy goals. I had John Cassara on recently, and he talked about that China has probably half of the global illicit trade profit coming into it. And when people measure China, they measure its GDP. They don't measure that black economy. Because most of it goes right back out into the world to fund these illicit criminal groups that are also complicit with the PRC and the money that goes to the pockets of people willing to take the influence dollars to do what PRC wants. But it was really your book that opened that perspective. And it sounds like what you're seeing is the tuning of that process. and how they're really bringing it to bear to see how far they can go and being successful in moving a country's orbit into the PRC influence space. 00:07:37 SAM COOPER Yeah, I agree with everything you said there, and thank you for saying that. I do think my book had a little bit of a cognitive advance in showing people that when we're speaking about the mercantilism of the People's Republic of China and the trade mixed into that, by design, I believe, is trade -based money laundering in which, of course, there are some honest tycoons or almost as honest as you can be within China's system. But there are many that have both legitimate and underground casino facilitation, capital flake facilitation, direct narcotics trafficking, weapons. But China doesn't look at those people as the government should have a distance from them. China sees those people as ones that have connections abroad, ones that have great influence in diaspora communities. And business persons that are involved in organized crime in Beijing's playbook should be used to influence politicians that are looking for votes in the diaspora. 00:08:43 JACK GAINES Do you think that Xi Jinping and the PRC allow a certain amount of wealth and influence or affluence? in these people that are expats around the world in exchange for conducting these types of operations? 00:09:00 SAM COOPER Yes, I think there's a lot going on, and I'm always trying to clarify my understanding, but some have coined the term strategic corruption. This is what we saw in Ukraine for years before Putin made his move. We saw the oligarchs and the tycoons, people like Semyon Mogilev ich, had great control over the Ukrainian resource industries. A person named Boris Berstein, who settled in Toronto, was a major underground banker and money launderer with connectivity to the KGB. So, we've seen this playbook in Ukraine, having people with gang connections or direct intelligence connections corrupt foreign governments and try to pave the way. And I think China is doing a bigger and even more sophisticated variation on that now, where they want people that are, as I've reported in Canada, we have major real estate developers, major portions of Vancouver and Toronto are in fact Chinese or Hong Kong money. And these big real estate developers, there's no question that Beijing has relationships with them, that they will be protected in their illegitimate business activities if they deliver objectives. to Beijing. And there's so much more going on, but yes, in a nutshell, Beijing offers protection to the highest-level criminals in the world if they will deliver political objectives wherever they are. 00:10:27 JACK GAINES Are you seeing a cohesion of operations between them? How closely tied are they to Beijing? Or is it decentralized to where they say, look, if you build influence and you just let us know who you have contacts with, we'll let you know if we need you. Is it more of a mafia style relationship? How closely tied are they? 00:10:46 SAM COOPER Well, that is the trillion -dollar question. I mean, I'm always trying to get my understanding. And I'm sure they don't just show you. 00:10:52 JACK GAINES I'm sure they don't just show you. Here, here's our relationship map now. I mean, I spent a lot of time thinking about it. 00:10:55 SAM COOPER here's our relationship map now. I mean, I spent a lot of time thinking about it. And as best as I can understand, and I'm always talking to experts to understand more. Sure. But it's not as hierarchical and rigid. I've been told that it is the most fluid. entrepreneurial system you can imagine. There's all types of competition. We have something called Guanxi, which is this very deep sort of transactional cultural relationships between people at high levels in China's system. And we have interrelationships of gangs, interrelationships of intelligence agencies. We have competition among both of those forces. 00:11:40 SAM COOPER To boil it down, I don't think Xi Jinping is able to say, OK, mafia leader A, you're going to go to Canada, specifically Toronto, and achieve this. It's more that we have what you know is the united front system. That is, all these community groups at the end of the day have been co -opted by officials in consulates around the world so that the community groups are controlled directly by Chinese intelligence officials in embassies and consulates. And they have various levels of tasking to these community groups, who I am saying are almost exclusively involved, high -level tycoon type gang associates. And then within these United Front networks, you have intelligence handlers of the type to circle back to this BC case of this PLA veteran, Tiger Yuan, who is able to be like an area manager of legitimate and illegitimate. business activity in various regions. In my understanding, we have some bosses in Toronto, Ontario, for the Eastern Canada, who are this blend of an intelligence handler and a very high-level organized crime person. We have similar bosses in Western Canada. And I'm sure because I've read a corruption case involving a senator in San Francisco. We don't need to name the name, but this senator was allegedly involved in offshore arms trading, an FBI sting operation got him. He was involved in talking to the various families in that area. By families, I mean triads. And so, I have to believe in California, we have these very same type of PLA intelligence handlers that are into that fluid mix of gangsters, businesspersons, politicians. that one way or another, they'll get their guanxi from Beijing if they deliver objectives. Right. 00:13:40 JACK GAINES And then you have the community police there to track people down if they take their wealth and disappear, or if they're not producing, or if they don't feel like they're part of the fold. 00:13:51 SAM COOPER Yeah. The CCP police station really just made everything we're talking about in this fluid network much easier to understand because they had little bricks and mortar shops. Right. that the FBI and others have discovered have both gangsters and traveling CCP officials involved to look over the community. 00:14:11 JACK GAINES Right. Because you have to have an enforcer. If you're going to run a…
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Welcome to the One CA Podcast. In this episode Assad Raza hosts Henrique Garbino, Joao Mauricio Dias Lopes Valdetaro, and Jonathan Robinson as they discuss their paper and the competing concepts around civil military planning and operations. --- Great news! Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at: https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/ --- You can find "Civil Military What?" online at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/378267976_Civil-military_what_Making_sense_of_conflicting_civil-military_concepts Special thanks for Nakaboncajon for posting pandeiro // bossa nova. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npixMWE0QWk --- 00:00:06 Introduction Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com. Or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes. Also, today's guests would like to state that the comments in their interview are their opinions and represent themselves and no other organization. So let's get started. 00:00:52 ASSAD RAZA Welcome to the 1CA podcast. I'm your host, Asad Raza. And today our guests are Henrique Gabino, Jonathan Robinson, and Jao Valdeterro. The authors of Civil Military What? Making Sense of Conflicting Civil Military Concepts. First, I really love your title. As a former civil affairs guy and working with the United Nations in the past, it really demonstrates the different perspectives that we have about civil military operations globally based off of these different lexicons that are out there. So before we start, can you quickly introduce yourselves with a little bit of background for our listeners? 00:01:29 ENRIQUE GARBINO Yes, I can start, I guess. So Enrique Garbino and thank you for having us here. Before I start, kudos to João for the title. That's his creation. So I started off in the Brazilian Army as a combat engineer officer. So I was there for about 12 years. I joined to work with peacekeeping operations after my first deployment to Haiti. I worked with Show Brazil Peacekeeping Training Center, and there I was coordinating the military coordination course with João, who is here with us. And we realized there were a lot of confusions with different concepts, Brazilian concepts, UN concepts, American concepts, regarding civil military relations. I worked for different NGOs, for example, and was in The Hague Civil Military Cooperation Center of Exile, COE. I also worked with a comparison, conceptual analysis between EU and NATO civil military concepts. That was when the CCOE became the department head for semi -military cooperation for the EU as well. And now I'm at the Swedish Defense University, where I don't study semi -military relations, but I'm working the use of landmines by non -state groups, landmines, IEDs, booby traps, things like that. 00:02:42 JOHNNY ROBINSON Thank you. Who wants to go next, John or Jao? Yeah, I don't mind jumping in. Johnny Robinson, and I'm porting the U .S. Naval War College's Humanitarian Response Program. So a global fellow at Brown University's Center for Human Rights Humanitarian Studies. For that, I spent almost a decade working in the Middle East for various humanitarian conflict resolution and private entities. We focused on aid worker security systems for civil military coordination analysis for the Carter Center, Caritas, Switzerland, the International NGO Safety Organization, amongst others. As you can tell from my accent, I'm not originally from the U .S., but I was born in the U .K., but ended up in Prince, Rhode Island, marrying my wife. So, yeah, and I got part of the project. And so, yeah, we've been on this journey together for a few years now. 00:03:34 ASSAD RAZA Hey, John, thank you. One question. You talk about being a fellow at Brown University. Do you know Stanislava? Yes. 00:03:40 JOHNNY ROBINSON Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I know Stanislav. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Stanislav did an interview with her, 00:03:40 ASSAD RAZA Yeah, 00:03:42 ASSAD RAZA did an interview with her, I think, last year on her book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, when Rambo meets the Red Cross kind of thing. 00:03:48 JOHNNY ROBINSON meets the Red Cross kind of thing. Like, wow, really, really good. Yeah, no, it's great. Yeah, it's great. Perfect, 00:03:53 JOAO MAURICIO DIAS LOPES VALDETARO, John. Thank you. Thanks, Ata, for having us. And my background's a little different from both of them. I'm still in the Army for the last 21 years. I'm a major engineer reg in the Brazilian Army. I've been working in peacekeeping issues for 10 years already. So I shared, we've got, you know, we worked structures back there in the Brazilian Peacekeeping Operations Center. Regarding Civil Affairs, I had two deployments in Haiti. One of them, I was a platoon commander, but dealt a lot with CEMEC inside the Peacekeeping Mission. And my second deployment, I was T3 of the Brazilian Engineering Company, and also had a lot of publics to attend to. I've also been deployed at Central Africa Republic. We literally set up the first CEMEC branch in the Central African Army. And that's it. This paper has been worked for a while already, and I guess it's almost ready to be published. 00:04:53 ASSAD RAZA Jao, thank you for coming on. It seems like you have a wealth of experience. So let's get into the topic here. So in your opinion, based on your research, how have the definitions or applications of civil military concepts varied among the different organizations like the United Nations, the European Union, and NATO? 00:05:10 ENRIQUE GARBINO This is Henrique. Could you take a quick look at the conceptual framework? like the concepts used by different organizations to organize the relationship between civilians and military actors there is room for a lot of confusion so i'm going to give us some examples so we can kind of visualize them more for example the u .s army civil affairs concept it's a military capability that tries to achieve the military mission through showing civilian actors right The UN civil -military coordination, so the concept used by military UN peacekeepers, is a similar approach. NATO civil -military cooperation is also similar. So you have civil affairs, military cooperation, civil -military coordination, three different terms that mean roughly the same thing. Of course, there are differences between them, but overall, they all mean the same military capability. And you can also have the same term that mean different things. For example, the UN mission has this semi -military coordination for military peacekeepers, but they also have the UN humanitarian semi -military coordination, which is a concept dedicated to promoting and preserving the humanitarian principles in the interaction between military and civilian humanitarian actors in crises and emergencies. So it's a very different thing. The European Union also have the semi -military coordination concept, so the same term, but it's about the coordination between the headquarters level, military bodies, and the civilian bodies in Brussels. So it's something completely different from the other two concepts. The same terms being used, meaning very different things. And then if you start a little digging deeper, you come up with different concepts that you don't really know in which basket you put them, like military civil fusion, a concept being used in China at the moment. Civic military unions, a concept we found in Venezuela. So it's really hard for someone who is not really familiar with that organization in particular to really understand what that term really means. It can get very confusing. And I think the irony here is that most of these civil military concepts, they have a shared understanding between civilians and military actors. The concepts cannot agree among themselves. So I think that's a bit ironic and that's a gap we try to fill. 00:07:34 ASSAD RAZA And I think a lot of people are confused on the different concepts or the terminologies. I myself at times was a little confused. You know, I had the opportunity to work in northeastern Syria and we would coordinate the UN civil military coordination center that was in Jordan on humanitarian aid and trying to de -conflict HA that was coming in from the UN into Syria and some of our operations that not really having a good understanding could never got tied to what these organizations did at the time. So it was a bit confusing. But it was a British guy on the other end. So John, you know. 00:08:03 JOHNNY ROBINSON Yeah, no, I was on the other side, as it were, from you. So I came in from the humanitarian community. And so we also got confused as well by all the different terminologies and civil affairs versus SIMCORD versus SIMIC versus humanitarian -military interaction. And so, yeah, it's a cool problem, right? I think it shows that. It gets complex quite quickly when you have these multinational civilian military environments. 00:08:30 ASSAD RAZA Absolutely. So I know we talked about some of the challenges that you've experienced ourselves as practitioners on the ground. So is there any other challenges that we talk about that we might have missed? 00:08:40 JOAO MAURICIO DIAS LOPES VALDETARO, Maybe you want to talk about Brazilian in Haiti. But it's the same as the Assad was saying. It was something that we used to do back in the old days, but we didn't call it civil affair. We had been doing that for a while. battalion to Haiti. The battalion commander was the man that, hey, send us your semi -mobster to the meeting. And then they were like, what's semi? We were dealing with local population. We were dealing with people in the Amazon forest. We were dealing with civil defense, but all different stuff. So when we arrived in Haiti, and we were teaching in the peacekeeping center, we had a lot of students who just arrived and say, oh yeah, we have this civil social action the army would do to the local population or dealing with local authorities. And when we started to study the UN SEMREC doctrine, it also developed through the time after the mission haze. Within the SEMREC doctrine, what we used to do as civil action, people were arriving in the mission in the beginning, and they were doing exactly the same that they were doing. back home, but we were able in the end to highlight what CIMIC was for them, and they started to do the right stuff. Not under the first contingent, but at least, I can say, half of the mission on, we were doing the right stuff in the head. 00:10:12 ENRIQUE GARBINO I think another aspect of this issue is that what this is referring to is a military civic action. Before, it was done by a soldier in Damned Force. It's not a specialized function. You don't go to special training to do this. The army giving dental care or toys or food to the population. And then in the UN mission context, then you should do much more. You should partner with local organizations. You should not take the lead as a military actor. And those clashes of principles, clashes of modus operandi, that was visible. It's something you need to unlearn first so we could learn the new doctrine. 00:10:50 ASSAD RAZA Yeah, it seems like a really big challenge because you're trying to learn on the fly, on the ground, which causes frustration with some of the other participating organizations, right? Kind of going back to the biases that some people have, especially in a nonprofit NGO organization, like don't want to work in the military because of some of those challenges. So let's go into talking about your analytical tool, your concept that you guys develop. I know the paper, you were talking about like the four core parameters. So can you guys talk about your analytical tool? Yes, of course. Well, the main goal of the project was to come up with a way to sort different concepts so we can see which concepts are similar from each other, 00:11:19 ENRIQUE GARBINO goal of the project was to come up with a way to sort different concepts so we can see which concepts are similar from each other, which ones are different, and also why. So we can learn from each other when comparing, for example, civil affairs experiences with NATO -specific experiences, but we cannot really compare EU and SYNCORDS, so the EU and humanitarian and humanitarian coordination with civil affairs. So this was an abductive process. So we would study a specific concept in detail, like go to the guidance documents, try to break it down into what it means. Then do the same thing for the second concept and the third concept, and then try to find current aspects of that concept. And we tried maybe 20 different parameters, but it boiled out to four, which are the perspective that the concept takes, the scope of the relationship between civilians and military, The level of applicability and the structure. So for the perspective, is it mainly a military concept? It's a concept that serves the military mission. Or is it a civilian concept? A concept that serves the work of civilian organizations. Or is it a joint concept that serves both in an equal level? In terms of scope, to where the relationship between military and civilian actors are placed. For example, is it about internal coordination? For example, I mentioned the European Union concept of civil -military coordination, and that's an internal scope because it's about coordination within the EU, not between the EU and external actors. Other concepts are mainly external, so it's about, for example, the humanitarian organization dealing with military external actors. Some concepts are both internal and external. For example, if you take the UN civil -military coordination concept used by military peacekeepers, That has both an internal component, which is about facilitating the relationship between the UN military component within the mission…
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One CA Podcast
1 Holiday Replay, 179: Civil Affairs Innovation with Colonel Brad Hughes, part II 32:43
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One CA Podcast
1 Holiday Replay, 178: Civil Affairs Innovation with Colonel Brad Hughes, part I 31:08
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One CA Podcast
1 Holiday Replay, 160 Curtis Fox: Part I, Russian Hybrid Warfare 26:04
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Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedToday, we welcome Curtis Fox, author of Hybrid Warfare: The Russian Approach to Strategic Competition & Conventional Military Conflict, which is hot off the presses and in stores now. We discuss the book's concepts and how they apply to current events. This is part one of two, so sit back, enjoy and come back next week for part two. Link to Biography: https://www.linkedin.com/in/curtis-fox-mba-pmp-59b74223/ One CA Podcast aims to inspire people interested in working on-ground to forward U.S. foreign policy. We bring in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences and recommendations for working the "last three feet" of foreign relations. Have a story to tell? Email us to either speak or guest-host at: capodcasting@gmail.com One CA Podcast is a product of the Civil Affairs Association: https://www.civilaffairsassoc.org/ Today's music is from the Disney film COCO and is a tribute to Ana Ofelia Murguia, whom I once met at a San Diego Latin Film Festival. Ana passed away this week at age 90, so this episode's music is her tribute. See you next week. --- Great news! Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at: https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/ --- Murguia: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/01/movies/ana-ofelia-murguia-coco-dead.html Link to music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJfoPUOUWBw --- Transcript for Episode I&II Introduction Welcome to the One CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. One CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting@gmail.com. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www.civilaffairsassoc.org. I'll have those in the show notes. 00:00:41 CURTIS FOX This is Curtis Fox. 00:00:43 JACK GAINES Curtis! Jack Gaines, how you doing? 00:00:45 CURTIS FOX Doing good, man. You're very punctual. 00:01:07 JACK GAINES Russia and Syria is a great example of a combination of, as you say, hybrid operations evolving into the full scale kinetic operations. 00:01:35 JACK GAINES For the listeners? Sure. I can't even pronounce them. And I did read them, but it would be better for you to describe them. I mean, 00:01:42 CURTIS FOX I mean, I tell you what, I speak Russian and they're still hard for me to pronounce. Maybe the first term we can go into is Maskarovka, because this is one of the Russians' favorite terms. And that literally just translates to camouflage. This is the hidden hand approach that the Russians have in history done so well. They don't want these things to be directly attributable to Moscow. 00:02:06 CURTIS FOX Just literally means activity. And what they mean by that is all of the little things that you do in the background to try to frustrate a target nation's institutions from responding to the intervention that you're conducting. You do not want them to be able to get forces in the field. Preferably, you'd have them stay in their barracks. And you want to set up blockades that frustrate public transit and encourage people to stay in their homes. Or maybe come out in mass protest, preferably in front of city hall or a police station so the political apparatus is frozen. And then vignettes at most is surprise. But it's surprise of, you know, like speedy movement. And what they mean by that is if they can use soft forces to rapidly deploy and establish some sort of a foothold on a limited number of key objectives. then they need the rapid maneuver of heavy ground forces to entrench those gains. This was the secret sauce that did so well in the Crimean annexation back in 2014. So the VDV, the Russian Airborne Services, those are really the elite trigger pullers of the Russian armed forces. And once a number of Spetsnaz battalions had advanced far enough up roads and blackaded positions coming into the peninsula, The VDB immediately used a number of secured local airstrips to move in forces in mass. And they spread rapidly throughout the peninsula and secured all those gains. 00:03:43 JACK GAINES You know, it kind of reminds me of Bosnia and Kosovo during the conflict and how it has resulted in Kosovo having a Bosnian shadow government in part of the border towns. 00:03:53 CURTIS FOX There's some real similarities in the way Russia continues to manipulate and maintain influence in Georgia. and the Serbian approach in Bosnia. That's probably where they get a lot of these ideas from. If you look at Georgia, there's an autonomous enclave called South Asatia, and then another one called the Bukazia, which is right up on the coast of the Black Sea. And the Russians would have us believe that these enclaves had ethnic Russians in them, that they would have you believe that they don't want anything to do with that government. And they want to remain segmented off and autonomous from the country with no trade and political independence. 00:04:33 JACK GAINES I remember Lithuania had that issue, too. They were arguing that there are Russians in Lithuania that want nothing to do with Lithuania. I remember them posing the same argument there. So it must be a form of foothold mentality where they're saying, look, these are our people. 00:04:49 CURTIS FOX Sure. Yeah. Vladimir Putin actually talks about it as a genuine tragedy that these are Russian citizens that have been scattered across the globe and isolated from the government in their mother country. Never really offers so many resources to come home if it's really that big of a tragedy. And they don't seem to want to migrate to Russia on their own dime. But this being a civil affairs podcast, it's probably also worthy to point out something the Russians do very well. is they figure out what influencers have their hands on which buttons. They're very good at understanding which individuals have access to what information and which individuals run X, Y, and Z departments and who would it be good to make friends with. 00:05:36 JACK GAINES Right. They have good influence operations. They know how to map people and their networks and reach. So your book is really large. 00:05:44 JACK GAINES book is really large. 00:05:48 JACK GAINES And I appreciate it. I mean, it's what, 500 pages? 00:05:52 CURTIS FOX I tell you what, my publisher made me take out three appendices and an additional chapter. I actually wrote a chapter. It was a comparative glance on U .S. doctrine to highlight how is the Russian apparatus, the political apparatus, how do they actually create authorizations for these interventions? And then, you know, how do they actually deploy military force? from the available units that they have in SOF. And then I compared that to how we would do it in the United States. So that whole chapter was removed. And then I had separate appendices on the Soviet arsenal that Russia inherited in 1991, including the nuclear ordinance. 00:06:35 JACK GAINES Huge maintenance cost. Oh, my gosh. 00:06:37 CURTIS FOX my gosh. And then I had an appendice on the state procurement programs, GPV 2020 and 2027. And I go through. All the hardware that they've been purchasing over the last 10, 12 years, you know, for Army, Navy, Air Force, Strategic Rocket Forces. 00:06:53 JACK GAINES So are you going to push those into a second book or are you going to make those online dependencies for people who just want to learn more about it? 00:07:01 CURTIS FOX So those are on the website right now. You can actually go read those. And, you know, if you're, I mean, you need to be an Uber nerd to get into them. But if you want to know which electronic warfare systems Moscow is running in Ukraine right now, it's all there. 00:07:15 JACK GAINES Well, if I'm uber lazy, could you send me the link so I can post it on the website? 00:07:19 CURTIS FOX For you, anything. 00:07:20 JACK GAINES I'll put it in the show notes. That way people can check it out. 00:07:23 CURTIS FOX I'd love to pivot from that and talk to you a little bit about some of the units that they actually need to execute these strategies. And the reason it's such a relevant conversation is because a lot of these units have been hollowed out now in the current war, the Russo -Ukrainian War. Oh, 00:07:41 JACK GAINES wow. 00:07:44 CURTIS FOX has taken such extraordinary casualties that it was combat ineffective by the end of last year. 00:07:51 JACK GAINES Is it kind of like that old saying about soft? The best time to train a soft person is 10 years ago? The best time to train a new VZV person is 10 years ago? Is that what they're facing right now? 00:08:03 CURTIS FOX It's a little bit of that. The other issue that they're running into is they just have nobody they can recruit into the ranks. They have an inverted demographic. in their country, and so they just have no healthy young people that can serve as soldiers. So they can go through and round up the homeless, and they can go through the prisons, and they can round those people up. They have a vicious, vicious narcotics crisis in Russia, and they can put people who are addicted to substances in the armed forces, and you can throw those people in as cannon fodder, but they don't perform the soft mission very well. And they certainly don't make good elite light infantry. So they're in a real pickle as far as deploying elite forces go. And you need those elite units to conduct hybrid warfare. So maybe that's a good starting point. 00:08:51 JACK GAINES Are they recruiting other people than the White Caucus people from the steppes so they don't have a race issue that's also blocking it? 00:09:01 CURTIS FOX It's entirely possible if they get desperate enough that, yeah, they'll start channeling them into elite units. I don't really have any direct evidence that they wouldn't have put people from an Asian disposition into, you know, let's say the 10th Spetsnaz Brigade. 00:09:14 JACK GAINES Right. 00:09:15 CURTIS FOX But the big one to watch are the Chechens. The ruling family in Chechnya is allied with Vladimir Putin, and they're very willing to contribute troops. But one of the unspoken realities about that is that the more Chechens are organized into, you know, the Volstok and Zapad battalions and pushed into foreign wars. The fewer Chechens there are at home to cause trouble for Moscow. And there are other ethnicities that start getting uppity. Moscow will absolutely adopt similar tactics. 00:09:46 JACK GAINES Sure. Now, the trick is, though, the surviving Chechens that are battle -hardened to come back to Chechnya, what's the risk that they'll flip the nation back towards independence? 00:09:56 CURTIS FOX It's definitely on Putin's mind. But the goal is, first off, those individuals are loyal to the family and basically rules Chechnya through a puppet governor, let's say. It operates almost as an autonomous vassal state. And so they would first have to fight their own people. And then the second issue is that Moscow has absolutely no qualms about sending a special missions unit down there to round somebody up in their home. I mean, you can go to their Wikipedia page and they're open and honest about saying they still conduct operations in Chechnya all the time. 00:10:35 JACK GAINES Actively hunting people down. Actively hunting people down. 00:10:37 CURTIS FOX people down. And they're on the southern end of Chechnya. And those guys will have no problem going up there and getting them. Okay. 00:10:45 JACK GAINES Okay. So it's dangerous, but it's unlikely. It's less likely right now. Yeah. Unless Russia comes out of this Ukraine conflict so battered that everyone starts seeing the blood in the water. Right. 00:10:57 CURTIS FOX The one thing that could create a real separatist movement in Chechnya is if Kardarov and his cronies decide that they're just going to switch allegiances. Sure. If he decides that Putin is weak or that serving Moscow is no longer in the family interest, that would change everything. 00:11:14 JACK GAINES Okay. So we were talking about the development and evolution of hybrid warfare. 00:11:20 CURTIS FOX Yeah, yeah. We got a little off track. 00:11:24 JACK GAINES That's okay. We'll just play as is. It's fine. 00:11:27 CURTIS FOX Well, and, you know, Chechnya is a good place to start for this because the first and second Chechen wars were so taxing on Russian and international standing and resources and manpower and so embarrassing for Moscow that they realized they needed to come up with another way to do this. They needed a way that would limit their investment, limit their risks, limit their attribution, and let's say stack the deck in their favor so it was more likely that they could slant the outcome to victory. 00:11:57 JACK GAINES And they've had a long term intelligence practice. And so do you think that a lot of their successes in intelligence were just incorporated into a more military style that they just weaponized it a little bit more? to what we want, our desires for Russia. 00:12:29 CURTIS FOX Russia. So let me kind of outline the framework here, I guess, and I think I'll answer your question. Sure. There is a ruling class in Russia of about 200 individuals. Right. Those 200 individuals, they call themselves Slovy. Most of them were educated during the Soviet era. The education system collapsed when the Soviet Union collapsed and it was never rebuilt. And so their talent pool that is constantly getting smaller and dwindling. A lot of these guys are into their mid -70s now. Some of them, like Sergei Lavrov, came from the Foreign Service, but a lot of them are simply KGB men like Putin. 00:13:08 JACK GAINES So these aren't long -term families of Russia? No. They're…
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One CA Podcast
Today, we welcome Rocco Santurri, who wrote "Spoils of the Status Quo," an article that describes the current stalemate in Korea as the best option for the international community. Spoils of the status quo: https://divergentoptions.org/category/writers/rocco-p-santurri-iii/ Other points in the discussion 1-Beginning with the historical and current foundations of KJU’s legitimacy as Supreme Leader, how those could be degraded, and which internal groups could exploit that degradation. Given KJU needs the US “threat” to substantiate his narrative to his domestic audience, how de-escalating tensions through de-escalatory IO works against the KJU regime. 2-Expanding bilateral and trilateral relationships, and/or new relationships with NATO countries or the bloc itself to offset increased Russian influence in the region (more of a Eurasian Theatre-outlook, versus EUCOM and PACOM). 3-The rapidly expanding relationship between RUS/DPRK also presents an opening for the US; DPRK is still heavily dependent on China, especially economically, far more than any other country. China might be receptive to assisting US efforts to remind RUS/DRPK of their standing as lesser powers in the region. 4-The dream of denuclearization might need to die; it is very difficult to imagine a scenario in which KJU would voluntarily agree to any level denuclearization, and even if so, proof of compliance would be problematic. Taking that off the table could advance other foreign policy efforts, many of which it currently inhibits. --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org --- Music by Escape One Best of Japanese Jazz Fusion and Japanese Jazz Funk with Japanese Jazz and Japanese Jazz Music Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z64nA4F_pbQ --- Transcript 00:00:05 Introduction Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail dot com. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes. Today we welcome Roko Santuri, who wrote Spoils of the Status Quo, an article that describes the current stalemate in Korea as the best option for the international community. So let's get started. Jack Gaines So where'd you get the idea of Spoils of the Status Quo? I was thinking about how could I say that there's benefit from a stalemate because you don't really get too much verbiage about that. 00:00:58 ROCCO SANTURRI was thinking about how could I say that there's benefit from a stalemate because you don't really get too much verbiage about that. You always hear spoils of war. We're used in that regard. And I thought, what about spoils of status quo? Because it definitely is providing some rewards to people. For Korea, I was looking at the four options, war, peace, reintegration, a stalemate. Looking at it and putting them all against each other for all the parties, stalemate was the one that actually had some type of significant interest for each party involved. 00:01:25 JACK GAINES Okay. Everyone had what they wanted from it. 00:01:28 ROCCO SANTURRI At least a strong portion of it, not ideal, was usually better than the alternatives. Yeah. 00:01:33 JACK GAINES If the option is a fight or to get along awkwardly, most people will go for the awkward relationship. Absolutely. But people never rate you on able to keep the stability in a region. It's not as heard of, but it does make sense because if you are able to maintain a dam, So the floods don't come down and kill everybody in the town done well. So it's an interesting perspective. Can you tell me a little more about what your thinking was on the article? You mentioned this when we talked previously about Korea. 00:02:09 ROCCO SANTURRI Korea. The idea of stalemate is definitely vastly superior compared to what the alternatives might be. And with the Korean War not being too far in the past and with politicians mentioning that as well, too, it's a thought that. Even though it's not ideal, we don't want to have a redo of what happened with the Korean War. And the previous president for the current one mentioned this specifically, saying that we cannot afford to have another catastrophic war on the peninsula and destroy all that we've built. 00:02:38 JACK GAINES I think Kim Jong -il would use nuclear weapons if he was about to lose his regime. Absolutely. 00:02:44 ROCCO SANTURRI I think that's the consideration of his decision -making calculus. And if KJU comes to that point, what really would prevent him from doing that? And that's what... A lot of people have been trying to get into that thought process and what that might look like. Right. Without question, an extreme threat. And now the advances in weaponry, it's just on the peninsula. 00:03:04 JACK GAINES And the thing is, everyone's worried about Seoul, but he'd probably be just as happy blowing up forces inside his border with a nuclear weapon. The behavior of the regime seems to be fairly callous towards its own people and military. 00:03:21 ROCCO SANTURRI It's tough to argue that the entire country isn't living in a horrible condition for the sake of one family to basically be billionaires. That argument could be made. This is not about the country. It's about the family. So you have a rare instance where a dictatorship is multiple iterations. He has a template going forward, which is good in a way because that did not involve nuclear weapons. But if it's all crashing down, one has to wonder. what his mindset would be like then and what he would be willing to do. And in that case, he might not have much to lose. 00:03:53 JACK GAINES to lose. Could be that that template has other pages that we haven't read or seen. And that is the, what if it all comes down? What do you do? And his father has said, look, if this is what happens, this is who's in place for this reason. And you have him hit that button and you have this person do these things. and we just haven't encountered it because we haven't gotten into those phases of reality. Absolutely. And that's the great unknown, 00:04:20 ROCCO SANTURRI great unknown, and that's something that it's really difficult to determine what that might look like, especially right now with the rhetoric, with the vitriol between the two sides. Sometimes it's difficult to separate between the two, and that might equate to actually some type of significant action. Fortunately, it seems as though it has settled somewhat. It's tit for tat. But it seems like that has sort of fallen into a pattern where it's not escalation. It's sort of a coordinated response, and it's almost expected at this point, particularly when it comes to the balloons, some of the other issues that are going on now as well. 00:04:57 JACK GAINES Right. Shows of belligerence. No one's dying. Once people start dying, that's the peak, and then it all backs down from there. 00:05:05 ROCCO SANTURRI I think so. There have been border issues, and soldiers have been killed, and those resonate still decades later. So I think that's very accurate. I think a lot of what happens right now in terms of balloons, I think a lot of this is for domestic audience consumption, to show that there is no backing down, to show that there is a response. But I don't think it's much beyond that at this point. 00:05:28 JACK GAINES But you do have some thoughts about how his position and how his legitimacy can be degraded. You want to talk a little bit about those? His legitimacy with the domestic audience is extremely important. 00:05:39 ROCCO SANTURRI the domestic audience is extremely important. And in some ways, he is facing threats that have been historic, even with his grandfather and his father. Some of those are similar threats, which include from the elites and from the military. He has purged a lot of the military, and he's, for the most part, seemed to have kept the elites relatively happy. He's a lot more secure in power than he was earlier in his ring. But there are still threats. From the younger demographic, he seems very fearful of South Korean K -pop culture influencing younger generations. And he's responded with very severe penalties against individuals who've listened or viewed bad content, including executions not long ago of two 12 -year -olds. So what he has employed is sort of an imminent threat, enemy at the gate, domestic audience narratives. So he constantly pushes that. the country is under imminent threat, and that this substantiates the difficult existence that most of the DPRK civilians endure. If that threat were to exist, the populist might question why they have to live in a state of deprivation, limited freedoms, why in some ways they couldn't live more like South Koreans, which they have access to some of what is going on here, and they probably would be pretty accurate to ask questions about why they're living the way they are. And that's where his... narrative comes into this populism. 00:07:07 JACK GAINES But also South Korean dramas. Absolutely. I remember where popular people in North Korea seem to be bringing them in to watch TV shows, which I think is great. From a pop culture standpoint, 00:07:19 ROCCO SANTURRI standpoint, it's important and has an effect. It casts South Korea in a very positive light. And this goes against a lot of the propaganda that you have internally against South Korea, against the United States. It's well -optimated even with the war. The history has been rewritten. The DPRK did not invade. The U .S. invaded. This museum's there, what the U .S. did during that war. So any type of ability to sort of swing the info war is definitely something that he sees as a tremendous threat. 00:07:50 JACK GAINES So it's mostly an IO war right now. That and shows of force. Definitely shows of force. 00:07:57 ROCCO SANTURRI force. Obviously, the nuclear program is a high priority, and they've really done everything possible to expand that and remain. completely committed to it. 00:08:06 JACK GAINES Is there any broadcasts of North Koreans that have integrated into South Korea and are just living their lives that are going up to North Korea so people kind of know what's going on? There's a good amount of interviews with defectors and they'll talk a little bit about what their life is like here. 00:08:17 ROCCO SANTURRI interviews with defectors and they'll talk a little bit about what their life is like here. They'll talk a lot about what their life in the DPRK and show the tremendous contrast between the two. 00:08:27 JACK GAINES So that is promoted to a certain degree. Well, there's one thing. If you've got a person... in an interview, you've got them sat down and they're just talking about their lives. It could look scripted. Sure. But if you're doing a day in a life where they've got a funky hat on and some whatever clothes and they're going down to the tables with all the baked goods, buy a little snack and they're a little coffee and they're walking over to their job, something like that where it's not that they have a convenient moment, but it's just they're hustling to go work and have a life. A day in the life type of coverage, I think, would be really effective because it shows that But there's people who have left North Korea. They have a life. You know, here's our apartment. It's a mess. But it's probably a lot better than what they had there. And just show that. Matter of fact, actually, wasn't there just recently a movie about a South Korean girl family who crashed in North Korea and they helped her get back? And so it's kind of sparked a romance between a North Korean elite and her. And you remember that? I've seen a lot of different movies and some YouTube series as well, 00:09:30 ROCCO SANTURRI lot of different movies and some YouTube series as well, too, and it sort of vacillates between the two. It vacillates between what you're saying, where it shows a very positive spin and it really promotes cooperation. Others will talk some about the defectors, and it actually is a little more realistic in that it shows that they are benefiting from being in South Korea, but they also expand a little bit upon some of the challenges culturally coming into a society and how there's growing division between the two. even in terms of language and somewhat with culture. So there's a lot out there that will try to sway opinion one way or the other. But I think it's encouraging that it's still going both ways. It's not all negatives. There is some positive aspects as well. 00:10:11 JACK GAINES The last time I was at an exercise in Seoul, we were having a conversation about options that weren't explored. And I recommended that they just offer to KGU to make him emperor. Give him... $100 billion to become the emperor of all of Korea. He has no judicial powers. He has no powers at all, except for as a title. But he gets to be a hundred billionaire and all of Korea will be under his rule as emperor, but the most he can do is a parade. 00:10:42 ROCCO SANTURRI He definitely does seem to like his parades and ceremonies. That's for sure. There's no shortage of those. 00:10:48 JACK GAINES Everyone's happy. The family's wealthy. They're emperors, emperors of all of Korea. They won. in that aspect. And then South Korea, North Korea can then become one unified state. So you make sure he gets all the shit he wants, but the government is run by basically South Korea. 00:11:06 ROCCO SANTURRI And…
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One CA Podcast
Welcome. Today, we bring Dr. Stanislava Mladenova to discuss the NATO CIMIC Foresight Conference. Book: Rambo Meets the Red Cross. Found at: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538187722/When-Rambo-Meets-the-Red-Cross-Civil-Military-Engagement-in-Fragile-States --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org --- Special thanks to Ambience Lord for the sample of OKTOBERFEST Music Retrieved from: https://youtu.be/Kb_lr32vcrk?si=_V4vM_4BBv2zNxY2 --- Transcript 00:00:01 Introduction Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail dot com. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes. Today we welcome Dr. Stanislava Mildanova, author of When Rambo Meets the Red Cross. We met at the NATO Strategic Foresight Conference in The Hague this October. In this session, we reflect on our experiences at the conference and discuss some ideas for the future of civil -military relations. So let's get started. 00:00:56 STANISLAVA MLADENOVA We tend to very constantly think about civil as a human -to -human function on the ground or, you know, potentially function of the Navy when it pulls into port. And whenever I try to explain this to a civilian and what it means, I have to kind of think logistically through every function that the military could perform, which is any function potentially. And whether they join well, whether a domain joins well with another domain, or whether that domain needs to be able to understand what is in the civilian environment that it needs to better integrate with, that's where I think things can get a bit wonky, as you said. Sure. Yeah, I think at the moment, business is booming in Europe, for obvious reasons. 00:01:42 JACK GAINES Very true. What did you think of the conference? It started off with... some panels, and then we went into some work groups, and then another panel, and then we had some social hours in between. Yeah, 00:01:56 STANISLAVA MLADENOVA I think I found that exactly as I expected to, which is trying to really be creative around the conversation of what the future means. Of course, I was with one of the groups where we looked at how the world could be in 2045 from a cognitive superiority standpoint. You know, ask a soldier to be a social scientist or ask a soldier to be an environmentalist or a techie. And that is by definition something very difficult to do. I mean, ask a civilian person to be a military person, right? And that's kind of the whole idea of putting yourself in the other's shoes. And it really gets at the heart of Sid Milne. So I think that within the constraints of how... creative and innovative, we can be within the three days. But also understanding that the military by default has this culture of, you know, creativity is not the place, right? You execute, you're kind of given orders and you just go about them. I think that I've gone to several of these conferences now with them. And I think that every time it just kicks the can a bit further down the road. And that's good. I don't think we can be too aggressive or innovative or get outside of our comfort zone, certainly whenever you're talking about the military and whenever you're talking about bureaucracies. 00:03:18 JACK GAINES Right. The listeners should know, and that's that they did a 20 -year projection into the future. And most of the, I would say their military forecasters, projected pretty dour futures. Less freedoms, a lot more conflict, a lot more environmental challenges. Not a lot of peace, love and happiness in the future with those guys. I have to challenge it because I don't fully disagree, but I don't fully agree as well. I think there had some logic gaps because military forecasters, they look at risk and what future risk looks like. 00:03:54 JACK GAINES look at risk and what future risk looks like. So if you're going to look at a military forecast, it's going to look like risk problems because that's what they're looking at. If you look at some of the other forecasters that are not risk -focused, you'll see there's some really positive things coming up as well. I just didn't think it was as balanced as it should have been. 00:04:15 STANISLAVA MLADENOVA Well, this is where I think trying to get a bit more in their community is very important. So let me give you a bit of the perspective of a development person. Let's say you're a development person that's working on climate. 00:04:22 JACK GAINES let me give 00:04:22 STANISLAVA MLADENOVA a bit of the perspective of a development person. Let's say you're a development person that's working on climate. And we talk about all kinds of things get thrown around. on the climate, the seas are rising and everything's getting hot and you're going to have conflict and so on. And that's correct. And at the same time, when you're throwing the resilience conversation, it'll probably be a whole other podcast series. But essentially, you do have a lot of innovative strategies on how to leverage. the opportunity that presents itself. So are you looking at new types of horticulture? Are you looking at more exploratory ways to allow for livelihoods? Are you necessarily looking at, the assumption is always like, oh, people are going to move away from very hot areas where they can't grow food and go somewhere else and go on a huge influx. But we don't actually know that it's very hard for humans to just pick up and go elsewhere. likely they're going to try to adapt. And adaptation is part of being resilient. You don't have the shock absorbency to deal with something. So you need to come up with new ways to react to your current environment. And I think that there's also an assumption somehow that conflict will also cause people to leave. And that's also not necessarily a straightforward answer because people may be more willing to live in a place with terrible land. And more Cossack simply because they can provide for their livelihood and they don't want to leave their land and their families. So I think the more we can open up the aperture to think adaptation as opposed to shock, we're probably dealing with a more realistic scenario. And there are people outside of the military profession. Think about this. And their DNA is all about long term. How do you grow? In 30 years, how do you provide livelihoods? How do you lift people out of poverty by the end of the decade, by the end of the century? 00:06:25 JACK GAINES Right. Matter of fact, I got to bring Gus Ferreira and Jamie Critelli back on because they are long -term economic agriculturalists. Another thing that struck me about the conference was the work groups. Did you attend any of the work groups or did you just present? 00:06:42 STANISLAVA MLADENOVA I actually facilitated one of the work groups. Really fascinating. You go and you facilitate, but you're also learning. And our groups were really very well mixed. We had someone from the police that from you, Paul, and we had also a couple of colleagues from the NGO communities. But again, I found that I think our difficulty was trying to really look to the future. We thought about the future in the construct of what we know about the presence. 00:07:14 JACK GAINES Which is how most people project the future is what we know now and just kind of extend it out and see how things have changed. 00:07:21 STANISLAVA MLADENOVA Exactly. It's really hard to know, right? So we were kind of thinking like, well, what will NATO look like? And as some of us, is there a guarantee that there will be a NATO or there will be an EU? Which actually, if I can take us back to your question, I think it ties very neatly into really not underestimating how difficult multilateralism actually is. 00:07:44 JACK GAINES Oh, yeah. 00:07:45 STANISLAVA MLADENOVA It's very hard politically, extremely hard operationally. And we now have 32 nations. I was with NATO, young staffer, when it was only 28, I believe. No, it was actually 26 when I joined. And it was a really interesting, up -and -close experience to see what it means to get everyone to agree and then to operationalize what a guidance means. Try to get 32 different countries whose military do things different ways. Yes, to join NATO, you need to be part of the force structure. There's a common denominator under which everyone needs to be able to operate. But these are still sovereign nations and sovereign militaries and culturally, mechanically, organizationally, technically, budgetarily, whichever way you want to spin it. There's very much a difference. So you will appreciate this. There's always kind of a bit of, you know, CA and SF and, you know, CA and something else. Well, take a small country's military where the soldier has to be all things, where there is no separation between the lethal and the diplomatic in development. And then you're just dealing with a very different mindset and a ballgame in terms of what and who you can deploy. 00:09:05 JACK GAINES True. That reminds me of Switzerland. Even though they're not a NATO member, they're soldiers. They have to do everything. They have to know how to do disaster response. They have to know how to do offensive operations. And they have to have technical skills. It's a lot, but be diverse and be successful at it. And that's another part of it is Europe having so many wealthy countries that have good education and training. Get really quality people. I mean, and to be soldiers, the Simic teams that I met. Those people were brilliant, really capable. So it was impressive to talk with them and to work with them on different subjects. One thing that caught me, though, it seemed like a lot of people were hung up on Article 4 and 5. And they didn't really want to talk anything pre -Article 4 or 5, any kind of lead -ups, any kind of what I call zero -based planning, because that's not where the business is. They were like... Once the rockets hit and we go to Article 4 or 5, that's when we do our job. And so I found a challenge there, and it's one that I pitched at NATO, and that is to start a working group to discuss CIMIC in competition. Domestic CIMIC, where you're doing crisis response in a nation, even if it's your nation or if you're going over to a nation to support them, as well as... expeditionary civic, where you're deployed overseas or in a hostile zone, what kind of efforts can you do before the fight begins? 00:10:44 STANISLAVA MLADENOVA I think you've hit the nail on the head. Everyone says, oh, we need to be talking to each other before the crisis happens, so before Article 5. We say this, and yet it's very, very... deliberate, thoughtful, long -term, and kind of taxing to think about a worst -case scenario and essentially be able to think through every possible outcome. This is why I really enjoyed the work and the exercise that we had. As you know, I've been focusing a lot on this work and trying to mobilize the conversation as well in Washington for quite some time around research around the book. What actually very pleasantly surprised me from the conference is that signal is booming in Europe. The conversation is there, I think, for obvious reasons because of what's happening in the East. But again, it's booming because there's literally a crisis and there are boots on the ground. And I always wonder why we've not had the same type of energy and urgency. here in the US. And of course, we have it. We have it in the context of great power competition. Here it's China. In Europe, it's Russia. So you really have to bow to the moment and what people are talking about and thinking about. But it's exactly as you said, we need to be having these conversations in advance. And it's got so much other stuff to deal with. Bigger fish to fry. We'll feed people their signal vegetables when the moment comes. And I think this conversation around fragility This conversation about donor funding now increasingly going to fragile states. If we can focus on prevention, we can certainly focus the conversation more deliberately to start getting these signs to speak each other's love language. If we need to have the conversation around capacity and absorbency on the health or education side, we certainly can have the same conversation on the security side. The security relationship oftentimes is a political relationship. It's not necessarily focused around the fascism. But if you take up a multilateral organization such as the World Bank, they're now starting to operate in programming spaces that were completely off limits just 15, 20 years ago. So we have an impetus and we have plenty of terrain to see how some of this works by deliberately coming to the team. 00:13:21 JACK GAINES When people are talking about crisis, they mostly are focusing on Ukraine. The one thing that I brought up was that Georgia is just as much a crisis as Ukraine because government is being toppled. It's just not with war. It's by political subversion. And that's where SIMIC can help a country if they were involved with Georgia in working with civil security, spotting risk, coordinating better responses so that they could work with the military on countering things like cyber incursions. or financial encouragements, while then showing the public that the military is there as part of the full -of -nation policy, it would have slowed down or even reversed the Russian attempts to subvert that government and bring in a bunch of politicians that are now rewriting all the laws in Georgia, a pro -Russian stance. And that's my challenge, is that if we lose in competition, there's not going to be a war. There won't be a need for a war. Everyone's equipment's going to be obsolete, because The gove…
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One CA Podcast
1 202: Andrew Gonzalez on Marine Civil Affairs in the Pacific (Part II) 24:07
24:07 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked24:07
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedWelcome to One CA Podcast. Today, Brian Hancock talks with Master Sergeant Andrew Gonzalez about how the Marine Corps modernization is shifting Civil Affairs' roles and duties in the force and how those changes impact their work in the Pacific. MSgt Andrew Gonzalez joined the USMC-CA community in October 2015 as an E7. CA activations of note include OCT 2017 CJTF-OIR, clear and hold Mosul after displacing ISIS, DEC 2021 in support of Operation Allies Welcome operating out of Fort Pickett, VA, a rare opportunity to support a Defense Support of Civil Authorities mission. MSgt Gonzalez was most recently activated in support of JTF-Red Hill, the safe and expedient refueling of the underground fuel storage facility on the island of Oahu. Allowed to meet with the Waianae Kupuna Council to discuss the transition from JTF-Red Hill leadership and mission to the Red Hill – Navy Closure Task Force. MSgt Gonzalez has supported 1st Civil Affairs Group for nearly 10 years and continues to drive USA-USMC CA collaborative efforts, civil information management best practice, and USMC - Civil Military Operations training standards in direct response to OSD/INDOPACOM/MARFORPAC/IMEF demand for CA and Civic Action Team support. --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org --- Special Thanks to "Cool Jazz Hot Bossa" for the sample of Energy Jazz Music Playlist - Jazz Instrumental Upbeat - High Energy Jazz Music Mix. Retrieved from: https://youtu.be/bdWUj2NYDYQ?si=_bLf2fdTw6Ba93oh --- Transcript 00:00:04 Introduction Welcome to the 1CA podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes. 00:00:40 BRIAN HANCOCK Welcome to One Civil Affairs Podcast. I'm Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hancock and I will be your host for this session. Today we have with us Master Sergeant Andrew Gonzalez to discuss United States Marine Corps Civil Affairs, Civil Information Management, and civil harm mitigation and response. Master Sergeant Andrew Gonzalez joined the United States Marine Corps Civil Affairs community in October 2015 as an E -7. Civil Affairs activations of note include Combined Joint Task Force, Operation Inherent Resolve, Clear and Hold Mosul after displacing ISIS, Support of Operation Allies Welcome operating out of Fort Pickett, Virginia, which was a rare opportunity to support a defense support to civil authorities mission. Master Sergeant Gonzalez has supported First Civil Affairs Group for nearly 10 years in direct response to the Secretary of Defense, INDO -PACOM, MARFOR -PAC, and IMEF. Boy, that's a lot of acronyms. Top, welcome to the show. Great to link up, Ryan. It's been a while. Far, far too long. The last time we worked together, we were lamenting the state of civil information management in both the Marine Corps and the Army because we saw the potential there to help us achieve strategic objectives that are often tied to the civil population. 00:02:03 ANDREW GONZALEZ Yeah, I can only speak for the Marine Corps. And then, you know, because you were with McTog at the time and then you had a leg inside, I think it was 351st KCOM. So that's what always made the conversation interesting. So you could just step into both worlds and say, this is what I'm learning on the USA, CA side. Conversely, this is what McTog is doing it. And really what it came down to was the commander's perspective. 00:02:25 BRIAN HANCOCK Absolutely. I am very grateful to the Marine Corps for the opportunity to learn, you know, both from professionals such as yourself, as well as from some of your schools, like the Civil Military Operations Planners course back in Quantica. Amazingly good. I'm really excited to have you here today because you're going to give us a much -needed additional perspective and thought on some of these challenges that we're wrestling with, frankly, all over the world. 00:02:55 ANDREW GONZALEZ You and I had first connected, and all throughout that time, numbers are shrinking, toker shrinking, and we're like, where's value? And that came into our initial dialogues with civil information management, thinking that, hey, we could probably get some traction with this, but ultimately, it took several years, but then... I call it the great IF Sauron, right? The DOD looked west and said, hey, Indo -PACOM, this is the simple problem. But I just felt like when it came to developing relationships with the host nation, that's a given. We're going to be placed inside the host nation. But what's the commander's perception? And that's where I want to kind of pick up the conversation due to the fact that that has changed. And now it's coming down to IMF landing general saying, what I witnessed in Vallarta 1024. With respect to the civil affairs engagement in theater, I want more of it. I want more cowbell. And that's what we're going to deliver it in Balakatan 25. With the planning that's going on right now after the initial planning conference that I just got back from, I asked for it. And without hesitation, the Armed Forces of the Philippines, G7, responded with, we are going to give you civil affairs teams. So it's just a much more open, much more inclusive, much more inviting environment when it comes to the civil picture. 00:04:08 BRIAN HANCOCK That's fantastic. In 351, a number of years ago, I was involved in Balakatan. And previously, when I was in the SIOP demand, now military information support and operations, we participated there. And it was not easy, and it was not friendly, and it was not open like that. And it was really just an opportunity to send some of our service members who spoke to Gallic to go on over there. There was some increase in capability of the Philippine Defense Force, but they were still very much struggling against Abu Sayyaf and MNLC and these other terrorist organizations that were operating at the Holo Archipelago. It was just a really rough time. So it's fantastic to hear that years later, fast forward now, and we have a much stronger relationship, a much more effective relationship, a stronger partnership. We're talking about reopening some of our military bases there. We've lost some of those bases years ago, which allows China certainly to say, OK, if you only got one major port where you can do roll on, roll off operations, boy, we know where to set up our ISR and target. Right. So the strength of that relationship and the work that you're doing out there, I think, is really important. I'm glad to hear how it's progressed. 00:05:19 ANDREW GONZALEZ I have a couple of relationships with 351st KCOM 3Shot. So maybe sometime after the podcast, we'll reconnect and talk through. Some of the collaboration, because it's been a while since I've talked with them. But during the initial planning conference, I reached into USRPAC to say, hey, we would really, really appreciate some USACA flavor. And the response was, what do we need to do? I said, can you put me in touch with 350 first? And it happened that day. 00:05:46 BRIAN HANCOCK While you reconnect there, make sure our 38 golf program with all of those PhD level experts and everything from medicine to engineering, that is really taking off. 38 golf, got it. Yes, that MOS within the functioning specialty team constructs that we have in the Army is delivering incredible value. For instance, in our region, they recently did the NATO 7 resiliency studies of other areas, which is things we should be working in competition, and food resiliency within Medova and other areas. These things are such quality, they're being published in Military Review. And right now, the iron is hot because they're still trying to figure out... How do you utilize those 38 golfs and functional specialty teams? So make sure as we partner with you in the ground combat element in the core that we're fully utilizing some of those capabilities I think would add a lot of value to those of you who are doing planning on the Mew and doing assessments. 00:06:43 ANDREW GONZALEZ Yeah, it's very easy to say things like 1CA, okay? It's the people. It's individuals that see and understand that given the tyranny of distance, there's lots of things, right? Like expeditionary. advanced -based operations. And just that there's no possible way that one service couldn't cover all that distance and cover down on all of those requirements. So the bottom line is we have so much to learn from one another. And I am definitely going to discuss that with 351st S3 Shop for sure. 00:07:11 BRIAN HANCOCK Fantastic. I really encouraged to hear that. And I know 351st will receive that well. Many of our listeners happen to be Army just because there's a little bit more civil affairs in the Army. The Marine Corps is a little bit smaller force. Let's level the table a little bit, help them understand some of the Marine Corps civil affairs structure. For instance, in the Army civil affairs, this is a non -accession branch, certainly for officers it is. But here's the thing, both officers and NCOs, once they get the MOS, can spend their entire careers in civil affairs. And the way the pyramid is built out, there's plenty of room and plenty of slots for promotion. So it's very realistic that you can be awarded. a 38 MOS in the Army, and then that's it. That's what you'll be doing for the next 15 plus years or however long you go until you choose to retire. Now, I understand the Marine Corps, it's not like that. Can you elaborate a little bit on how that process is for Marines? 00:08:11 ANDREW GONZALEZ Yeah, you're 100 % right with respect to officers. Once you get to E -8 and E -9 in the Marine Corps, you suddenly start to see how difficult it is for the O -4 and above. to get to kernel. And it is incredibly competitive. So what's also happening is the 17XX migration. But that came out of not just consolidating MISO and Comstrat and SIOP and civil affairs all under one MOS branch. And some space operations in there too, I recall. It's what's required, right? In order for us to work through any kind of distributed operations, we're going to have to rely on space substantially. Yes. But these changes are happening at the headquarters Marine Corps level where 17XX will now give officers a career path. Nice. In 17XX. And this is where you and I were having conversations about what does that mean for Reserve CA? Are we going to be completely replaced, supplanted, marginalized? 00:09:10 BRIAN HANCOCK Right. 00:09:10 ANDREW GONZALEZ And in the end. From 21 to 24, we learned that even though our schoolhouse got completely consumed with consolidating the MISO, the PSYOP, the Comstrat, the CA schools, all in one building, to teaching the entire 17XX curriculum. 00:09:25 BRIAN HANCOCK In fairness, the Marine Corps has done some massive changes, at least relative to, say, the Army, which turns a little bit slower. Look at their entire divestiture of tanks under Commandant Berger. And the standing up of these Marine littoral regiments. uh brand new formations the very new equipment that they're looking at that's tied into very specific missions the marine corps is innovating across stop gulf pp very quickly it's impressive to see i popped into third mlr in oahu when i was there from october to april 2024 and asked them about civil affairs 00:09:57 ANDREW GONZALEZ popped into third mlr in oahu when i was there from october to april 2024 and asked them about civil affairs And their concept of civil affairs employment wasn't so much about understanding the civil population. It was really just understanding that they're there. We're going to take this into consideration. But there was no real collaboration, if you will. But what they did was, as they reached out to requisition CA specifically, because they recognized that there was a little bit of a delta there. And they wanted to make sure that civil affairs had a seat at the planning table when it came to MLR and specifically overall combat team operations. 00:10:36 BRIAN HANCOCK Good. 00:10:36 ANDREW GONZALEZ It's a part of their training tasks. And that's the commander's perspective that I keep coming back to. If the commander sees value, if the commander sees a necessity, then it will happen. Marine Corps, Army, Navy doesn't make any difference. 00:10:48 BRIAN HANCOCK make any difference. So when you're referring to Marine Corps, civil affairs, I understand why we would say Navy, civil affairs. But the Navy itself organically had its own. civil affairs program. We'll talk about that later. They disbanded it. So I just want to make sure that the audience understands that when you're saying Navy civil affairs, you're still referring to United States Marine Corps civil affairs. 00:11:09 ANDREW GONZALEZ Yeah, but let's drill down on just one specific point. When it came down to BK -25, we reached out to the Naval Expeditionary Combat Command. And this is kind of analogous to your 38Gs in the USA. It's a very specific maritime focus for that commander. that says hey before i go into this littoral region with ships etc i'm not i need a really good evaluation of what's the host nation look like are they amenable and open to us being in the area yeah and then drilling down on that so we asked because they were clamoring to get involved in bk24 and immediately they responded with one of their maritime ca units great and then ideally we're going to do that in bk25 as well so i'm just trying to bring in the one ca mindset I really have to say it's not just lip service. Speaking about BK -25, Armed Forces of the Philippine CA is going to lend six teams. I see no reason why 351st CA leadership isn't going to lend at le…
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One CA Podcast
1 201: Andrew Gonzalez on Marine Civil Affairs in the Pacific (Part I) 21:44
21:44 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked21:44
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedWelcome to One CA Podcast. Today, Brian Hancock talks with Master Sergeant Andrew Gonzalez about how the Marine Corps' modernization is shifting Civil Affairs' roles and duties in the force and how those changes impact their work in the Pacific. MSgt Andrew Gonzalez joined the USMC-CA community in October 2015 as an E7. CA activations of note include OCT 2017 CJTF-OIR, clear and hold Mosul after displacing ISIS, DEC 2021 in support of Operation Allies Welcome operating out of Fort Pickett, VA, a rare opportunity to support a Defense Support of Civil Authorities mission. MSgt Gonzalez was most recently activated in support of JTF-Red Hill, the safe and expedient refueling of the underground fuel storage facility on the island of Oahu. Allowed to meet with the Waianae Kupuna Council to discuss the transition from JTF-Red Hill leadership and mission to the Red Hill – Navy Closure Task Force. MSgt Gonzalez has supported 1st Civil Affairs Group for nearly 10 years and continues to drive USA-USMC CA collaborative efforts, civil information management best practice, and USMC - Civil Military Operations training standards in direct response to OSD/INDOPACOM/MARFORPAC/IMEF demand for CA and Civic Action Team support. --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org --- Special Thanks to "Cool Jazz Hot Bossa" for the sample of Energy Jazz Music Playlist - Jazz Instrumental Upbeat - High Energy Jazz Music Mix. Retrieved from: https://youtu.be/bdWUj2NYDYQ?si=_bLf2fdTw6Ba93oh --- Transcript 00:00:04 Introduction Welcome to the 1CA podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes. 00:00:40 BRIAN HANCOCK Welcome to One Civil Affairs Podcast. I'm Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hancock and I will be your host for this session. Today we have with us Master Sergeant Andrew Gonzalez to discuss United States Marine Corps Civil Affairs, Civil Information Management, and civil harm mitigation and response. Master Sergeant Andrew Gonzalez joined the United States Marine Corps Civil Affairs community in October 2015 as an E -7. Civil Affairs activations of note include Combined Joint Task Force, Operation Inherent Resolve, Clear and Hold Mosul after displacing ISIS, Support of Operation Allies Welcome operating out of Fort Pickett, Virginia, which was a rare opportunity to support a defense support to civil authorities mission. Master Sergeant Gonzalez has supported First Civil Affairs Group for nearly 10 years in direct response to the Secretary of Defense, INDO -PACOM, MARFOR -PAC, and IMEF. Boy, that's a lot of acronyms. Top, welcome to the show. Great to link up, Ryan. It's been a while. Far, far too long. The last time we worked together, we were lamenting the state of civil information management in both the Marine Corps and the Army because we saw the potential there to help us achieve strategic objectives that are often tied to the civil population. 00:02:03 ANDREW GONZALEZ Yeah, I can only speak for the Marine Corps. And then, you know, because you were with McTog at the time and then you had a leg inside, I think it was 351st KCOM. So that's what always made the conversation interesting. So you could just step into both worlds and say, this is what I'm learning on the USA, CA side. Conversely, this is what McTog is doing it. And really what it came down to was the commander's perspective. 00:02:25 BRIAN HANCOCK Absolutely. I am very grateful to the Marine Corps for the opportunity to learn, you know, both from professionals such as yourself, as well as from some of your schools, like the Civil Military Operations Planners course back in Quantica. Amazingly good. I'm really excited to have you here today because you're going to give us a much -needed additional perspective and thought on some of these challenges that we're wrestling with, frankly, all over the world. 00:02:55 ANDREW GONZALEZ You and I had first connected, and all throughout that time, numbers are shrinking, toker shrinking, and we're like, where's value? And that came into our initial dialogues with civil information management, thinking that, hey, we could probably get some traction with this, but ultimately, it took several years, but then... I call it the great IF Sauron, right? The DOD looked west and said, hey, Indo -PACOM, this is the simple problem. But I just felt like when it came to developing relationships with the host nation, that's a given. We're going to be placed inside the host nation. But what's the commander's perception? And that's where I want to kind of pick up the conversation due to the fact that that has changed. And now it's coming down to IMF landing general saying, what I witnessed in Vallarta 1024. With respect to the civil affairs engagement in theater, I want more of it. I want more cowbell. And that's what we're going to deliver it in Balakatan 25. With the planning that's going on right now after the initial planning conference that I just got back from, I asked for it. And without hesitation, the Armed Forces of the Philippines, G7, responded with, we are going to give you civil affairs teams. So it's just a much more open, much more inclusive, much more inviting environment when it comes to the civil picture. 00:04:08 BRIAN HANCOCK That's fantastic. In 351, a number of years ago, I was involved in Balakatan. And previously, when I was in the SIOP demand, now military information support and operations, we participated there. And it was not easy, and it was not friendly, and it was not open like that. And it was really just an opportunity to send some of our service members who spoke to Gallic to go on over there. There was some increase in capability of the Philippine Defense Force, but they were still very much struggling against Abu Sayyaf and MNLC and these other terrorist organizations that were operating at the Holo Archipelago. It was just a really rough time. So it's fantastic to hear that years later, fast forward now, and we have a much stronger relationship, a much more effective relationship, a stronger partnership. We're talking about reopening some of our military bases there. We've lost some of those bases years ago, which allows China certainly to say, OK, if you only got one major port where you can do roll on, roll off operations, boy, we know where to set up our ISR and target. Right. So the strength of that relationship and the work that you're doing out there, I think, is really important. I'm glad to hear how it's progressed. 00:05:19 ANDREW GONZALEZ I have a couple of relationships with 351st KCOM 3Shot. So maybe sometime after the podcast, we'll reconnect and talk through. Some of the collaboration, because it's been a while since I've talked with them. But during the initial planning conference, I reached into USRPAC to say, hey, we would really, really appreciate some USACA flavor. And the response was, what do we need to do? I said, can you put me in touch with 350 first? And it happened that day. 00:05:46 BRIAN HANCOCK While you reconnect there, make sure our 38 golf program with all of those PhD level experts and everything from medicine to engineering, that is really taking off. 38 golf, got it. Yes, that MOS within the functioning specialty team constructs that we have in the Army is delivering incredible value. For instance, in our region, they recently did the NATO 7 resiliency studies of other areas, which is things we should be working in competition, and food resiliency within Medova and other areas. These things are such quality, they're being published in Military Review. And right now, the iron is hot because they're still trying to figure out... How do you utilize those 38 golfs and functional specialty teams? So make sure as we partner with you in the ground combat element in the core that we're fully utilizing some of those capabilities I think would add a lot of value to those of you who are doing planning on the Mew and doing assessments. 00:06:43 ANDREW GONZALEZ Yeah, it's very easy to say things like 1CA, okay? It's the people. It's individuals that see and understand that given the tyranny of distance, there's lots of things, right? Like expeditionary. advanced -based operations. And just that there's no possible way that one service couldn't cover all that distance and cover down on all of those requirements. So the bottom line is we have so much to learn from one another. And I am definitely going to discuss that with 351st S3 Shop for sure. 00:07:11 BRIAN HANCOCK Fantastic. I really encouraged to hear that. And I know 351st will receive that well. Many of our listeners happen to be Army just because there's a little bit more civil affairs in the Army. The Marine Corps is a little bit smaller force. Let's level the table a little bit, help them understand some of the Marine Corps civil affairs structure. For instance, in the Army civil affairs, this is a non -accession branch, certainly for officers it is. But here's the thing, both officers and NCOs, once they get the MOS, can spend their entire careers in civil affairs. And the way the pyramid is built out, there's plenty of room and plenty of slots for promotion. So it's very realistic that you can be awarded. a 38 MOS in the Army, and then that's it. That's what you'll be doing for the next 15 plus years or however long you go until you choose to retire. Now, I understand the Marine Corps, it's not like that. Can you elaborate a little bit on how that process is for Marines? 00:08:11 ANDREW GONZALEZ Yeah, you're 100 % right with respect to officers. Once you get to E -8 and E -9 in the Marine Corps, you suddenly start to see how difficult it is for the O -4 and above. to get to kernel. And it is incredibly competitive. So what's also happening is the 17XX migration. But that came out of not just consolidating MISO and Comstrat and SIOP and civil affairs all under one MOS branch. And some space operations in there too, I recall. It's what's required, right? In order for us to work through any kind of distributed operations, we're going to have to rely on space substantially. Yes. But these changes are happening at the headquarters Marine Corps level where 17XX will now give officers a career path. Nice. In 17XX. And this is where you and I were having conversations about what does that mean for Reserve CA? Are we going to be completely replaced, supplanted, marginalized? 00:09:10 BRIAN HANCOCK Right. 00:09:10 ANDREW GONZALEZ And in the end. From 21 to 24, we learned that even though our schoolhouse got completely consumed with consolidating the MISO, the PSYOP, the Comstrat, the CA schools, all in one building, to teaching the entire 17XX curriculum. 00:09:25 BRIAN HANCOCK In fairness, the Marine Corps has done some massive changes, at least relative to, say, the Army, which turns a little bit slower. Look at their entire divestiture of tanks under Commandant Berger. And the standing up of these Marine littoral regiments. uh brand new formations the very new equipment that they're looking at that's tied into very specific missions the marine corps is innovating across stop gulf pp very quickly it's impressive to see i popped into third mlr in oahu when i was there from october to april 2024 and asked them about civil affairs 00:09:57 ANDREW GONZALEZ popped into third mlr in oahu when i was there from october to april 2024 and asked them about civil affairs And their concept of civil affairs employment wasn't so much about understanding the civil population. It was really just understanding that they're there. We're going to take this into consideration. But there was no real collaboration, if you will. But what they did was, as they reached out to requisition CA specifically, because they recognized that there was a little bit of a delta there. And they wanted to make sure that civil affairs had a seat at the planning table when it came to MLR and specifically overall combat team operations. 00:10:36 BRIAN HANCOCK Good. 00:10:36 ANDREW GONZALEZ It's a part of their training tasks. And that's the commander's perspective that I keep coming back to. If the commander sees value, if the commander sees a necessity, then it will happen. Marine Corps, Army, Navy doesn't make any difference. 00:10:48 BRIAN HANCOCK make any difference. So when you're referring to Marine Corps, civil affairs, I understand why we would say Navy, civil affairs. But the Navy itself organically had its own. civil affairs program. We'll talk about that later. They disbanded it. So I just want to make sure that the audience understands that when you're saying Navy civil affairs, you're still referring to United States Marine Corps civil affairs. 00:11:09 ANDREW GONZALEZ Yeah, but let's drill down on just one specific point. When it came down to BK -25, we reached out to the Naval Expeditionary Combat Command. And this is kind of analogous to your 38Gs in the USA. It's a very specific maritime focus for that commander. that says hey before i go into this littoral region with ships etc i'm not i need a really good evaluation of what's the host nation look like are they amenable and open to us being in the area yeah and then drilling down on that so we asked because they were clamoring to get involved in bk24 and immediately they responded with one of their maritime ca units great and then ideally we're going to do that in bk25 as well so i'm just trying to bring in the one ca mindset I really have to say it's not just lip service. Speaking about BK -25, Armed Forces of the Philippine CA is going to lend six teams. I see no reason why 351st CA leadership isn't going to lend at l…
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One CA Podcast
1 200: Jörg Grössl on the NATO Civil-Military Cooperation Centre of Excellence 32:37
32:37 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked32:37
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedWelcome to the One CA Podcast. Today, Commander Jörg Grössl from the NATO Civil-Military Cooperation Centre of Excellence will discuss the center’s contribution to the maritime domain. From research, I found that 80 percent of the world’s population lives near a coast, and 90 percent of world’s trade is carried by ships. So, we are bringing in Commander Grössl to discuss the CIMIC role in the maritime environment and cooperation with Government and Non-Governmental Organizations to build awareness and mitigate the potential impact of military operations at sea or in the littoral regions. --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org Music Afternoon Lounge Jazz - Relaxing Jazz Music for Work & Study https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRyJe-0Uie0 --- Transcript 00:00:01 Introduction Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail dot com. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes. Today we have Commander George Grossel from the NATO Civil -Military Cooperation Center of Excellence, who will discuss the center's contribution to the maritime domain. 00:00:46 JACK GAINES From research, I found that 80 % of the world's population lives near a seacoast, and 90 % of the world's trade is carried by ships. So it makes sense that we would have a maritime simic type of operation. So Commander Grossel, welcome to the show. 00:01:02 JÖRG GRÖSSL Yeah, thank you. And to add some figures to what you said, we had in 2024, the crisis and the Red Sea, in addition to the Panama Canal drought and the Baltimore Bridge incident, a reduction of container traffic of 80%. We had... 3 ,400 ships in the Suez Canal less than the year before. So that is what we are talking about. It's how the CIMIC can support that and what does that mean for us as a society. That must be a pretty good size impact on the global economy to have that much slowdown in shipping. 00:01:32 JACK GAINES must be a pretty good size impact on the global economy to have that much slowdown in shipping. 00:01:38 JÖRG GRÖSSL Yeah, true. And approximately 500 ,000 containers waiting in Singapore to be transported because of all those interruptions in sea traffic are causing a delay. 00:01:49 JACK GAINES Right, because the production doesn't stop just because the sea lanes have slowed down from shipping. 00:01:54 JÖRG GRÖSSL Yeah, true. 00:01:55 JACK GAINES I remember back at the end of COVID how the Port of Los Angeles had 100, 200 ships in harbor waiting, lined up for unloading, and it was just an enormous mess until everyone finally was able to get back to work and catch up with that delay. Yeah, 00:02:12 JÖRG GRÖSSL we were never given that motor as that big container vessel. Grounded in the Suez Canal for six days in 2021, that resulted in a backlog of 400 ships and trade loss of almost $60 billion. So that is a mess what we are talking about. 00:02:45 JACK GAINES defending themselves or prosecuting a conflict. 00:02:49 JÖRG GRÖSSL Yeah, that is the one thing. And a good example was the blockage in Ukraine in 2022 -23 that caused effects even in Africa with the shortage of grains being transported there. 00:03:04 JACK GAINES I remember North Africa and the Middle East were struggling to get enough grain for the simple breads that they use every day. And it was a real concern here in the United States. Did NATO have concerns about the wheat blockage? 00:03:18 JÖRG GRÖSSL Well, it was more a UN or a nation's initiative, especially then when we had the agreement arranged by Turkey. But NATO as an organization was not involved in that. 00:03:30 JACK GAINES Okay. And plus, Ukraine's got a border with Poland, so it could export grain that way into Europe. And Europe has a pretty robust grain agricultural system too, so it probably wasn't as big of an impact. 00:03:44 JÖRG GRÖSSL Yeah, well, it developed to a bigger impact. They compensated it now, but especially at the beginning, it was all based on sea transport. And land transport was basically possible, but not in the same capacity as the sea transport. And they had to make that running via land. They went through Romania to the Mediterranean, things like that. But that was not established at the beginning. And so NATO had to be involved in? 00:04:09 JACK GAINES so NATO had to be involved in? Deconflicting military and commercial maritime operations and also collaborating? 00:04:16 JÖRG GRÖSSL NATO nations like Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey, they had their ships there, but NATO as an organization was at the beginning not involved. That developed then later. But in fact, NATO was not involved into protecting transport or things like that. So it was just putting the picture together and minimized the impacts. With all of the issues with commercial shipping, 00:04:41 JACK GAINES issues with commercial shipping, grain shortage, how did you work with NATO to deconflict gray hole operations with commercial shipping and ensuring that they didn't get drawn into the conflict between Russia and Ukraine? 00:04:58 JÖRG GRÖSSL They were basically, they were in the conflict. They were a kind of a bargain. from the Russian side to allow or deny the flow of goods. And that was a clear bargain that they used against Ukraine. And at that time, NATO was not involved because they didn't want to be thrown into the conflict and get into an active part. So it was more like the NATO nation, Turkey as such, who played a role. But the NATO as an organization observed that, but we didn't play an active role in it. Okay. 00:05:33 JACK GAINES Now, with Turkey being effectively the arbiter between Russia and Ukraine on shipments and security, did what they learned help NATO out with their maritime summit programs? 00:05:47 JÖRG GRÖSSL Turkey not just played a moderator role, of course. With them owning the choke point of the Boxboroughs and the Marmara Sea, they were also a nation that allowed or denied traffic going through. And so the key message that NATO learned from that was who owns the choke points as the joker in his hands. He who holds the choke points makes the rules. Yeah, exactly. You see that on the other side at the Bob Elman Depp, 00:06:14 JÖRG GRÖSSL exactly. 00:06:16 JÖRG GRÖSSL see that on the other side at the Bob Elman Depp, you see that at some other choke points like the Panama Canal, who has control, writes the rules. 00:06:32 JACK GAINES stop policy or promote policy, and those who run it have enormous power over the lives of the rest of the nations in that region. And we've seen some use by countries to influence that. Iran has used mines in the Straits. 00:06:50 JÖRG GRÖSSL Yeah, absolutely. And we see that at the Bob Ellman debt, the moment where a rather short number of foodies have a severe impact to world economy. Right. 00:07:02 JACK GAINES And that's been a real struggle on trying not to get sucked into a full conflict with the Houthis in the Red Sea. 00:07:08 JÖRG GRÖSSL We all know who the Houthis are, that they're a proxy for Iran against Saudi Arabia, Israel -Gaza war, and the Israel -Lebanon conflict that we have at the moment will add some more oil to that fire. Well, 00:07:24 JACK GAINES and that's the challenge that NATO faces. It's always been a networked organization with multiple nations that can forward foreign policy. And now other countries are starting to become regional powers and are using similar tools and techniques to influence policy in those areas. And so we have to start thinking of Iran, Russia, China as networked organizations. They're not just one country anymore because they've got partners, they've got proxies. Some of them have criminal groups that work as operators on behalf of them, and some have paramilitary groups. So it's a more complex environment for NATO. to work on international rule of law and stability and security. 00:08:06 JÖRG GRÖSSL Yes, absolutely true. But to make that clear, at the moment, NATO is not involved, for example, in operations in the Red Sea. It is only run by NATO Nations or the European Union. The NATO as an organization at the moment is not involved. We are doing other things that have the same importance, for example, in the Baltics, in the Mediterranean. but not in the Red Sea at the moment. Well, tell me about the Baltics. We usually call the Baltics Sea a kind of a swamped field. And sometimes you can walk with dry feet from Germany to Denmark or to Sweden because of that amount of shipping. And of course, you have basically the only ice -free Russian access to the north in the Baltics, but they have to go to the narrow of the Femont Belt and the Catechart in Denmark. You have Kaliningrad in the Baltic. You have St. Petersburg in the Baltic. And of course, in that rather small area, you have a high density of gray ships. You have a high density of white ships. And to have a picture on that is quite challenging. And NATO nations are working together to get a picture of what is going on above the sea. 00:09:25 JACK GAINES Is that what the NATO Shipping Center does? picture and help coordinate between gray holes and commercial shipping? 00:09:32 JÖRG GRÖSSL shipping? To some extent, the NATO shipping center is adding to that. But the NATO shipping center has no tools. They have no radar stations. They have no electronic devices. So they just use the picture that they get from the bordering nations. They use the information that they get from the ships that are in the Baltics, for example. condensed that to a picture that they can use to support the merchant shipping. Okay. 00:10:04 JACK GAINES Explain to me how they support merchant shipping. 00:10:06 JÖRG GRÖSSL The NATO Shipping Center, it is meant to be the link between the organization of NATO and the merchant shipping community. And basically, they are the point of contact to exchange and to get information, to propagate warnings to the shipping, and to interact with the wide shipping. The NATO Shipping Center as such is a rather small organization, but they have a quite extensive network of reservists that are captains of merchant shipping in their civil life and participate in the NATO Shipping Center when they do their reserve missions. And so they are the connection between the military part and the civil part, like passing information. passing warnings, and try to filter the information that are coming from the civil life and put them into the military. 00:11:01 JACK GAINES They cover the Baltics. Do they cover the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean as well, or does it go further than that? 00:11:08 JÖRG GRÖSSL They're covering the Baltics. They're covering the North Sea, the Atlantic to some extent. It always depends on what nations are available if you have them. Like in the Baltics with Germany, Denmark, now Sweden, Finland, and Poland. For example, in the Mediterranean, only the northern part of the Mediterranean is covered by NATO nations and the southern part is not. So your picture that you have there is different than, for example, in the Baltic or in the North Sea. 00:11:37 JACK GAINES That makes sense. And then, of course, whenever there's a crisis, like that ship grounding in the Suez, then they also probably put some type of focus on that because it's going to impact. shipping coming out of the Baltics in the North Sea? 00:11:50 JÖRG GRÖSSL Not to that extent, because if there is an incident like that, then there is still the International Maritime Organization with their center in Kuala Lumpur. And they are basically responsible for the civil side of it. So it is not a NATO task to inform the merchant shipping about the civil incidents that took place somewhere. So they have their own organization to some extent. Okay. 00:12:19 JACK GAINES What was it called again? The International Shipping? 00:12:22 JÖRG GRÖSSL IMO, India Mike, the International Maritime Organization. 00:12:22 JACK GAINES IMO, 00:12:26 JACK GAINES Okay. Do you guys ever partner with them or work with them? 00:12:30 JÖRG GRÖSSL Yeah, we cooperate with them when needed. Let's say it like that. Sure. Because you don't want to get too deep into their business and they don't want to get too deep in yours. 00:12:36 JACK GAINES into their business and they don't want to get too deep in yours. 00:12:38 JÖRG GRÖSSL Yeah. And they're acting globally and we are not that much interested in about what is going on off the coast of Chile. 00:12:46 JACK GAINES But sometimes, I mean, NATO gets pulled into, I mean, they got pulled into Korea. Yeah. Pulled into Iraq. So sometimes it's outside the borders and I'm sure there has to be some cooperation when NATO extends itself beyond. 00:12:59 JÖRG GRÖSSL Yeah. But that is a case by case basis. 00:13:02 JACK GAINES Sure. But can you give me your perspective of NATO civil -military cooperation in the maritime domain? What is your role? How do you apply it? 00:13:13 JÖRG GRÖSSL CIMIC functioning in any domain, but especially counts for the maritime domain. What are the civil factors in my environment? How does this impact my operation? How might I impact the operation of the civil traffic? And we try to de -conflict that or to coordinate that, and if possible, even to cooperate…
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One CA Podcast
1 199: Jeffrey Fiddler and the U.S. Gaza Relief Mission 22:44
22:44 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked22:44
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedToday, Brian Hancock hosts Col. Jeffrey Fiddler to discuss his work helping manage the DOD response to the Gaza relief mission. --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org --- Special thanks to Natalia Lafourcade for the sample of Tú Sí Sabes Quererme (En Manos de Los Macorinos). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABLT6hdgEek --- Transcript 00:00:01 Introduction Welcome to the 1CA podcast. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website. at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes. 00:00:34 BRIAN HANCOCK I'm Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hancock and I will be your host for this session. Colonel Jeffrey Fidler is a civil affairs officer with 34 years, thank you sir, of combined enlisted and commissioned service. He has a master's degree in strategic studies and a master's and bachelor's degrees in criminal justice. On the civilian side, he is a career law enforcement officer. currently employed as a special agent with the Department of Homeland Security. Colonel Fidler, welcome to the show. Great to be here, Brian. Thanks for having me. So let's talk about Gaza. It's a man -made disaster. Of course, natural disasters are on the rise as well. This one happens to be a man -made disaster, and the toll is high. At present, 96 % of the population of the Gaza Strip, which is an estimated 2 .15 million people, are food insecure. Now, you went to that region. You're back. You probably have a view of this from multiple angles. Can you tell us a little bit about the U .S. response to this crisis? 00:01:38 JEFFREY FIDDLER This was a complex operation. Yeah, no doubt. It involved a joint force across two different combatant commands. So you have Cyprus, which belongs to UCOM, AOR, and then you have Gaza, Israel, which falls under CENTCOM. And you have... IGOs out there, United Nations, UKAID, USAID, Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance, which is the most important one for us when it comes to HA, bringing all those actors, so to speak, together to form a coherent response. Like anything we do in civil affairs, it can be challenging at first. 00:02:15 BRIAN HANCOCK But it's extra challenging because we're military. Many of these actors you just described... have a little bit of baggage when it comes to military, or they have neutrality requirements like the Red Cross that limits their ability to work with the military. If they don't understand civil affairs and what our role is and the heart we have for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief and our sincere willingness to help, I mean, if we are mistaken for folks who want to take a, you know, shoot them up kind of approach, then that... would not make that an easy group to bring together as a coalition of the willing. There is definitely some baggage from the wars, right? Yeah. There is. 00:02:55 JEFFREY FIDDLER There is. And we had the constraints. President made a decision. We're not going to have any boots on the ground. We follow orders of soldiers, right? So now you need partners on the back end. One thing the Army's always great at is logistic. So we can get a bunch of aid over there. And there'll be some friction getting it. Because you're dealing with civilian entities and organizations. There's always friction, but that's too easy. Really, the hardest part is once we get it on the beach, who's going to take it from there to deliver it to the people that are hungry? It's not going to be the U .S. military. And it's certainly not going to be really any military because you're dealing with organizations that can't necessarily work with a military organization. So it has to be civilian -led. 00:03:35 BRIAN HANCOCK -led. And there can be mistakes if military forces of any branch are rolling in there. They may be seen as aggressors or a party to the conflict under the law of war. Very complicated. But getting supplies through there, tough. You're talking, you know, everyone with a gun is going to shake down an aid convoy coming through because that stuff is just worth its weight in gold right now. So you've got that complexity once it hits the beach. And obviously we want the humanitarian assistance to get to the needy who requires that sustenance to continue living. You've got a logistics hub, as I understood it, sitting there in Cyprus that was put together to do all of the loading and preparation. Then you're going out to CENTCOM, crossing a geographic combatant commander's boundary to set up this giant man -made dock amidst threats from some folks to attack this structure in what's kind of amounting to the Wild West. And then we have ARSEN, formerly Third Army in World War II. who's in charge of this mission. And then we have all these partners in the mix. You're being very humble, I think, but this sounds like a tough coalition to put together and get them all to work into a common purpose. 00:04:52 JEFFREY FIDDLER It's not easy. Yeah. And I'll touch on that. I'm going to geek out for a second for all of our real civil affairs people. I'm going to talk about the Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance. Yeah, BHA. 00:04:58 BRIAN HANCOCK I'm going to talk 00:05:00 SPEAKER_00 Yeah, BHA. 00:05:02 JEFFREY FIDDLER So you need a MITAM to get the HA. You need a consignee. in Cyprus to receive the goods. And that's easy. 00:05:10 BRIAN HANCOCK The MITAB is a mission tasking matrix, kind of like a request from the host nation that you're providing support to saying, we need this type of thing here, there, which gets validated and vetted by the military. 00:05:23 JEFFREY FIDDLER Yeah. And it allows the DOD to respond, to actually use a piece of equipment to bring non -DOD articles or something to somewhere else. So the DOD doesn't get the bill. So you need a consignee from my team on both ends. The hard part was, who's that consignee going to be? It's a clear chain of custody. It's a requirement. Absolutely. So the World Food Program stepped up to the plate. But back to one of your earlier points of not working with the military, and look, that's their charter. Us and the military might hate it, but that's just the way it is. And WFP made it quite clear there's not going to be a military flavor to this when they receive the goods over there. And that's important to understand. So really bringing in everybody so that we could all get on the same shoot of music. 00:05:43 BRIAN HANCOCK a clear chain of custody. It's a requirement. 00:06:06 JEFFREY FIDDLER bringing in everybody so that we could all get on the same shoot of music. One of the things that I'm proudest of, what we did for civil affairs is helping set up a multinational coordination center with the Cypriots. So when we first started it, there might've been 10 people at the table, Brian. By the time we left her at the height of the operation, it was about 50 people in a room from all these various organizations. And we made sure that the Cypriots were in the lead. It's their nation. Yeah, yeah. Sovereign nation. Yeah. Sovereign nation, which is a whole other point. And we could do a whole other podcast on that about how civil affairs operates over in Yukon. But Cypriots are in the lead. We're there to support them and their efforts. And it was something as simple as, you know, Major Alan Diggertullo, my CPI chief, he was down there with me. One of the things we did with Alan was he would liaison with the Cypriots, 00:06:34 BRIAN HANCOCK Sovereign nation. 00:06:56 JEFFREY FIDDLER create a PowerPoint slide of... talking points that we were going to discuss during the MNCC. And that might not seem like a big deal to members of the audience out there that are Army. But other militaries, they don't necessarily do that. We weren't trying to insert ourselves. We were just trying to come to a middle ground where everybody could have a common understanding of where we were going. Trying to help facilitate. Yeah, exactly. So a lot of the friction points were wicked out during the MNCC. And then once a week, we would host a multinational decision board. where we would bring in senior leaders. So I'm talking one -star admirals all the way up to four -star generals in the army, plus the ambassadors. So you have ambassador level ranked from the Cypriots, other countries that are visiting, and the United States there, where if we hit a roadblock where we couldn't get something done during the MNCC, which is really like a working group, then you bring in the senior leaders for them to make a decision or something for them to action. So I think that's what kind of lessened some of the friction that we had. 00:07:56 BRIAN HANCOCK that we had. Yeah. Sometimes that can increase, too, when you have different equities, different political equities, different concerns coming together. And, of course, for the military, it's usually pretty short -term involvement in HADR. So you hit a couple of good roadblocks, and that could really derail the mission. And it's awesome to hear that you guys had to figure out a process and that apparently it largely worked to keep that moving forward and get that aid to the people who desperately needed it. 00:08:22 JEFFREY FIDDLER needed it. It wasn't easy, but there was mistakes made along the way, 00:08:26 BRIAN HANCOCK the way, for sure. Right. Mistakes don't define us. What we learn from them and how we pick up and carry on maybe does, but mistakes don't necessarily define us. Within the context of that, for the audience, we've kind of talked a lot about the Gaza mission. What was your specific role that you were assigned to? 00:08:44 JEFFREY FIDDLER Sure. And this goes back to, like we talked about a little while ago. You got to be aggressive, figure it out. Like I talked about, Hilda Fernandez, you know, came down to the Pentagon to do a job. She didn't necessarily end up doing that job, but she did what was required to do as a civil affairs officer. So my job was to go down there and to be the U .S. Army, Europe, and Africa, Army element, OIC, and just strictly focus on Army -related issues to support the mission. That completely morphed as soon as I got there, and we fell under a joint task force. And there was a need for a strong civil affairs presence in the MNCC and operations in general and civil knowledge integration. So we immediately shifted gears. I ended up becoming the de facto XO of the JTF. So I was dual -hatted as the senior civil affairs officer for the operation and the XO. And Major DeGratulo was the CKI chief and one of the operations officers for the JTF. So it just turned into that and it worked for us. Okay. 00:09:46 BRIAN HANCOCK Well, you brought some handpicked team members there, so I'm not surprised that they were able to adapt. I think that's one thing that really defines us as civil affairs professionals is that we're very adaptable in different environments. We don't bring just like one tool to the fight. 00:09:59 JEFFREY FIDDLER Absolutely. I sometimes see that culture out there where it's like, hey, we're going to find a way to know. And one of the things that I appreciate about civil affairs, most of us have a mindset of let's find a way to yes and figure out the problem. For one example, both Alan and I went out to sea with the French Navy. That's not something I ever saw myself doing in civil affairs, but they wanted a liaison officer on the French warship to deliver aid. So we actually went within four miles of the shore of Gaza. And that was just to make sure the French Navy was comfortable, that they were able to talk to the U .S. Navy. They had an American officer on board. And, you know, we'd pull in, deliver the aid, and then leave. Did you do that under a French flag or were you international? 00:10:39 BRIAN HANCOCK under a French flag or were you international? French flag. Sometimes they re -flag depending on the mission. So that's interesting. But you know, others in our community who might be involved in defense support to civil authorities, DISCA or humanitarian assistance disaster reef, HADR, what were some of the obstacles that you encountered in your mission in Gaza and how did you overcome them? Sure. 00:11:02 JEFFREY FIDDLER Like I said earlier, the friction points, that was difficult at times. And you said it earlier, Brian, there are folks that have been doing this for 20, 30 years in the civilian world. I think baggage is the wrong word. I'm going to say scar tissue. And you need to recognize that. If you see that, you know, you as the civil affairs officers, you're going to take part in this and kind of, if you're going to take a leading role to make this thing work, you need to recognize that and allay their fears that you're going to do everything you can to protect the process that they use. They're not showing up to be difficult. They have a process like BHA. They have a process for MITAM. You don't want to go to the left or right of that because that's the way that they do their business. And I think it's one of our jobs as civil affairs to make sure that our military understands that process so that eventually the two can come to a way to yes of how we're going to get something across the finish line. 00:11:56 BRIAN HANCOCK Yeah, that's awesome. In civil affairs, we get access to some specialty training like the Jayhawk, the Joint Humanitarian Assistance Operations Course. the hard course. And I'm not sure that the larger force, especially in the combat arms, that they necessarily broaden with these kinds of things. But it's really important when we're working for BHA, that's always in a support role. And if we're doing DISCA, again, always in a support role, we ma…
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One CA Podcast
1 198: David Luna, State-sponsored criminality in strategic competition 34:37
34:37 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked34:37
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedIn this episode, Mariah Yager is interviewing David Luna and Jack Gaines as they discuss how adversaries use criminality to achieve their foreign policy goals while removing U.S. influence and capability. The interview is based on a presentation at SMA (Strategic Multilayer Assessment), an online Pentagon forum. Link to the show and resources: https://nsiteam.com/smaspeakerseries_22august2024/ --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org --- Special thanks to the Epidemic Blues channel for the sample of Peter Crosby - Jailhouse Blues. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuyc-bIjQ10 --- Transcript 00:00:06 Introduction Welcome to the 1CA Podcast, a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website. at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes. 00:00:39 MARIAH YAGER Hi, everyone. I'm Mariah Yeager, and welcome to today's guest, David Luna, the founder of International Coalition Against Illicit Economies. Prior to ICAIE, David Luna was the Senior Director for International Security and Diplomacy at the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement. He focused on strengthening international cooperation and fighting threat to illicit networks. And David also helped launch the Organization for Economic Coordination and Development Task Force on Countering Illicit Trade. But with that, Mr. Luna, I'd like to hand the floor over to you. 00:01:11 DAVID LUNA Thank you very much Mariah and Jack. It is great to be here to participate about the radar warfare in grey zones related to China and Russia, manipulating instability through co -option and coercive economics, including by weaponizing corruption. including election interference, as Secretary Blinken has underscored in recent months, elicit financial flows to support pro -authoritarian candidates that advance malign influence and that exploit governance gaps to secure friendly policies, while harming our U .S. national interests. This also includes the leveraging of criminal networks, proxies, and professional enablers. to advance policies to construct a multipolar world, exploiting grey zones in the process from small islands in the Asia -Pacific region to fragile democracies in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Europe. The United States remains unprepared for irregular warfare. China, Iran, and Russia continue to seek to undercut U .S. influence. They degrade American relationships with key allies and partners. and to exploit the global environment to their advantage, including by exploiting instruments of competition, strategic corruption, blind influence operations, terrorism, sabotage, and subversion through asymmetrical and clandestine efforts. And so we can dictate the costs related to these hostile actions by effectively prosecuting the strategic use of corruption. and predatory criminality by adversaries across race zones to ensure that democracy reigns over authoritarianism. Greaterly the rule of law and international -based systems must outlive targeted chaos, abversion, and malign influence. I think that we must use such current and horizontal threats to repressive threat convergence so that we can develop actional responses to counter illegality. that is corroding the rule of law and interconnected with the threats networks. Through this framework, I firmly believe that we can better help DOD, the intelligence community, the interagency community, our combatant commanders, and our warfighters to understand the threat and to equip them with pragmatic resource sustain, irregular warfare tools, and anti -crime capabilities. The Department of Defense and our interagency partners to develop more dynamic NASA security military strategies and to get ahead of the game in planning for future irregular warfare campaigns, using these innovative capabilities to expand the competitive space to the U .S. advantage of their allies. A few months ago, I had the distinct pleasure of delivering the keynote address at a meeting hosted by the Department of Defense. Office for Special Operations, as well as the Cali Narcotics and Cali Transnational Organized Crime Program. At that time, I focused more on criminal networks, and I would like to expand on that discussion. I've been focusing more on the policy actions that I believe are needed and that must be integrated into greater warfare strategies. Last month, the Office of the Director for National Intelligence released a brief report. entitled Conflict and the Gray Zones, highlighting non -relations, will increasingly feature an array of hostile gray zones activities. As China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia seek to challenge the United States and to gain advantage over other countries through deliberate campaigns while also trying to avoid war. These gray zones are more often than unexploited in places where corruption thrives. Criminals finance chaos, impunity, and insecurity. So I will focus again on some of these reasons to give you a better understanding how some of these adversaries are leveraging illicit criminal activities, using climate grids, using organized criminals, and other proxies to promote authoritarianism and weaken democracies. erode institutions and undermine the rule of law and global order. Russia and Iran and China continually work to gain access and gain control over strategic locations, critical minerals, ports, and other infrastructure, with the aim of becoming board operating bases for their military forces and intelligence agencies. The islands in the Pacific Rim have become a challenge in recent years that has corroded American influence in these countries and, of course, more globally. We continue to work across sectors with cutting edge research to help map these threat networks, to help the United States and its allies to really understand today's threat environment, to see the interconnections of illicit vectors. to pinpoint nodes of crime convergence, identify those gray zones that are being exploited by some of these malign state actors, and to track illicit rude supply chains and illicit financial flows that enable authoritarians to weaken democracies. So we hope that these challenges or relays will drive further analyses and investigations to disrupt illicit threat networks and their... 00:07:10 MARIAH YAGER Hey, David, thank you so much. The Criminality Index, how were those calculated? How did that data come together? 00:07:19 DAVID LUNA This is the Organized Crime Index that was developed by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. Without getting too much in the weeds of their methodology, they do look at various baskets of data sets from different international organizations. different governments to share more of their methodology. 00:07:41 MARIAH YAGER And on that, I did post your white paper that you mentioned, and then these slides and your remarks, so everyone can look through the different sources. I mean, there's just some great resources there, from ACLED to some of the track stuff, so I will get those available. 00:07:57 DAVID LUNA And we also emphasize that despite many successes within the law enforcement community, Global criminality and corruption has expanded greatly today compared to even a decade ago. Illicit entrepreneurial networks collectively continue to exploit the lucrative illicit economies, which, according to some estimates, are between 7 % to 15 % of the world's economy, or up to $20 trillion a year. They really go towards criminal networks. and they contribute to expanding these illicit economies. $20 trillion a year, that is staggering. Equally concerning, adversaries such as Russia, China, Iran, underwrite armed conflicts and malign operations against Western democracies and free markets. Among the reason local conflicts no longer end is that they are supported by illicit threat networks. For example, paramilitary groups supported by criminal opportunists, profit -driven, illicit companies who exploit conflict, and instability to expand criminal economies. In fact, rampant corruption and the violence wrought by organized criminals and terrorist networks help to soften the conditions for insecurity that are exploited to weaken other fragile governments. The state capture aided by criminality and strategic use of corruption results in democracies sliding into optocracies and through proxies helped to start and expand conflicts of regional insecurity. For example, if we look at Russia's Wagner group, who had assisted in a series of coups in Africa that had brought some lundas to power or enabled further optocracies to raid. In exchange, Proxies now rod global high -value commodities in those countries and allow for autocrats to remain in power. In the Central African Republic, Wagner's successors continue to employ active measures to disrupt African efforts to move their countries from violent conflict to stability by moving money and weapons around the continent through an intricate web of shell companies and through criminal networks that specialize in illicit trafficking and legal trading. and sanctions busting. What results is chaos, furthering the corruptive influence of extremist insurgencies in many cases, or regime protection of authoritarians who have faced sanctions and condemnations, including for their human rights abuses. Some of the dirty money that is derived by Russian mercenaries in Africa have helped Russia bypass global sanctions to fund its war in Ukraine, or to support political upheavals. paramilitary misadventures in the Middle East, the Balkans, and forward Soviet republics. Inland America, Russian proxies are selling some of the more advanced surveillance technologies to state and non -state actors across the hemisphere, greatly enhancing their ability to monitor and attack political enemies, law enforcement, officials, anyone else that they perceive as a threat. And as many experts correctly pointed out, Russia remains a criminalized state, led by a ruthless and thugish godfather. In fact, the Russian mafia is an extension of the Putin regime in advancing Russia's national interests overseas, and as an instrument of power operating in the shadows, elicit facilitators, super -fixers to other criminal networks. Russian cybercriminals not only penetrate businesses, it steals. trade secrets and bonds, but also to launch cyberattacks against enemies of the Gremlin. The Siloviki, too, may be asked to engage in kidnappings or assassinations on behalf of their masters in Moscow. Finally, one last point related to Russia. While annexation of Crimea and the recent invasion of Ukraine have significantly affected regionalized economies, Russian criminal networks continue to aid Russian intelligence and special forces in smuggling needed weapons and technology. Obviously, this undermines Western sanctions and transport bans for highly sought consumer goods and helps to londer the assets of Russian countergrants and oligarchs in places like Dubai, London, New York, and Western capitals. Now let me focus for a few minutes on the bigger threat. China. According to FBI Director Christopher Wray, China has become the biggest threat to our national security and to the homeland. This is not because of the global ambitions and active involvement of transnational crimes, but also through political interference operations. China's involvement in expanding illicit economies around the world has a triple whammy effect. Yet, first of all, it increases tremendous illicit wealth. hurts U .S. national security, American competitiveness, and innovation. Finances showing this ambition to become the predominant superpower by 2049. President Xi has openly stated, he would like China to become that predominant power. Through our research and through other institutions like the Terrorism Transnational Crime and Corruption Center, the CCP has leveraged corruption, illicit markets, Predatory crime to become the world's largest player in almost every sector of transnational crime, including counterfeits, trafficking of weapons, humans, wildlife, illegally harvest timber, fish, natural resources, the theft of IP, and trade secrets, illicit tobacco, organ harvesting, and other crimes. Several trillion U .S. dollars in the list of proceeds every year are generated from productive fences for money laundering that touch China's jurisdictions and markets and are often used to finance China's authoritarian regime. According to our ICAO research, China may very well be the biggest money laundering hub in the world. So, on so many fronts, China poses a serious geopolitical and organized criminal threat. Given its proximity to make money on crime and laundering dirty monies for drug cartels or other counterparts, terrorists, sanctioned rogue states, and other pariahs, China has also helped Russia, Iran, and others evade international sanctions, including on oil exports. threats will continue to garner more attention across different illicit industries driven by China as they continue to expand across the developing world. In Latin America and in Panama, for example, China is leveraging bribery of government officials to win concessions to control the port and other critical infrastructure along the Panama Canal. Alarmingly, China already controls or operates in more than 40 ports across Latin America. In many of these ports, the Chinese triads are also quite active. As the former Salcom commander testified a few years ago, China continues to be the number one underwriter for the Mexican drug cartels and other criminal networks. In Venezuela, China is firmly supported to corrupt the Jura regime. not only because of its access and investment in the oil sector, but because it truly is a strategic partner to counter American influence. If we look at Canada in recen…
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One CA Podcast
1 197: Scott Mann "Nobody is Coming to Save You" 33:44
33:44 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked33:44
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedToday, we welcome back the author, actor, public speaker, Ret. Lt Colonel Scott Mann to discuss his new book "Nobody is Coming to Save You" https://scottmann.com/ The website Nobody is Coming to Save You is a practical guide for leaders who want to make a bigger impact in the world now. It distills what I’ve learned over my three-decade career as a Green Beret into strategies you can use to lead others through hard change. These are the same tactics Green Berets use to get vital stuff done when stakes are high and conditions impossible. You’ll also learn about human behavior, strategic influence and dynamic storytelling because relationships are rocket fuel for getting big sh*t done. --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org --- Special thanks to Ahimsaz for the sample of “Shahamat." Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wmoH-fHhwQ --- Transcript 00:00:01 Introduction Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes. Please welcome retired Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann. 00:00:39 JACK GAINES As a Green Beret, Scott designed and led the local village stability operations program in Afghanistan. After leaving the military, he began to focus on using his experience with the struggle of transition from a fast -paced, high -risk lifestyle to civilian world of work and family. As a result, he launched Hero's Journey to help other service members, first responders, and their families cope with post -crisis trauma through storytelling. Scott also wrote and featured in the play and film Last Man Out, which portrays the impacts of war on our veterans and their families. Additionally, after Kabul fell to the Taliban, Scott and others launched Task Force Pineapple Express to help Afghan partners leave the country. Scott has made three appearances on TEDx to discuss his work with veterans and first responders and is now announcing his new book, No One is Coming to Save You, which will be released in October. So enjoy. Your book is coming out. It is. In October, right? October 1. October 1. It's a great book. I really liked how you took the turn. This is a lot of different things that the ESM would diagnose as issues with. adaptability, with coping skills, general anxiety, you were able to successfully build them down into a thing you call the churn. And that's really, really helpful because if I told somebody they have a bipolar and anxiety complexity disorder, they'd be like, what in the hell are you talking about? But if you say you're stuck in the churn, which is a culmination of all these different types of things they're struggling with. you created an object, you gave it a name, and it gave them a way for people's minds to focus on that and identify it. And then by doing that, preying on how to separate themselves from the churn and give themselves a break, give themselves some air so that they can recover a little bit. Because with any kind of condition that people are struggling with, they have to learn how to separate themselves from it in order to grow, to heal. 00:02:45 SCOTT MANN Yeah, it's well said. And the thing is, I've been working on the book for years, and most of the books I've written have been either about Afghanistan or they've been about veteran transition. And a lot of folks have been after me to write a nonfiction, story -based, narrative -based book on how did we do Pineapple? How did we do Last Out? Because I don't have a title. I don't have authority. I don't have a lot of resources. Yet those were strategically impactful things, just like DSO. How did I do that? And so I decided to write a book, a very quick read, called Nobody's Coming to Save You. which was the rally cry in most SFA camps throughout history, but you can still get big shit done. And this is what this is. It's kind of a guide to getting big shit done. And to your point about the churn, the thing is, and this is Ivan Tyrrell again, he says that the brain is a metaphorical pattern matching organ and it has a mandate to make sense of the world. So metaphor and story is how the brain makes sense, right? And this is another reason that we want to be storytellers. And what I found is, for example, The Democrat or Republican sitting across from you at the holiday dinner table is not the enemy. The person that cuts you off in traffic is not the enemy. The person who wears a mask or doesn't wear a mask and points their finger at you is not the enemy. The person on LinkedIn that disagrees with your political opinion is not the enemy. The churn is the enemy. And I characterize the churn as the antagonist in this book. It is both an external and internal condition within our civil society that is novel and new. And it's something that we just have not faced as a country until the last five, 10 years. And we see versions of the churn over in Afghanistan, in Iraq, where tribal dynamics at play in groups and out groups. And you've also got your own internal resistance that you're dealing with. And that's just the nature of being in that roiling, churning environment. But it's weird to see it here in the United States, where we are supposed to be a society of abundance and rule of law. And out of many come one. And much of that has fallen away. And it was in that dark period of my transition that I saw, wow, there's a churn right here at home. And as Sebastian Younger says, most combat veterans are willing to die for their country, but they have no idea how to live for it because it's hard to know how to live for a country that's tearing itself apart along every imaginable line from race to economics to religion. And that is my assessment, the churn and that division, that distrust, that disengagement. As humans, we have an obsession for imitation. Back in the traditional world, we imitated animals when we thought animal pelts. Well, now we're obsessed with imitating machines. And the left hemisphere of our brain is obsessed with control while the right hemisphere is obsessed with the connection to the natural world. And the left has always worked for the right. But according to a lot of neuroscientists, it's flipped because of these things. We've become so obsessed with this represented reality that we've lost our connection to the natural world. And so my book starts off by framing the enemy. That's the first special ops imperative. Always understand your operational environment. Well, our operational environment has changed. What got us here is not going to get us there. So I take about one third of the book to lay out, look, your operating environment is different. And it's not just about transitioning from military to civilian. The civil society we live in. is different externally and internally. And if you don't know that, then you are at risk of being lured into shadow tribalism and a range of other things. If you do know it, the antibody to it is an understanding and appreciation of the human operating system. Another metaphor I use is the iceberg, right? So you've got the iceberg versus the churn and getting below the waterline of that iceberg part you can't see. That's where the innate human realities reside that we can leverage. 00:06:32 SCOTT MANN storytelling, empathy, active listening, breath, a range of things that are available to us. They're innate. They're already in us. Our ancestors knew, but we need to access them in a new way with an improved understanding of how our environment has changed so that we can lead with those things. And the cool thing is, and I'll end on this for this question, is that that's available to all of us, whether you're working in diplomacy right now, whether you're working in civil affairs right now, or whether you are transitioned and you're trying to just lead your family, most people are victims of the churn. And if you have a language and a grammar for it, and if you have an understanding of the human operating system and a practicality and how you can engage using old school or personal skills, you can lead your way pretty much out of anything without a time. 00:07:20 JACK GAINES One brilliant point you had in there was that the person on the social media that's Leaving comments is not your enemy. A person who cuts you off is not your enemy. Because if you are stuck in a churn, it triggers that they are the enemy because it's your natural instinct that they've wronged you and you have to defend yourself. So by separating the person from that sense, you can back away from potential fights, road rage, getting arrested. It does. Yeah. 00:07:50 SCOTT MANN And all of that could happen. Think about how we're trained in these rough places around the world to respond, and the responses that have been ingrained in us are not necessarily appropriate for responses in our civil society here at home. Yet, the way in which our body physiologically responds, it goes into a trance state. We enter a sympathetic state of fight, flight, or freeze. Our bodies have been preconditioned to fight. Our bodies have been preconditioned to lean into the problem in a very aggressive way, for example. And that's a primal response that has been infused with training. Okay. Well, here, if you're watching your 401k erode over six months, kind of response that we were trained to do is not appropriate. Is to go burn down the hedge fund. Yeah. The reality is, so what's actually happening there is that trance state that Ivan Terrell talks about. We all go into it. A trance state is just a state of hyper -focus. And the churn has created these conditions all around us where people are in it all the time. And when you go into a trance state and get a secondary emotion of anger, anger makes you stupid. Anger reduces your higher intelligence functions. You can't look with a shared perspective. You're trying to survive. And so what are we going to do for those of us who have trained a certain way? It's not good. And so we have to manage our energy. We have to manage the energy in the room. And it starts, I believe, when emotions are low by reading about and learning about the charm that's out there and this human operating system that's old and primal within us and is going to act on us one way or the other. And the more that we can appreciate the human operating system and reconnect to it, the more we can manage our own energy in a possible way within this new context that we live in. and be the most relevant, relatable person in the room. Those skills that we learned in the military all of a sudden truly then become very relevant. But if we can't manage the churn or read it for what it is and then manage our energy and those around us, we will be a pawn for the divisionist leaders that are out there just like everybody else. 00:10:09 JACK GAINES That's a great point. That churn of feeling like it's coming at you from every angle. allows people who do work in information and influence to then say, okay, you're all wound up. Here's the bad guy. And then have them lunge at that person or that issue and explode all that energy that they've been building up on a problem. It goes after what I want them to do versus them thinking through an issue and actually coming up with their own position, either agreeing or dissenting on what I want. 00:10:37 SCOTT MANN It's a very good definition of what I call divisionist leaders in the book. It's at a basic level that the civil society we live in here in the West is based on the individual. The individual is above the group. Well, in most places of the world and where we all come from, the group is above the individual. Status society is where we all come from. Just like any other mammal, it's for the good of the group because it's the only way you can acquire resources, maintain resources, find a mate. It's all within your circle, your tribe, your quam. And the group is above the individual. Well, in America and other places, we put the individual above the group. That's not a natural state of affairs. Which is why cults are so popular. Yes. And it's also why leadership is so essential and why a lot of social scientists say that you need for a democracy or a republic to survive that way. You need social capital where you have faith in each other and trust as neighbors. You need institutions that you can. have trust in and then you need stories that you tell each other and the outside world that you believe in right how are we doing on that we are really struggling with all of those so as a result they've abandoned that stewardship of bridging and then instead they practice this divisionist approach where they foment instability from the president all the way down both parties to meet their own narrow agenda social media engineers Instagram and Facebook create algorithms that are designed to encourage us to share negative fear -based information about outgroups because they've done the studies and they know that we will share information faster if it's negative information about an outgroup. So in other words, you have engineers that have done deep research on in -group, out -group, tribal dynamics, and then they're using it. You orchestrate algorithms that will leverage in -group, out -group behavior. Now, that to me is insidious. That is a divisionist approach that is practiced in 24 -7 news. It's practiced in politics. It's practiced in social media. And if we're not careful as humans who are just moving along our day, we will enter into this represented world. It's not reality. It's a represented reality. It's not the natural world. And that world is their world. 24 -7 news is the world of the divisionist. It's not an even plank. And so it's so easy to just get sucked into that trance state where the primal condit…
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One CA Podcast
1 196: Jeffrey Fiddler on the DOD response to COVID 19 22:31
22:31 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked22:31
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedToday, Brain Hancock hosts Col. Jeffrey Fiddler to discuss his career and his experience at the Pentagon helping manage the DOD response to the COVID 19 outbreak. --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org --- Special thanks to Natalia Lafourcade for the sample of Tú Sí Sabes Quererme (En Manos de Los Macorinos). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABLT6hdgEek --- Transcript 00:00:01 Introduction Welcome to the 1CA podcast. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website. at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes. 00:00:34 BRIAN HANCOCK I'm Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hancock, and I will be your host for this session. Colonel Jeffrey Fiddler is a civil affairs officer with 34 years, thank you, sir, of combined enlisted and commissioned service. He has a master's degree in strategic studies and a master's and bachelor's degrees in criminal justice. On the civilian side, he is a special agent with the Department of Homeland Security. Colonel Fidler, welcome to the show. Great to be here, Brian. Thanks for having me. I tell you, sir, with all of that experience you have in both infantry and military police, who actually rolls with more firepower than an infantry company, I'm making you think you just like to fire guns. Oh, yeah. Love shooting guns. Fair enough. So I'm going to ask you a little bit about your civil affairs journey in a moment, but let me give out the quick disclaimer here. A reminder to the audience, all of the remarks of the participants are solely ours. Now, sir, I met you here in Europe when you replaced the legendary Tony Vaja as chief of the civil affairs division at U .S. Army Europe and Africa. Boy, a lot has happened since then. It has. 00:01:41 JEFFREY FIDDLER has. A lot has changed. First of all, Colonel Vaja is great. Tough guy to replace. As you know, Brian, he was the DCO of the 353KCOM when I was in brigade command. So I got to know Tony for two years. We would talk at least a couple of times a week. The institutional knowledge that he has is just amazing. It's unbelievable. It really is. So I still talk to Tony to this day. 00:02:03 BRIAN HANCOCK Tony to this day. And there's so many rich reasons why you join civil affairs. But the quality of the people you meet on that journey, I think, is one of the things that keeps us in this field. Absolutely. Yeah. So when I first got here, 00:02:16 JEFFREY FIDDLER we were G39. We had SEMA, Space, IO, Civil Affairs, PSYOP, Brigadier General Ellis, who's... Selected for major general, our old boss, our old boss's boss, he wanted to separate all those divisions out. So we're now fully functional G3 civil affairs division, which is interesting for USRAF because the 06 lead is going to be a comp of three person going forward, which is a little different from some of the other directorates and divisions that you see here in USRAF. Yeah. 00:02:48 BRIAN HANCOCK Well, given the breakout, I wonder if they're just going to add a G9 shop at some point. I thought about that. The two -star level, certainly we have a G9 shop. Yeah. I'm currently filling a G9 billet for the 79 Theater Support Command. So that would not surprise me, especially given the importance that civil affairs plays in CIMIC and in competition and in all of the setting, the theater and shaping operations that we're doing right now. Absolutely. I went back and forth on that because I had talked to General Ellis about that. 00:03:12 JEFFREY FIDDLER and forth on that because I had talked to General Ellis about that. The reason why I like being in the G3 is that we have all the integrating cells, the G33, G35. Right. And for long -term planning, we do have an officer, Major George Warren. He's embedded with the G5 downstairs. And the reason why I like being in the G3 is that any organization that you go to, the three shop is the center of gravity. Always. So when those emergent missions come up, like Cyprus or the Greek floods, anything even remotely related to civil affairs, even in an infantry mindset or whatever, they look over to us and then we get the tap on the shoulder, which is pretty cool for the soldiers in the division. 00:03:52 BRIAN HANCOCK in the division. Well, you must be doing something right to have that kind of demand signal. So well done. It's just luck. I'd rather be lucky than good in the final analysis. So I appreciate that. Yeah. Now, one of the things that I personally love about civil affairs is that since we are a non -accessions branch and Of course, in the Marine Corps, it's a B -billet for the officers. So while they're non -commissioned officers can be a civil affairs officer for their career, they cannot on the officer side. So there's a lot of rotation and change in both the Army and the Marine Corps on the officer side, which basically means almost every civil affairs officer that you meet is different, has different skill sets, has a different career path, a lot of awesome diversity, I think, that we have in the branch. And so let me turn to your story. You commissioned as an infantry officer in the 90s. And now you're a civil affairs officer. How did you get here? 00:04:50 JEFFREY FIDDLER So I think it was right after the surge in Iraq. And that was when they took a lot of the chemical folks because I was at the time. Made a mayor defense artillery. Yeah. 00:04:57 BRIAN HANCOCK at the time. 00:05:00 JEFFREY FIDDLER So I was voluntold like, hey, you're going to go down to Fort Liberty. You're going to go to CA school. And then all started before that, I was in the Massachusetts Army National Guard and very tough to get promoted. Yeah, a few slots. Yeah, a few slots. So after Operation Noble Eagle, when we did all the defense of the bases, I transferred over to the Army Reserve, 00:05:12 BRIAN HANCOCK a few slots. 00:05:21 JEFFREY FIDDLER had to pick up a basic branch that the Army Reserve had, which is an infantry. People out in the audience might know there is one infantry battalion in the Army Reserve. I didn't know that. I was thinking the Guard, 00:05:31 BRIAN HANCOCK didn't know that. I was thinking the Guard, but I didn't realize we had it in the Compo 3. 00:05:33 JEFFREY FIDDLER but I didn't realize we had it in the Compo 3. Yeah, no, there's one infantry battalion in the Army Reserve, and it's out in Hawaii. A good friend of mine, Alan Perkins, Lieutenant Colonel Alan Perkins, just commanded that, but that's a whole separate story. So you want to talk about IDT travel, he had to fly from Boston to Hawaii for drill weekend. He probably hated that. Yeah, he probably did. But it's the only infantry battalion in the Army Reserve. All right. So we needed those influx of CA officers. So I got orders to go down there and went to school and the rest is history. 00:05:35 BRIAN HANCOCK Yeah, 00:05:51 BRIAN HANCOCK Yeah, he probably 00:06:01 BRIAN HANCOCK history. You've spent most of your career in infantry law enforcement and the chemical corps. How do those fields assist you in your civil affairs work? 00:06:14 JEFFREY FIDDLER Well, two things come to mind. In the infantry, you have those type A personalities. And I'm not saying I am one, but you have to be aggressive in the infantry. For us as civil affairs to show our relevancy, you have to be aggressive. Agreed. If you sit back and wait for something to happen, you're going to be marginalized. Right. You're going to watch your budget go, 00:06:32 BRIAN HANCOCK You're going to watch your budget go, dude. 00:06:34 JEFFREY FIDDLER Yeah. Exactly. So you've got to show some type of relevancy to that maneuver commander. So you don't necessarily have to be infantry to start up, but I think you need to be an aggressive officer. Like we say in the civil affairs division, we're not taking the foot off the gas pedal. 00:06:47 BRIAN HANCOCK Right. We're just going to keep on pushing forward. You know, that's one of the things I also I've noticed about civil affairs formation, even at the civil affairs. action team cat level foreman and army doctrine. These folks are always volunteering for missions. They're always making suggestions. They're not waiting to be tasked to solve a problem that they think they can help and add value. They're speaking up. They're going to the three. They're going to the fire's chief. They're going to whoever and saying, hey, you know, I think we can help you with that problem. And they're very aggressive. And that makes them one of the hardest working and highest op tempo groups as a slice enabler. to combat arms in combat operations. But that's about a return on investment and earning your pay. So I agree. I think now more than ever, with some civil affairs battalions going away, there's force reduction in the army in general. It's not just civil affairs. I think now more than ever, we have to beat those folks who ship up and add value at every level of war to make sure that we're not only achieving tactical battlefield success, but we're also... achieving operational and ultimately strategic success so we don't keep going back and repeating crisis after crisis. Yes. 00:06:47 JEFFREY FIDDLER We're just going to 00:07:57 JEFFREY FIDDLER And I think on the law enforcement side, one of the things that they're looking for for training is negotiation training. Yeah. How do you do that? And I think in law enforcement, if you're a decent law enforcement officer, you've got to know how to negotiate with people. And I think for civil affairs, that's a huge thing for us because we're really that connective tissue between the civilian populace and the military. We saw that just recently down in Cyprus, that you dealt with a pretty big problem set getting humanitarian assistance into Gaza, and you have a lot of international players everywhere. IGOs that are over there that want to do something, NGOs, different militaries from other countries. How do you pull all that together? You have to have some kind of negotiation training, or have done that in the past, and I think a lot of us have in civil affairs. 00:08:03 SPEAKER_00 Yeah. How 00:08:43 BRIAN HANCOCK I think so too. Many of the most important problem sets, there are ways to solve them other than bullets. And bullets may be expedient, but again, that tends to generate a lot of long -term animosity, which leads to that crisis after crisis, right? So critical skill definitely need more of that. And if we're not going to plus up civil affairs, maybe we need to start training some other people to understand that, or at least how... to utilize the civil affairs assets they have properly. And I think we're going to talk a little bit more about that later. Now, not long ago, the psychological operations groups of the United States Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command, known as USACAPOC, they did that reorganization. They took their separate psychological operations groups, their POGs, and which, by the way, had a broken officer pyramid. They had about 100 captain positions, which would go to 33 major positions. and then go to 505 lieutenant colonel positions, four of which were battalion command. 00:08:57 SPEAKER_00 right? 00:09:45 BRIAN HANCOCK So it really became hard to have a career in PSYOP. Those are now moved under the KCOM, theoretically integrated within the KCOM. So we have civil affairs and psychological operations not only working together, but actually coexisting the same unit together. KPOC started with some experiments in that, and there's more of that occurring now. You commanded a civil affairs and psychological operations combined battalion. What was that experience like for you? And do you have any opinions on whether combining those two elements is a good long -term strategy for the command? Sure. Well, 00:10:21 JEFFREY FIDDLER I'm not going to say any psyop jokes because I put my foot in my mouth in the past on that. There's a lot of CA officers that are dual -headed. I am. I'm one of them. Exactly. See? So I didn't do it. It's not going to be there in perpetuity. All right. But I had a CA PSYOP training battalion, Brian. So really, we're training NCOES, wasn't an operational battalion. Still counts as battalion command time for anybody that's out there that's looking for a battalion command. And those CA PSYOP training battalions are, in my opinion, you're not only getting your command time done, but it's also a good broadening assignment because you're running a schoolhouse. Right on. How often do you get that opportunity other than going into one of the more traditional training commands? Yeah, 00:10:28 SPEAKER_00 Exactly. See? So I didn't do it. It's not going to be there in perpetuity. 00:11:00 BRIAN HANCOCK you don't. You either work for TRADOC or you become a defense contractor for somebody's school, right? Yeah. 00:11:06 JEFFREY FIDDLER It's a really different experience. I really enjoyed it. I learned a lot about running a schoolhouse. So that was, it was interesting. For example, so my S3 at the battalion was PSYOP. So, you know, you can't do anything without your S3. He didn't work too much with CA. I haven't worked too much with PSYOP, but at the end of the day, we're all wearing a uniform. We're going to figure out a way to make it happen. When I look at 353KCOM, I think they have 2POG underneath them. So now you have three brigade -size commands under there. So I think I understand why KPOC did it. I think we'd have to ask the folks down there, but they were direct reporting, right,…
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One CA Podcast
Today, we welcome Cleo Paskal, Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a frequent lecturer for the U.S. military about the Indo-Pacific region. Cleo came in to discuss the PRC's efforts to infiltrate Guam and the regional islands to undermine US relationships with those communities, the threat it creates to national security, and how we need to do to respond. --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org -- Special thanks to Noel Flores for the sample of the Album Eat Your Greens and song Anger Management by Anita Schwab on his channel Jazz of the South Pacific. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/zfRUrnNhwfs?si=Afcsham-r5Gjnjaj --- Transcript 00:00:04 Introduction Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website, at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes. Today we welcome Cleo Pascal, investigative journalist for Freedom for Democracies and a special lecturer at the Air War College about the Pacific region. Cleo came in today to discuss the PRC's efforts to infiltrate Guam and the regional islands around it to undermine U .S. relationships with those communities, the threat it creates to national security, and how we need to respond. So let's get started. 00:01:04 CLEO PASCAL For most Americans, the idea is that there's the West Coast. Alaska, 00:01:10 JACK GAINES Hawaii. 00:01:11 CLEO PASCAL Alaska, Hawaii. And then if they're being clever, they might go, oh yeah, there's Guam. But the distance between Hawaii and Guam and the location of Guam is often pretty fuzzy. So Guam is maybe two, three hour flight from Manila and maybe five or six hour flight from Honolulu. In fact, it's the other side of the dateline. So if you're going to be very geeky about it, you'll go, is that the west -western part of the U .S. or is that the most eastern part of the U .S.? Because, of course, it's the other side of the dateline. Right. And then what you really need to do is look north of Guam because Guam is the southern part of the Mariana's island chain. It's its own thing. It's its own territory. It's been... part of the United States as a territory since the Spanish -American War, so since the late 19th century, which includes the islands of Saipan and Tinian, and they are also part of the United States. This is where the United States shares a maritime boundary with Japan, and we're the site of some of the most fierce battles of World War II. We just passed the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Saipan and the Battle of Tinian. That became the busiest airport in the world in early mid -1945, where the B -29 bombers were taking off in wave after wave after wave to hit Japan. And that's where the Enola Gay took off from. And that is all the United States of America. Highly strategic, has been for a long time, right off the coast of Asia. In between Hawaii and Guam, there's a whole other stretch of islands, which is the Marshall Islands, the Federal States of Micronesia, and Palau. which are independent countries, but which have signed this completely unique document with the United States called the Compact of Free Association, which gives the U .S. exclusive defense and security rights and responsibilities in those countries. So these are independent countries, along with what is now CNMI, Commonwealth of Northern Marian Islands. 00:03:26 CLEO PASCAL were all part of the Japanese Empire from 1914 to 1944. This is what enabled Japan to be in a position to hit Pearl Harbor and created this impenetrable chunk of the Central Pacific, which meant that U .S. forces had to go south through Guadalcanal, through the Solomon Islands, up through Bougainville, and then come up from the bottom through Tarawa to be able to start to fight its way across east to west. So that control over the Central Pacific that Japan had meant that Japan could keep the U .S. pushed towards Hawaii and isolate Guam. The Japanese hit Guam just after they hit Pearl Harbor and took Guam. So that gave them the whole stretch across the Central Pacific. And after the war ended, the U .S. Navy controlled an area that combined is about as large as the continental United States. and administered it under naval control. And there was all sorts of stuff going on. Saipan was closed to the outside for years. On the record, the Naval Technical Training Unit, I think, was the cover for it. But the CIA basically was running operations in Saipan to train a few Tibetans, but more Taiwanese that were supposed to be sent in to mainland China with disastrous results. The Marshall Islands were nuked 67 times in various nuclear tests. This was kind of an active zone for testing, training, very highly strategically important. And there was a real understanding in D .C. because you had people in Congress who had fought in the Pacific Theater, who knew people who died in these islands, who didn't want that to happen again. The U .S. strategic community knew how important control over this area was to keep the threat contained to the Asian coast. But some of that information has now been lost and the Chinese are all over the place. That assumption that the U .S. can safely get across the Central Pacific to get to its treaty allies and to get to Guam and to get to the bases in Japan and South Korea is now being questioned. 00:05:52 JACK GAINES Is it U .S. defensive officials or is it strategy watchers in the region? 00:05:52 CLEO PASCAL it U 00:05:57 CLEO PASCAL Indo -PACOM is starting to get very concerned. And definitely the leadership in Guam and the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas is starting to say, we've got some serious problems here and we need help. And especially currently the governor of Commonwealth of Northern Marianas is saying, we're seeing Chinese activity that is very disconcerting. And we need help. In my mind, 00:06:21 JACK GAINES we need help. In my mind, I see a lot of water and a few dots of islands reaching back and forth. It's hard to imagine it as a territory. 00:06:32 CLEO PASCAL Yeah. And what you said is if you put your logistics hat on, a lot of water and a few islands, a few islands become really important. So the less land and the more water, the more important that land is. 00:06:47 JACK GAINES Yeah. You want to talk about what? it is that's concerning them about the RC's activities? 00:06:53 CLEO PASCAL Sure. So the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas, which the acronym is CNMI, joined the United States. But when it joined, it kept control over certain aspects of immigration and labor because its economy is so different than the rest of the U .S. Some may remember the issues it had with garment factories, for example. Early on, Chinese interests had set up garment factories there with some pretty horrific labor conditions. But because it was part of the U .S., they could put the Made in the USA label on it. From the beginning, the Chinese were eyeing CNMI's loopholes to figure out how they could use it to gain advantages in the U .S. When China was allowed to enter the World Trade Organization, the value of that disappeared. But it started to shift to earth tourism. where Chinese would come and give birth in CNMI and then they'd have little American babies. You had more recent issues, Chinese -linked casinos. One of them, a few years ago, running more money through it than the casinos in Macau. Billions of dollars. And it was almost exclusively Chinese gamblers. And the way that the money was coming out of China and... Working through corresponding banks to give these lines of credit to these gamblers made it look an enormous amount like money laundering. There was never any proper investigation done by the U .S. government. There are about 40 ,000, 50 ,000 people living in Saipan. And you've got billions in Chinese casino money flowing through the economy. So you can imagine how that distorts politics and the economics of the place. 00:08:39 JACK GAINES Oh, absolutely. Just trying to wonder, what is it that they're laundering? Is it all the commodity trade that they're doing around the world? Is it the fentanyl? 00:08:48 CLEO PASCAL It needs an investigation. We shouldn't be wondering. This is U .S. jurisdiction. So there's absolutely no reason that this question can't be answered. If you go to Garapan, which is the capital I've come with under the Marianas, it's the biggest town in Saipan, by far the biggest building. is this casino, which was almost finished. It had started operations, but it had a whole hotel complex on it. And they had a typical Chinese Communist Party -linked style. They had built it on a grave site, so the locals were just horrified. You know, they dug up ancestors, and there was no proper reburial or anything. Like, the whole thing was just horrific. It was very close to completion. And then one of the construction workers fell off the scaffolding and died. And it turned out that they were not there on a work visa. And this gets to this other question of the visas. So apart from these other loopholes, Chinese can get on a plane in Hong Kong and fly straight to the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas with no visa. And the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas is considered U .S. 00:09:54 JACK GAINES the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas is considered U .S. territory. So they can take a domestic flight from there into the continental U .S.? 00:10:02 CLEO PASCAL They're not supposed to. Supposed to stay in the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas. But there are successful prosecutions of people who have been illegally taking Chinese by boat to Guam. We talked to the mayor of Rota, which is the island closest to Guam. And one Chinese guy who got off the plane in Rota with an inflatable boat as his luggage. Yeah, there have been cases of Chinese sea people with boats on their docks and knock on the door and ask to buy the boat or to get a ride. And they did it for one of the Fish and Wildlife guys. You know, it's not hidden. But the other thing is that the woman who ran the Bureau of Motor Vehicles in the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas has been convicted of selling. driver's licenses, specifically to Chinese. 00:11:01 JACK GAINES Oh, wow. So, 00:11:01 CLEO PASCAL So, yeah. 00:11:03 JACK GAINES Any idea how many she sold? 00:11:05 CLEO PASCAL I don't know, but it wasn't one or two. This was a business. So everything I'm mentioning, there have been people prosecuted for bringing Chinese from CNMI to Guam. The Bureau of Mortar Vehicles woman was found guilty. They've also been using the U .S. Postal Service because, of course, once you're in CNMI, that's the U .S. domestic mail. So using the U .S. Postal Service for distributing drugs, over 30 members of Congress led a letter to Secretary Mayorkas. Why does this loophole persist? And that was in November last year. And they finally got an answer, which said that, well, the Chinese contributed a lot to the tourism economy of CNMI in 2008, 2009. So that was the justification. Oh, wow. The regulations that allow for them to come in say this can be suspended on national security grounds. So it's sort of inexplicable. They're now saying, well, we'll change it from no visas to some sort of electronic semi visa. But there's no reason it shouldn't be a normal visa like any Chinese national going to anywhere else in the United States. 00:12:18 JACK GAINES What else are you finding happening due to the flow of? Chinese tourists into Guam. 00:12:24 CLEO PASCAL We know that one of the big priorities is Taiwan. And we also know that they want to, as much as possible, win without fighting, which is a misnomer because they're fighting. They're just fighting on a different battlefield. 00:12:38 JACK GAINES Yeah. Win without major combat. 00:12:40 CLEO PASCAL Yeah. Win without major loss of Chinese life is probably the more accurate way. But if you're focused on Taiwan, one of your biggest challenges is Guam. You need to disable Guam or take Guam offline somehow. Make it inoperable or ineffective. 00:13:00 JACK GAINES Sure. Because that's where all the aircraft that are going to support Taiwan defense are going to go. 00:13:05 CLEO PASCAL Yeah. And other forms of military support and intel support and all that. And we know that Guam already had issues with Volt Typhoon cyber infiltration into critical infrastructure. And you also, ideally, you want people on the ground. To be very blunt, you can blow up the planes or you can disable them, but you can also kill the pilots. 00:13:30 JACK GAINES But in the waiting without fighting mindset, how do you see their efforts in these islands? 00:13:36 CLEO PASCAL If you've got the Chinese that have come in to CNMI without a visa, very hard to know who they are. There's no background check. They've just gotten on a plane and gotten off the plane. And then they've illegally come into Guam. you don't know who they are. So you have untraceable saboteurs, whatever. And the U .S. military has found Chinese nationals roaming around bases in Guam and have handed them over to the FBI, and I don't know what's happened to them after that. Guam is a problem for them. And being able to get people onto Guam without detection is an advantage. Now, two of the three countries, Palau, and Marshall Islands recognize Taiwan. If they recognize Taiwan, that gives them an added layer of defense because it means there's no Chinese embassy. And the Chinese embassies operate like these forward operating locations. You can run the influence operations and the intel operations more…
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One CA Podcast
Today Brian Hancock interviews Doug Stevens who is an expeditionary pastor, working faith-based diplomacy to improve international relations. The discussion is on his work travelling to partner nations to reach out to locals and leaders to overcome social trauma from war, genocide and help rebuild communities. --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org Links mentioned: Hope international ministries: Hope4nations.org --- Special thanks to Dimitar Dodovski for sampling Keith Jarrett's album Spirits 20. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Yeh7OX5m4E --- Transcript 00:00:03 Introduction Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes. 00:00:38 BRIAN HANCOCK I'm Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hancock, and I will be your host for this session. Today we have with us Pastor Douglas Stevens to discuss religious outreach, relief operations in Ukraine, and mission opportunities in Ukraine. Doug is a graduate of both Cal Berkeley and Fuller Seminary. Doug is active with humanitarian missions in Eastern Europe. in Haiti and elsewhere. He is a people lover, culture watcher, mountain bike rider, and avid world trader. Isn't that the truth? A quick disclaimer to the audience, a reminder, all remarks are solely those of the presenters. Further, due to the subject matter of our session today, some of the content may be a little bit disturbing to some audiences. Now, Doug, I first met you in the United States. when you swooped in to rescue our church as God's quick response force. Do you remember those days? I do. I remember them fondly. It seems like a lifetime ago to me, so much has happened since, but our church is still standing, so you must have done something right. 00:01:36 DOUGLAS STEVENS It seems 00:01:42 DOUGLAS STEVENS Well, it was a great time. I have friendships from that that continue. 00:01:46 BRIAN HANCOCK Outstanding. Some of the things that you do are similar to what we do in the Army of the United States, or at least there are some similarities to it. The way we view the American military is as an expeditionary force. We often go places with large numbers, with lots of equipment and logistics and partnerships. And oftentimes these areas we are going to are characterized by great suffering. Relief agencies may not be able to get in there to operate. So that's usually when the world often turns to the U .S. military. Now, it seems to me that you've spent much of your life in a similar capacity as an expeditionary pastor. 00:02:29 DOUGLAS STEVENS Well, first of all, I just want to say what you're doing and what you represent is not well enough known as a part of the U .S. military's mission, the humanitarian side of that. And I just want to encourage you. So thank you for what you're doing. Now, my experience is on a different plane and yet heading in the same direction, just trying to help people. and have been in a variety of places around the world. In Haiti, for example, serving in Colombia, South America. I have been to Bosnia during the war back in the 90s when things were very tense. That was with World Vision. I have been to Rwanda in East Africa. That was with International Justice Mission. I have been overseas to places like Beijing, China, Cambodia, in the aftermath of their genocide. And have seen light shining in some of the darkest places in the world, places that you wouldn't expect any good news to come out of. And yet some wonderful people doing some heroic work in those places. In fact, we have just returned from more than a weekend in Ukraine. I know that you personally have a podcast that you host. 00:03:34 BRIAN HANCOCK know that you personally have a podcast that you host. Yes. Very, very inspiring. Hello, darkness. Stories that transform. And I'll tell you, having read about... The scenario in Rwanda you mentioned, I think a number of people have watched the movie Hotel Rwanda. Yes. Very dark. You've got Hutu mothers murdering their neighbors Tutsi Chol. Yeah. You've got massive numbers fleeing. Yes. You have the radio saying there is work to be done. Kill the cockroaches. Right. You have female leaderships in the government calling the men in the camps, often stadiums, other places where, Hutu have herded the Tutsis to kill them brutally with machetes and complaining, saying, well, you need to rape these women before you kill them. And they're saying, well, we're just too tired because of all this killing. It's what they were saying at the time. And of course, the international community, we have some bases there and some other things, but we are not allowed to leave the base. There is no protection that is offered by the international community. There is no sanctuary. Clearly, this was hell on earth. It was. Have you seen some light come out of something like that? 00:04:48 DOUGLAS STEVENS It went on for about 90 days back in 1994. That took nearly a million lives, as I understand it. We were there in the aftermath and the recovery time. And they had these wonderful trials for people who had been convicted of murder. But in these trials, you actually had the opportunity for reconciliation. You had the opportunity to extend forgiveness. potential repair of communities. And so we were close to that. We were supporting efforts as that was happening. There was a filmmaker who was there with us. So that was our time in Kigali and the countryside in Rwanda. And pleased to see the development since then. And of course, there are more complications now politically, and that's happening in our world. So that's a whole nother story. 00:05:33 BRIAN HANCOCK I hear you. But I'm also glad to hear that some justice, some reconciliation, some path forward does exist there that you were able to see. Now, in Army Civil Affairs and United States Marine Corps Civil Affairs, both of us work with what we call united action partners. These may be local allies, they may be host nations, oftentimes the non -government organizations. We often can't work directly with them if they need to maintain a neutrality. help both sides, such as Doctors Without Borders. You are for World Vision and I believe a few others. What is it like working with a non -government organization doing this type of work? And did you ever have any interaction with the military in that role? And would you have even liked any interaction with military civil affairs? 00:06:30 DOUGLAS STEVENS Well, we primarily worked with churches and NGOs that were there doing a variety of things, and those folks are the heroes on the ground, often unsung and unrewarded for what they did. But they didn't do it for that reason. They were doing it for the people they loved, the people they were sacrificing for. And we worked very closely with them and wanted to support them because they were the ones who were on the ground. We're going to be there for a long time after we left doing whatever we were doing. And often we were bringing in humanitarian aid. Sometimes we were doing leadership training. Sometimes we were doing reconciliation, conflict resolution, working with local churches that were... suddenly coming back to life again and wanting to encourage them, and the work they were doing in drawing people close to the, well, the work of God, if I can put it bluntly, because what needed to be done seemed impossible. How do you crawl out of this deep, dark hole? But it was happening, and there was a tremendous resurgence of faith in the hearts of many people who were then living it out. Hard to explain how this happened except to call it a miracle. 00:07:35 BRIAN HANCOCK And I'm glad that miracles still do happen. 00:07:37 DOUGLAS STEVENS They do. You have to invest in it. It doesn't happen because you're hoping for it. 00:07:42 BRIAN HANCOCK Right. May of last year, you found yourself in Moldova. Now, that may not be a household name for many folks in America. I knew nothing about it until I went there. 00:07:51 DOUGLAS STEVENS knew nothing about it until I went there. Next door to Ukraine. 00:07:54 BRIAN HANCOCK We have a regionally aligned civil affairs commands who get to know some of these places. And for the European region, civil affairs command is... the 353rd Civil Affairs Command, which is back on the East Coast. And in January 2023, they actually published an excellent article in our flagship publication in the military, the Military Review. You've arrived if you get peer review publication in Military Review. And the functional specialty team, a couple of brilliant captains, published. an article regarding food resiliency in Moldova. So this is a hot topic. Can you tell the audience a bit about the mission that you were doing in Moldova, as well as what you experienced? 00:08:41 DOUGLAS STEVENS Well, Moldova is a relatively poor country inside the EU, hoping to get in, not in NATO yet, hoping to enter, be approved, along with Ukraine, of course. that took in a million refugees in the last couple of years that were flooding out of Ukraine, looking to escape. The Moldovans themselves, many of them literally have their bags packed in case Ukraine is overrun by the Russian invaders. And they know that they would be next and they have no defense. And NATO is not officially obligated to intervene. So right now, for the moment, they look relatively safe, but they have absorbed an awful lot of special needs. coming in from Ukraine. Now, Moldova is also an agricultural country. They produce a lot of what they need, but they were overwhelmed by this crisis that took place. And so there is help coming in from other places. We were able to bring some of those materials in, and we were very impressed by the work of many different missions and churches working together in ways they never have before. And that's happening all across this area. People are working together like they never have. So it's a great thing to watch that happen and be part of it. 00:09:54 BRIAN HANCOCK That's outstanding. And of course, right now, you've got a lot of Russian interference in going Moldavian elections. 00:10:00 DOUGLAS STEVENS We've heard about that. It's still a controversy because Russia apparently is jealously looking at other parts of other countries they would like to retake as part of the Soviet venture. Now, no longer part of the Soviet experiment, which closed down in 1989, 91, somewhere in there. but want to now reestablish, according to Putin, the Holy Russian Empire. And it now has a religious overtone, backed by the Russian Orthodox Church, that basically wants to reclaim all of these lands, whether it's Poland, whether it's Georgia, whether it's Moldova, Ukraine, the Baltic states. We don't know how far this ambition goes, but we've been shocked so far, so nothing right now is going to shock me. 00:10:44 BRIAN HANCOCK I thought we had closed the chapter on large wars in Europe. Maybe not. It sounds like Putin styles himself a bit of a czar. We know how well that worked out. It's a shame that we seem to be heading that direction. Putin's language, of course, is, hey, we want to open another front just to take Ukraine. 00:11:02 DOUGLAS STEVENS And, of course, the war in Ukraine has been going on from at least 2014 when they took Crimea. And then the oblasts in the east, they've been occupying there. And now, of course, trying to come across. Right now, the front is essentially frozen, although I will defer to you and the military for a better estimate of what is actually happening. And we don't know where this is going. And my role, our role, is to come in and support those who are doing this good humanitarian work, especially in the faith -based areas. 00:11:30 BRIAN HANCOCK Yeah, I'd like to tug at that string a little bit, because you just literally, a few days ago, got back from a mission in Ukraine. And I understand that it was a multifaceted mission. You're doing a number of different things, all important works, why you're there. Now, while most of the audience is at least to some degree aware of the mental suffering that's taking place in Ukraine, can you, having some firsthand experience, tell us a little bit about what you saw, what you did, and what you found? 00:12:00 DOUGLAS STEVENS A year ago, when I went into Ukraine, we went from Odessa all the way to Kyrgyzstan, all the way to the front lines, essentially, visiting along the way, doing leadership training, because the churches were asking for that. As people left, all kinds of new people flooded into these churches, which was a surprise to me. I didn't know about that. I wasn't expecting that. I thought maybe they'd be emptied out. But because they are serving so well, not just their own congregation, but the whole community now is looking to the church, even more than the government, which is busy fighting a war to supply those needs. And there are... Of course, other organizations that are there are Samaritan's Purse, World Vision, World Central Kitchen, various other churches in that area. And I had no idea how strong the church was in Ukraine, the evangelical, Protestant, Pentecostal, Catholic working together. Not the Orthodox so much. They tend to be a little bit more aloof. Some of them are still aligned with Russia, even though Russia is the invader. But the other churches working together and mitigating the trauma and the food insecurity and everything else that's needed and providing m…
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One CA Podcast
1 193: Patrick Alley on Global Influence (Part II) 22:09
22:09 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked22:09
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedToday we welcome Patrick Alley, co-founder of Global Witness. Patrick Alley and his team at Global Witness are credited with countering multiple autocrats and kleptocrats worldwide. The most notable is collapsing the Khmer Rouge by exposing the illegal timber trade that was bankrolling the rebels. They created the Blood Diamond campaign to counter the De Beers diamond cartel and multiple rebel groups in Africa that used the conflict to fund some of the most brutal civil wars in the late 1990s. Their findings were also critical for getting the UN Security Council to impose sanctions on Charles Taylor in Liberia and trials for crimes against humanity. Patrick and Global Witness conducted similar operations in Europe and the Americas before he retired and published his first book, Very Bad People in 2022, and now his second book, Terrible Humans, which is available online and will be in bookstores around mid-August. This is part two of a two part episode with Mariah Yager from SMA to cohost the discussion on DOD Integrated Influence. Patrick Alley: Global Witness: https://www.globalwitness.org/ Book, Terrible Humans: https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/patrick-alley/terrible-humans/9781800962385/ Book, Very Bad People: https://www.globalwitness.org/en/blog/very-bad-people-inside-story-fight-against-corruption/ Ted Talk: https://youtu.be/lUIrYBtkfl4 SMA version of the interview: SMA version of the interview: https://nsiteam.com/smaspeakerseries_31july2024/ --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org --- Special thanks to the Juanes Channel for the intro sample of Desde Que Despierto Hasta Que Duermo. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZCeqUVeRMU --- Transcript 00:00:03 Introduction Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail dot com. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes. Welcome, Patrick, to the show. 00:00:40 JACK GAINES This is a quick introduction, and then we'll get right into it. Patrick Alley and his team at Global Witness are credited with countering multiple autocrats and kleptocrats worldwide. The most notable is collapsing the Khmer Rouge by exposing the illegal timber trade that was bankrolling the rebels. They created the Blood Diamond Campaign to counter the De Beers Diamond Cartel that used the conflict to fund some of the most brutal civil wars in the late 1990s. Their findings were also critical in getting the U .N. Security Council to impose sanctions on Charles Taylor in Liberia and the war crimes trials for crimes against humanity. Patrick and Global Witness conducted similar operations in Europe and the Americas before he retired and published his first book, Very Bad People, in 2022, and now his second book, Terrible Humans. which is available online and will be in bookstores around mid -August. So, welcome, Patrick. With all the unrest in Venezuela, Ukraine, Le Levant, Africa, we live in interesting times. 00:01:36 PATRICK ALLEY How are you? I'm good, thank you, and thank you very much for asking me to take part. It's a real privilege. I'm a child of the Cold War, and nuclear war was sort of ever -present when I was younger. We were really quite worried about it. And then the world seemed to be quite a nice place for many years. And it seems we've gone back to Cold War II, which is a bit of a worry. Yeah. 00:02:01 JACK GAINES The reason I brought you on today is because I felt like EOD and the US government overall struggles with strategic competition. We are in action with Russia, China, the four plus one, basically, trying to figure out how to counter their foreign policy goals. And we're finding that they're... more and more using criminal groups or paramilitary groups that have criminal practices to achieve their foreign policy goals. And North and Central Africa are excellent examples with the Russians and Wagner helping to provide coups and then slowly taking over countries' management so that they can get to the mines and to the timber and then selling that to avoid Russian sanctions for the war in Ukraine. Yeah. 00:02:48 PATRICK ALLEY In the case of Wagner, and I have to give credit to the wonderful US -based organization, The Century, but I talked to them extensively for my book, Terrible Humans, and the Central African Republic, CAR for short, and how Wagner has sort of infiltrated. And many people in this call may know this well, but it was an extremely clever and strategic operation. Obviously, we all know Wagner is sort of the deniable arm of Russian military or foreign policy. But how they wheedled their way in, the Russian resource of Sochi with the new president promising him arms, and in the end, not all of the subjects of that conversation were made public, but what obviously transpired, was the Russians did everything for that guy. So first of all, they gave him personal security through Wagner. Wagner created a troll farm, and so they started manipulating public opinion. The Russians created the ruling political party, the Mouvement de l 'accord, the United Hearts movement in Central African Republic. The national election server is based in Russia. And as they were doing all of this, they were training the army in everything from straightforward combat to torture. And then... Wagner troops were with the army and various rebel groups against other rebel groups throughout Central African Republic, not just trying to win battles, but creating terror. The motto was leave no trace. So mass rape, mass execution was the order of the day. And you're right, they also set up companies, particularly in gold. diamonds and timber. A lot of this obviously became much more relevant when Russia unreaded Ukraine and sanctions started to bite, because these valuable commodities are leaving Central African Republic, as we speak, and making their way, or the money from them making their way to Russia. And when I finished that chapter, before the book was published, Wagner arrived in Niger, and there was a coup, the president was locked up. And I thought to myself, I wonder how long it'll be before the population are waving Russian flags in the streets. And it was the next day. And you think, well, they didn't just arrive overnight. There's something in the planning. 00:05:16 JACK GAINES Well, you met the guy that goes out there to prep for an event and passes out flags. 00:05:21 PATRICK ALLEY Yeah, I didn't meet him. I talked to him on Zoom. He was only involved in the Central African example, but it's a really good example. He's called Abdullah Ibrahim. And he was related by marriage to senior people in the government and indeed to the president. And when the new president came in and he was voted in and there was no reason necessarily to think he was going to be awful at that time, this guy went back in and started campaigning politically and building up cells in France, the ruling party amongst the diaspora in France. But then it started getting a bit murky and he was asked, initially to organize welcoming demonstrations so when the first armored vehicles came in from russia they were met by enthusiastic crowds and he was the guy who hired the enthusiastic crowd and bought them the baseball caps and the t -shirts and the flags to wave and gave me the numbers which are frighteningly small i can remember top of my head like 25 30 000 bought a demonstration but then he got even worse and he was asked to impersonate a rebel general, and to call on the killings of these people and those people in order so that Wagner could take advantage of the populations and the resources in those areas. 00:06:38 JACK GAINES so that Wagner could take advantage of the populations and the resources in those areas. 00:06:43 PATRICK ALLEY Yeah, black ops, which by that time he felt he had no choice but to do because he was in a very bad situation. In the end, he fled and he's back in France. So basically, 00:06:53 JACK GAINES basically, Wagner came in, they helped with the governance and security by bringing in forces and training troops. But then they got so close and in tight with leadership in the government, they were able to also dictate the policy within that government and then open up new areas for them to exploit. 00:07:11 PATRICK ALLEY Yeah, that's absolutely right. And I think what's interesting about it is CAR is perhaps the best documented of the countries they've gone into. That's arguable, but I think it probably is. Wagner have a presence. And I was thinking, actually, just over the last day, what can you do about Wagner? And that's maybe the subject of this conversation or another, whatever you like. But one of the things I didn't think of, because it hadn't happened very often, is what happened in Mali over the last few days, where Wagner actually lost on the battlefield. And I think quite a few Wagner troops were killed. And that's not a common thing. Usually they've had the upper hand. So maybe there's another way. 00:07:57 JACK GAINES And do you think that is more of an opposition leader frustrated with doing neocolonial control of the region? Do you think that's a reaction to that? Because I know the Tarigs are famously anti -government in most countries. 00:08:11 PATRICK ALLEY Yes, I think they are. And I honestly don't know the answer to that question. And of course, there were links with al -Qaeda, IS, etc. So it could be any number of reasons. I think going to the point you're making, which I think is the really important one about neocolonialism, is that's exactly what Russia is doing. They were doing it in Libya and Syria way before the invasion of Ukraine. But with the invasion of Ukraine, it's become probably much more important to them, I think, because of the resources that Africa holds. So in a sense, it's straight back to the colonialism perpetrated by the British, the Belgians, the French, the Portuguese a century or more ago. It's the same thing. And it's just as brutal. And it's just as essential. And the global north wants those resources. And I think those countries that we've talked about are important in their own right from a resource perspective amongst others. But if you start looking at places like DR Congo, which possesses two -thirds of the world's cobalt, essential for the energy transition, if the same thing happens there, and I believe Russia did sign a military pact with the Congolese government over the last few months, then, you know, you've got a globally significant problem. 00:09:27 JACK GAINES Right. And we also had talked in the past about how you and Global Witness have also mapped some of Wagner's networks for getting either the resources out or funneling money to Russia in order to avoid sanctions that are going on with Ukraine. I remember you mentioning a gold transfer in the UAE, which now has stopped, correct? 00:09:50 PATRICK ALLEY Yeah, I mean, UAE, I think, is a very good point to raise because it's kind of mafia central, isn't it? It's where you want to go if you want to launder money or launder resources. So I know the US were particularly looking at the activities of a guy called Colotti, who was one of the major gold refiners in UAE, and literally billions of dollars worth of cash transactions, people actually coming off the streets with gold and walking away over a short period of time with billions of dollars for cash. But I think it goes further than that, because one of the things I mentioned in the book, and this was something I think it was CBS News tracked, is that one of the Aleutian 76 transport planes based in CAR flew into the UAE. They tracked it going there. Another Aleutian 76 flew from Russia to UAE, and those planes shared a runway for eight hours. Then they went back to where they came from. No one actually knows. what happened but my suspicions would be that resources were going out arms or whatever were coming in right in your book you were talking about how small banks in the car were being super funded with millions of dollars those monies were then transferred up into was it russia or was that other points basically well actually it was russia trying to bring money with the exchange of money and and the problem that russia had with that 00:10:58 JACK GAINES your book you were talking about how small banks in the car were being super funded with millions of dollars those monies were then transferred up into was it russia or was that other points basically 00:11:08 PATRICK ALLEY that other points basically well actually it was russia trying to bring money with the exchange of money and and the problem that russia had with that was that because most of the correspondent banks, and I think all of the correspondent banks, of banks in CAR are based in France, which theoretically gives the French authorities the ability to monitor transactions. And they thought, well, how are we going to get around that? And then they thought, okay, let's fly the money in by private jet, which is what they resorted to doing in the end. 00:11:37 JACK GAINES So with Global Witness, they're on the ground where they know people and they've got connections and they're building a case. through these observati…
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One CA Podcast
1 192: Patrick Alley on Global Influence (Part I) 26:21
26:21 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked26:21
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedToday we welcome Patrick Alley, co-founder of Global Witness. Patrick Alley and his team at Global Witness are credited with countering multiple autocrats and kleptocrats worldwide. The most notable is collapsing the Khmer Rouge by exposing the illegal timber trade that was bankrolling the rebels. They created the Blood Diamond campaign to counter the De Beers diamond cartel and multiple rebel groups in Africa that used the conflict to fund some of the most brutal civil wars in the late 1990s. Their findings were also critical for getting the UN Security Council to impose sanctions on Charles Taylor in Liberia and trials for crimes against humanity. Patrick and Global Witness conducted similar operations in Europe and the Americas before he retired and published his first book, Very Bad People in 2022, and now his second book, Terrible Humans, which is available online and will be in bookstores around mid-August. This is a two part episode. Next week we bring in Mariah Yager from SMA to cohost the discussion on DOD Integrated Influence. So, stay tuned. LInks: Today we welcome Patrick Alley, co-founder of Global Witness. Patrick Alley and his team at Global Witness are credited with countering multiple autocrats and kleptocrats worldwide. The most notable is collapsing the Khmer Rouge by exposing the illegal timber trade that was bankrolling the rebels. They created the Blood Diamond campaign to counter the De Beers diamond cartel and multiple rebel groups in Africa that used the conflict to fund some of the most brutal civil wars in the late 1990s. Their findings were also critical for getting the UN Security Council to impose sanctions on Charles Taylor in Liberia and trials for crimes against humanity. Patrick and Global Witness conducted similar operations in Europe and the Americas before he retired and published his first book, Very Bad People in 2022, and now his second book, Terrible Humans, which is available online and will be in bookstores around mid-August. This is part two of a two part episode with Mariah Yager from SMA to cohost the discussion on DOD Integrated Influence. Patrick Alley: Global Witness: https://www.globalwitness.org/ Book, Terrible Humans: https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/patrick-alley/terrible-humans/9781800962385/ Book, Very Bad People: https://www.globalwitness.org/en/blog/very-bad-people-inside-story-fight-against-corruption/ Ted Talk: https://youtu.be/lUIrYBtkfl4 SMA version of the interview: https://nsiteam.com/smaspeakerseries_31july2024/ --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org --- Special thanks to the Juanes Channel for the intro sample of Desde Que Despierto Hasta Que Duermo. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZCeqUVeRMU --- Transcript: 00:00:03 Introduction Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail dot com. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes. Welcome, Patrick, to the show. 00:00:40 JACK GAINES This is a quick introduction, and then we'll get right into it. Patrick Alley and his team at Global Witness are credited with countering multiple autocrats and kleptocrats worldwide. The most notable is collapsing the Khmer Rouge by exposing the illegal timber trade that was bankrolling the rebels. They created the Blood Diamond Campaign to counter the De Beers Diamond Cartel that used the conflict to fund some of the most brutal civil wars in the late 1990s. Their findings were also critical in getting the U .N. Security Council to impose sanctions on Charles Taylor in Liberia and the war crimes trials for crimes against humanity. Patrick and Global Witness conducted similar operations in Europe and the Americas before he retired and published his first book, Very Bad People, in 2022, and now his second book, Terrible Humans. which is available online and will be in bookstores around mid -August. So, welcome, Patrick. With all the unrest in Venezuela, Ukraine, Le Levant, Africa, we live in interesting times. 00:01:36 PATRICK ALLEY How are you? I'm good, thank you, and thank you very much for asking me to take part. It's a real privilege. I'm a child of the Cold War, and nuclear war was sort of ever -present when I was younger. We were really quite worried about it. And then the world seemed to be quite a nice place for many years. And it seems we've gone back to Cold War II, which is a bit of a worry. Yeah. 00:02:01 JACK GAINES The reason I brought you on today is because I felt like EOD and the US government overall struggles with strategic competition. We are in action with Russia, China, the four plus one, basically, trying to figure out how to counter their foreign policy goals. And we're finding that they're... more and more using criminal groups or paramilitary groups that have criminal practices to achieve their foreign policy goals. And North and Central Africa are excellent examples with the Russians and Wagner helping to provide coups and then slowly taking over countries' management so that they can get to the mines and to the timber and then selling that to avoid Russian sanctions for the war in Ukraine. Yeah. 00:02:48 PATRICK ALLEY In the case of Wagner, and I have to give credit to the wonderful US -based organization, The Century, but I talked to them extensively for my book, Terrible Humans, and the Central African Republic, CAR for short, and how Wagner has sort of infiltrated. And many people in this call may know this well, but it was an extremely clever and strategic operation. Obviously, we all know Wagner is sort of the deniable arm of Russian military or foreign policy. But how they wheedled their way in, the Russian resource of Sochi with the new president promising him arms, and in the end, not all of the subjects of that conversation were made public, but what obviously transpired, was the Russians did everything for that guy. So first of all, they gave him personal security through Wagner. Wagner created a troll farm, and so they started manipulating public opinion. The Russians created the ruling political party, the Mouvement de l 'accord, the United Hearts movement in Central African Republic. The national election server is based in Russia. And as they were doing all of this, they were training the army in everything from straightforward combat to torture. And then... Wagner troops were with the army and various rebel groups against other rebel groups throughout Central African Republic, not just trying to win battles, but creating terror. The motto was leave no trace. So mass rape, mass execution was the order of the day. And you're right, they also set up companies, particularly in gold. diamonds and timber. A lot of this obviously became much more relevant when Russia unreaded Ukraine and sanctions started to bite, because these valuable commodities are leaving Central African Republic, as we speak, and making their way, or the money from them making their way to Russia. And when I finished that chapter, before the book was published, Wagner arrived in Niger, and there was a coup, the president was locked up. And I thought to myself, I wonder how long it'll be before the population are waving Russian flags in the streets. And it was the next day. And you think, well, they didn't just arrive overnight. There's something in the planning. 00:05:16 JACK GAINES Well, you met the guy that goes out there to prep for an event and passes out flags. 00:05:21 PATRICK ALLEY Yeah, I didn't meet him. I talked to him on Zoom. He was only involved in the Central African example, but it's a really good example. He's called Abdullah Ibrahim. And he was related by marriage to senior people in the government and indeed to the president. And when the new president came in and he was voted in and there was no reason necessarily to think he was going to be awful at that time, this guy went back in and started campaigning politically and building up cells in France, the ruling party amongst the diaspora in France. But then it started getting a bit murky and he was asked, initially to organize welcoming demonstrations so when the first armored vehicles came in from russia they were met by enthusiastic crowds and he was the guy who hired the enthusiastic crowd and bought them the baseball caps and the t -shirts and the flags to wave and gave me the numbers which are frighteningly small i can remember top of my head like 25 30 000 bought a demonstration but then he got even worse and he was asked to impersonate a rebel general, and to call on the killings of these people and those people in order so that Wagner could take advantage of the populations and the resources in those areas. 00:06:38 JACK GAINES so that Wagner could take advantage of the populations and the resources in those areas. 00:06:43 PATRICK ALLEY Yeah, black ops, which by that time he felt he had no choice but to do because he was in a very bad situation. In the end, he fled and he's back in France. So basically, 00:06:53 JACK GAINES basically, Wagner came in, they helped with the governance and security by bringing in forces and training troops. But then they got so close and in tight with leadership in the government, they were able to also dictate the policy within that government and then open up new areas for them to exploit. 00:07:11 PATRICK ALLEY Yeah, that's absolutely right. And I think what's interesting about it is CAR is perhaps the best documented of the countries they've gone into. That's arguable, but I think it probably is. Wagner have a presence. And I was thinking, actually, just over the last day, what can you do about Wagner? And that's maybe the subject of this conversation or another, whatever you like. But one of the things I didn't think of, because it hadn't happened very often, is what happened in Mali over the last few days, where Wagner actually lost on the battlefield. And I think quite a few Wagner troops were killed. And that's not a common thing. Usually they've had the upper hand. So maybe there's another way. 00:07:57 JACK GAINES And do you think that is more of an opposition leader frustrated with doing neocolonial control of the region? Do you think that's a reaction to that? Because I know the Tarigs are famously anti -government in most countries. 00:08:11 PATRICK ALLEY Yes, I think they are. And I honestly don't know the answer to that question. And of course, there were links with al -Qaeda, IS, etc. So it could be any number of reasons. I think going to the point you're making, which I think is the really important one about neocolonialism, is that's exactly what Russia is doing. They were doing it in Libya and Syria way before the invasion of Ukraine. But with the invasion of Ukraine, it's become probably much more important to them, I think, because of the resources that Africa holds. So in a sense, it's straight back to the colonialism perpetrated by the British, the Belgians, the French, the Portuguese a century or more ago. It's the same thing. And it's just as brutal. And it's just as essential. And the global north wants those resources. And I think those countries that we've talked about are important in their own right from a resource perspective amongst others. But if you start looking at places like DR Congo, which possesses two -thirds of the world's cobalt, essential for the energy transition, if the same thing happens there, and I believe Russia did sign a military pact with the Congolese government over the last few months, then, you know, you've got a globally significant problem. 00:09:27 JACK GAINES Right. And we also had talked in the past about how you and Global Witness have also mapped some of Wagner's networks for getting either the resources out or funneling money to Russia in order to avoid sanctions that are going on with Ukraine. I remember you mentioning a gold transfer in the UAE, which now has stopped, correct? 00:09:50 PATRICK ALLEY Yeah, I mean, UAE, I think, is a very good point to raise because it's kind of mafia central, isn't it? It's where you want to go if you want to launder money or launder resources. So I know the US were particularly looking at the activities of a guy called Colotti, who was one of the major gold refiners in UAE, and literally billions of dollars worth of cash transactions, people actually coming off the streets with gold and walking away over a short period of time with billions of dollars for cash. But I think it goes further than that, because one of the things I mentioned in the book, and this was something I think it was CBS News tracked, is that one of the Aleutian 76 transport planes based in CAR flew into the UAE. They tracked it going there. Another Aleutian 76 flew from Russia to UAE, and those planes shared a runway for eight hours. Then they went back to where they came from. No one actually knows. what happened but my suspicions would be that resources were going out arms or whatever were coming in right in your book you were talking about how small banks in the car were being super funded with millions of dollars those monies were then transferred up into was it russia or was that other points basically well actually it was russ…
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One CA Podcast
1 191: Drew Biemer on Energy Sector Civil Affairs 22:21
22:21 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked22:21
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedToday, Assad Raza interviews Drew Biemer, an energy outreach strategist and senior advisor to the New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission. Drew has experience leading domestic and international campaigns to support energy sector projects and came on the show to discuss how Civil and Public Affairs are key to building positive relationships between projects and the population. --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org --- Special Thanks to Sahraoui and Fadela for providing the sample of "Mani" from the album Arabic Groove. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCJI52eWDLw&list=PLloxRkIwt8TNujJnQFxjH7kJ0yjKJkpeg&index=7 --- Transcript 00:00:03 Introduction Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail dot com. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes. 00:00:39 ASAD RAZA I'm your host, Asad Raza, and today our guest is Drew Beamer. Drew is a management and communications professional with 20 years of experience in governmental, public, and civil affairs. He is the current administrator of the Site Evaluation Committee, SEC for short, the Agency Directorate for Energy Facility, Sitting, Permitting, and Enforcement of Compliance, in the U .S. state of New Hampshire. Thank you, Drew. I've been following your Baseload Power newsletter on LinkedIn for a while, and you touched on a broad list of topics from leadership to strategy to include civil affairs and information operations. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. 00:01:12 DREW BEAMER It's great to be here. So what got you interested in the topic? Well, my early career was spent in political campaign management, and I segged into public affairs on energy and infrastructure projects in my 30s. That was a very interesting time because I got to see firsthand a lot of the strategies and tactics that seemed to work and that seemed to not work in energy and infrastructure development. I've spent a lot of time in the United States and in Africa working on energy projects. And one of the reasons I'm interested in civil affairs as a discipline and as a strategy is a lot of these concepts translate well. into infrastructure development. And I'm definitely a squeaky wheel on this stuff because a lot of the infrastructure developers don't take these things seriously. They believe they can just go in and they can tell you the benefits of a project and that you're going to support it. And then that's it. So I'm passionate about this topic because as the United States strives for our own energy security, as we strive to extend our hegemony throughout the developing world. This topic is extremely important. And as you've mentioned on your podcast before, this is the last three feet of diplomacy. And the last three feet is probably the most important. 00:02:35 ASAD RAZA Drew, I really like how you are applying civil affairs strategies and information operations to civilian sectors, specifically the infrastructure development. So why are civil affairs strategies important in energy resource development? 00:02:48 DREW BEAMER Well, one thing that energy developers need to realize, every single boot on the ground, is an arm of this operation. Every single person who interacts with the local community, whether you're a line worker on a utility project or you're a soldier in theater, the tactical missteps can create massive strategic problems. And one of the things that energy developers do not take seriously is that even if you're working on a domestic energy project in the United States, the local population is going to view you as an occupying force. That doesn't mean they'll view you in a negative light. It just means that they will view you as an occupying force. Most of the time, your construction workers and your contractors are going to be new people to the region. They're going to have cultural differences that may rub locals the wrong way. And what you really need to focus on is how do we endear ourselves to the local population? How do we let them know that we're going to be good community partners? is not achieved by simply telling them things. You need to actually build that capital and you need to build that capital before you need it. Because a lot of projects will just parachute in and they'll say, hey, we're here to help support our project. And that's not an effective strategy. You need to be on the ground in advance. You need to be listening to folks. You need to be helping them address their problems. And then once you've built capital, then you can call on that capital when it comes time to build something and you need local support. 00:04:25 ASAD RAZA Drew, I like the way how you frame that. When we were in Iraq and Afghanistan, they had a saying about the strategic corporal, that corporal that's on the ground engaging with the local population. Any actions that they're doing can have a strategic impact negatively or positively. So what are some of the common pitfalls that developers fall into during the process? There's a phrase called the engineer's fallacy. 00:04:47 DREW BEAMER the engineer's fallacy. And the engineer's fallacy states that an engineer will interpret any lack of support, any deficit in support as the stakeholders not having all the facts. So what I mean by that is I propose a project. You're a local stakeholder. You oppose the project. The engineer's fallacy says that I will address your opposition with just more facts because I believe in the project so much that I believe. that any opposition from you is just a deficit of facts. I don't take into account that it might be an emotional argument. I don't take into account that I've failed to build capital with you. And this engineer's fallacy is inherent in a lot of civil affairs context. You certainly look at some of the hearts and minds campaigns that we've embarked on in the 20th century and the early 21st century. is you don't win hearts and minds by just telling people why your way of life is the best, right? You don't win hearts and minds on an energy project by going into the region and just selling people on facts alone. You need to build capital with people. So one of the pitfalls that developers fall into is, first of all, they're not in the field early enough. They show up when they support, not before. And then they don't take into account the fact that a lot of these arguments become cultural and or emotional arguments, not necessarily factual arguments. So you need to exercise a good bedside manner. You need to make sure that locals know that you are there to help them solve their problems, rather. And once you've done that effectively, then you're going to get support. or minimally you're going to mitigate opposition. 00:06:43 ASAD RAZA Interesting when you're talking about the engineer fallacy, engineers motivated or driven by facts when other stakeholders, specifically the local populations, are probably viewing the problem through either emotions or some other interest versus just the facts alone. So how do you shift the mindsets for engineers that are focused on the facts and driven by their own views and help them to look at the problem through the local population's eyes? That's a good question. I would say that civil affairs, 00:07:09 DREW BEAMER that civil affairs, public affairs, government affairs is important enough that the person running the entire project should be from one of those disciplines. They should not be an engineer. And this goes into a lot of corporate environments and a lot of governmental environments where people promote subject matter experts, the leadership positions. And there's a saying that when you're a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. When you're an engineer in charge of a major. infrastructure project, every problem looks like an engineering problem. So one of the things that I did in the private sector as a consultant is I would get put over top of these big projects. They could be adjacent to energy development or they could be like disaster power restoration projects. We have to communicate real time with stakeholders in the community and you need to communicate with local elected officials and local governments to give them real time updates. So in those scenarios, they would call on people like me to lead an ad hoc team that we assembled. And that team would include people who are above my pay grade. I mean, they would have people who are directors and VPs of companies. You'd have external consultants. You'd have people who had more experience. And the way that you get them out of that engineer fallacy mindset, you need the person running it to understand the nuances of the campaigns. You need to demonstrate proof of life on your concepts. You need to be able to demonstrate how focusing on things like civil affairs and public affairs make everybody's life easier. Because when you avoid those small tactical missteps, you don't create major strategic blunders for yourself. And the other issue is once you've painted yourself or you've allowed opponents to paint you as an occupying force, anything you do positively or negatively will be held against you. I've worked in scenarios where we were trying to build an energy project and the developer had let the information space get away from them. And they would say things like, we may have to use eminent domain to get the property needed for this project. And people would say, well, that's corporations taking private property. Then the developer would say, well, we're just going to pay a lot of money. We're going to pay several times value for your project. And the opponents would say, now you're just paying people off. You want to avoid those damned if you do, damned if you don't situations. And one of the issues, circle back to the crux of your question, is the engineer's fallacy is avoidable for the same reason a lot of these types of issues are avoidable. I would recommend against putting a subject matter expert in charge of one of these projects. You need somebody who's more of a generalist and more of a manager. And just like a military operation, you want the commanding officer to understand all the different components. They don't have to be an expert in all the components, but they have to know how they work synergistically with one another to create a holistic operation. And an engineer, generally speaking, is not going to be very good at that. 00:10:13 ASAD RAZA That makes sense. Engineers aren't developed to think like that. They're developed to be engineers and be subject matter experts within their field. So which makes sense. You hit something and you're talking about how your competitors can exploit these tactical mishaps. So how can some of these energy projects become proxy wars between their competitors or their meat peers? In the United States, you have a dynamic that's called astroturfing. 00:10:36 DREW BEAMER a dynamic that's called astroturfing. I'm assuming it exists elsewhere in the world. But astroturfing is basically the manufacturing of grassroots, okay, through dark money. So when one company proposes an energy project, you'll see grassroots opposition crop up. They'll all be singing off the same sheet of music. The messaging will be dialed in. They'll have branded collateral materials. They'll have yard signs. They'll have t -shirts. And I would say nine times out of 10, that opposition is funded and ginned up by whoever your competitor is, usually an industry incumbent. Okay. So there's a dynamic that we've seen in proxy wars in the past hundred years anyway. And that is that In a proxy war, sometimes you want to defeat the enemy, but other times you just want to bog them down. You just want them to bleed out money forever and ever and ever. So you were building a hydroelectric project and your chief competitor in the market was a nuclear power plant. The operators of the nuclear power plant are going to have a cost assessment where they're going to say, if your hydro dam comes online, it's going to cost them X millions of dollars a month in lost revenue. So if it's going to cost X millions of dollars a month in lost revenue, then if they can delay you by a year, they've just made X times 12 in found money. So what they will do is they will hire political operatives to create a grassroots insurgency against your project. And bringing it back to the engineer's fallacy, the grassroots insurgency will be based primarily on emotion. It will be people who... at the grassroots level who've been convinced that your project is going to completely destroy their way of life for one reason or another. It's going to have environmental issues. It's going to have cultural issues. They're going to throw a lot of messages at the wall and they're going to see what sticks because one of these messages is going to saturate. And the engineer's fallacy is people will look at this grassroots opposition and they'll say, well, we can sway them on. facts and reason and logic. We're just going to tell them how clean the power is, how many jobs it's going to create, how it's going to improve energy security and lower energy prices. We keep telling them those facts. They'll have no other choice but to eventually support us. And that works almost as well as going into South Vietnam and telling people that the American way of life is the way everybody should live. absent cultural context, absent building capital, the facts are not going to matter, which is why one of the reasons I say, if you think you're going to build something somewhere, get in the field very, v…
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One CA Podcast
1 190: Pavlo Kukhta on Ukraine Reconstruction 34:22
34:22 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked34:22
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedToday, we welcome Pavlo Kukhta, Ukrainian Economist and Special Advisor on Reconstruction. Additionally, Mariah Yager from SMA joined me as cohost of the conversation. We brought in Pavlo to discuss the current state of conflict reconstruction, the strategy for post-conflict reconstruction, and how to overcome challenges like balancing government oversight with designing a system that removes major corruption while managing Ukraine's transition into the EU. I set up this interview because I know that many diplomats, aid workers, and servicemembers are focused on helping Ukraine now and after the conflict. --- One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org --- Pavlo's info: https://ua.linkedin.com/in/pavlo-kukhta-93190091 SMA version of the interview: https://nsiteam.com/smaspeakerseries_20june2024/ Special Thanks to Jamming Edward for the music sample. Retrieved from: https://youtu.be/lRboIm0tlqE?si=be0Mai-k4EsIQr3h --- Transcript 00:00:07 Inroduction Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail dot com. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes. Today we welcome Pavlo Kufta, Ukrainian economist and special advisor on reconstruction, and Mariah Yeager from SMA to co -host the conversation. 00:00:52 JACK GAINES We brought in Pavlo to discuss the current state of conflict reconstruction and the strategy for post -conflict reconstruction, as well as how to overcome the challenges of balancing government oversight with designing a system that removes major corruption while managing Ukraine's transition into the EU. I set up this interview because I know there are a lot of diplomats, aid workers, and service members focused on helping Ukraine now and after the conflict. So let's get started. I think it's critical that people are looking forward to the future of Ukraine, the vision of where it's going and how it could be. And your work has been seminal in going around the international community, talking to leaders, talking to people about how important it is to support Ukraine in its current fight, but also to look at the future and how Ukraine can be a partner in the international community and how they can help support making that happen. 00:01:48 PAVLO KUFTA Oh, and by the way, I have to give a warning to you guys. If I drop out suddenly, this means there is a blackout. Because periodically electricity goes out, unfortunately, these days in Ukraine. So I will be back with you in a minute or two. I just simply need to shift to my mobile. Actually, that's kind of my main job these days. I'm working with a whole bunch of companies, mostly European, mostly from Central Europe, on getting them into the reconstruction effort. Right now, a lot of it is focused on energy. We spend about a third of our time here without electricity. I mean, I have a generator in my house. I'm also installing battery systems now. With all that, I should be going more or less independently. Most of Ukrainians actually live in multi -apartment buildings. Millions of families suffer from that, and into the winter it will be even tougher. And here I actually have to thank the American public for their help, because it's actually USAID spearheading the provision of gas generation. the small steel power plant running a natural gas to Ukraine for the winter to actually make it through. Because the blackouts will be with us for a year or two now, but one thing is to periodically have electricity, another is freeze to death in the winter. We really need that equipment here that aid is quite appreciated. It's life -saving. 00:03:17 JACK GAINES Now, you're private industry, but you're also the senior advisor to the Minister of Finance on... Ukraine Reconstruction, right? 00:03:25 PAVLO KUFTA Reconstruction. We're actually now out. You've heard about the old team. 00:03:30 JACK GAINES Yeah, Mr. Mustafa, right? Mustafa is the head of the agency, and Mr. Alexander Kubrick, 00:03:36 PAVLO KUFTA who was an advisor, he was the deputy prime minister for Reconstruction. Now the team for the Reconstruction is not in limbo, but it's hanging up in the air. We don't know who will be appointed, how will the system work now? 00:03:51 JACK GAINES Well, like most cabinets in war, people rotate in and out because of stress, because of politics, family, everything else. Well, there's politics in every country, right? Yeah. Because as a private citizen working in a private industry, you're able to continue focusing even as the reshuffles occur. 00:04:09 PAVLO KUFTA I've been working on that simply as a voice in Ukraine, respected and heard as one of the top economists in the nation, as someone who has close relationships to literally everyone in the government. These are my former colleagues for many years. Some of them I've known for more than a decade we've worked together. So I'm working with everyone, and reconstruction has been my priority since a short stunt at the front lines. 00:04:57 JACK GAINES We all have skills that we have to go forward with. Right, but your work in economics is much larger. 00:05:04 PAVLO KUFTA The magnitude is totally different. So since then, I've been engaged mostly in the efforts for reconstruction of Ukraine. I've produced some internal reports to the government and how to help construction so that it is most conducive to private sector. Because my firm opinion is that the key to get Western multinationals, 00:05:27 PAVLO KUFTA because that is the type of economic agent. or let's say stakeholders that we lack in Ukraine. I mean, there are many multinationals here. They're working here, they're present in the market, but compared to the more successful economies of Eastern Europe who are in the EU, the share of international companies, multinationals present there is much larger. And consequently, the structure of the economy is much different, much less resource -based. more complex, more production -oriented, more knowledge -based. So that is what we want to do, right? We will not be rebuilding this old Soviet industry that has been destroyed by the war. It's useless. Just to illustrate, so these blackouts, why are they happening? Because the Russians have done a concentrated, unfortunately quite successful, assault and sprained on Ukrainian energy system. But what they have destroyed, they have destroyed all power. That's the bulk of the assets that they have wiped out. They've also damaged heavily old hydroelectric dams, but the main problem comes from these full power plants. These were old Soviet assets, essentially in our conditions in Europe destined for being thrown out. We're switching to gas. Europe is switching to green renewables. That's what happened to them anyway. So what the Russians have done is in a very destructive and catastrophic fashion, but they've... If destruction, that would have happened anyway. Because the coal power plants are out. We're not going to lose. But the question is what to build instead. Because depending on the success on that endeavor, that is actually, you know, the definition of victory here for me. Because victory is not just getting Russians out or getting to some stable peace. Victory is throwing them out, drawing the iron curtain behind them. and then rebuilding Ukraine in a way that would clearly make it as successful as its EU natives. Because that way, we will firmly get this territory and this nation into the West, integrate them in such a way where it will become fixed. In the same way as Poland has become fixed as part of the Western alliance, in the same way as Slovakia has become fixed as part of the Western alliance. Even Hungary, with all these political issues around it, political conflicts. still is firmly fixed in NATO, EU, Western political structures, and ultimately it's not about anywhere. And that is actually the goal, which I believe it's not just about restoring justice, it's not just about stopping bloody war, it's also about finally closing that tissue between the two worlds, between the West and the authoritarian Asia that Russia essentially represents. Because if Ukraine is no more in some kind of gray zone where we don't know what it is, the two sides can fight for it. Or at least Russia can pretend it's fighting the West over Ukraine, right? While the West was not really fighting and then had to come in to help Ukraine. So we close that picture. Once that picture is closed, once it's clear to everybody where the border between the two civilization and the border should run on the eastern border of Ukraine. 00:08:38 JACK GAINES Okay. Have you been working with Parliament on building up better foreign investment laws to protect companies coming in with the government of Ukraine as well as going out into the international community and recruiting foreign investment? 00:08:54 PAVLO KUFTA Actually, that's kind of what my career was mostly about. It's not about fighting groups or some kind of social justice. It's about an old Soviet corrupt model of the economy where essentially, Whoever is in power, whoever has begun, exploits everyone else, extracts resources from them. Versus the modern, liberal, normal market economy, where people earn money meritocratically, right? Whose ideas is better, who work more devoted wins, resources. And that's how it worked. And that's at the core of this question of Ukraine. Because you hear a lot of talks about Ukrainian corruption. Mostly these go nowhere. either descriptions of some corrupt officials, but this doesn't really tell you the nature of what we're dealing with. And we're dealing with this old legacy, because that is how the Soviet system essentially comes. You had the party and their apparatus, kind of keeping everyone else enslaved and then exploiting them. That's international, that's what Soviet Union was. Since that system did not really collapse, rather there was a kind of gradual transition. The former communists declared themselves now to be nationalists and pretended they are pro -independent Ukraine. Well, really, they are the former party bosses. Unlike to the West, unlike in Poland, where the system crashed and the new people came and the old guys were kicked out, and Ukraine did not happen. And that's why Ukraine went on this different path, much less successful. Because then no really quick and sharp reforms were possible. Well, there was a lot of shock here, but there was no therapy. because there were no real market reform. Instead, there was this mishmash of gradual introduction of market mechanisms into the Soviet system, which allowed to generate future profits, which created dollar guards, which created all kinds of injustices, instead of a normal market economy where you compete in whoever is better with. So that legacy is the problem, and that's what we're trying to get rid. And it's a fight right now. These days, it's a fight. I believe to win it, what we need is a proper... integration into the eu so it's kind of a carrot stick where the country has to change its system in exchange for money but not just giveaways for it to grow just hand something into the budget and you know they pay pensions with it no what we're talking about is an exchange okay you change your environment we give you structural funds to build up infrastructure to attract investment So the reforms create a better environment for the actors which we bring in to then change our economy, kick out the oligarchs. And then in a proper market time, really corruption, it doesn't disappear, right? Then you need a strong state, good institutions to fight it. 00:11:44 MARIAH YEAGER Thank you. What is the scope for greater political decentralization as a route to limiting corruption? 00:11:52 PAVLO KUFTA So decentralization has been ongoing in Ukraine. It's been a tool used pretty heavily over Europe. So all European countries were pretty centralized, unlike the U .S. Federal nations, all European countries used to be very centralized at some point. Then they realized that it's very inefficient. And they've started descent. It makes the system more efficient because it introduces competition on the level of local authorities. The decision -making is much closer to people, so it's much more effective and more efficient. It's simply a better system. It's not necessarily a tool for fighting. Because what happens is corruption from the center and it moves to the big cities or towns, local buildings. Not necessarily better. I mean, the examples are everywhere, including the states. We all know, like, towns captured by corrupt officials who then start rigging local election systems. perpetuating themselves in power, even in very developed countries. So these things can happen in any of this environment. So no, decentralization, I would say it's just simply a necessary reform for a modern way of life, because our modern societies are way too complex to be governed for one capital city. And that's why, you know, when people start talking about using some kind of strategist model, free construction of Ukraine, right? Let the state control everything and it will run everything. They don't know what they're talking about because that is exactly the way to create new oligarchy, new corruption, and to fail miserably. We need to keep it as a free market competition, as many Western companies and businesses as we can get, as much Western funding, Wester…
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Marine wife Erin Corwin was just 19 years old when she disappeared in California’s Joshua Tree National Park. Nearly two months later, her body was found in an abandoned mine in the unforgiving desert, and suspicions quickly fell on a fellow Marine. “48 Hours” and “NCIS” join forces, merging the award-winning journalism of one of the most celebrated true crime news programs with the world’s #1 TV franchise, to bring you the real-life cases that NCIS agents will never forget. This 6-episode p ...
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America is more divided than ever—but it doesn’t have to be. Open to Debate offers an antidote to the chaos. We bring multiple perspectives together for real, nonpartisan debates. Debates that are structured, respectful, clever, provocative, and driven by the facts. Open to Debate is on a mission to restore balance to the public square through expert moderation, good-faith arguments, and reasoned analysis. We examine the issues of the day with the world’s most influential thinkers spanning s ...
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The Young Turks is Home of The Progressives. Cenk Uygur, Ana Kasparian and a host of progressive voices deliver the news and provocative commentary. Whether you are seeking a breakdown of current events, politics and the mainstream media or just a quick laugh, the TYT daily podcast will always keep you informed and entertained.
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Jay Rayner hosts a culinary panel show packed full of tasty titbits that might change the way we think about food, cooking and eating. An expert panel answers audience questions.
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