 I'm Dan Rundy. I hold the Shrier Chair here at CSIS. We're going to be talking about typhoon hyan, lessons learned in effective coordination of international disaster relief. I think we're going to have a very interesting conversation. I'm going to just wait a second while my colleagues, the other panelists come up and join us. Maria and Praveen, if you guys could just please come up, that would be wonderful. Thank you very much. Are we going to show a video? Okay, we're not going to show a video. Okay, good. That's good. I prefer not to show a video. But let me just, I think the thing to take away from typhoon hyan is a terrible natural disaster happened almost six months ago. But oftentimes, at these sorts of conversations, there's a bad news story. This is not a bad news story, and certainly there was a terrible tragedy, but out of a terrible tragedy is a good news story. And the good news story is the resilient response of the Philippine government, the effective partnership between the US military and the Philippine military, the effective partnership of the UN agencies and the private sector, we're going to talk about that, the effective partnership of UN agencies and donor countries, such as the United States government and others. I'm going to list some of the other donor governments. And the fact that many things were taken care of in a way swiftly and in a coordinated way, taking advantage of changes in technologies and practice in the disaster response space over the last five, 10 years, and some lessons learned from other disasters that many lies were saved and the response to the disaster has been very impressive. So I think this is a good ultimately out of the tragedies come a good news story and a lot of room for optimism and hope for the Philippines. I also think though that as part of the response, there's been some important, if I can put it this way, this wasn't expected, this wasn't part of the what was expected, but I do think that there have been some unexpected geostrategic outcomes that have come about as a result of the response to Typhoon Haiyan or as known as Typhoon Yolanda. Let me just list the donors in terms of government, government contributions to the response. The number one donor to the response of Typhoon Haiyan was the United Kingdom government with $110 million, very, very significant and in some ways unexpected. Then the United States at $90.9 million, Canada very generously at $63 million, Japan with $58.9 million, and Australia at $38.7 million. You notice on this list, you don't see the government of China. The government China gave, I believe, a grand total of $100,000 and a hospital. I think this is a lesson and opportunity for China to think about its public diplomacy and how it's perceived in the region. I will use that as an editorial comment, but I also think even though the United States has held in very high regard in the Philippines already and we have a deep and long friendship with the Philippines, I do suspect that the effectiveness of the U.S. response and partnership through the private sector as well as through U.N. agencies, I also think has set the table for the very recent military security partnership agreement that was signed in the last 10 days. I think it created sort of the conditions for greater acceptance in the Philippines for a deeper security partnership with the United States. As I said, it wasn't planned, but I do think it's one of the knock-on effects that I think is there in the sort of one of the elephants in the room that I think we just need to be aware of. But now let's go to the main reason why we're here today and talk about the response, the effectiveness of the response, and the good news story that came out of this tragedy. So without further ado, I'm going to turn the floor over to each of the panelists. You have their biographies in front of you, but I'm going to ask, first, Maria Austria, who is the Deputy Chief of Mission for the Embassy of the Republic of the Philippines here in the United States, to kick us off. Maria, the floor is yours. We're moving into a new building. If there's good news is we have a new building. The bad news is we're still working out the kinks, so sorry about that, folks. Thank you. I'll try to keep my remarks brief and confined to three main areas. What happened and how it affected us? What have we done and where do we want to go from there? So for a country used to typhoons and natural disasters, we have an average of 20 every single year. The typhoon, the typhoon Haiyan was really one for the books and created the humanitarian crisis that would have challenged any government. So 14.1 million people were affected with more than 4.1 million displaced. Over 6,000 people killed and to this day, over 1,700 people remain missing or unaccounted for. The difficulty is many entire families were lost, so we have difficulty in tracking down exactly who died, who was found, who remained missing because of this difficulty. One very graphic description was it's like a giant fist came down from heaven and pounded the entire area, so there were areas where there were practically no survivors. So the immediate humanitarian effort we launched had to contend with a number of significant challenges. The wide area of destruction scattered over many islands, meant great difficulty in getting into the affected areas. This was compounded by lack of transportation, extremely limited or in some places absolutely no communications and damaged infrastructure. Humanitarian supplies and personnel arrived within days, but we had difficulty in getting them to the more remote areas. So when we did get the supplies into the staging areas like the bigger islands like Takloban, we then experienced a problem with capacity. So after a few planes came in, we already were fully booked, the airport was fully booked. So we had to go into creative responses to make sure we were able to distribute the supplies and aid effectively. So at the time, we were very grateful for the help of both of many foreign governments, including the United States governments and many NGOs. So from the life-saving early days, we went into more programmatic areas like emergency livelihood. So we implemented cash for work programs, particularly in the area of debris clearing. We asked the survivors to come in and help clear debris in exchange for cash handouts, which they used for their immediate needs to supplement the aid that was coming in. So we also did clearing and tried to transform the 44 million failed coconut trees into usable cocoa lumber for temporary shelters. For the fishermen, we mobilized private sector organizations to try to rebuild boats to be able for them to sustain their livelihood. So six months later, a UN report describes this humanitarian situation as fragile, but stabilized across the affected regions largely because of the humanitarian response coupled with the survivors' remarkable resilience. I think this is a very apt description of what happened to the Philippines and how we managed to get through the immediate phases of the crisis through the Filipinos' resilience and the help that poured out from the international community. So the initial response was food and humanitarian efforts, food and humanitarian supplies, and now we are moving on to support for long-term efforts like permanent shelter, long-term employment for the displaced people, education, and the auxiliary services. So in December, the Philippine government launched what we call the REI plan, or the Rehabilitation Assistance for Yolanda. So the president also appointed a presidential assistant for rehabilitation and recovery who in turn formed cluster groups to address the different sectors such as infrastructure, resettlement, livelihood, social services, and support services. So the Philippine government is very much aware that may be just the beginning of more destructive storms due to climate change, storms that we have not seen before. And we are particularly concerned at this point because by next month, the typhoon season will start, and it will go on for the next five months or so. So we are very anxious to make sure that the communities, specifically the vulnerable populations, are secured to make sure they're able to handle whatever comes next. So at the backbone of the Philippine government's program is the philosophy of building back better, and this will involve several components. For one, we are trying to build 200,000 housing units to resettle the displaced population. We now have over 180,000 in the pipeline, but there's still a gap. In terms of education, we have 5,333 classrooms committed out of the 18,000 classrooms that need to be repaired or rebuilt. In terms of livelihood, we have distributed materials for 12,000 fishing boats, but at the same time, we are also exploring ways to ensure that we build back better and have more sustainable employment opportunities for others. One of the ideas we have been exploring is that of getting a special trade preference from the U.S. government to attract manufacturing industries to resettle in the areas affected by Yolanda. So we're making, we are proposing a short, limited time trade preference program for products coming out of the areas affected by Yolanda. So the challenges that confront the Philippines are lack of available land for housing units. We need to build over 2,000 housing units, but we have only 26,000 lots available. One factor that complicates this is the fact that by building back better, we want to make sure that our people build away from the shoreline. So an initial idea was to have no-build zones, but that is a major political and practical concern if you have, because you cannot put back like 200,000 people into an area that can only accommodate 20,000. So we will have to embark first on a comprehensive hazard mapping exercise which will determine which zones should be absolutely no-build, which zones will be safe, and which zones will be controlled zones. So we're working very closely with our local government units to make sure that we are able to determine safe zones in a practical and practicable manner. So at this point, the Philippine government is working out a master plan for reconstruction and rehabilitation, consolidating inputs from local government units. We hope to be able to unveil the master plan by June. So with that, I look forward to a productive discussion with our colleagues from the private sector and the U.S. government and NGOs. Thank you. Thank you very much, Ms. Austria. Thank you very much. Praveen, you're the representative and country director for the UN World Food Program. You were on the ground and we had a very interesting discussion before this panel over lunch, and it's quite clear you have a very detailed understanding of what's going on and the World Food Program has had a very complete response to this emergency. Thank you, Dan. And good afternoon. First, the reason we're all together here today is to talk about coordination. And for coordination to really work, I think no place better than the Philippines. They actually have a word. It's called Bani Nihan. And this is so far entrenched in their way of being that it made our life so much easier. It is the concept of sharing. It is not the concept of an immaterial or materialism. This is mine. This is yours. It's everybody pulling in together to work for a common goal. And I pray tribute to the government of the Philippines and its people. They actually have a concept, which is called Bani Nihan. Having said that, let me just tell you why this coordination was so important. It saved lives. The tragedy of having lost so many lives due to the crisis, to the typhoon, and the storm surge that followed, it's really, really incredible that the damages and loss of life is not much larger. But as together as an international community, we really came together and what we did was save lives as the first and primordial result of this coordination. Originally, I had proposed a video just to show you a very quick synopsis of what that damage was. But if you think of it very quickly in a mind, the Philippines has 7,106 islands. This is an incredible number of islands. If you can just picture that in your mind and say across from north to south and then draw like a highlighter through the middle, that's where that would be the path of the typhoon. Hitting an incredible vast array of people, 14 million people, as you heard Maria say, 4 million were displaced. But due to this coordination and the partnerships that we have with the US government, with the private sector, with NGOs, with private individuals, we were able to reach 3 million people right off the bat. And when I say right off the bat, I literally mean starting from day one. The flexibility and the generosity shown to us and the Filipino people by everybody being there and working for that common goal was in the way they made themselves available and the sorts of tools that they made available. And as a world food program, people must be thinking we're only food. Well, you're 90% correct. How do you attend 3 million people? Where's the food? And you need this sort of flexibility to be able to buy it, to get it locally, to move it, to store it, to make sure it gets to the right people at the right time and in the right place in the right quantity. It makes no use to hand out a little bit, and then you need to do it 100 times. It's just impractical with the sort of extent and damage. And that's where coordination, and that's where the concept of Bani Nihan, and that's where the concept of the cluster approach of the United Nations systems comes into place where specialized agencies are doing specialized work. And the World Food Program led the cluster, we call them clusters as well, as Maria mentioned, the government. On the logistic cluster is an area that is led by the World Food Program. It takes care of all the logistical, the actual physical movement of food and storage of food and non-food items that may be required. Now, when we talk about movement, and you think of the damage that happened, one of our greatest partners was the Civil Military Support, and that from day one was there. It was there for a very short time, but it enabled us to quickly come together and set up the mechanisms that would be needed. And in this regard, I'd like to put on record and thank the U.S. government specifically. When we first landed, I landed there on the very first day, the morning after at seven o'clock in the morning, there was no airport. And while many people may think, well, the military can usually land, what happens when it goes dark? You can't see it. There was no lights. There was no ways. There was no fuel to make the planes fly. So with that sort of augmented capacity that was made available, this partnership became intrinsic and extremely valuable. In the very first days, I talked about the 7,000 islands to get out to the locations in a place that has lost, as you heard from Maria, boats. So how do you go? We were able to, with the support, get out to these remote islands. So this Civil Military Support that was provided was a real godsend in making sure that the people received the benefits and the relief assistance that was needed. This was a learning lesson for us. We were doing three things at the same time, which we had never done before, which is response, relief, and then recovery. People normally think you do the response, then you move to the relief, and then you move to recovery. Well, here we were doing it from day one. The extent of the typhoon was so large that where it made landfall we were doing response. In the middle we were almost moving into relief, and in the far west we could already start thinking about recovery from day one. Put in the wheels into place that would enable us to do so. To do this as a group, most of the coordination was happening on the ground on a daily basis at seven o'clock in the evening. And why am I so specific? Because at seven o'clock in the evening, even humanitarians need to take a break. And so they would do so by getting all together and talking about what needed to be done. And that coordination wasn't in some high flying, high skyscraper in Manila. It was on the ground in the very location that was made available so that everybody came together and they said, this is what we're seeing, this is what is happening. Communication totally blacked out. There was no communication with our process and working with everybody in the private sector, in companies like Erickson, we set up telecommunication system that enabled not only voice but data. So there was a sharing of information immediately that would be made available to all. And what I'd like to say is that when you're in this situation, it seems, and it would be in most situations, but in the Philippines, it seemed that everybody naturally fell into place. And that was because they were so specialized in everything that they did. The people that came, the surge capacity, I can talk about the World Food Program, my office, under the best of circumstances, about 100 people. For this particular crisis, we surged by 300 people. So we had 200 people flying in and we contracted 100 people locally. So in order to build up and to have that capacity, it requires real knowledge about what's needed, when is it needed and where is it needed and what is that expertise. And because of this coordination, we were able to very quickly come to say, okay, we need so many nutritionists, we need so many logisticians, we need so many field monitors to go out and monitor and make sure that the assistance is getting out to the people that need to receive it. And this was possible because of this coordination. And I'd like to say that none of this would have been possible or would have been a lot more difficult had we not had the backbone structure that the government provided. The government of the Philippines was there in every step of the way. We were able to piggyback, strengthen what was already being done. I think Dan, you mentioned very importantly the debris cleaning and the use of the forces. But really, I can tell you, from the airport to the city of Tacloban is a distance of maybe 20 minutes, maximum. It would have taken you five hours on that first day. Yeah. We were shipped by helicopter. So none of that, but the two days later, you did it in the 15 minutes. Roads were cleared. And that's what the civil military provided in that coordination so that we could move relief goods and make it available. As we are now six months later, is it over? Is it done? Can we all say we did a great job? Now we need to slowly wind down and move away. I think some of the more serious work will now begin. We did save lives. It's no longer, and I think you heard it from Maria and you heard it from Dan, the Philippines goes through about 30 typhoons a year. Last year we were at Yolanda. Why? In the alphabet. So it's no longer a question of if. It's a question of when. It's a question of how strong will it be? How many people will be affected? So we need to lay the foundation for moving into livelihoods and early recovery. And that is the stage that we as Welfare program and the international community is currently at. It's moving to this next phase and saying what is it that needs to be done and how can we do equally a good job together to address those needs? And it is a question of scaling up, but scaling up into newer areas, into newer needs. And I just want to say that with the government as the backbone, we were able to reach 500,000 people in the month of February with cash. As markets came online, we were able to use the very important resources provided by our donor community in a very strategic manner, making sure that the people that needed to receive it got it. And we did that through the government of 500,000. We did that through the NGO community where we reached an additional 85,000 people. So in total almost 700,000 people got cash as we translated from food to other resources, the flexibility of the international community. And I would be remiss if I didn't highlight the role of the private sector. The private sector was crucial. Welfare program, and I'd like to be sort of unbashful if you allow me, is to think we think we're incredible. We think we know it all. We think, hey, there's an emergency. We're there and we can do it. But Larry, I'm really proud that the Welfare program has a partnership with companies as solid as UPS, that when they came in and did what they do, you sort of sat back and said, wow, here we can really learn something. And that sort of partnership and that sort of thing from the private sector bringing in that expertise. And just for anybody else, but I feel very proud about it. As Welfare program, I don't know another country that has received so much assistance from the private sector to be the second largest contributor to the Typhoon Yolanda. Amongst all the countries that came to our support, but the private sector in its totality represented almost the second largest donor. To the Welfare program. To the Welfare program in Yolanda. In Yolanda. And I think that speaks highly of the Philippine people. I think it speaks very highly of the private sector, that this was not something that they were willing to stand back to. And I'd like to think that has a lot to do with Bani Nihan. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Larry Darrow, you've flown in from Atlanta to be with us. Thanks for being with us. You're the President of Global Business Services for UPS. You have a deep strategic relationship since 2009 with the World Food Program. Talk a little bit about that and talk about your contribution to the response to Hurricane Yolanda, Typhoon Yolanda. The success between UPS and the World Food Program is really about having shared values to support humanitarian needs and relief. And their ability to leverage UPS as a World Food Program with the need for logistics expertise. So our relationship began in 2009 and has deepened year over year, not only from a financial contribution, but also from engagement and expertise and engagement of our employees, whether up at the top of UPS or down on the ground in the areas such as the Philippines with community service to support disaster relief. The value, I think, that I challenge other private organizations with is the value of the relationship between the nonprofit and leveraging the expertise within a company, not just the financial source but also the expertise. So in our case, we were able to provide support from resources on the ground. We had managers who were trained as logistics, emergency team members that were trained in health and also in disaster relief that were put into position that helped facilitate the supply chain of moving the goods for relief from different locations through the network into late day. And our manager not only manages the equipment of warehouses and equipment of trucks in the movement, but also managing the inventory and developing a systematic process that avoids spoilage by moving product out based off the timeliness of the exploration. So the resources that are trained are, I think, vital to emergency situations. And some of our staff were asked specifically by name because of their experience in previous disasters. So the success of a partnership I think really comes down to leveraging the expertise and having resources at all levels throughout the world that can help support times of crisis. Thank you, Larry. Thank you very much. Jeremy, you are the, you come from, of course, the Conmercy Corps, but you're now at the U.S. Government and you are the Director of Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance. Can you talk about the U.S. response to the technical? Yeah, happy to. Thank you. I'm going to try and just convey a couple of the big takeaways and I'm happy to dive into these in more gruesome detail during the Q&A. But I think we do look back on the initial humanitarian response and relief response as a pretty good success. I think we got in very quickly, both we the USG and we the larger international response infrastructure, there was fantastic partnership with the government of the Philippines and great leadership from the government of the Philippines. And very quickly moved what was quite precarious and logistically difficult situation. Is this working? Yeah, okay. Into a situation that where the major humanitarian indicators got stabilized very, very quickly, we got the population out of an acute kind of acute risk phase very, very quickly and we're able to move pretty swiftly into more of a recovery and transformation posture and a few things that I think were key to that. One was that some of the disaster risk reduction investments that the U.S. government and the Philippines government had been making for years paid off. And as was said earlier, the Philippines gets hit many, many times a year by various kinds of disasters be it floods, typhoons, earthquakes, you name it. So this is a country that knows how to handle disasters. But also a country that has made some strategic investments in preparing for and mitigating those disasters. And so before this typhoon hit, there was a lot of aid goods got prepositioned in some of the areas that were in the path of the storm and that enabled the communities who were affected who are always the first responders in any crisis. You know, we sort of tend to focus on the international community or on the military or whoever, but it's always the communities themselves who are the first responders. By prepositioning some of those supplies as well as having shelters in place and so on, it enabled those communities to play that first responder role more effectively and to meet some of those initial needs right up front. So that was an effective piece. It also meant that we had more of a platform to build from because that there was an ongoing partnership. It wasn't suddenly the whole international community shows up and has to figure out how to work with the government of the Philippines. No, we had had a partnership in the case of USAID working heavily with World Food Program for years on disaster risk reduction programming, which then gave us a great platform to build off of for the response. The second piece I'd identify as why this was a fairly successful response, I think in the USG side, we were much better coordinated than we have been in some past responses. So if you look at the Haiti response a few years ago, which was effective on a lot of levels but also faced a lot of challenges, one of the challenges was while we were trying to apply a whole government methodology there, we didn't really have the structures and tools and arrangements fully in place that we needed to do that within the US government. And so what was intended to be a process of pulling together a lot of different capacities in a coherent way ended up being a lot of different capacities being pushed into a response in a fashion that was not always that well coordinated or effectively organized. We've learned from that. And so in the several years since the Haiti earthquake, both my office, the Office for Disaster Assistance, which has the lead coordinator role, but also other parts of the USG have invested in building more of a coordination infrastructure inside the government for this kind of a response. So we don't then find ourselves in a situation where people in Washington are saying, hey, there's a disaster. What can we send out there? But rather, it's much more of a demand signal oriented arrangement with kind of a clear traffic cop and USAID in the role of that traffic cop. And so what we saw in this response, a lot of interest across the US government, people being much more attuned to what are we hearing from the field in terms of what is needed. How do we coordinate that? So it's sent out in a way that is effective and is responsive and is driven by needs and demand signal as opposed to projections on this end of what we think might be needed, which is best practice. And then we now have an infrastructure in place to make that work. And so on the USG side, we were much better coordinated at Washington level than I think we had than we have been in some past responses. At field level as well, we were much better coordinated and particularly on the civil military piece. USAID OFDA has been investing for several years now, actually for longer than that, but particularly ramped up the investments for the past several years in being able to partner effectively with the military. And so we have some of our humanitarian advisors placed at each of the combatant commands. We do hundreds of trainings per year now for military officers on how to work with us in disaster response, basics of disaster response, what appropriate roles are, how the system works. And that has just been a huge, huge value add so that we don't, again, sort of the same notion that we don't want the first time we're meeting to be when we're on the runway in Tacloban figuring out how we work together. So in this case, the Marines that they pulled down from Okinawa had actually just been through an exercise with USAID OFDA staff on a disaster response scenario. So they got in there, they knew just what to do. General Paul Kennedy, who was a fantastic guy, did a great job, knew exactly how to plug in and was there very much and very intentionally in a support role to USAID. And that was written right into their orders, actually. The request for assistance that went from Secretary Kerry over to Secretary Hagel to officially request the assistance from DOD actually stated, we request that DOD be in a support role to USAID OFDA, who will be the lead coordinator. And the military found that that worked extremely well and also got them out of there pretty quickly because it set real parameters around what did we need from them? What role did they have? How could they have that value? And it laid that out very, very clearly through systems that we've been working with them on for years and refining for years. And it meant that within a month they were back out of there again because they had played their role. They got us over the logistical hump in those early days. And I really do think that without the U.S. military role, the whole response at large probably would have been at least a week behind where it was just because the military got in there so fast and cleared the logistical hurdles so quickly. And then they were able to get back out again. And that was something that is also pretty popular on the military side when they can get the job done quickly. And they saw how these systems helped in that. So on the USG side at all levels, we kind of got out of our own way more than we have in past responses. Another thing I'd point out just to pick up a little bit on what Praveen said, I think on the U.N. side we're starting to see good proof of concept on some of the U.N. reforms as well. The U.N. also learned a lot from Haiti and from some of the challenges encountered there. And they've put in place a number of different reforms, probably the most important for this is what they call the L3 response. So level 3, when they hit a level 3 response, that gives the U.N. carte blanche to do a lot of things that they can't normally do in terms of changing out staff, surging in staff, it triggers certain funding mechanisms. And this was the first fast onset where that was in place. And we saw it put used to, I think, really great effect. And that helped to enable a much more appropriate, much swifter, better staffed, better resource response. And then Dan asked me to also just say a couple words about NGOs and the private sector. I think that the private sector piece Praveen and Larry have covered it fairly well. The logistical capacity of the private sector, particularly a company like UPS, is pretty remarkable in a response like this and has a lot of value to add. Larry was talking at lunch earlier about some of the ways in which the expertise that a company like UPS has in the Philippines or in any country, because they're there before. They're not showing up for this response. Can be used to enable the whole response at large, smoothing the way, helping groups that are newer to understand the systems they're working in. But another thing I think is really important is how the private sector has a role to play in the transition to recovery and transformation. So there is a really major challenge coming up. Well, we're in it. It's not coming up. Okay, so we got the situation stabilized in those first few months, but there is a long-term structural challenge here. There are people living in zones where, as Maria said, these are not safe places to build and to live. There is huge damage, the destruction of all the coconut trees, which was millions and millions of trees, which was the principal livelihood source in these areas. So there are some pretty major logistical policy and economic challenges that are going to endure for years as the country and these parts of the country in particular adapt to this new poststorm reality. USAID has partnered with Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, other companies to work on restarting productive economic sectors in these areas, restarting businesses, giving people opportunities to have new livelihood options for those who might have been more dependent on coconut production before. It's a critical, critical role for the private sector. And we're also seeing some challenges on the private sector front. One of the things that we would like to do would be to enable people to build back with higher quality construction materials. We're finding it's hard to source those because they're not produced in anywhere near the quantities and volumes that are needed. And so getting an understanding of which parts of both the international or the Filipino private sector are working well, but also where the gaps are is important to understanding in the much longer term what are the not just government, not just NGO, not just UN, but also private and economic capacities that this country is going to need in order to be able to be more resilient against these disasters in the future because they are on the upswing. So I'll leave it there, but I'm happy to talk more about that. So let me start question for you, Jeremy, first, which is we talked a little bit at lunch about what's difference in five or 10 years ago. I wanted to push on this issue of monetization and cash and some of these innovations. And could you also talk about the role of technology that say difference safe five or 10 years ago? Well, you know, on the technology front, the ability to predict and anticipate these storms has just gotten much, much better. So we have, again, kind of a whole government thing. We have a USGS expert who works in our office on hydromet disasters and helps us to anticipate and predict which way these things are going to work. Is that new? That's something we've had for a few years. The technology is getting much better. The ability to predict is getting better and better. And so that's very helpful. We, you know, technology and the role of technology in it is always iterative. So one of the things that we tried that didn't frankly work that well during this storm was seeing if we could do satellite based imagery analysis of damage through a crowd sourcing platform, which is a really cool idea. You kind of send it out to the cloud. There are a lot of tech geeks out there who look at this stuff and can identify. We found that actually it didn't work that well. There aren't that many people in pajamas and garages doing this. There were plenty of people, but the crowd sourcing, basically the analysis did, it was not that effective. And no, that's something to learn from. But it's also good to experiment because you can kind of figure out what works and what doesn't. And there's, you know, you always have like 50 field light bulbs before one works. I take your point. I thought what was interesting and encouraging in the lunch conversation was you've gotten some additional authorities to cash grants. I'm sort of getting at indirectly this issue of is there something around the food monetization thing? Does that help you guys and something like this? Let me speak to that. The USAID has gotten a number of new authorities, new funding streams around food assistance in the past few years. And that has enabled a much more effective response. And the way we were able to, so if you go back 10 years, the main tool that USAID would have had would be commodity food. And so we would have had that basically just becomes a logistics exercise of how fast and how much of that food can we get into the zone. But generally it would take weeks if not months because you'd have to ship it from somewhere else or divert a ship that was already on the water and it would just take months. In this case, because we have new cash authorities and we're less reliant just on commodity to meet food needs, we were able to drop some cash right away into WFP to enable them to procure high-energy biscuits and other immediate foods that could be taken right away to the communities and make a difference literally within a few days of this storm hitting. We were then able to drop cash in as well for a much larger volume local procurement of rice there within the Philippines that could get to the zone within a couple of weeks and then last until our large-scale bulk commodities were able to come off the water a couple of months later. So by having these tools, we could have a much more continuous stream of support appropriate to the context at the time as opposed to just having one tool that we try to shoehorn in regards to the situation. Yeah, when I was in the Bush Administration, I was asked to help lead the private sector partnerships in response to the Indonesia tsunami as well as the the Pakistan earthquake and we had limited tools and it was just there was, in my sense, there was a before and after in terms of the private sector response to the tsunami as well as Hurricane Katrina and so Larry, I'm thinking that there's been a real evolution and sophistication among companies. I mean UPS has always been very sophisticated about this and obviously you guys take your time in picking partners and you must have taken a long time in finding WFP as a partner but could you talk a little bit about how UPS thinks about emergency responses beyond its partnership with WFP A but B could you talk a little bit about when you talk to other companies how they're thinking about emergency response because I suspect you're not the I know many of your peer competitors but not just in your sector but other industries have become far more sophisticated in the last 10 years about responding to emergencies because because because they have to. So I think there's a couple areas. First of all speed of decision is important in time of crisis and having a master operating plan that how we can support and implement and how that can be executed whether it's resources whether it's financial support through grants or whether it's through emergency response teams that are trained in that specific area that are working toward a plan and then after the relief actually editing and post-crisis analysis to make that plan better for the future. But the use of technology if you think about the needs that an organization like the World Food Program has as far as the movement of food throughout the world and food products and our expertise as a leader in the world for logistics and the use of our technology it's just like shipping a package it's the movement of the package it's the use of technology and I mentioned the technology earlier that we have given grants to organizations to help develop that will help better manage the food inventories of areas of crisis and warehouses along with identification of refugees so when they are given their food rations. So technology that's related to the day-to-day business of transportation can be applied to non-profit organizations like the World Food Program for disaster relief. I'm so impressed with UPS I was talking to you about it earlier and I think oftentimes people don't realize how large of a company you are how many how many countries are you operating in. We have service in 200 countries and territories and we've got 395,000 employees throughout the world. So just just bear with me as I have some leading questions here but how many how many employees do you have in the Philippines? We have 1,900 employees. Okay compared to 100 for the World Food Program right and how many packages do you deliver every day around the world? I bet it's over a million oh close to it it's it's over 13 million okay so you deliver 13 million packages every day so think about the logistical operations that requires internationally to deliver 13 million packages so I would suspect they have something to teach us about complicated logistics that just just a guess the and then the in terms of just let me just get a little bit further on this issue of it's not it's oftentimes is about the technology and expertise that you all bring. Can you talk a little bit more about this would you call them LETs? What is an LET? Well it's the logistics emergency teams that are developed to support the UN crisis needs from four organizations which happen to be competitors Agility, Marisk, TNT and UPS and there's a hundred staff that are trained for emergency relief and health services and 30 of those staff are from UPS that we do deploy based off of emergency needs two of them that we deployed to the Philippines one with the world food program the other with the Salvation Army and basically there we're utilizing our expertise and movement of goods and services but customs clearance which many people don't think about behind the scenes that happen and the importance if the product can't get through customs and cleared to the destination it's going to sit then you have issues such as timeliness and spoilage that you have to worry about. Thank you very much. Proving can you just talk a little bit about and I want to also hear from Jeremy and from Maria about this issue of NGO coordination I think we talked a little bit about it beforehand that there was it seems as if there was a market improvement in the Philippines case compared to say other cases I could I could name where that may not have been so successful. Can you talk a little bit about you you you all work with all sorts of NGOs but I'd like to hear your take on why that specifically worked how you how coordination with NGOs work I'd like to hear from Maria a little bit from the the Philippine government perspective that I'd like to hear from Jeremy about that. Thank you Dan. The NGOs play a crucial role and as you as all of us have said this is not the first time in the Philippines that we're facing a crisis. Welfare program itself has a substantially large program in the Philippines apart from the response to disasters such as Yolanda. We work mostly in Mindanao and we have a pre-existing partnership with a lot a good many large international NGOs like Samaritan's Purse plan international world vision so it there is a an inbuilt capacity and knowledge about what are the common objectives and visions and how we work together so all of this because of our regular program of work which already involves a very strong partnership with the NGO community we have been actually preparing it's a it's all it's all part of preparation when you when you're already doing these in already normally trying conditions and you have a situation like this it goes without saying that you don't have to wait huge amounts of time as to what it should in agreement look like what can they do can they not do how will it work will it not work do you have all the things that are famous auditors will accept at the end of the day no this isn't a receipt but this is and that so all of those things happily are washed away and we have and the most important and I think I hope I don't get into trouble for saying this but one of the greatest things I found coming out of Yolanda we literally could pick up an NGO and say yes just go and do it and we're worried about the agreement further on and because the need was so great and they knew exactly what needed to be done and we knew exactly where they were coming from and we already but people weren't running around willy-nilly and it wasn't no no no it was the need was so great the need was so great and then everybody knew and as I said there was a a pre a pre-established coordination system okay and a very strong partnership I mean they didn't come and ask us for something that they were asking somebody else okay yeah and he asked let me ask Maria this question so I can think of other my sense is that you know the Philippines has very you know it's a very capable and successful country and it's a very resilient society and has a lot of experience with disasters and so maybe that is part of it but I talk a little bit about how the Philippine government thought about the response and how it thought about the role of NGOs in the response thank you Dan as both as all the other panelists have said coordination was key especially in the earliest days when there were no systems that we could bank on at the outset the Philippine government tried to complement tried to help NGOs do their work by establishing such mechanisms as we had one stop centers one stop shops at the airport at the ports which facilitated clearing for customs purposes for movements of logistics practically all Philippine government agencies also established shop in Cebu and in Tacloban closest to the areas of disaster to facilitate work among the NGOs we in the Department of Foreign Affairs we established also a 24-7 office to facilitate offers of assistance from foreign government partners and NGOs and we had this office set up for more than a month until we were able to establish a more permanent structure so what happened was people came in and say we're willing to do that and we said okay can you go here and do what you're good at doing and they went so at one point we have cross-cutting networks of like some NGOs would adopt a particular locality or municipality some some NGOs would adopt a particular need like for there was a time when it struck me as very strange but there was one NGO who said we have electric sauce and I'm like okay and apparently it fit a particular need and with proper coordination we had a whole gang of people with electric sauce going to the areas to help in the clearing operations so that kind of coordination across across different agencies of government across NGOs and across foreign governments particularly helpful in saving lives and facilitating the recovery effort. Jeremy how do you all think about this issue of NGO coordination I know it's an ongoing challenge and opportunity for the for the United States and these sorts of emergencies but it seems as if it's sort of it's sort of work it seems as if it worked in this case. Yeah I think it did work better in in this case than it has in some of their major disasters and I think there are a few factors in that and I don't want to I don't want to be too polyamorous I mean I think you know in any in any instance like this there is a lot of chaos there is there and you do get a lot of you get a lot of well-established NGOs you also get a lot of NGOs that have more let's say more more goodwill than expertise let's say and and so you know I don't think that that the mix of who showed up was necessarily hugely different than it was in others but I think that a few factors kind of helped us in this one one was that the the coordination infrastructure is more is more mature the the the coordination architecture is more mature now than it was say four or five years ago and so there have been a number of reforms that I referenced earlier that the UN has been taking in terms of how we coordinate in instances like this and we just have a better architecture in place for that than we than we used to have though that gets better staffed now you know the UN agencies who lead these who lead these coordination mechanisms see that as a principal focus as opposed to a sort of annoying second or third task for you know for for a mid-level staffer which is how it used to be how it used to be run second factor I'd say and that is that that we you know there was a strong capable government and and a tight coordination tight alignment between the UN agencies and the government the government was very involved and very engaged on coordination and when you have that that helps everyone else to kind of find their niche and fall in line when you don't have that that's a huge missing piece and that was one of the big challenges in Haiti was that the government had been hit as bad as you know as badly as anyone else and couldn't step up and play that role in the way that the Philippines government was able to in this case and the third I think partly it was easier just because of geography and I think again the comparison to Haiti is instructive in Haiti the the the NGO chaos got a lot of press the the disaster in Haiti was very very concentrated and so you had everyone tripping over themselves because everyone was tripping over themselves they they were all trying to respond in the exact same place through a very narrow straw here the the nature of the disaster and the geography of the disaster was spread very widely over I don't know hundreds let's say of islands and across a really wide area so if you were an NGO coming in it wasn't that hard to go and find an area that no one else was working in but which needed assistance and focus on that and so the the geography of the disaster just meant itself to a much frankly easier coordination challenge okay Maria so I there's been a significant progress since the typhoon I know there are some things that the Philippine government would like to see happen in terms of policies what can your friends such as the United States do to be helpful to the Philippine the Philippines right now in terms of other certain policies in Washington you'd like to see happen that that that could be helpful to the Philippines right now there are a couple of things for one we greatly appreciated the passage in early April of a bill in Congress which allowed people to make tax-free donations to the typhoon Hayan effort so that was very helpful for one we also have been trying to get people to get to build more industries rather than have people in the affected areas rely on agriculture so we've been pushing for a trade preference arrangement which will allow the duty-free entry into the US of certain products from the affected areas this will be a time-bound thing but will be extremely helpful in getting manufacturing industries get a foothold into these areas there are also other types of assistance we will need like we will be embarking on a major geohazard hazard mapping exercise and technical assistance from the US will be very much appreciated in that area I think we'll open it up now for some some Q&A I know there's some very thoughtful people in the room this woman back here this woman here I also want to hear from my friend Mike Hess as well so these these three people go ahead we'll do a bunch of together hello hello good afternoon I'm Annie Kayaban Wilderman and I'm retiring from the Navy I have been very fortunate to have been educated by the government both in high school and in college and education from the US Navy so my passion to promote engagement through the government is unfettered and I would like to ask because I'm trying to respond to USAID school for five-page concept papers and I would assume that the appendices would require some data take note I've been away from the Philippines for 25 years although I have been in 1981 and before I left I was educated by USAID so your specific question my specific question is is the panel going to be willing to share the data because whatever project we try to I try to conceptualize should be consistent with what the Philippine government should be doing and so that I don't have to vet other data we get thank you very much this woman this woman up here hi good afternoon my name is Veronica Martin I've just returned from three months in the Philippines where I was the interagency coordinator for accountability to effective populations for Ocha I'm getting ready to go back next week for an aid effectiveness study and in in that capacity I had a lot of opportunities to speak with affected communities about their perceptions of the response and so I just wanted to highlight some of the things that I heard that I think are interesting to put on the table in addition to your perspectives and I had the opportunity to do listening exercises in and three issues that I just wanted to bring up to add to the picture communities very consistently spoke about certainly how grateful they were about the aid for sure and then when we dug a little bit deeper they also talked about the politic how aid was politicized and so they were issues around municipalities giving aid in a way that favored the barangays which is the the villages basically based on their political alignment and then within the barangays there was of course also sort of a aid was also affected by the the political perspectives of the the the villagers so that was an issue that came up very very consistently that they would have highlighted around aid effectiveness and them getting aid and the most vulnerable getting aid a second issue was the issue around livelihoods it was very interesting because I didn't get there till January and I left in mid-april and from January onwards when I went out and spoke with communities they were really clear that they wanted to go beyond cash for work and they want to go to meaningful livelihood activities and it's just worth noting because I think in our sort of chronology of aid you know immediately of course we're doing cash for work and we're doing sort of short-term aid and but they would have been ready for like some long-term livelihood programs like at week two you know now we're at month six and I know that's still something that we're struggling to get going and it's very challenging for sure but it was an issue that very consistently came up it's obviously an empowering issue it's an issue that minimizes reliance on outside aid and also from a mental health perspective people are saying you know it gives us something to do with and to sit here and kind of wait for inconsistent aid so it was really critical and very important for them to start early on and the third issue that came up was a real need for information about the response you know people wanted to know when are we getting aid how long who's it coming from what kind of aid when are we being moved how long do we stay in temporary housing are we getting permanent housing so just a lot of questions around the response and just engagement with the community in terms of what they could expect from the response short-term and long-term great thank you very much thank you for my friend Mike has thanks Dan interesting comments on the civil military coordination and obviously with the climate change that's been highlighted these tragic storms are going to get even worse and it's going to require much more military response I think due to the severity of these these tragedies but what is the military doing in your perspectives and I know there's no military panel member but my friend Jim Shears sitting over there anxiously gnawing at this one to make this not a pickup game to institutionalize these responses we've been working on it for a long time I started I was six seven and had brown hair and it's a battle all the time because the military is so large and to train them and keep them ready and focused on this is not their primary mission but what can we do to make this more effective quicker so that we can't do the pole versus the push and minimize these disasters that are going to be coming more and more often great so we got a whole suite of issues I'm going to ask Jeremy to start to just to the initial question on the concept papers I'm not I'm not sure which solicitation I think that's probably being driven by the usaid mission in the Philippines uh in Manila so I would recommend that that's probably your best point of contact is to try and reach out I'm sure there's an email address for that that that you can ask some of those those questions too I'm not I'm not familiar with that specific solicitation on the the response from affected communities I'm I'm really glad that has happened and I think that that is and I'm glad you raised those points because I think it's very easy to to kind of look at everything that's been achieved and say and kind of pat ourselves on the back and it is really important and I'm glad Ocha's doing this to structure into our process those feedback mechanisms to get that feedback on you know to check ourselves basically on whether on whether we're doing as well as we might think we're doing I think on the on the point about aid being aid being politicized all I might punt that mostly to the government I think that the you know we there's you want to have local ownership and when you've got a capable government in place you that's your that's your principal partner that does get you into government governance issues and governance responsiveness issues and so on and that's kind of unavoidable and and you know I think we we face even in you know crises in the United States we we face a lot of blowback against local federal and and and state governments about whether or not they've handled things effectively or not I think that's a natural part of any response but I in one level I actually take some encouragement from the fact that of all the thing the whole universe of things that people could be concerned with that they're focused on that as opposed to you know a cholera outbreak or something like that like you know on the hierarchy of needs that's that's one that's a better one to be to be getting back than you know folks are you know folks are living out in the open six months into the crisis or something like that and on the but I think that's a really important exercise and I'd actually love to to make sure that OFDA gets copies of that because I think that's useful to us I'm sure you're talking with our teams out in the field in any case on the the the military piece Mike the yeah it is it is a challenge because the military is huge and and you know we're not small but we're not like military big it is a challenge to how to institutionalize that and you're right this is going to be happening more and more often and for my conversations with with the military and I went out and talked with Pacific Command last fall when this was going on on my way out to the Philippines to visit the the response they're very seized with it you know in paycom they're very seized with this they see this as this is going to be a pretty much standing element of their mission in the Pacific on an ongoing basis so they get that they're going to need to to be able to up their game and do this right and and I think that commitment exists all the way up to Secretary Hagel Secretary Hagel a couple weeks ago convened the the ASEAN defense ministers in Hawaii first time the U.S. has ever hosted that and and he made a point of ensuring that there was an event as part of those those several days focused on disaster response and he invited you say to convene that so our boss Rajiv Shah co-convened that with him and they co led that event so there is I think a strong commitment in the military recognizing this is going to be an important role for them going forward but what's equally just fantastic about how they're approaching that and this again a commitment all the way up to Secretary Hagel is a commitment that that needs to be a civilian led process and and that was really the message that that we were trying to convey to the ASEAN defense ministers as well that the most effective model here is civilian leadership backed up by military support and the the military has a lot of capacities to bring but they're they're not as you say this is never going to be their primary mission so on the strategy on the priority setting the goal setting that's not going to be what the military that's not going to be the military's comparative advantage so you need that you need systems for pointing the military in the right direction and using those capacities towards the right ends and I think we've developed some some some good systems for that we're still getting better but I think that the Philippines has been a nice proof of the Philippines response is a nice proof of concept that some of those investments that we and the military have been making in a a higher level of interoperability are actually paying off I'll just make I guess one comment I guess the feedback regardless of what organization I think the feedback going back to the group or the nonprofit or the companies the private helps build the MOP as part of the editing in the post crisis as far as what can be done better next and that's all I'd say about that thank you Praveen I suspect that there's many things you could respond to and in some of the questions that were here I think most of them have been covered I'd be well I'd welcome a lot of conversation when you're back and talking but I think this feedback mechanism is extremely important it's really important that this information get up and and be able to be seen and I think there's lots being done but a lot more could be done in ensuring and it's a new area I must I must admit it's a new area maybe all that needs to be done has not been done and we need to work through this so it becomes part of our process okay I suspect Maria there are a lot of the questions and comments have a government component to them so I think we're all quite interested in your take on all this very briefly thank you for your comments the Philippine government is very much engaged listening and we are taking all feedback on board to make sure as we said this is not a one-off event unfortunately we are bound to see the same disaster happen hopefully in a smaller scale but we are taking all suggestions and inputs that will allow us to respond more constructively in a better way to future events on the issue of the local government such issues has always come up but what I can say is under the reconstruction plan being drafted the inputs of all local government agencies are being solicited and inputted into the program which we expect to unveil in June the local governments are in the best position to tell the national government exactly what they need when they need them how they need them so the presidential assistant on reconstruction and recovery has been very mindful of making sure that the inputs of all local governments regardless of political affiliations are heard and put on board on the issue of mil to mil cooperation and how to institutionalize it there have been very long and productive discussions both on the bilateral and regional level on this and we have seen this figure more prominently in all discussions between the defense authorities at regional and bilateral levels so we are hopeful that this will become a regular part under the framework of the military being able to preposition both their skills and capabilities in support of civilian operations for disaster relief humanitarian assistance and disaster relief thank you okay so I want to hear from this suite of three folks here start with this this woman in the in front and then there's two folks in the back microphone thank you Erin Cochran world food program USA so I'm going to be a little biased here a question for Pervin and then for Larry Pervin can you talk a little bit about what you all are doing right now to prepare for the typhoon season coming up in it you know in light of the fact that obviously you're just getting through high end and continuing that recovery effort and then Larry can you you've talked a lot about mop your master operating plan can you talk about some of the feedback that you received so far from the ups folks that were on the ground during high end and what they learned from the experience and how that's going to change the plan going forward hello I'm Jim sheer formerly dod and provoked by Mike Hess I would simply add one very small comment there in terms of looking ahead at DoD or the U.S. military as a disaster responder let's bear in mind that the formulation that our Philippine colleague used build back better that's development assistance that's not something the DoD can fund so we have to be very careful about that 500 lawyers would immediately descend on me in DoD with that problem but here's a specific issue on the NGO and the public private partnerships you're absolutely right that this is not a primary DoD mission and DoD may disappear if it has a military mission to do halfway through the operation as we did during Hurricane Mitch response in Central America in 1998 suddenly there was Desert Fox and Baghdad we were gone we needed UPS to haul stuff so let's bear that in mind but in in terms of the larger effort of NGOs in Haiti as you said one of the biggest challenges was giving our military air traffic controllers at the Porter Prince Airport the knowledge of which is the best five or ten NGOs within the shelter cluster or the food or the health cluster give them access through very limited allocations of flight slots that was I would say if you could rebuild the cluster in the air traffic control and especially in staging airports where its access was hard if you can do that that would be very much appreciated so thank you very much the woman next to you thank you so much my name is Rita Geron Adkins I'm a journalist and this would be in the speculation box the Haiyan disaster as Ban Ki-moon had said is a wake-up call to the world and President Obama is sort of now in a role talking about climate change and the disastrous effects not only here in the United States but of course and other parts of the world my question is that is this an opportunity for the think tanks including CSIS to go beyond the disaster perfecting the efficiency of the recovery and the rebuilding processes eliciting from the federal government from the government as well as the NGOs but is this also an opportunity to sort of move the debate to what the freaking hell is causing all this and what to do about it such as for instance the alternative to the cost for it which is apparently the carbon footprint which is crossing this disaster these changes in the environment that unfortunately the poor developing countries like the Philippines are not in a good position to recover without our help what I mean by help itself so the root causes right right but what to do so far you want to close up your question right the question is that is this therefore an opportunity to also have the dialogue move to what are the alternatives to these disastrous mechanisms and goodies that we use carbon footprint et cetera and all that and help the developing countries to sort of with our technology with our savvy with our research et cetera to sort of stimulate what are those other alternatives to this disastrous use of coal based types of things thank thank you very much the United States help the Philippines and the rest of the world thank you very much okay thank you okay so Praveen why don't we first take the world food program question and then I would like to hear various perspectives on Jim's question why don't I take a crack at the third question okay thank you very much and very quickly yes as we move forward we've heard from everybody that it's not a question of if but when and what do we do how do we get ready for the next one what do we need to put into place well we've been in discussion with the with the government of the Philippines I'm sorry with the government of the Philippines in looking at what we're calling a three hub concept looking at the entire country and saying what do we need to pre-position place and we're looking at one in Subic Bay we're looking one in Cebu and we're looking one in Davao to have some pre-existing capacity and knowledge in in Yolanda we were moving food packages from Manila Tacloban is more than an hour's flight with no row rows and no sea transport available no land transport available and of course air transport just telling what's a row row just make sure not row row your boat of course but it is actually it is actually a boat but it's what we call roll on and roll off right transport vehicle for for for sea so it is creating that capacity and installing that capacity within the country but more importantly than just a physical stock and you're putting food or non food and pre-positioning and all that is really creating a a capacity building and training people and using these as situation rooms as training areas where the first point of call is as I believe Jeremy was saying it's the community how do they respond so getting the communities the the municipal authorities the provincial authorities which should be the first point of call really engaged and knowing what needs to be done so we're we're as we're moving forward we're doing that on the one front in terms of preparedness but in the other in the in in terms of Yolanda specific is working with our other UN colleagues and partners in laying the foundation for early recovery and livelihood so that that can be built upon and and move forward Larry I'm just thinking about you there was this earlier comment and discussion about feedback loops and learning you have a multi-company partnership of of let's and so the of the let and you had a group of them deployed to the Philippines how does that learning come back and how does that group prepare and talk a little bit about and and how was this a group housed out of the is this a group that came together through some through the World Economic Forum how did you all just first talk about how did you all come together what did you take away from the Philippines and how does that feed into your preparations then okay I start off with it came came together through the UN and the request for logistic support the logistics cluster as I mentioned before four competitors actually working together for a common goal which doesn't happen often second of all how the information comes back the teams actually formally report back improvements so a couple points to Aaron to your questions what some of the feedback and what we do differently experience was heavily weighted I actually spoke to our team members having trained people because as you've heard and you've seen before there's a lot of people who want to do good who volunteer and provide relief however they need trained or organized and steered in the right direction and that's where you need the experienced staff and as I said the let's are trained in advance and obviously those that are trained specifically in this type of relief or in these geographical areas provide even greater value the second point they made was the importance of local staff local staff that of course speak the language understand the culture and in our case in our case one of our managers who actually was an expert in customs clearance as I mentioned helped other organizations clear clear their products based off of new changes through brokerage requirements so having someone with that local knowledge and the ability to clear product faster than they would have without having that knowledge helps get the product to the end game or to the receivers the third point would be the preparedness and we have worked with the WFP in several different areas Rwanda, Dominican Republic, Syria doing preparedness assessments and determining what the transportation capabilities are of those areas so that when a crisis strikes that you can actually move relief you know have to based off of capabilities whether it's a port or an airline whether it's a truck also simple things such as the equipment that you provide for relief that there's clearance based off the bridges in that country or what the maximum tonnage is on a road so my point is the preparedness assessment would provide value to these emerging markets and areas of high risk and preparing that is part of the MOP the last point they made was these kinks in the supply chain and and try to identify what those are whether it's customs clearance or whether it's unsolicited relief product being sent one example was this huge gallon I want to say 100 gallons jugs of water but a way to containerize it to get it to individuals so it was a good intent but wasn't really good to go through the supply chain to distribute so preventing the kinks and eliminating the the clogs that can occur in a supply chain. Jeremy I'm hoping you and Maria can take this question of the civ mill relationship and I might start with you and then Maria the specifics of the Philippine case in particular. Yeah yeah and Jim I take your very much take your point about the build back better and I don't think we're you know we're not looking to the military for that but what the military has are these amazing logistics capabilities and the ability to scale up extremely extremely fast and the I think that the example you raised of the the airport in Haiti and the air traffic control challenges there is a nice again it's a nice contrast with where we've gone in the in the several years since then because we faced a pretty similar challenge in the early days in the Philippines we had you know Tacloban was the worst hit area it was the epicenter of the crisis it was really the major city in that entire area and the port was heavily damaged and the airport was heavily damaged and so the ability to get things in for those first couple weeks was very very constrained and we were pushing the orange through a straw and the US military came in and had the same set of questions what do we prioritize we have we have four or five C-130s that we can land down there every day what do we put on those things the UN wants you know the US has its own stuff stuff from OFDA stocks that are going on a couple of them but the UN wants to put things on their NGOs want to put what the difference in Haiti is we have a system for that now much better than we had that and we have the bodies to actually staff it so in Haiti we we were way outmatched the the military had a lot more people but in a lot more units and we didn't have the bodies to keep up with them and we have one of the one of the one of the really positive things to come out of the QDDR for you said was an authorization to to my office to staff up further in recognition of that of that reality so we have really staffed up our military advisory capacity such that we have it now a surge core globally that we can pull people forward from when this sort of thing strikes and so as the military ramped up its engagement we just kept pulling people forward they sent an aircraft carrier we pulled someone put them on the aircraft carrier they set up at the airport we pulled someone put them at the airport so that we could stay stepped with the military engagement and keep them pointed in the right direction and play that advisory role so that they weren't thinking do we put MSF stuff on or Oxfam stuff or this NGO we've never heard we could actually do that and that worked really well thank you I would have to agree with sharing me that in the case of the Philippines the military and the civilians really played complementary roles in our case the national disaster risk reduction agencies our lead agency in cases like this and its civilian lead but normally we would have to go to the backbone of the military to do things that in the height of the disaster no civilian can like we were not we had practically no runways so the help the military bringing in this magnificent helicopter this magnificent planes that did not have to go they did have that did not need a runway were really lifesavers especially in bringing relief products to the smaller islands but again this was all done under the direction of civilian authorities and NGOs so the military played an excellent very big support role to the civilian effort that was going on I want to just I'm going to wrap up the conversation here and just say that there was a terrible tragedy six months ago but I think as you've listened this conversation there's a lot of hope and the response I think is was really in a exemplary response of the various sectors and I think there's a lot of lessons to be taken here and I want to thank the panel and please join me in thanking the panel