 So, for many of you, Rob Jenkins will need no introduction whatsoever. Rob has been the Director of the Office of Transition Initiatives over at USAID for quite a while now. He has, he's wearing a lot of different hats these days, kind of all over the world. He's also the Acting Deputy Assistant Administrator for the Bureau of Democracy, Conflict, Humanitarian Affairs, as well as being Director of OTI. But he's also spending quote, 100%, end quote, that's a direct quote from Rob, on, as head of the US, the Syria Task Force. And when I was talking to him last week and asked him if he would, if he would do this, he said, well, I'm in, I'm in a meeting on Egypt right now. Let's talk afterwards. I said, I thought you were 100% on Syria. So he's clearly spreading himself thin, but there's a lot to spread. I'm not really sure if that comes out right. I wish you were talking about my hair, but you're not. So just to kick off this conversation, let me just tell you a few of the things that we've heard throughout the day. I'm sure everybody here will have their own list of what some of the major themes were. And that's a conversation that we all welcome. There were, let me just mention five fairly quickly. The first is about data. There's been a lot of talk about how important it is to have good data. I was admonishing people to, if they're collecting data to geocode it, and then to share it, please, everybody, pretty please, preferably in a way where it's shareable and accessible. Technologically, there's lots of fancy ways to do that. It would be great if everybody could work on that. But there's also been a lot of talk about issues of indicators and how they're important, but they can sometimes trap us. Because if you have an indicator of success, a lot of your efforts are going to be geared towards satisfying the indicator rather than satisfying the objectives. We heard also a lot about respect. In the lunchtime panel, you heard some of the recipient officials are a little bit tired of being told what to do and how to do it. One of our speakers said that they have knowledge, they have ideas, what they need are resources. And others said that while that's true, they're also open to ideas. And the partnership should be a partnership as a two-way street. We heard a lot of issues about local ownership and local knowledge. The recognition that any place we go is going to have its own history, its own complexities, but there will be competing voices. And it's difficult to understand how, who, and how much to engage with different local actors. There's a lot of mixed messages. The key there is local knowledge, spending a lot of time really getting to understand the specific local environment. That includes power brokers. There's a bit of talk of success in the morning panel particularly from Ambassador Dobbins about the research that he's done that shows that in fact we in this field have been successful in a lot of cases. But in the cases where we've been successful, it's when issues of local power brokers and issues of geopolitics are both point in the right direction. We need to do a better job of understanding local power politics. The unit of analysis often talks about the state. And we often think about failed states, fragile states, but it's really understanding subnational governance, subnational power, and the local political economy. Geopolitics being a separate issue, which brings us to one of the most important ones, which I think I referred to earlier today as know-thyself donors. We often have strange expectations not only about what is possible in a lot of the places that we're operating in, but also about what we ourselves can deliver. We just heard in the last panel Andrew Natsios talk about the complications of how much oversight there is and earmarks and the Foreign Service Act and other limitations on what that we impose upon ourselves on what we can do. This is very consistent with research that we've been doing here. We call it absorptive capacity, but it's really more about feasibility at the local level and about donor delivery capacity. We need to understand ourselves and what we're capable of delivering a lot better before we can expect the results in the field that we desire. So Rob, you've got a lot of experience in the field. So I'd be interested in two things. First is how do you respond to what I just laid out here and what is your sense of the state of the field? And I'll sit down and let Rob talk. Thank you, Bob. And hello, everybody. This is quite a crowd. If we could all have a party, it'd be great. I see a lot of former colleagues, I'm sure future colleagues, current partners, past partners, and no doubt future partners. Bob was kind enough to remind me that only I and Rick Barton stand between you and the end of the day in a cold beer or beverage of your choice. I've often thought and now I know that Andrew Natsios is a hard act to follow, but I have no illusions that my only job here is to be the warm-up act for Rick Barton, my friend and former boss. So I'll try to go through this quick list very concisely and then you can ask me some more questions. I see that this is called state of the field, so I expect about every paragraph or so to everyone stand up in a standing ovation after what I've said. I'd love to paint a rosy picture. I got, as a good bureaucrat, say it's a mixed bag. We have come a very long way in this field as it is, but there's obviously a lot of room for improvement. On the one hand, it has become a discipline. 20 years ago, when many of us and our organizations were trying to make sense and do a commendable effort in the Balkans, you could not get a master's degree in post-conflict. You couldn't get a master's degree in this thing. Now there are many to choose from. I, myself, don't have one yet, but I'm often asked to guest lecture. Don't ask me, I'm busy right now. On the other hand, we still don't have a name for this thing. This is stabilization and reconstruction is the title of today. But if you look at the kinds of places we're talking about, it's not all about stabilization. It's not all about reconstruction. When OTI was created by Rick and others, post-conflict was the term. And Rick used to always say, we are post-bullet. Well, I wish we only had the luxury, not just OTI, but all of us that are trying to do these things of working in places that are post-bullet. And I wish it was only pre-bullet, but in fact, many of us are trying to struggle with how do you work in a place as the bullets are flying. So it's not post-conflict. Stabilization, as my boss, Nancy Limburg, likes to remind me all the time, and I think she needs to, just stabilizing some places, aiming pretty low. Shouldn't we aim for something more than that? And then when you're talking, I'm sort of focused on Syria right now, reconstruction doesn't really get you where you need to go either. So your first two things were about data and indicators. How do we know we're making a difference? It's very hard to measure something if you don't even know how to define it and you don't even know what you're calling it. So we have a challenge there, and we've come along as an area of focus or expertise, a great way in monitoring and evaluation and putting in systems and putting discipline in and trying to tell how do we know we've made a difference. But we actually don't know exactly what works best. We have our gut reactions. We have lots of lessons learned. But Raj Shah, our administrator, talks a lot about a data-driven process. He wants data. How do we prove we prevented conflict, right? What are the indicators for that? How do you prove a negative? In most of these places, that's what you're trying to do. You're trying to make it better. You can tell if it's better, okay. But then how do you attribute your contribution or the international community's contributions in this huge milieu of other things that are going on, this complex crisis that you're working in and say this thing that we did, you can attribute this outcome to that? So we start to talk about contribution a lot. And I think that's about as good as we're going to get. People say, what do you mean by contribution? You know, Barack Obama is President of the United States. Why? There's a lot of answers to that. One of them in 2008, he won an election. Okay, let's just take that one. Why? Well, he got the most votes. Why? There's a lot of answers to that. Now, one thing that that campaign did in a new and revolutionary way was use the power of the internet to raise money, get the word out, get people involved. Tell me how many votes or percentage points his use of the internet got him. That's an unknowable. But I think most people would look at it and say we know that it made a contributing difference and helped. That is the kind of thing I think we might have to just be happy with as we look ahead on how do we know we've contributed to making a difference. We talked about respect and local ownership. And you also, we talked, I guess, and by the way, I would have loved to have been here all day. I think the first panel to see Ambassador Dobbins and David Ignatius speak on this, I would have loved to be, I had really fun meetings I was at instead. But expectations are one of the things that we still have not gotten a handle on. As Americans, we think that all problems can be solved if we only work hard enough, right? The military has a line they use, you know, the enemy gets a vote. Well, in these situations, the people that live in the country don't only get the vote. Their vote's the one that matters. Our job isn't to try to bring them along and dictate a solution of which we can't actually prove it works because we're still trying to learn how to do that. We'll say we're contributing. But we can't come up with a plan, although we try often still. Before we even engage, here are the following 14 things we're going to do. And within the six months timeframe, we're going to have this change that we've brought about. The expectations on what we can do, the expectations on the timeline, the expectations on what our contribution can actually, we have to get a handle on that. You know, when OTI was created, Congress and OMB, and they still remind us of this all the time, said that OTI should be in and out of a country within two to three years. That was long enough to get, I see Rick's smiling because he remembers that. Six months, Johanna says originally. That should be long enough for the bureaucracy and the apparatus that is the US government, not just USAID and the embassy, but all its myriad parts, to turn that large battleship and focus on the new normal that was going on in that crisis. But a transition does not last two to three years. The World Bank study of two years ago says they looked at all the transitions that they could since World War II. Those successful transitions took 20 to 40 years, 20 to 40 years. It's generational. It's very hard to tell a policymaker who wants to see a change within six months, a positive change, that don't worry in 20 to 40 years, I'll be able to prove that we contributed to making this place a better thing. So we got a lot of work on that. Subnational governance, subnational power, all politics are local. We got to forget that a lot. They really are. And you pick the country, I won't name any, where we, not just as a US government, but the international community, focuses so many resources, time and attention on that very thin strata at the top of society. Diplomats talking to diplomats, ambassadors talking to presidents, how can we try to, if we just tinker at the top, make that change in a very fragile, brittle, complex society, whatever country it is, we think that we're going to turn a few things at the top and that's immediately going to show change. If you're trying to do anything in a quick time frame, the way to touch people is to do it locally where they live, where they sit, where their kids go to school. That alone, though, doing things just on the local level, paying attention to that local context, paying attention to those dynamics that are flowing through the society. You have to look at that and I think we've gotten very good at that and there's an understanding generally from practitioners that that's where you're going to see real change and that's where real change has to take place. You don't have to touch everyone, but you have to touch enough people and then broadcast that that they can all say and see, you know, today might be a little bit, well, tomorrow might be a little bit better than today and there's a chance that the day after that might be a little bit better. You don't do that just working at the national level. People have to see it, they have to touch it, or else they opt out and you're trying to get people to buy into the solution because they don't have enough patience. Strange expectations, I think I touched on that. Go ahead with a question, Bob. One of the themes that... I can go on and on or I'll just ask Andrew to talk some more about Sudan and then we can... One of the themes throughout the day was one of the things that I've been encouraging people to address is we've all read lessons learned and best practices and we've seen program evaluations make recommendations about a lot of these exact issues about local ownership and respect and local knowledge and data and so on and so forth. I have sort of a two-part question. One is, along these lines, what are we doing better today than we did 10 years ago? And then two, what is it about us that makes it so hard to turn these lessons into institutional practices? Thank you. What are we doing better? We work... A lot of people will say we're not doing this right. I will say, at least when I joined the agency in 1998 compared to then compared to now, we work better as a U.S. government, much better. The alphabet soup that is the U.S. government comes around tables more often, more successfully, with more focused attention on problems than they used to. A lot of efforts have been made to improve that and we're not there yet, but we are much better at that. I spent yesterday down at CENCOM, meeting with folks down there in Tampa, and USAID now has a handful of people full-time in all of the combatant commands around the world. That was unthinkable years ago. Not only that, those that are working at the combatant commands around the world have an understanding of what USAID and what State Department does, I think, way beyond what they did before, and vice versa. So there's some lessons learned there. I think if you look at what the QDDR said and came out, we have learned the lesson that prevention is important, that trying to get out ahead of a problem means fewer problems, means less money, means fewer wars. We've learned that lesson. It's unfortunate that the QDDR came out at a time when budgets were no longer expanding the way they were and there's a lot of things in there that are aspirational but with the creation of CSO and other things, we are implementing lessons learned. There's a backside or other side on that where I mentioned budgets. There's still not enough budget to do these things. We wait until the problem comes up and then we say we'll find the money from somewhere. There's money for humanitarian assistance, never enough but it exists. There's money in the Defense Department, but then, and as Andrew said so wisely, that budget, the rest of it is broken up into all these line items. There's not a bunch of line items of sufficient size that say we can guess in three years when this budget we just put together is finally passed or in fact it's probably a continuing resolution, there will be some contingencies we don't know the name of yet or what we have to do but we need the money when it happens. That doesn't exist. For about a decade, there were supplementals, but those supplementals aren't gonna happen anymore. So we need to look at how are we going to resource these things as they come up in a budgetary environment that is less than robust compared to what we've seen in the last years. That, your second point was, I can't even read my writing. We saw a long way to go and when we do make mistakes in a lot of these places, a lot of times the lesson learned study that comes out afterwards is well, next time around we shouldn't do X or we should do X next time. What I think a more interesting question is, well, why didn't we do X in the first place since we've heard it all before? What is it, maybe not all, but what is it about us? The United States government, the individual institutions, however you want to interpret that. That makes it difficult for us sometimes to actually institutionalize some of the lessons that we've been collecting for so many years. Part of it is we don't like to take risks. And one of those lessons learned is we all conceptually and intellectually see that no risk, no gain. I'm not a big investor, but I know if you only put money on that you know you're not risking any money, you're not gonna get much back from that investment. We all know that, but the government at least, I'll just speak for us as a government or who am I to speak for the entire US government? I will speak for a small part of USAID. You come up with a great idea, but there is any number of people in that chain just in your chain of command who go, ah, that's unproven. A lot of this is unproven, no, but we've never done that before. That's just crazy. If you can convince them at aid, you gotta convince state. If you can convince state to take a risk, you gotta convince the people on the hill. And then everyone's sitting there saying, yeah, there's gonna be an audit. Gotta make sure, I mean, are you sure this is gonna work? I'm not sure it's gonna work. Tell me something right now in Afghanistan, you're sure it's gonna work, right? But we have to try it. I know the FDR quote, just try it, you got it. But it's very hard. So a lot of the lessons learned, we look at them paper, we catalog them, and then we do it again, we do it again, we look at it and we say, oh yeah, a smart person would next time, we're not gonna do it this way, but then we end up when that means something new. I'd say one of the things we do is we over-learn some lessons. There are lessons in Iraq and Afghanistan that are very, very positive. There are also lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan that are very negative. Just because it didn't work in Afghanistan doesn't mean we can't try it somewhere else. And that goes into the risk averse thing. People have sometimes pulled back. One of the OTI partners right now, I think, is undergoing 16 different audits. 16 audits at the same time. Speed, agility, and creativity are three of the things that this field needs to be successful. You have to be fast, you have to be agile, you have to be ready to change your mind and change the course of action when you need to, which means convincing someone that I know that we said this was the right thing three months ago, but believe me, this is the right thing now. And then you have to take enough risk to do it quickly. But with everyone looking over their shoulder all the time because of the multi-layered audits that come down, and we've lived this over the last 10 years, for very good reason. The IG, GAO, we need those. But people have pulled back into a shell where I would, in many ways, we are more risk averse than we used to be. And to get around that, a bureaucracy has grown up like a thicket around those organizations that are supposed to be fast and flexible. Bureaucracy equals slowing things down. It means the memo that used to be 10 pages long is now 25 pages long. The clearances that were eight are now 18. One of the good things I said is we're working to better as a government. It also means if you wanna move on this, you have to go outside your organization to multiple different parts of other organizations and they all have to sign off on this crazy new creative idea that you have. That's how people work in the salt mines to make this happen every day, is to run around and get people convinced to sign their name on a piece of paper. And you have to have them all there so later when there is an audit everyone can say we did our best to check all the boxes. But that doesn't equal speed, flexibility and agility. In so many ways, Syria is a terrible case by which to judge our field, just as in a lot of ways Afghanistan is. And I think what you said that you can't take the lessons of Afghanistan or Iraq and apply them to every instance. I'd like to just ask you very briefly to apply all of these observations to Syria and give us a sense, A, what we're doing. But B, how what we're doing and trying to do in Syria is similar and how it's different from what we in this field, this unnamed field. Are trying to do more generally. That's an easy question, not. You're welcome. As I was on the plane down to Tampa night before last, thinking about what I was gonna say to try to tee up what the situation is right now in Syria to our colleagues in Sencom. I looked back at what the situation was a little less than a year ago. So I looked at the numbers in September of 2012. At that point, there were 1.2 million IDPs. 1.2 million, which was huge. We're now at over 4.5, possibly much higher than that. All of the numbers, and this is the technical term I use are squishy when talking about Syria because there's a lot we don't know. That's four times as many people in under a year that are displaced. There were less than 20,000 people killed as of September last year. We're at almost 100,000 now. That's a five-fold increase in less than a year. The number of refugees that the international community was struggling to try to respond to in neighboring countries was 290,000, which was a huge number of refugees. We're now six times as many. 1.8, approaching 2 million refugees, and predictions is that could go as high as 3 million in the next few months. And at that point, our government had spent a little over $100 million on humanitarian assistance. Less than a year later, we're at $815 million, and that's only increasing. Why do I point all this out? We have been less than creative when we come up with what the worst case scenario is. We keep passing the worst case. And as we look at it now, folks on the Hill, folks at OMB say, so when is this going to, obviously it's gonna level off on the humanitarian side. There aren't a lot of indicators right now that show that things are going to level off and get better right away. We're asked often when we are trying to get on the humanitarian side money for the humanitarian side, compare this to what we did in Haiti money-wise, compare this what we did to the Pakistani floods. I say the earthquake in Haiti was 60 seconds long. And then we picked up the pieces and did what we could to help the Haitian people after that. We are two plus years into Syria, and it's still going on. This isn't post-conflict. This is conflict. So just quickly, we are at USAID working robustly, both on the humanitarian assistance side, our Office of Food for Peace and our Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, but also working on the non-humanitarian side to do what we can to work with the Syrian coalition, along with our State Department colleagues to help them strengthen themselves, to build their credibility and help increase their reach on the civilian side inside Syria. The lessons that I personally would take away and are trying to implement in Syria go back to expectations again. Let us get the expectations right. Let us not fool ourselves how difficult a job this is. Let us be sure that we don't come up with a nice matrix with little offices and dollar amounts down one side and think that that is going to get us success alone. The role of the Syrian people, the role of the Syrian regime, the role of the opposition are very, very important things and we cannot just decide to dream up programs and then expect them to get us where we need to be. I would just add that a lot of this, we talk about risk management, people being more risk averse. We have an opportunity and there's not a lot of great opportunities in Syria right now. One opportunity is to really get real about that discussion as a government and as an international community. What is the degree of risk we are willing to take in our programming, in our political calculus, and in the kinds of programs that we do, but also in security? What are we willing to accept as risk and what are we willing not to? Because the events on the ground for the foreseeable future in Syria and our ability to help contribute to success in Syria are very much related to it is an extremely difficult environment. Speaking to a government colleague the other day and they said, yeah, but USAID, tell me, you guys don't actually work where the fighting is happening, right? You sort of work where things are safe. I said, this is not a refugee camp in Kakama, Kenya where you sort of just back up the truck and offload the stuff and distribute it. This is humanitarian assistance in a hyper-kinetic active war zone where people are dying, people that implementing partners are dying. This is a very, very difficult thing. So the biggest lesson that I would try to apply is let's be very, very clear-eyed about this. Let us talk around tables with what we know is possible, what we hope is possible, and make the difference there and not confuse them. And also, let's do all we can to inform the American people and others about what is the contribution we can make and what is a realistic expectation. Very important point. Rob Jenkins, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts today. Thanks. It looks like we can get there. As Rob steps off the stage, I'd like to ask Rick Barton to step forward and I'll introduce him from the podium. Two months later, I was hired into what was then known as the PCR project. About two months later, the both co-directors of that project got jobs in the new Obama administration. Karen Von Hippel went over to the State Department. And then Rick was brought in as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Economic and Social Council. And suddenly I found myself as the acting director of the PCR project, having to fill some absurdly enormous shoes. And I'll admit that I felt pretty under-qualified at the time. But I had a great deal of encouragement from CSIS more broadly and in particular from Rick Barton. One of the things that I've learned about Rick over the years is that Rick's presence makes other people better because he tries to make them better. But he also stands up as an example to a lot of people for the kind of person you can be in the kind of career that if you work hard and are smart can achieve. Rick obviously was one of the founding directors of OTI. He's held any number of positions in this field. After he was the U.S. Ambassador to UN ECOSOC, he was, as we all know, named the Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. The successor to the Office of the Coordinator for Stabilization and Reconstruction. He's been there for almost two years now. And I think he had a great challenge in front of him and he's, as always, in his career has met it head-on. So it is my pleasure to introduce my predecessor in this job, Rick Barton. Thank you. Thank you, Bob. If it's OK, I'd like to just talk from here. Does this work for everybody? Can you still see me and hear me? I can see many of you. First off, thanks, Bob, for your very nice words and Johanna and I think John Henry was here earlier in the day. I just see a room full of friends, but especially Arthur Keyes for helping to make this possible and bringing everybody together. Just many, many thanks. I look around the room and there are a number of colleagues from CSO. So maybe I could ask them to stand up as I, if I miss you, then I'll ask for kind of a quick pass or for those that I've missed as well. But I think I saw Rafael Carlin and Cindy Wong and Etan Santag and Clint Fennin. And I thought there was maybe an Adam Graham Silverman should be here as well. I don't know if it's an Adam. Anybody else from CSO here and Sky Stahlbomber as well? So it's just I hope you have all got a chance to get to know them. It's a really, it's an excellent team and I obviously feel really fortunate to be working with them. It's kind of a little bit of a sentimental journey because this may be the last time I get a chance to speak in this hallowed B1 hall with CSIS going off to its spanking new headquarters just a few blocks away, which I'm kind of looking forward to as well. Even though this will be a sad farewell, it will be great to see this new facility. And obviously a lot of great conversations here that I've been part of. I see Craig Cohen as well, who's really one of my favorite old colleagues as well. So anyway, thank you all very much. My understanding of the day so far is that it's been a really thoughtful and constructive conversation. And so I really just want to offer maybe four provocations that I think have come up in some of the earlier conversations as my colleagues have reported, but also just because they're what's most on my mind right now. And so rather than trying to do kind of a tour of the horizon or the high points of the past year, just really the things that are coming forward and really perplexing us, challenging us, and put that challenge to you and hope that that in turn will lead to a good conversation. I don't notice any clocks here. So I'm just going to take this out to make sure that I don't go on longer. Because I think I understand you've been here much of the day, and many of you are planning to leave at four. And I really do want to get into a conversation with you. So I'm going to try to do this in 10 minutes. And let's see how well that works. The first idea that I wanted to just put into play is that I think we need to strengthen and really address the changing face of conflict and crises. That there is something really different going on out there. It isn't really more Bosnia and more whatever. It requires a fresh optic. And what I'd like to say is that it's obvious that we're in the post-Iraq Afghanistan world, and we're not likely to see that. I think we're seeing more genuine, popular revolts. I mean, when I talk to people in Syria, and they say that when they talk about the revolution, you have the feeling that they really think of it as a revolution. It's not some convenient phrase that they've just applied to it. There's a sincerity of commitment there that's quite deeper. There's an ease of violence now, which we might not have been as familiar with. There was a moment a few years ago where the elites could turn on and turn off the violence as they wanted. Now they turn it on, and poof. Suddenly 1,500 people are dead and 500,000 people left their houses. That was not the control model that we knew. One of the things that's really troubling for us right now is that when we sit down with groups of the US government, and we try to be as inclusive as possible, because that's really the only way we can go forward. And we ask people, if you're doing everything, if all of us here are doing everything as well as we possibly could, what's the trend line? And oftentimes in these heavy conversations, the trend line continues to be negative. That's with everybody on plan A doing their work as well as possible. That's kind of sobering as well. The speed of events, I think everybody would agree with, is much greater. But there could also be a change in dynamic, which could be as a result of this intense military effort of the last 10 years in particular. We may be arriving at a golden moment for civilians, because as we look at the number of these crises, and we look at the reluctance of the American public, people are really looking for an alternative to the kind of intervention that we just saw. So first issue, let's just really make sure that we're not missing some rather large things that are happening in the conflict and crisis world and settling back into where we were. The second point that I want to make is that there are a couple of fundamental organizational things we have to do if we're going to make progress. And the first one that I would offer is that we need to bring policy and implementation much closer together in a much more inclusive fashion. The State Department for a long time has had a model of we'll take care of the policy and the strategy, and you folks take care of the implementation, oftentimes meaning AID and the Defense Department. What we've ended up with is kind of a Frank-Gary-like dream where the roof and the building are in search of each other for perhaps the entire engagement. And we've really gotten way beyond that. It's obvious that we have to learn more from the people who are in charge of the implementation. And it's obvious that the people who are implementing have got to shorten the calendar of at least some positive signs. If we accept Rob's premise that 20 years is maybe what it requires or 40 years for transitions, and I happen to think sort of the post-colonial experience takes 50 or 60 years to get out of just by definition, we can accept that. But that doesn't mean that the kid doesn't go to kindergarten, learn something, first grade, learn something, and that there's a progression all along that we're showing some good things are happening. You cannot keep the American taxpayers saying the South Bronx will eventually be livable again in 40 or 50 years. I mean, that just doesn't work. And it didn't work in the South Bronx, so why should it work in a much more obscure part of the world that they're just getting to know? So the same standards and the same measures, I think, are fair. But we've got to bring the grassroots and for those of you who love the grassroots and for those of you who love air cover, grass doesn't grow without sun and rain. Otherwise, it turns to hay. And sun and rain without grass is usually mud and dust. And so it's a pretty good argument for these things have really got to be tied to each other. The second point that's just fundamental organizational change is that we have to have a center of gravity. So let's assume that Bob's thesis that there's a new crisis every two and a half weeks. You have to have an organizational model that has a center of gravity within the US government on a regular basis. And by the way, the National Security Council isn't able to do that. It's not that big. It's not that agile. It tends to get caught up in a few things that are really at the top of the pile. But you have to be able to do that on a much faster basis. And I would say that it has to have a driver. It has to be a decision-making model. You can't have a coordinator or a convener. That's just not enough. It's got to be somebody who has the ability to clarify direction, resolve differences, make choices. That person doesn't have to be in any one office. It has to be who's best suited for the nature of the crisis and of the conflict. And there happen to be lots of talented people. We don't have to bring in all new special envoys for every one of these things. But if we keep empowering people with barely the authority to convene a meeting, we're not likely to be able to really lead through some of these crises. And we'll end up having such difficult internal conflicts that we'll never get out of our own way. It's our best chance for coherence. I know that John Herbst probably was in a search for coherence when he had a chance to do this job. I think it's, I happen to think that that's something that the State Department needs to offer more definitively. I think it's possible. We're finding ways to do that. Usually we're finding ways to do that by putting other people in the lead and offering them all the help we can for those conversations and those discussions to take place. But it's possible for the State Department to do this if it makes a commitment to play well with others, which is, I think, one that it needs to reaffirm on a regular basis. The third point that I wanna make is that we need to reshape our analytical lens. We've got to expand beyond regions. There's a natural instinct to think that because I'm working in Angola that therefore I'm smarter about the DRC. But actually when I was at OTI and we were working on those places, I thought that the DRC was much more like Haiti and I thought Angola was much more like Serbia than they were like each other. So these things happen and some of the dominance of regional thinking is not necessarily the best case. We have to expand the themes obviously, religion and youth for example. We have to go from elites and those in power to broader landscapes of people. I think Rob and others have mentioned that. We have to go from individual, from undecideds and swing voters and moderates and dear hearts which tends to be the way American politics keeps getting over analyzed to what I believe is true in almost every country we're working in now which are silenced majorities. They're women, youth, they're business people that don't like the ruling elites. They don't like the sort of traditional opposition but they tend to make up huge numbers of the population and we've got to look at them and think of them a different way. We have to go from industry views and we have industries in our government obviously big, big pockets of money and counterterrorism and drugs and AIDS and refugees for example to a broader more balanced context so that our intelligence is not driven by those who are asking for it. And the people who are asking for it tend to be those who have the greatest numbers and the greatest pools of people. So that's going to take an institutional change. And why do we want to do this? Well to make sure that we get what's actually happening in a place. Wouldn't that be a refreshing way to start? Wouldn't you rather actually know what's happening in the place rather than coming in with your own pre-cooked narrative and saying this is what's going to happen and therefore I'm going to pursue this and we've been guilty of that in various places. So when we reach in these places we, when we reach these places what we want to do is we want to make sure that we're actually answering the question of what is most needed or what is most important as opposed to what are we ready to do? What do we have most available in our shop right now? So the final point I want to make is that I think we have to definitively expand our view of local ownership. I think it's been a slogan for a long time. Many people think they've committed that, committed their careers to this, but I think the evidence is still weighted on the side of when we see a problem we tend to bring in bringing our own folks we tend to build up our own capacities. And I don't think that we've taken the local ownership into play at the front end as aggressively as we need to. There's a pretty obvious reason for doing that. It's our only chance for success actually near and long term. There, if any of you still have your 55 year old child living at home, I'd like to, and it's a healthy child I'd like you to raise your hand. But we have, we have aid missions and other, an evidence of other 50 and 60 year commitments to places that suggest that we haven't quite figured out what the transition should be. And I think we need to think about that more critically. It starts with, it's actually gets to the core of humility that President Obama and others have really alerted us to in these places that we're working in. And I believe that there's significant opportunities for doing this better. I was gonna take a little bit more time to talk about some of the things that we've done in Kenya and in Honduras and Syria, Nigeria and Burma just to give you a feeling for some of the ways that I think you can take on these places. But what I would say in order to get to our conversation is that in every one of those places it has not been difficult to press the local people into leading us to what they think is the most important problem that they're facing at this time. Even if it's people running a $600 million US program, if you say to them, what is the most important thing going on in your country at this moment? And for the next year, they have almost no difficulty whatsoever telling you what they think is the greatest threat to their country. Now, that doesn't mean we can naturally and easily move the $600 million from one program to another. But it does mean that we have to give attention, we have to give a real commitment to what's most important because otherwise we're not likely to have the desired result in particular in dealing with the challenges of conflict and crisis. So I would just conclude by saying, yes, we have an important role. It's obviously a catalytic role. Some of it may be definitional in helping people to understand what's going on in their countries in a way that they've not been able to because they're so consumed by the pressure of the daily conflict. I think we can focus much more on the zero to 18 month period because that's still the period that the world has a difficult time responding in. So there are industries, there are people that are working beyond that. But when we get there, let's make sure that we're focused on the top problem and building off of the local initiatives rather than coming in and doing what we are most comfortable with or what we know. So I firmly believe, I continue to believe that this is a great opportunity to make a difference. We are contributing in key ways, but we obviously need your ongoing help and the fine work that many of you have shown over the years that you've worked in this field. So thank you very much. Great, well I'll look forward to some of your questions and comments. Is there a glass, is there a glass? I don't know if this is, I guess it's probably all right. Can I have a glass? For your questions, please raise your hand, identify yourself. And wait until the microphone arrives. The microphone is on, believe it or not. So let's start up here with this gentleman. David Lipp from the Institute for Defense and Business in Chapel Hill and a former FSO. Rob Jenkins told us about the importance of foreign service engagement at the sub-national level and as a former foreign service officer at times, the good old times of Afghanistan and Syria and Niger. We did exactly that, did not engage that much with presidents and other diplomats as much as we did at the local level. That's harder to do today and the new QDDR tells us that state and USAID will manage risk in a much better way to allow foreign service officers to do their job but to be also safe and secure. Can you give us some guidance or ideas about how that's playing out on the ground in crisis zones? Yeah, thanks, David. It's still very problematic, I would say. There's plenty of room for improvement. The post-Kin Benghazi environment has not been hugely helpful in that regard. But we found, for example, that we've been able to supplement an awful lot of the sub-national work in many, many of the places that we're working in, obviously in Kenya. We focus on what we thought were two hot spots outside of the capital, in particular the Rift Valley and the coast. But even in Burma, what we found is that just having a few extra hands on board there has given the US Embassy a much, much better understanding of the ethnic conflicts all over the country, in particular, and also what's happening with the Rohingya. That kind of agility has not really, that is not a trademark right now of the structure of the department. I think it's a desire of many, many officers. But I think there are limitations that range from safety to practices that we probably need to address more aggressively. But I think it's highly desirable every time it starts to happen. It's so warmly received. I've been sort of using the made up number that there are about 15 ambassadors that we've had a chance to work with over last year that really have fallen in love with this ability to reach out within their country to understand better what's going on, to get on the problem of the moment rather than to just inherit a portfolio. And it turned out, so Cindy took that number because I've been using it somewhat liberally. And I think she came back and said it was 16 or 17, which is good. Usually I'm on the other side of the exaggeration. But I do think that these kinds of practices are what really gives you the understanding of the place. And if you don't have that full understanding, you inevitably get stuck with the elites. Or you get stuck even with the well-intentioned Foreign Service Nationals who've worked in the embassy for a number of years. So you've got to push outside of that, outside of your comfort zone. And we've got to find a way to do it. And that's the safety. You cannot minimize the safety issue at all. You've seen what happened as a result of the Libya case. On the other hand, I do think that we need to have a really fulsome conversation with our professionals so that there's a real understanding of what the risk is that's involved and what is an appropriate risk. And we've tried to manage that. We've tried to get out to places that I think are hazardous. We typically take somebody from our Department of State security with us. Now in a lot of these places, when we send people out, or they go out and review and tell us what more we need to do. So we try to be responsible. But by and large, it is a more dangerous world out there as well, I think, than it used to be. So it's hard. Doug, in the middle, please. Hi, Doug Brooks, consultant formally with the International Stability Operations Association. Hi, Doug. Nice to see you again. If I could give you a magic wand and basically say in the five to 10 year range, what sort of three, two or three top changes would you want to see within the US government structure that could improve the government's ability to influence these situations, such as Syria and so on, more positively? Well, I did try to offer a couple of those. I hope they're not magic wands, and I hope they won't take 10 years. I mean, I see them within my reach. But as you know, these are well-established bureaucracies, and so you really have to be there every day. I've come to the realization the genius is nowhere near as valuable as persistence, which is kind of dismaying because my grandmother used to say it was 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. And she seems to be closer to right than most of us. But I do think that I think a big part of it is for people to accept the enormity of the challenges. So I guess I would say that would be the biggest thing that I would look for. And I was surprised when I went to Iraq that in 2003 that that was really the biggest thing that was missing, that people did not appreciate the enormity of what they were getting into. Now, if I had been asked the question that Rob was asked, what did we learn the last 10 years, I would say, we have a greater appreciation of the enormity of these tasks. And we're probably not going to do Iraq and Afghanistan again, or certainly not in the next two or three years. Fine, but you can still find yourself in countries where there's a genuine threat of violence breaking out, of conflict, of unhappiness getting to the point where people are hurting each other. And you can still run into kind of an attitude which says, it's a complicated problem, but I'm going to keep a lid on it for the two years that I'm out here. The other side of the equation and the side that I think is a lot healthier is people, when you get to a country and you see an ambassador who's tormented by what's going on. And her face might look like a munch drawing where she's going, you know, she knows she needs help. This is a bad situation. That's where it starts, doesn't it? I mean, if you have a problem and you don't know you need help, you're usually cooked. I mean, right at the start. So that would be the one thing that the one structural change that I look for is just the realization that, hey, these are really tough, complicated cases. We're not going to win most of them, as probably all of your speakers today have said. But at the very least, you have to start with the realization of the difficulty of the task. Let's get on the side over here in the back. Thank you. John Simon with Total Impact Advisors. This has been a great day. But one element that has been missing is how we work with and mobilize regional organizations and countries within the region to support our efforts in this area. And I'm thinking in particular of what was done with Somalia, where the engagement of the AU really turned a situation that for two decades had been written off into a situation that now is considered today and can change tomorrow as something that's progressing and something of a success. And so I wonder if that's an element that can be brought in to fill the gap that exists when, obviously, we're not going to be deploying our own kinetic forces the way we used to be able to. Yeah, I think our feeling is that we should be shamelessly opportunistic about who our partners are and who is best suited to do whatever the difficult task is. And in many, many cases, it is going to be some sort of regional configuration or, obviously, it could be the United Nations. And what we're trying to do is get away from this entitlement sense that this is my space. I'm always the person who deals with this problem when, in fact, the answer that you may be bringing to this problem might be shaped by, it might be 10 years out of date. So I would just, I would be completely, I'd like to be much more opportunistic. On the other hand, we've got to build up the capabilities of some of these people. And many of them still need a lot of support, at the very least, financial support. I almost always need that. I wonder if I could ask you a question that I asked of Rob and some others earlier today, which is, over the years, a lot of lessons have been collected for our field. And we've done a pretty good job of incorporating some of them and implementing some of them. But there still are a lot of lessons that we seem to relearn over and over again. Now, the answer that Rob gave as to why this keeps happening was regarding risk aversion. I wonder if you could give your response to that. Well, it's a really good question. I mean, I think I do think that there are a handful of places where we really just have to do better. And that's why I spent so much time on analysis. Because if one person thinks it's a terrorism case and the other person thinks it's a model democracy, we have a divergence of opinion at the beginning of this venture. This is something that Elizabeth Kevvie-Dashvili used to use to describe the core problem in Afghanistan. How do you have those two things? So I do think that analysis, focus on top priorities rather than doing everything, is still right at the top of our list. I would say one thing that, in terms of this whole risk and how creative we can be, I've asked a number of US government audiences in the last few months, maybe last month and a half. If you had a spectrum, and then one end of the spectrum is native caution, and the other end of the spectrum is American ingenuity, how many people here in this room, and this would be a US government employee room, feel that they spend most of their time on the American ingenuity side of the spectrum? And I've yet to have anybody raise their hand to say that they've, so obviously we're doing a pretty good job on native caution, except for perhaps in the one most basic area, which I mentioned a few minutes ago, which is in making the initial decision, making the initial decision as to what places you work in. Because there are a lot of places you just are not going to be able to make a difference, whether you spend $3 trillion there or you spend $100 million there. We have a number of countries in the world right now that we're spending probably around $1 billion a year without knowing it, without really paying attention to it. And I don't know how you feel, but I still think of $1 billion is a lot of money. I know it's a little bit, I know it's a bit kind of dated concept, but it still strikes me as a lot of money, especially for a really small country and an obscure part of the world. So I think for $1 billion, you've got an expectation of getting something. So I would like us to start more with kind of a zero base review, always. In every country we go into, start with a zero base review, what are we doing here? And Andrew obviously has worked the Somalia case at length, but Somalia could easily be a billion dollar case. By the time you do pirates, you do food, you do terrorists, you do a little bit of governance, you do a number of the other things we're doing there, and you just take the US share of those things, that's a serious commitment. It's not a recreational experience. An earlier speaker used a different scale. He referred to the two P's, and on the one hand is passivity, which is kind of doing stuff. On the other side is panic, is what? Panic, for everything we've got at it. And he recommended a middle P, which was pragmatism. Now that's a different dimension from what you're talking about, from ingenuity to caution. Let's take one more question. I like pragmatism is I think it is America's core philosophy. And so we need to stay close to it. My dad worked for USIA. He used to go out and have to speak about American culture around whatever country we were in. And he developed a speech on American philosophers, and there were people from a lot of these countries that said, there's no such thing as American philosophers. You know, America doesn't have a philosophy. We don't know, he's hundreds of years old and all these people who come up with these great ideas. And so he ended up anchoring his talks usually on pragmatism. And I think, yeah, you know, it's not that bad. I mean, I think we got accused of being roaring pragmatists and then we bring creativity on top of it. We're probably going to be a pretty darn constructive world player. Let's take one final question in the very back in the middle, please. Make this a true or false, will you, Mike? Thank you very much. Almost that easy. Mike, Jayjit, thank you so much for your insights into the challenges you're facing. And I just wanted to pick up on a couple of them. You mentioned that the need for empowerment to be able to even convene a meeting, the need for intelligence so that you can get an assessment of what the real drivers of the conflict are, but the fact that different bureaucracies and agencies will have different views on what that is. So my question has to do with the nature of the strategic planning process in the government today is in terms of rethinking stabilization, maybe this is one of the things that we need to rethink. So my question is, would you agree with the chairman's assessment and the lessons from a decade of war, one of the critical lessons was the need for interagency collaboration and one of the recommendations is that Congress needs to tell the executive branch that there shall be interagency, well, I'll put the term strategic planning. So would you consider to be the needs to be able to put in place and empower your organization to be able to do effective strategic planning, the assessment piece, defining the objectives and monitoring and evaluation on whether our strategies are working? Thank you. Thanks, Mike. I actually think this is an area that we've been making real progress in this first year of CSO. I mean, we've had some of the most stimulating round table exercises with basically colleagues, all the people in the US government that have ownership of a problem on a number of big cases and just by co-hosting them with the regional bureau or co-hosting it with others who have an interest, it doesn't, we don't have universal access, we can't do it automatically on every case. Again, in each case, we're still having to negotiate our way, find the parties who are in agreement, make sure that it happens. But when you get people together, it is really amazing how getting a group of well-intentioned people around a common problem with a little bit of time can still actually help you make progress on. I mean, that doesn't sound like a very exotic formula. At least it doesn't to me. But it's still kind of not, it's not totally habit, it's not totally practice. And the department has room to be more welcoming to other parts of the US government. I still find admirals and generals at my door on a regular basis. And oftentimes, this is a little bit facetious, but they're looking for a window to crawl in. I mean, they're just trying to find an entry point into our halls. So I think people understand that the State Department has a logical contribution to make there, but it has to show an eagerness and a willingness. I think we've done that. I think we've done it not only in these tabletop exercises in some of these longer planning sessions, but we've done it as our teams have gone out to places like Kenya and other places. We're happy to go out and join teams. A lot of it is not looking as if you're too bureaucratically zealous yourself. And if you look, if it's all about self-promotion, there are plenty of people who will undercut it. So how do you share that opportunity and that responsibility? Because obviously the work is tough. And sometimes we just facilitate, but whatever it takes to make sure that there's a better conversation. Just give you one, for instance. We had a conversation the other day about a country that's going through a fairly elaborate peace process. And it's clear that within the US government there would be different views of whether a successful piece would be as desirable or not. I mean, that's pretty fundamental. And that was a good conversation. Really good day-long conference they have. And everybody left the room recognizing we've got quite a ways to go just to get ourselves on the same page. In our own bureau, when we get together to talk about Somalia, five people in the room, three and a half views. So we can't even, we're not even ready to go out much farther because we still have to sort out what the heck we think is happening there and what we might do that could be potentially helpful. But I think we've really expanded the view and the opportunity. And I believe that while people say the State Department has no planning instinct, or I've been at enough meetings now where I've heard people say, gee, this was really great. We should have done it a few months ago that suggests that there's a real opportunity there. And there are other parts of the government that are doing more work in this area. But I think some of the political tuning that goes on, that should go on at the State Department, is beneficial to their work as well. And this work really only matters if it comes together. It's not great to have a military plan for one place and to have a civilian plan for another place. And what does that mean? So I think we've really got to bring these together, and that's part of what we're trying to do. And I believe there's a big upside here, and I think we're going to make some even more significant gains. And that's the way that you can play, you can make a huge contribution much greater than just knocking off one country at a time. So we have that in our sights and we believe it's central to our challenge. Before I thank Rick Barton, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank IRD and AECOM for co-sponsoring this conference with us. Thank you, Arthur and Jeff at IRD, and David and Maxuda at AECOM. Thanks to my staff, Catherine, Joanne, Siddica, and to all 22 of our speakers today. And we will be putting out a report. The full video of the entire day will be available on c3.csis.org, along with a few other shorter video clips. Let's take Rick's words seriously when he suggests that we combine American pragmatism with American ingenuity as we continue to rethink our field and how we go about our work. And let's all give a round of applause to Rick Barton. Thank you for coming today.