 Good morning, everyone. Good morning, everyone. We've got to wake us up here. My name is Nancy Lindbergh. I'm the president of the United States Institute of Peace. And I'm delighted to welcome everyone here today for the second event that USIP has co-hosted with the US Advisory Commission for Public Diplomacy. And we're delighted to have worked with ACPD for the last two years to explore how can we collectively manage and mitigate the physical risk that we are increasingly seen in the environments in which all of us work, where we have increasing high threat and complex places. Or as director of national intelligence, James Clapper said to the Senate this spring that unpredictable instability is the new normal. For those of you who haven't joined us here before, US Institute of Peace was founded in 1984 by Congress as an independent, federally funded institution dedicated to the proposition that peace is possible, practical, and essential for national and global security. And we do this by working on the ground, often in conflict environments with partners in communities, institutions, governments, equipping them with tools, research, and training to manage conflict so it doesn't become violent and resolving it when it does. And this means that by definition, our teams, like many of your teams, are working in places where there is implicit risk. And I'm delighted to see so many of you here from, I understand, all parts of government, from military, from state, from USAID, from the private sector. And I commend all of you for being here with us today for this important conversation. Because you also know that we will not succeed in our jobs if we are not able to have the kind of local knowledge, the local relationships, the understanding and ability to support local solutions. And you cannot have that information, that knowledge, those relationships from here or from inside highly barricaded fortresses. And yet, the security threats are there. They do exist. So it becomes a critical issue to figure out how to balance those. We've seen the mounting concerns. We've seen the travel bans. I know from my time in the government that I often felt that if I hadn't been to a lot of places before I entered government, I would not understand them in the same way. So it's imperative that we get this right and that we enable our very hard-working civilians to do the job that they need to do. I look forward to the rest of the conversation. And to kick us off, I'm going to introduce an introducer. So it's my honor to introduce Doug Wilson, who will introduce our keynote speaker. Doug is the former Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the Department of Defense and the Pentagon's former senior spokesman. He, three times, was the recipient of the highest honor for civilians at the Pentagon. And he served secretaries Cohen, Gates, and Panetta. He has since joined the private sector, served as a vice president for a number of companies, and remained very active on a host of national security issues. He's currently the chair of the Board of Advisors for the Truman National Security Project. He has been nominated by President Obama to serve on the US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, still waiting for confirmation. Fingers crossed. Doug, any minute now. He was the keynote speaker of this event last October. And so somebody who's deeply knowledgeable and cares about these issues. And it's not just the physical security, but the staff care and the mental care that we need to offer our teams. And I know Doug is a champion of both. So please join me in welcoming Doug. Thank you very much, Nancy. 20 months ago, almost to the day today, a large group of us gathered here at the US Institute of Peace to discuss what constitutes acceptable risk for US diplomats and development workers who face increasing challenges trying to build relationships with foreign publics in dangerous places. That nonpartisan gathering included one of the giants of American diplomacy, Ryan Crocker, the respected former US Ambassador to Iraq, James Jeffrey, and the former Commander-in-Chief of US Forces in Europe and NATO Commander, Admiral Jim Stavridis. The simple premise of that discussion was this. For those who serve their country in uniform, on the battlefield, the acceptance of risk in all its forms is a given. The public understands this. It gives its unqualified admiration, respect, and support to these young men and women in uniform as they carry out their missions. But we have given less focus and less attention to US government civilians and to the ever-broadening spectrum of risks which they now face. They too are serving their country. They are doing so in an ever-increasing number of high-risk environments around the world. So what constitutes acceptable risk for these civilians? US diplomats and development workers face increasing challenges, trying to build relationships with foreign publics in what is now almost everywhere a dangerous place. And the ways they've been told to deal with these challenges too often have been counterproductive. An overreliance on social media and rote reliance on fortress-like compounds constrains and prevents the effective development of the human relationships necessary to achieve mission goals. Both military and civilians who spend their careers engaging in these environments know this. They fear that the US government and the US public are becoming so risk-averse that we're creating fundamental barriers to building trust among the very swing publics that are critical to giving our policies and our goals the benefits of the doubt and critical to helping our civilians on the front line understand and minimize the risks they face. So 20 months ago here in this room, we began a real, serious, holistic, apolitical, productive discussion, a discussion involving all public and private stakeholder institutions on how US government civilians can effectively engage with foreign publics in high-thread environments. It was a discussion that was informed and framed by the views of more than 60 individuals from all parts of the national security spectrum, current and former diplomats, AID workers, and public diplomacy practitioners, senior, mid-level, and junior. Men and women who had served in uniform on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, NGO leaders and workers, security professionals and Republican and Democratic staff members from the House and Senate committees on foreign affairs and armed services. And we began then to address these questions. In an era where zero risk environments is a virtual oxymoron, what constitutes acceptable levels of risk for our frontline civilians? How do we balance mission and risk and not frame these issues as a zero-sum choice? What tools and resources are necessary to minimize risk without undermining or negating basic goals of engagement? How do we define the tipping points? When is it productive to engage abroad and when and where are the risks too great? How can civilians benefit from the public engagement lessons learned by the US military over the past decade and a half on the battlefield? Are we giving up connecting with the majority of local publics in order to stay protected from just a few? What training should there be to enable our frontline civilians to engage more effectively in these places and perhaps most important, and this Heather is why we're so delighted you are here, how do we recruit and retain a new generation of civilians willing to engage on behalf of the US government in so many dangerous and hostile places around the world and make those careers meaningful and important to them? I was honored to have helped to lead that discussion 20 months ago and equally honored to be here, to be part of this one. Nancy, I wanna thank you so much, you and your team at the US Institute of Peace for the key role that you have played in promoting this dialogue and hosting these events. And I wanna thank Tom Periello and the staff of the State Department's policy planning for what they did to incorporate so much of the core of the 2014 discussions into the subsequent QDDR. And I also wanna thank and congratulate the US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy for the seminal role it has played in putting these issues on the front burner. The commission chair, Sam Farar, who couldn't be here with us today. Commissioners Ann Wedner and Penny Peacock who are with us today. And most especially, you'll permit me to extend a joint and collective thanks and congratulations to Catherine Brown, the outstanding young executive director who will be concluding her tenure later this summer and to whom all of us owe a huge debt of gratitude for all that she has done to focus attention and resources on these issues that matter so much to the conduct of foreign policy. And this morning I have the great privilege of introducing someone who has listened to these pleas to take these issues seriously and is doing so as a leader at the very top echelons of the State Department. Heather Higginbottom is the Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources. She is former Counselor to Secretary Kerry for whom she served as a legislative director when he was in the Senate. She has also served as Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget and as Counselor to the Director of OMB. And her views have been and continue to be heard well beyond the State Department. Heather served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council from January 2009 to January 2011, where she helped to design the race to the top and promise neighborhood programs. And she served as Policy Director for President Obama's first presidential campaign. She was Founder and Director of the American Security Project and I believe this is the thing I like the most. It was very fitting that she began her career at communities and schools, a national nonprofit organization which is dedicated to keeping young people from dropping out of school. It's fitting because here today, the task is to keep young people from dropping out of public service and from recruiting and retaining a new generation who will stay in public service and have the motivation and talents to serve their country in an increasing number of hostile environments abroad. Shortly after the death of his son, former Ambassador to Libya, US Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, his father, Jan Stevens, wrote this. Chris would not have wanted to be remembered as just a victim. He knew and accepted that he was working under dangerous circumstances. He did so just as so many of our diplomatic and development professionals do every day because he believed that the work was vitally important. He would have wanted the critical work he was doing, the kind of work that made him literally thousands of friends and admirers across the broader Middle East to continue. Heather, thanks to your leadership, we can continue to focus on giving our diplomats and development workers the tools to make that happen. The floor is yours. Good morning. Thank you Doug so much for that introduction and to both you and Nancy for just laying down why this conversation is so important and why we're so pleased to be a part of it today. Nancy and I had the pleasure of working together on the Ebola response when she was at USAID and she was an incredibly steady and competent leader of USAID's really heroic efforts and so we were sad when we no longer had her around the situation room table but we're so pleased that she came to USIP to lead this great institution and commit to a world without conflict and this conversation today is so important. We're so grateful to USIP and the advisory council on public diplomacy for engaging in this conversation. Secretary Kerry has said that we as a nation need to engage in a larger conversation about the inherent dangers of diplomacy and today this conversation is part of that discussion and the others that Doug was just speaking about. USIP and all of you understand that our vital work only happens when a special sort of person steps forward on behalf of their country. Someone who volunteers to leave the comforts of home to contend with microbes and monsoons and unfriendly governments and armed guerrillas. We call these people frontline civilians because many times they are required to risk their security in order to advance the nation's interests and it's our responsibility to protect them, to support them and their families. Diplomacy and development are the first lines of defense and a really good return on investment as former defense secretary Bob Gates said, we must focus our energies beyond the guns and steel of the military, beyond just our brave soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen. We must also focus our energies on the other elements of national power. So an aid worker who helps one village get clean water may stop the next superbug, next Ebola from emerging. A diplomat who's able to quickly re-emerge, re-engage quickly on the ground after a temporary evacuation may help preserve a fragile truce. Our efforts to counter violent extremism, propaganda and recruitment may steer a potential terrorist down a better path. But we can't do any of this if we can't and we can't score if we're not on the field. And that's why state and USAID, our interagency partners, Congress, all of you, we need to continue to work together on the three-dimensional puzzle of monitoring threats, mitigating risks and staying engaged on the ground so that we can continue to pursue our national security interests and look out for American citizens abroad. Risk is continuing to evolve, but it's not new and it's not insurmountable. And so today I'd like to spend a few minutes laying out our strategy to manage physical risk, talk a bit about the progress we've made and then highlight the work that still lies ahead. This year we celebrated the 100th anniversary of our diplomatic security service. So need to mitigate physical risk is not new. The modern era goes back at least to the Inman and Crow reports from the 1983 Beirut and 1998 Kenya and Tanzania bombings. And of course, more recently, we've drawn recommendations from reviews following the terrible and tragic events in Benghazi. These recommendations have helped the department adapt to this evolving threat environment by leveraging updated mechanisms and procedures to make sure that we're appropriately balancing our mission and its risks. So for instance, stabilizing and developing Afghanistan and Iraq and even places like the southern Philippines and northern Nigeria is necessary so that they don't serve as basis for terrorists. Building peace in Columbia is part of stopping transnational crime. Global health efforts help prevent diseases from becoming even more lethal and from reaching our shores. To enable our diplomats and development professionals to carry out their mission, we have to give them resources, flexibility and support to do their jobs. As Doug mentioned, last year, Secretary Kerry unveiled the second quadrennial diplomacy and development review and it elevated the quote, need to understand the dangers we face and depoliticize the risks. And that's a big part of what we want to talk about today. One of the key efforts to emerge from the QDDR is a department-wide agility review that is helping us to identify innovations and policy and operations and high threat environments and to institutionalize them. So far the agility review has identified six priority areas ranging from how we adapt aid programs in changing security situations to how we deal with transnational challenges like Daesh and Boko Haram to how we actually get around in dangerous places. This agility review will make concrete recommendations that help spread lessons learned and best practices not just from post-to-post and region-to-region but department-wide. Based on a new and more holistic approach to weighing risks on the ground against our national security interests, we've created the High Threat Post Review Board and the Vital Presence Validation Process, or VP2. The Board convenes senior officials from across the department to determine which of our posts are most at risk so that they can receive greater scrutiny and move to the front of the line for security needs. And through the VP2 process, we are constantly reassessing our presence for our high threat posts and for any other posts where changes in the security environment raises concerns. The VP2 process brings new analytical rigor to identifying evolving threats and to ensure that we spot trends and apply lessons learned. We've also instituted a new risk management policy and are strengthening our security toolkit by growing our Marine Security Guard Program. We're expanding an intensive training course for all employees assigned to high threat posts which features hands-on training and how to recognize, avoid and respond to security situations. And we're also building a new consolidated Foreign Affairs Security Training Center in Virginia. We're developing processes to gather and incorporate lessons from the field into the decision-making and training that we provide. So I've just gone through a lot of bureaucratic speak and detailed processes, but I wanted to give you a sense of the nuts and bolts of department-like hours responding to this evolving risk and what it takes and how we think about it. And we think these tools and processes have enabled us to creatively strike a balance in the field. And so here are a couple of examples that get beyond the bureaucratic speak. First, Somalia. We haven't had an embassy in Mogadishu since 1991, but we've never severed our relations there. Our engagement from embassy Nairobi allowed us to maintain relationships with the Somalis and the international community working there. And we've ramped up our presence using a phased approach from day trips to Mogadishu to longer stays there, to trips to other cities, and to more routine movements between Nairobi and Mogadishu. This has allowed us to establish the security necessary for a formal diplomatic return, a process that Secretary Kerry launched during his historic visit to Mogadishu last year. Second, Cairo, a very key post in which our VP2 risk analysis made clear that a significant presence is in our national security interest, but that we also needed to be proactive in reducing our footprint where possible. So in response, Post reviewed the necessity of performing each function in Cairo and determined that tasks that were administrative, some tasks that were administrative in nature could be moved and that enabled us to reduce by 20% the number of US direct hires in Cairo without affecting or disrupting the work. So we've made a lot of progress toward defining acceptable risk and mitigating it in actual on the ground situations. And that brings me to the last part of where we're headed and how do we need to continue to evolve in the years to come? So I just wanna highlight two really important things. First, we need to continue to do a better job of caring for the people who take the risks for their families, for our frontline civilians to ensure we're addressing those needs as the threat environment changes. And second, and Doug spoke about this and it's at the heart of these conversations and it's critically important to us carrying out our mission, we have to foster a more nuanced understanding in Washington on the risks inherent in the conduct of diplomacy and development. So I've talked about the steps that we're taking now to appropriately address and mitigate the risk. We know we have more to do before, and during, and after deployment to ensure that our people have access to both physical and mental health care and peer support. And importantly, that they feel that they're able to avail themselves of those supports without risk to their security clearances or their career prospects. But on the second, we must continue the public dialogue like the one we're having today and has happened over the last two years about the need to balance risk and mission if we accept that a world in which we lead with diplomacy and development is ultimately a safer one. Our military and intelligence communities are the first to say that they should not be managing foreign policy alone. But if we're not present, that's what they have to do. And leaders in turn must accept that some uncertainty and danger will always be part of being part of the world. Our workforce at the State Department is cleared for worldwide assignment, as we like to say. Our people thrive when they're having a positive impact on the ground. That's why they wanna do this work. If we don't stay engaged and don't stay at the cutting edge, we will lose our most effective and talented foreign service officers. Our civilians, our workforce, they don't seek out danger, but they're willing to take it on when the interests of our national security demand it. Whether it's working to stabilize countries in the Middle East or Africa, deny terrorists a safe haven, containing pandemics, diffusing conflicts. America is the one indispensable nation and we depend on our frontline civilians. So it's so important that we get this right. We have to strike the appropriate balance between mission and risk as the risk and threat environment changes and evolves. And to do that, we need your help. So we are so grateful to be a part of this discussion. We are so grateful that you're here and that you're a part of it. And we hope to continue the dialogue. Thank you. Thank you, Secretary Higginbottom, for those remarks. My name is Linwood Ham and I am the director of the Global Policy Team here at the Institute. And it's been my pleasure for the last two years to be the USIP representative working with Catherine Brown, her colleague, Chris Hensman, and the US Advisory Commission for Public Diplomacy to start this conversation and continue it. I want to invite to the stage now our next speaker, Mr. Thomas Stahl, acting assistant administrator of the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance, Dacia at USAID. He's eminently qualified to talk about this issue of physical risk because he's lived it since 1988 working with aid. His lived experiences in Sudan, Kenya, other parts of Southern and Eastern Africa as well as West Bank and Gaza. Additionally, Tom is an important thought leader in this topic because he is leading Dacia, both in advising how the development workers in Dacia are proceeding in these hostile areas as well as being a voice within the agency and the larger agency community on this issue. So without further ado, I'd like to welcome Tom Stahl to the stage. Good morning. Thanks. Thank you very much for the introduction, Linwood. Thank you, Nancy, for hosting this, gathering on this very important topic as Heather has mentioned and Doug and others. It's great to be here and to be a part of this. I'd like to share some thoughts on the threats of that frontline aid workers, some of whom are here in the audience today and diplomats are facing around the world and how USAID is addressing these challenges. And I want to thank Deputy Secretary Higginbottom for her strong collaboration and support for USAID efforts worldwide. We are especially grateful for the support we receive from the State Department to negotiate safe passage and our security for aid workers delivering assistance in some of the toughest places on earth. Today, more than ever, unfortunately, aid workers are operating in areas of protracted and often sporadic conflict and insecurity. 10 years ago, 80% of humanitarian assistance worldwide went toward natural disasters. Today, 80% is spent in conflict-related disasters, unfortunately, and as USAID Administrator Gail Smith highlighted at the World Humanitarian Summit a few weeks ago, around the world, humanitarians grapple with the willful denial of access by parties to conflict in the places we're working. We worked hard to raise this issue at the summit and we had 47 different countries join the US statement affirming the importance of adhering to international humanitarian law and norms and that was an important step but still much work needs to be done. And then just last week, I was at the World Food Program annual board meetings in Rome and I was struck by the powerful message that Pope Francis delivered on this issue. He said, it's a strange paradox that humanitarian aid is obstructed by incomprehensible sometime rules as well as bad actors, while arms can flow freely across borders and across conflict. In an effort to reach those in need across conflict line, aid workers face enormous security risks, harassment by roadside militias, search and seizure and worse. The figures are stark. USAID funded aid worker security database which tracks attacks against aid workers has tracked the increase in attacks over the last decade. In 2014, there were 190 attacks against aid workers. More than three times the number in 2004, 10 years earlier when they were 63. And in 2003, 56 aid workers were killed in 2003 and in 2014, it was 121. In South Sudan alone, 12 aid workers have been killed just in the last six months. Now we see also a closing operational space in addition to actual security threats for both humanitarian and development workers. To varying degrees, governments around the world are imposing legal and fiscal restrictions on aid workers which hamper their ability to operate freely and in some cases subject them to harassment, interrogation and surveillance. You know, when I was in Sudan registering World Vision which I was working in in 1985, I met with the head of security there and he said, we know all of international NGOs come to Sudan for one of three reasons, spying, subversion or proselytizing. And my job is to find out which one of those you're involved in and expel you. So sometimes that's the environment we're having to work in. And unfortunately our local staff and of course the local staff of our implementing organizations bear the brunt of these threats. In environments of inter-ethnic tension, they may even be perceived as agents of one side or another to the conflict. And as we saw in the tragic case of our colleague Zulhas Manan in Bangladesh, recently local human rights activists are especially under attack. But despite these sobering trends, we cannot allow ourselves to become bunkerized as Heather was talking about. We must venture out, we must get to know the local dynamics in order to be effective which makes it incumbent upon us to understand the risks we face and appropriately mitigate and balance those risks with the mission. And USAID has redefined and refined how it does business in several ways to respond better to security and operational challenges and much of that in cooperation with the State Department. First and foremost we've put greater emphasis of course on protecting our staff, both the international and local staff. Especially and our partners who are often the ones on the front lines. Taking lessons learned from our OFDA and OTI offices, USAID has increased the number and the level of our security training required of staff operating in non permissive environments and high threat environments including providing intensive training even for local staff. And we have increased the number of countries where this specialized training is required up to 30 now. Also more of our offices incorporate staff care and healing into management as well as programmatic activities. For example in South Sudan following the flare-up in the conflict in December of 2013, USAID trained our local staff in trauma awareness and resilience. Secondly we use several strategies to address operational challenges including seeking community acceptance. Operating with transparency and clearly communicating red lines. Communication on the ground is critical to overcoming challenges to humanitarian access. For instance in South Sudan, careful negotiations at the local level have often helped to ensure that partners have the buy-in of local authorities for their activities. And many of our partners also work together to advocate common solutions across a number of our partners working to improve the operational environments and of course we support them in these efforts. Thirdly we coordinate on security issues with the UN and other security agencies including working through the UN cluster system and with UN peacekeepers. And in some places we're working more closely with the US military which brings a unique set of capabilities and sometimes unique challenges to address logistical and security concerns. For instance in Central African Republic partners negotiated with MINUSCA the UN peacekeeping team there to increase patrolling, especially on roads where the WFP food trucks and other convoys were becoming increasingly the victim of roadblocks and attacks. And then lastly we calibrate programming so that it remains responsive to shifting needs and security constraints on the ground. We've adapted our program designs in some cases to make sure that the programs are implemented in fragile environments that we implement in fragile environments are appropriate and flexible so that we can continue to succeed. We've adapted our monitoring and evaluation systems so that we can properly and effectively oversee the work in environments where it's difficult for us to get out. Often we rely on third party local monitoring partners to carry out monitoring and evaluation in difficult to reach areas. And we also work closely with partners to assess risk, draw up contingency plans and reorient programming in the face of shifting security and political realities. OTI one of our offices is particularly flexible with its programming in transitional environments. And then we make more and I think better use of modern technology, cell phones, texting, Skype, video conferencing in order to communicate with our partners in places that we can't get to. And all of this is important, but it's still not really a substitute for direct face to face visits, oversight, dialogue by USA8 officials. And so there is some things that we just can't do that we think we should be doing more. Some work we cannot do without direct regular frequent interaction. And some of those programs are some of our most important where we really have to dialogue. And so it is having an impact on how we operate. We're gonna continue to be flexible. We're gonna continue to adapt, but we can't say that it's business, that we can just continue on and it's perfect. So we have to continue to look at that. And we're struggling with the impact on our staff, both the impact of working in a difficult environment, but also increasingly it's the impact of having to go to places where you can't bring your families. And people wanna bring their families. I spent 30 years of my working career overseas and the only post that I didn't bring my family was Iraq. But even some of those posts where I did bring my family in the past, no longer can you do that in Sudan, for instance. And so that has an impact that we're still trying to do. And that makes it difficult, not only for those who are there working, but also finding people who wanna go work there. And the length of time they're willing to spend there, which also impacts our ability to get to know the country over time and so on. So there's that impact too, which isn't always calculated. There is a cost. There's the cost to our partners who have to increase their security. There's the cost to us moving around and the cost of security. For instance, when I was in Iraq a few years ago, we visited a school that had been renovated by USAID. And it cost us about $20,000 to renovate the school. It cost me $30,000 to visit that school. When you added up all the security costs of the vehicles, the extra security and stuff. So obviously we can't do it very often, but unfortunately that has to be calculated in. So just to say that how important it is that we're having this discussion. We need to find a balance. We need to be there. We need to be overseeing our programs. We need to be seen to be there, that the US government is there. I was in Bethlehem a few weeks ago inaugurating a project that we had there at the Bethlehem University, which is a Catholic school. And during the worst of the Intifada, when USAID, the US government, evacuated a lot of staff out, we actually sent a security team to the school to evacuate the priests and brothers. And they said, no, we're not leaving, we're staying. That had a huge impact on the community, on their ability to work there, on their acceptance by the community. We need to find that balance somehow, even within our own program. So I'm really glad to be here today to be a part of this discussion, and thank you very much. The remarks, it's wonderful for us to understand how the department and the agency are thinking about the policy and also the practical application. It's also wonderful for USIP and for our audience to have an opportunity to actually pose a question. We don't often have that opportunity with senior officials, so we're grateful that you're able to stay. We have an opportunity to do a one round of questions. So my colleagues will pass the microphone, I'll take three questions from the audience and we'll ask each to respond. Right here. Hello, Deborah Sadie with World Food Program USA. And I'd like to thank USIP and the speakers very much because as was mentioned, in addition to the US government, I mean UN organizations, NGO partners are facing many of these same challenges and I know that we do collaborate on security issues in the field. I wanted to, just to complicate matters further, I wanted to note that in the context of the conversations around the World Humanitarian Summit and increasingly the recognition that in many of these environments, particularly let's say post-conflict environments or fragile environments, where sometimes even natural disasters in fragile environments need to have a response, that many of these situations are protracted crises and there's a call for more and more development oriented colleagues to engage earlier and to be on the ground longer rather than having humanitarians necessarily providing short-term assistance for extended periods. So in addition to the training that you've spoken about that is needed for people who are in a sense used to working in these kinds of contexts, it seems that there's even a new emerging population that is going to need to be given orientation and support to work in more complex environments than perhaps they're used to and this will apply to the international financial institutions as well. Thank you. Thank you. Question in the back? My name is Joyce Jones. In terms of hemorrhagic fevers and other epidemiological outbreaks, how is the US or humanitarian agencies responding to instances where the political map doesn't matter? It's more about how diseases are contracted on the ground and when we consider these within a construct of conflict, how much of that weighs against the science and awareness of how diseases proliferate because we're coming to an age where many diseases are not responsive to medication and so I really wonder how do we be nimble in this regard and transnational perhaps. Thank you. Last question. Hi, my name is Larissa Fast and I've been researching this topic for about 15 years now. I'd like to also complicate the issue slightly and also thank the speakers for their comments. I'm wondering about the normalization of risk. So we cite statistics about the increase in the number of aid workers who are attacked but those often lack context. We also know there's much better reporting now than there was 10 to 15 years ago. We also know that there's many more aid workers now and so if we're looking at rates of attack, it's actually fairly stable over time. So we have all of these trainings, we have the bunkerization of aid compounds and it leads to this notion that risk is normal and so I'm wondering if the speakers could comment on how that may affect the way aid workers and diplomats, the frontline civilians actually operate in context. Thank you. Thank you. So maybe with the first and third there's a bit of a bundling the protracted nature of conflict inviting more and more people to be in hostile areas and this notion of the normalization of risk and then additionally the increasing medical crises that know no borders also exacerbated by conflict. Well, thank you. These are all really, really good questions and I wanna simplify the issue so thanks for making it more complex. So a couple thoughts on the first question in terms of the more protracted humanitarian crises. I think, and Tom mentioned this, we are having a good policy discussion about how we think about our US government assistance against those challenges, which I think is really important and it's my hope and expectation that because we have what is now an unprecedented migrant crisis with the new data that was released by the UN on Monday, 65 million people forced to flee their homes, that this is a moment that can get not just the US government but really other donor countries and international organizations to think about that nexus between humanitarian assistance and development assistance and how that needs to change. It's not a new conversation. I appreciate that people have been having the conversation for a long time, but now is a moment where the world's consciousness is raised and I think we have to really lead by example there and we're trying to work through how to think about that and to do it. And of course related to the policy and the funding is then how you prepare people to be in those environments. So I really, the point I wanted to make in response to that question was that I think this is a really important moment to advance this policy debate because we are facing such an unprecedented crisis. I'm sorry, the third. Oh, the new normal. So the way I think we at the State Department think about sort of new normalization is that the risks have evolved and the threat environment's changing. It will continue to change. Tom gave some good examples of his own experience. I haven't spent 30 years working overseas so I'm pointing to him, but where you could have an accompanied post to know it's not, we have to recognize that our response can't be static. What we want to guard against is an environment in which we are forced to sort of retreat behind and can't get out there. And so I think we have to be setting up processes and procedures from a sort of management perspective that can evolve and respond and adapt and not sort of think that this is a new normal and now it's just like this. It's gonna continue to change. Yeah, thanks Heather. Important points and excellent, difficult questions. The protracted nature of these humanitarian or crisis is having a huge impact on how we think about how do we work in those situations both because they're not just short term and immediate that we need to start thinking about long term but also they're much more conflict related and that's different too. When there's an earthquake in Nepal then you approach it one way. When there's a humanitarian crisis in Syria it's very different not only because it's long term but because it's conflict related and that is different and not only that but it's also different in that even in the past where we worked in conflict related humanitarian crises in South Sudan 20 years ago places like that we were not seen as a party to that conflict, okay? So we could operate there, be careful of the security but not worry so much about attacks directed at us. That obviously is not the case in Iraq, in Syria, in Afghanistan and even in places where we don't think we're a party to the conflict say Northern Nigeria dealing with Boko Haram but in their mind it's Western values and so we are seen as part of the problem and that also makes it very difficult. The response is that we need to work more obviously with local partners who understand the situation, who live there and need to build their capacity and that's part of a more development centered approach and in also a way that working with people who understand and can mitigate maybe the security threat perhaps better than we can but it's not easy. Certainly in Syria where we are looking at longer term approaches to the assistance and we're doing some excellent things like working instead of just providing bread or food aid we're working providing flour through bakeries so that then they can distribute the bread, it helps the local economy supporting the White Helmets group that are the real first responders unfortunately they are often targeted just this past week they were targeted so it's a difficult thing that we're doing and as somebody mentioned the epidemic diseases, the transnational aspect that also means that we've got to provide specialized training for our staff not only in traditional security things but also in disease security aspects that we have to incorporate into our training and that's a big part of what we're trying to do as part of our joint collaborative work is to improve our training of our staff to work in these environments. The normalization of risk that's a huge issue and many of us have worked in these risky countries for some time but I do think that it is worse in that more and more we're seen as a party to that conflict and attacks directed more at us and at aid workers in the past even locally aid workers were seen as somehow neutral and that's clearly not the case in so many countries and that's a huge problem for us so thank you. Ladies and gentlemen please help me and thanking our guests today. We'll take a 10 minute break, thank you. Hi everyone, good morning. Thanks for joining us for this panel we're gonna get started. Pleasure to have you here, pleasure to be here. I'm Michael Crowley and I am the Senior Foreign Affairs writer at Politico and it's an honor to be leading such a distinguished panel here on frontline diplomats and development workers. I'm gonna quickly go through and just introduce the panelists by their titles, you have their full bios and then we are going to hear from them right away because there's a lot to say and a lot to cover. Let's see, so starting from my left is John Mangan, Deputy Director, Office of Near Eastern Affairs, Bureau of Conflict Stabilization Operations at the US State Department, Rusty Barber, Director of Program Development and Operations at USIP here. Stacia George is Deputy Director for Office of Transition Initiatives at USAID. Jim LeBlanc is the Vice President of Unity Resources Group and Board Member of the International NGO Safety and Security Association and at the end we have Rebecca Zimmerman who is an Associate Policy Analyst with the RAND Corporation. So what we're gonna do here is I'm gonna throw out a couple of thoughts to you guys and you're all gonna have an opportunity to talk for a few minutes. I will follow up and we will reserve the last 30 minutes for your questions. So for the opening guys, if you would all, maybe we'll start with you John and work down, take a couple of minutes, given that you all represent frontline civilians that we've been hearing about this morning, talk about why risk taking is so important for the work that you do. And if you have an easy opportunity to give us an example of a risk that you took and you think paid off, we'd love to hear about that. But make it real for us, tell us why it's important and draw from your own personal experience to give us that ground level perspective. All right, I think to start with the question of why is risk important, I keep coming back to a quote that I like enough that I use it on the auto signature of my emails from Donald Kagan. And it's I think from his book on the Peloponnesian War but it's something like a persistent and repeated error throughout history is the failure to understand that the preservation of peace requires active planning, the expenditure of resources, and sacrifice just as war does. Peace is not a naturally recurring human condition. If you want it, you gotta work at it. And from a diplomatic perspective, that's, and I'm gonna stick with that. We have other people who can represent other parts of the frontline civilian spectrum. But from that diplomatic perspective, if you can't go out and directly engage people, you're powerfully limiting your ability to influence the situation going on around you and you're limiting it in two ways. First, you're missing your chance to directly influence the event that's happening on the ground. But second, as a part of your job is to make policy makers in Washington aware of what they should be doing, you're limiting your ability to give them the fullest advice to shape how they might be able to affect the situation even if you can't. So from a diplomatic perspective, I think that's why confronting those kinds of risks out there is important. I'm gonna swerve for a little bit to just make a quick point that I think one of the problems we deal with though at State is these kinds of conflict situations, we spend a lot of time on them. At the end of the day, maintaining the world order generally doesn't link in too much to some of the issues of frontline diplomats. 80% of our posts around the world are fairly normal and stable places. And long may they remain such. The problem I think we run into in a lot of conflict environments is we try to apply the paradigms and approaches we would use in Oslo or Tokyo to a Juba or a Kabul or a Northern Syria. And that's where we start running into some issues where you might still be using the tools of diplomacy. I think you have to think through how you use them differently. And in particular, I think one of the things we have to go after in this security conversation is this notion of the diplomat as a dignitary. Despite the fact that I'm sitting on this August panel, which obviously makes me a very important person, the reality of the matter is you might want to call an ambassador a dignitary, they do represent the president. But as long as we use that kind of dignitary vision of protection, we are putting ourselves in a box that is not, I think, really right. And I think we're also transferring a lot of moral hazard off to other people, development workers, military personnel as if they're somehow not dignitaries and more expendable than we are. I don't think that's the way we intend to do it, that just ends up being a de facto result. And I think it's something we have to get past if we're really going to change how we influence a hostile environment. That I'll defer to my colleagues. Okay, great. Pusty? Well, as to the question of how risk-taking is important to our organization, that's a very easy question for me to answer. As Nancy Lindbergh stated in her opening remarks, USIP's mission is to help prevent, mitigate, and resolve violent international conflict. And it does so, in part, by engaging in these conflict zones. And if we don't, we're not president on the ground in these places that were neither relevant nor credible. And our business model also relies on it because we have a sizable education training and research capacity here at the Institute which directly draws on from our experience in the field. A lot of that is done as much as a great deal of it is done in concert with partners in those communities, in those host countries, in those governments. But there is no substitute for having our own people on the ground to have a tactile feel for these issues that they're supposed to engage on and be able to speak to. So that answers the first setup question. In terms of an example of where the Institute engaged directly in risk that had a positive outcome, we have numerous examples across the spectrum over the years. Personally, for me, I think the best example was in 2007, 2008, where the Institute was asked to directly assist community leaders and tribal leaders in a peace process in Mahmoudia, which is a region just south of Baghdad, about half a million people. One of the most violent places in Iraq, and that was saying something because that was at the height of the war, but that was a cauldron of violence where just everything from insurgents, terrorists, al-Qaeda was operating out of that region, heavily embedded in conducting attacks in Baghdad. You had various violent groups funded from Iran and elsewhere, and then you had a lot of intertribal, intersectarian violence as well, conflict. So everything that was going wrong in Iraq was happening in microcosm in Mahmoudia in those days. And the Institute made a conscious decision that we, after a lot of thought and deliberation, because of course the first paramount responsibility is not to do harm, and that was our primary concern. But we were also sending our staff and a lot of our local staff, Iraqi staff as well, into harm's way, operating in parts of that in order to try to pull together tribal leaders and community leaders and others to reach out to them to try to get them to join this peace process, which took about eight months in its entirety, over a year to really solidify. We got a lot of support from the US military because the Institute is small, we don't have the kind of security budget that would allow us to spend money on convoys. So the military partnered with us and did a terrific job. Nevertheless, we had convoys that were hit by IEDs, we were shot at, we had two of the tribal leaders who were to be part of the facilitated dialogue that we undertook assassinated before they could actually participate. So the risks were very, very high on all sides. The payoff was that we did reach the tribal leaders with our support, and particularly with those of our Iraqi facilitator team, were able to reach an accord. And that was in 2008. We just heard a few weeks ago from some of those tribal leaders that that accord is still in effect. In fact, the billboards promoting it and holding accountable the local tribal leaders for the agreements that they had and commitments that they had made, those billboards are still up in the district. And despite its proximity, it's only 45 miles from Fallujah. So it's less than an hour's drive to Fallujah. They so far have managed to work together to keep the region stabilized and keeping it from falling back into the kind of violence that existed back in 0708. Great, that really drives it home. Stacia. Since we're talking about risk protection, I'll start with the statement of these are my own personal opinions and not those of my agency. And I want to actually start back with a question for us to reflect upon, which is, there are many dangerous neighborhoods within the country that we live in. And there's not a conversation about, we should not let doctors and social workers and local government officials go into those neighborhoods. In fact, we provide incentives for them to go into those neighborhoods because we recognize that what they bring is something that will influence and change those neighborhoods in a way that's to our national interests benefit, right? So why do we have a conversation about the fact we shouldn't let our development workers and our diplomats go into similarly dangerous neighborhoods when we are bringing similar types of impacts and effects on these types of environments for the purpose of our national interest? I've signed up for this job. I know what I'm getting into. I have had my life put at risk and I don't regret the fact that I've done that because I believe in what I do. And ironically, it's actually gotten much harder to recruit for the positions that we have now that's become more restrictive. People don't want to be locked behind walls. They want to have impact and they know what those walls mean in regards to their ability to influence and be effective. Imagine if you will, after Hurricane Katrina, if the people in charge of rebuilding New Orleans were told, please go rebuild New Orleans but you can only do it from Atlanta, Georgia. And maybe we'll let you go once a month for an hour to walk the streets. Can you do it? Yes, there are many ways that you can figure out how to do it and lead a team from afar and get information and data. But can you do it as fast and as effectively as you would if even you were able to go walk the streets for an hour and meet partners and see what's going on and be able to quickly assess the situation? No, it's just simply not the same. So I ask that we kind of reflect on that as a group. I think it's not to say we want to take arbitrary risks. We want to balance our risk and our mission. As John was saying, there's a lot of risks we take by not getting out there, by not being present and engaging. One of them is if we're making policies based off of false assumptions, for example. So when I first went out to Peshawar Pakistan back in 2007, the driving assumption was there's no work that can be done in the tribal areas. These are completely lawless areas. No one can get in there. There's all these people just support the Taliban and there's simply no way to engage. But by being able to go out to Peshawar and walk outside of our consulate and meet with people in different groups, we were including people from the tribal areas. We were quickly able to ascertain actually you can work in those areas. You can do work there that can influence and the majority of the population is actually on our side. And that really changed the dynamics because we learned we had a whole group of people that we could engage with and work with instead of just ourselves with our Pakistani government counterparts, for example. Great, good example. Jim, how about you? I'd like to harken back to a comment Stacia made about the incentives for development groups going into these things. That would be terrific. So many issues, so little time. From the NGO development community, risk is essentially relative, I think, in a broader context. With the increase in restrictions on travel and program access that the civilians at DOS and USAID have has dramatically increased the reliance on development workers, which has dramatically increased the risk. And so NGOs are reevaluating constantly what this new risk threshold is. Some are doing it better than others, but it's a huge, plus the costs have gone up dramatically in assuming that risk. The other element of this, duty of care issues, many of the NGO community never really thought much of duty of care aside from it was kind of the right thing to do to look after your people. Now, with lawsuits flying, I mean, many of you followed the NRC, just in the Norwegian Refugee Council decision on the kidnapping case from a few months ago has sent shock waves and ripples throughout this whole community, through the NGO community on the duty of care obligations that they have, that the organizations have no matter how small. So that has had a dramatic effect on all of this as well. It's also laid bare the lack of standardization for training and education for individual NGO workers. One of the big programs that INSA is working on from a generous donation from Irish aid is the development of a safety and security professional development program that's gonna go right down to the basic field operatives, regional, international and executive level at headquarters to develop what capabilities and skill sets that these people need and certify it so that there's more standardization in the current. Quick example from myself is January, 2005, Iraq, day of the first election. Embassy was in lockdown, anybody under chief of mission status was in lockdown, nobody was moving. We assessed the risk a little differently in consultation with our security company and we were pretty well the only organization that physically got outside our compounds in the red zone. To observe the actual elections. That was an extraordinarily rewarding experience for all our staff and everything else which I had accredited all of them, both my local staff, the security staff and expats as international election observers which would allow us that extra space to get through. So working very closely with the security company, having a very different appreciation of risk working in the red zone allowed us to actually do something that we felt was very successful. Great, thanks Rebecca. Thanks. So first it might be helpful to say so I work for RAND, the work that I principally do involves studying security force development and governance in areas where the US is actively engaged. So that's been Mali, Indonesia, the Philippines but principally in Afghanistan. So as a researcher I think my experience as function is something of a natural experiment because I've been deployed to Afghanistan under every security configuration you could possibly imagine from not being allowed to leave a base at all to living in a house in town and being able to move around in a local car wherever I wanted to. And I can tell you that the difference in what I'm able to learn and what I'm able to contribute is stark. So when you are able to actually get out and do a job that you're supposed to do you can bring back not just immediate knowledge but you can bring back I think an understanding of second and third order effects and that's actually really where I see one of the big losses in the current security posture for a lot of American civilians who are overseas. When we are behind high walls we cannot really begin to understand the second and third order effects of US engagement, what the US is doing or even just really the deep reflections of what's happening out in a local environment. And we end up, I'm sure for those of you who've lived this yourselves you know what I'm saying, trapped in the bubble of the eternal operational now. Everything is sort of self-generated and we really lose the ability to check in and say what is this doing out in the environment? And so I think that fosters short-term thinking over long-term thinking. And so we're actually getting a sort of a strategic mismatch. We say that the nature of threats in the world has changed. The nature of our response needs to change as well. And we're not talking about a single turn of a game. We're talking about these very, very long-term deep-rooted situations. And so what we have to do is cultivate the ability to think in the long-term. And I think that requires being able to go outside and being able to go outside not just for the chief of mission for a high-level meeting, but for lower-ranking people to be able to go out and do things as a matter of course. The other thing that I wanted to say is that I think we tend to think about risk as operating on a single access. And it's security risk, risk to loss of life, risk of loss of property maybe. And that it's something that can be mitigated. But I think it would be more accurate in this context to frame risk as something which is pretty constant and which can be shifted around. So if we look at it instead as a spectrum or maybe as a two-axis problem, it is really a trade-off between accomplishing the mission and thinking about security risk. So there's security risk and mission risk. And the problem we have is that security risk is really easy to see. It's very tangible. It's easy to quantify. Risk to mission. All the things that my fantastic colleagues here have talked about are intangibles. We're talking about relationships. We're talking about knowledge and understanding, context. And these are things that are tremendously difficult to quantify. And so I would suggest that, because I know I'm preaching to the choir here, I would suggest that we all of us think about this, that nothing is unobservable or cannot be put into a more rigorous logical framework. So let's all try to think about ways in which we can better measure and make tangible these things that we lose when we don't get to get out and fully execute our missions. Thank you all. That was a great start. And I wanna stay kind of with the point that you closed on, which came up in several of your marks. This question of evaluating risk, preparing for it, sort of your risk education. Jim, you sort of said in passing some NGOs are better at this than others if I heard you correctly. And Stacia, you told that interesting story about the tribal areas and Peshawar being less dangerous than you had presumed. So does anyone here have thoughts about how to do that better? Or kind of micro quick case studies of success stories or who's doing it well or best practices that people here can study further or put on their radar? I'll throw it open to any of you. You're smiling, so maybe I'll... I'm laughing because I have some worst practices. Okay, that's great. No, that's helpful, awesome. What do we avoid? My first deployment to Afghanistan, my cultural prep that was required, actually by the military for me to go to Afghanistan was a PowerPoint briefing on Iraqi political history. So that's a not do. You were going to Afghanistan? Yeah, okay, that leaves something to be desired. Yeah, I was trying to do vehicle rollover training for a deployment I was doing to Southern Afghanistan and I was told the training was too risky to allow civilians to take it even though I was going to be spending about four months on the roads in Helmand in the summer. But those are worth writing, but that implies that it's all bad, which is not true. There are organizations, I know for example, Institute for Inclusive Security has done a lot of work. It's an organization that works with women peace builders globally. And I know they've done a tremendous amount of work on how they send their staff out to work with women and even looking at resilience and mental health for the women that they're working with, the local staff and the local volunteers. I really commend USAID, I've worked for USAID for a long time off and on and there's been incredible progress made in regards to the support to individuals going into these environments from training on how to drive for security in these environments to first aid training, but I also really commend the Staff Care Center that they've sent a setup. It's 24 hours, 24 seven assistance to people who can call from anywhere in the world to reach someone, a psychologist that they can speak to to provide assistance to transition back and it's even available to staff once they leave the agency. So if there's after effects, even five years down the road, you're still able to access that. So I really commend our agency on that. One of the best practices we've had in our office is we have a licensed clinical social worker who is on staff and can see every day what the needs are of our team. It can reach out to recognize when someone needs to be reached out to. She helps to train people on resilience and how to build your resiliency in these environments before you even go out and helps to prep them when they come back and transition back. So there's just a few, it really has evolved. The field has gotten a lot better, but we can do more to continue to advocate and push for the fact that this should be the norm rather than the exception. Rusty and then Jim. I can build on that a little bit. When I first went, I was first deployed to Iraq back in 07, the pre-deployment training consisted of running around in overalls in the farm fields of Virginia with flash pots going off and bangs, and nothing about situational awareness, nothing at that time about how to handle the stress of being in a high-threat environment. It was taught by British ex-military in that case, and that was the way it was done, which really was not helpful. The medical was helpful, but the rest of it I could have left behind. I think we have, as Sisiya said, we've come a long way since then in no small measure, because as mental health experts in Washington, particularly whom I've talked to about this issue will tell you, we have a whole lot of civilians walking around right now with a lot of consequences, a lot of psychological and medical consequences having served and been improperly prepared, improperly supported, and improperly, during and then post-deployment. And she said, this particular council that we actually retained, the Institute retained for advice, said that she's still treating a lot of some of them very, very senior diplomats, USAID people, people from the NGO community who are still feeling the effects of that. So that's the impact. The Institute actually with the help of Jim and Unity Resources Group did an overhaul, a review about two years ago of the Institute's own preparedness in which we discovered we had, frankly, a lot of these gaps. And that resulted in a complete refocus. And we also studied USAID and OTIs, in particular, pre-deployment approaches same with state departments, and learned from those and established our own far more rigorous and then we had processes and tools and means of supporting people both before, including in resilience during and after with counseling should they need it. And Jim and his team were particularly helpful from a governance standpoint because it's not just the training, the individual instruction and all of that. There's a huge, which Jim can elaborate on, organizational responsibility for accountability. And such things as, for example, establishing a director who directly reports to the president of the organization. So that at the highest level, you have responsibility and accountability for the risk management profile of the organization. Jim, I wanted to say something on that, John. You're free to chime in. I need to hammer down on a passing comment I mentioned about duty of care for the NGOs because what will keep me up at night and often does, the NGO community is behind the APOL on this, behind the wave in a lot of ways. A lot of them are getting better, but there are still too many that continue not to focus on their duty of care obligations in a much riskier environment. A lot of that responsibility is the senior leadership and the board of directors that often are not apprised thoroughly of the risks that their organizations are taking. They, you know, it becomes a budgetary issue or something. And I think that is a glaring gap in, that needs to be filled sooner, especially as I mentioned before, we're increasing our aid in state and others are increasing their reliance on us to implement the programs in much riskier environments. And to do that, if we accept that risk, then there's a fiduciary responsibility to do that. And a lot of NGOs still at the senior level still have not thought that through enough. And things like the NRC case is a huge wake up call that the sustainability, the legal sustainability of the organization could be at severe risk if they're not seen to be doing everything reasonable to look after their staff. So to me, that's one of the reasons why INSA is developing the training programs to be part of that. So I think that is a huge gap for us. Did you wanna, Charlie? Yeah, I had a good news story that at the moment is a bad news story, but I'm gonna say it because it could be a good news story. Okay. Take what we can get. So for many years, the State Department has had a one week long course called FACT, Foreign Affairs Counter Threat course. They're about when, I believe when the Deputy Secretary referred to improve training, they're about to take what was a course for people going to certain high threat posts and now turn it into something that everybody does as a routine part of their career at State, which is a great move really wise. But FACT was built around the premise that you were assigned to an embassy with a functioning security program and a set of protocols and procedures in place. And it was designed to help you get yourself out of a bad situation and get back into that safe environment. Between 2009 and 2012, my office spent a lot of time talking about, well, wait a minute, what about when you're not in an embassy environment with a proper security program? And we sat down with Diplomatic Security, we had a big ton of money at the time and we designed a three week version of this course. And we basically tripled everything. So instead of learning how to do evasive driving on a tarmac in the Crown of Victoria, we did it off-road in a fully armored suburban in a convoy, so to take everything and ramp up the level of complexity of it. The best part of the course, the highest value, was that we lifted bodily a three day Diplomatic Security training course on mission planning that is the same course they teach their own special agents. The value we found in this was in our work abroad, we could walk into the Regional Security Officer's office and say, I wanna go out here. I know it seems a little risky. I've done my risk analysis of it, I've done my mission analysis of it, I've come up with my primary plan, alternate contingency, use all the same language he would have used talking to his own security officers and he could say, oh, okay, you've thought this through and maybe I'm not gonna support your Dean anyway, but at least I see that you've put some consideration into it. There were missions in Kyrgyzstan and Southern Sudan that we could only run with people who graduated this course because those are the only people security officers would trust to come out and conduct those missions. We ran out of money in 2012. And security courses are insanely expensive because you got fuel and you got cars crashing into each other and all kinds of expendable things. But the biggest problem wasn't the money. We could have scrounged up the money. The biggest problem goes back to that culture thing I mentioned earlier in that while diplomatic security liked the course and valued the course, they weren't willing to attach a licensure to it. They weren't willing to say, because you have taken this course, it is presumed you can be trusted to do A, B, C and D and therefore, unless the RSO says otherwise, assume that you can do those things. And as my boss at the time put it, when he decided almost tearfully to kill the program, I can't spend this much money on A maybe. It's either you take the consular course you're qualified to give out a visa. You take the general services course you're qualified to sign a contract for the government. If I'm not given license to do certain things, I can't justify the cost. Now the good news is, this is the bad news, this course no longer exists. We're back to the pre-era. But the good news is this is a policy change that could be made relatively easily. It wouldn't take a whole lot of work. A couple of memos would get it done. The challenge is just do people want to take that on? How important in these environments is individual leadership? Who's setting the tone? How decisive is that? Can anybody speak to that? And again, case studies of this are great, but I don't wanna put anyone on the spot, but illustrations are really helpful. You responded to that Rebecca, so I'll give you the floor. Yeah, this is actually one of the big things that I wanted to say. And this is actually an area where we can really create cultural change and we don't have, I think, some of the obstacles that we have when we think about risk writ large. And I also wanna flag, because I know Siddharth is here, so everybody find him afterward and ask him more about this. USAID did a study on stress and resilience for USAID employees who go to some of these high threat areas. And one of the things they found that I found really fascinating, but again, those of us who've done the work know that it's true. One of the things that was the biggest source of stress, it's not the bombs going off and the threat of loss of life. Is that combined with management and leadership issues? So when it is a life and death situation and you are dealing with the bureaucracy and the bureaucracy is acting like it's a normal day, that dissonance, that cognitive dissonance is extremely taxing. So one of the things that we can do is really to work with management, and this is an area where OTI in particular really excels, is working with management to get better about managing in high risk, high threat areas. What does the bureaucracy look like and how does it function? What kind of behavior are leaders modeling? So if we're talking about a dysfunctional environment of very high risk and very high stress, the people who are most likely to be in management positions are the people who have lived in those environments for over a decade. So if going for one year to a place like Afghanistan is an experience that will stay with you for a decade, now imagine if you've spent your entire professional career in high threat areas, which a lot of people have. How does that affect the management culture? So in the field, management has a lot to do with making smart decisions about risk and not being cowboys. And if you came of age professionally in a time of a cowboy culture, how are you rethinking that with your employees as opposed to if your patterns are smart risk? What are you conveying to your employees? But also leadership back in Washington, are we conveying that we understand why risk is taken and how? And are we equally allowing people to go out and do their jobs and also holding them to account when they take unnecessary risks, when they do things that are really beyond the pale? I'm going to differentiate a little bit between management and leadership. I mean, you mentioned leadership. To me, it is absolutely critical you have good leadership on the ground and you can have good management, but you also need leadership. You're operating, the NGO community often operates without the infrastructure to support of a lot of what you have here. And so the individuals that are responsible for the safety and health of their employees, both local and their expat staff, that's something that needs to be taken much more seriously instead of just throwing a body at it, which often happens, short notice, opportunity, who's around, okay, in it goes. It cannot be under emphasized that you need absolutely strong leadership that is not micromanaged from headquarters. Security situations and risk changes so quickly on the ground in the field, you can't rely on headquarters to try and micromanage that on your behalf in the field. When I was in Iraq as country director for 0406 running a large NGO, I'd never dealt with trying to deal with the assassination of some of my staff. Don't train you that, I'm not in the military, I've never been in the military. How do you train for that? It's very, very difficult. And so you really need, I had a great senior leadership team, you really have to draw upon that for those unexpected experiences that are gonna happen to you in the field. I'll just add to that. I think we're working in very difficult environments trying to do a lot of very challenging things. And to not be present when trying to lead your team through that, to not be able to be physically present and look someone in the eye so they can understand where you're coming from and that you have their back. I mean, 80% of communication, some people say as much as 80%, is body language. And I think it's absolutely critical that when we work with our NGO partners and our local partners on the ground that I can sit in front of them and say, we're in this together to try to solve this challenge. And they can see that I credibly mean it. And I can read also, do they credibly mean what they're saying in terms of how we're gonna work together? It's invaluable. And I remember when my family was wondering why I was staying out in Pakistan when I still had threats on me, I was like, I have to be present. My team is doing very difficult, challenging things. And what kind of message am I sending as a leader if I'm gonna lock myself behind a door or just pick up and leave? We all are here because we want to make changes and differences and that physical presence of rallying your team and letting them see not just that you care, but also what do you mean? What are we trying to do together? Giving them immediate feedback. These environments change every day sometimes. And so being able to sit down and really say, well, yesterday we were gonna do X, but the world has now changed. So now we need to do Y. How are we gonna do that together? It's just, you can do it over the phone or some places you can't for security reasons, but it's just simply not the same as being able to communicate face to face with individuals. You don't all have to weigh in but if you guys have comments you wanna add. Well, just having, here. Sure, yeah. No, bye. Go ahead. I'm a self-witness superb leadership in these high-threat, high-stress environments and really bad leadership, the impact on morale, on mission. It is, I would say, leadership in those environments is a major point of success or failure. And it is incumbent especially, and this is where the disconnect that invariably happens. If the headquarters leadership are not closely engaged with that and monitoring and supporting that leader to make sure that, first of all, they are functioning in that environment well, but they're also leading well, then the trickle-down impacts are the consequences that can be profound. So I think that was one of the, actually one of the more salient points that came out of our committee roundtable discussions is how to properly prepare and support leaders in these places because of their criticality to mission and safety and security of the staff that are put in those places. Yeah, I mean, it's just an important thing. It's probably the thing. I'll give a bad example and follow it up with a good one. A bad one. My first one to Afghanistan, I know four is a PRT officer. PRTs were brand new. There was very little doctrine to guide what we were supposed to do. It was just sort of go out and do good things. Our deputy chief of mission, when I first arrived, I got a courtesy call, sit down with him. His entire career experience to that date, 20, 25 years in the foreign service, had been relating to Korea and Japan. And somebody had told him, hey, to be a career enhancing move for you to go out to Afghanistan and be the DCM in Kabul. Well, long story short, it was not a career enhancing move for him. But his guidance to me as I was getting ready to go out to this PRT was now, hey, don't try to be a player out there. And when you're already acting without a whole lot of guidance on what you're supposed to be doing, that's not constructive. And all I remember thinking walking out of the room is I'm not gonna get killed in this place having not been a player there. That's not gonna look good on the tombstone. So I spent most of the rest of the year trying to have to work around that problem and it went okay in the end. But to contrast that with one of the best leaders I've worked with in this field, Robert Ford, former ambassador to Syria, inspires near cult-like devotion in the people who have served under him. And I came under his wing relatively lately. I'm not a career Middle Eastern person. I'm not even a foreign service officer. My bureau was coming in to help run some programs to support the opposition. And the day we showed up to the first staff meeting he said, thank God, in NEA we've spent our career, we've all developed our career getting along with terrible regimes. I don't really know how to subvert one. So if you guys have any ideas on that, really glad to have you on the team. And the way he was able to foster that kind of inclusiveness immediately for a group of people who were coming in who barely spoke Arabic was really gratifying to see. And he fostered that throughout his tenure running Syria affairs. I think you may have missed an opportunity to tell him in the prior anecdote, don't hate the player, hate the game. Might have been a suitable answer. Sorry. I don't think that was in the lexicon. Yeah, that's not in the diplomatic handbook, is it? Okay. Okay, so let's just hit on one more topic quickly and then you guys can ask questions before we're done. And this is an opportunity for you to, in a sense, speak to Congress. Congress may soon pass the new State Department Authorization Bill. This would be the first one in the lifetime of some U.S. teenagers. It was 2002, I think, since the last one. The current version passed in May by the House Foreign Affairs Committee authorizes, quote, critical embassy security enhancements to protect U.S. personnel overseas. What would you like to see added in future authorizations for state and USAID? And use the opportunity to speak more generally about what you would like Congress to understand about your work. And if there are misconceptions that you think are important to specifically bat down, this would be, that would be an interesting angle on it. So who wants to jump in on that? Stacia, you're nodding your head. So I'm choosing you as a volunteer, but you can punt. I mean, I think I commend them for trying to do an authorization, which is exciting. We're still, the USAID one is even older, so hopefully they'll take that on next. But I would say, I'd commend them for the fact that they really have been advocating hard for support to security and trying to provide the resources that are required for that. It's not cheap to be able to provide security in these environments. And it's also, and it's not just on the diplomatic side, it's also on our programmatic side and for implementing partners, being able to provide those types of resources. So I commend them on that. And then, but the other thing I would say is security is not just about physical security, as Becky was saying. There are other risks that are at play when we can't get outside of the walls. And those of us who are in this career, we came into it because we wanted to make change. I came into this career because I wanted to go after terrorists and gangs and conflicts and wars, which are similar things I know our Congress is concerned about, right? I just came at it from a different angle where I saw that there are some things you need to do upstream to try to turn off why people end up choosing those avenues. So I would say really being able to keep in mind the physical security and the support for that, but also keeping in mind, help to support us to be able to get out and be most effective because these are high-threat environments, but they're also high-stakes environments. And by not being out and putting all of our tools as U.S. government into those high-stakes environments, we're doing ourselves a disservice. Yeah, John. Two things. Yeah, resources are nice. Normally we don't say this. I'm definitely not speaking from my department when I say this, but please constrain how we use those resources. Do not let us spend them on more concrete rebar and armed guards. I don't think that's our problem. Make us spend it on how we recruit and train people who are actually well-suited to work in conflict environments. I think the bigger thing I'd go after though is I trust if you're in this room, if you're interested enough in this subject to be in this room, you've probably heard of the Accountability Review Board. The thing that by statute is created whenever an American under chief mission authority has killed abroad. There's nothing inherently wrong with a law that says, hey, whenever an American gets killed abroad, it's a bad thing, convene some panel to think about how that happened and how we prevent it from happening the next time. When you call it an Accountability Review Board, what you're saying is the only way somebody gets killed is if somebody screwed up. And the purpose of this, you might as well call it a witch hunt. Let's figure out who's accountable for what happened. It creates no incentive for anyone to want to take a little risk because the downside of a casualty and we're not victims, we're casualties and that's different are just too great. So turning it into something more like a standing advisory commission like the public diplomacy one, have it conducted an investigation when somebody gets killed but make it a lessons learned investigation and put a little time into also looking at those high threat posts where nobody got killed this year and let's do an investigation of how did nobody get killed? My God, that place is crazy dangerous and yes, somehow we got through the year without any fatality, how did that happen? Because I think we might learn as much from those successes as we do from failures but as long as we stigmatize taking casualties we're not going to take risks. Any more quick thoughts and then we'll go to questions but go ahead. I have a couple. So first I think the state of our knowledge about this is still not where it needs to be. So me with my researcher hat on I'm always bound to say fun more research but in seriousness I think a lot of what the state authorization act says right now it has to do with either physical security, policies around security or training for security but I think there's an important workforce reform effort that needs to happen and it needs to happen for a variety of reasons not just related to deploying civilians overseas but to think through the authorities that are used to bring people in and to send them overseas. There's something like what, over 40 authorities or maybe that's just for USAID but there's something like 40 different ways that you can hire someone on and send them out and they all have different rules. They all have different forced postures. So part of it is workforce reform for hiring and then part of it is creating good on ramps and off ramps for this kind of work. I think we'll get the best people and enable them to do the best work if we have ways to really think about bringing them in and prepping them for that job and also ways to shift them into other paths inside these agencies or with other agencies if they no longer want to do work on the front lines. Let me ask you guys if you have thoughts on this to weave them into the Q&A which I'll start now unless you're really champing at the bit. You're champing at the bit, go for it. Only that the NGO development community is too often regarded as the forgotten children in this debate and we need to rely on our state and Pentagon and USAID supporters to help raise our issues so I'll just leave it at that one. Great, okay. Questions, your hand went up in the blue jacket there. John Rothenberg, I'm an Afghanistan specialist. I'm gonna have to give two examples before I can ask the question, sorry. So I conducted the first nationwide urban labor market survey in the history of Afghanistan as a direct advisor to the Ministry of Labor, independent. No security when I was outside of the building. Totally my own recognizance. I as a employee of a USAID contractor I evaluated a different program for the same ministry and had one of the best security details I've ever had in Afghanistan and most flexible but I was bunkered for the whole time that I was doing it and I believe strongly that it took about, well it took twice as long as it should have but about I'd say one quarter of that, one half of that extra time was because of being, because of being bunkered and being under security. So I wanna know is does the amount of security that being bunkered supplies to people, is it that much more valuable that it makes things cost 25% more? Go ahead. I would agree with you. No, I don't think it is. I think our tendency, again, from a diplomatic perspective, we fall into this diplomatic trap of we get into a city or a country and we want to find our embassy. So we're gonna find our building and we're gonna set up our building to be what we want. And I think in a lot of conflict environments, particularly in the early stages, that might, we're putting all that time into getting ourselves set up and that's time we're not spending, helping our colleagues get set up. I love the idea of embedding people in government organizations or civil society organizations on a more sort of, more like a military advisory model. These people are concerned about their own security. I'm willing to try to fit into their bubble and if I can bring along, if I've got three or four people I'm embedding in a ministry and I can bring a security professional along to help that ministry improve its security while they're at it, then I think everybody's winning. I don't think we look at that model enough because we tend to fall back to our, let's get our embassy set up and then we can start talking to people approach. Doug, VIP question. Make it a good one, Doug. It's not a VIP question, but I just wanted to say that the points that Stacia had made about why people go into this field that Rebecca mentioned about the balancing between mission and risk and particularly John, this last point that you made about the overreaction in terms of risk back here are all points that were made by virtually everybody, virtually every one of the 60 people who participated in the focus groups from all over government and particularly on the Hill, particularly the Democratic and Republican staffers on the Hill who know this, who know back here that the reaction when someone loses their life who's on the front line, who's a front line civilian is not to look at what the mission has been, but instead to so react violently that we need to spend more on concrete and more on arbed wire. So I have both a question and a recommendation for you which is both the same thing. How do you get this message that you're conveying here more publicly, both the members of Congress whose staffers agree with you privately and into the public through people like Mike Crowley and others in terms of writing about this, the recommendation being you all are in perfect positions to help do that exactly and conveying your kinds of experience and being able to say we're in this for this reason that perhaps something like Benghazi which has been a complete travesty of a discussion, some of these themes which are so relevant to it can be expressed. Who wants to take that? I'll do a quick one. I mean, as a serving government employee, I'm kind of limited in what I can say regarding the political issues on this. I will say I do think this, the fallout from Benghazi is uniquely different from other cases of diplomats killed over the past decades. You either had diplomats killed in Iraq or Afghanistan where they were frequently killed alongside military personnel and they were just one more casualty. Maybe if you think of like Ann Smedinghoff in Zabel province, a little bit higher profile but not causing great disturbance. We had people killed in terrorist attacks and right off the top of my head, Jordan, Pakistan and Sudan all made the news, none were dramatically more featured than military casualties will be. Benghazi, we had a compound overrun that wasn't unprecedented. I believe the Cairo compound was overrun the same week by protesters but everyone was in the safe haven, nobody got killed. You had an ambassador, not just a regular serving diplomat killed and you have a secretary of state who's gonna run for president. And that's a very unique situation that came together all at once. I'd like to think that's not gonna be- And it was two months before a presidential election. And two months before a presidential election. That's a really important fuel in the fire now. So that's a terrible nexus of things to come together at once and hopefully we don't have more casualties but we will and hopefully they won't come in that same critical nexus and hopefully they'll happen after January 20th of next year. I think just very quickly, one of the things that I've learned and outside of my work, I co-lead something called the Frontline Civilians Initiative which is part of the Truman Project. And one of the things that we've learned is that narrative is the way to make this real for the American people. So telling individual stories that make a point is how you get this across to the American people. But how you get it across to the American people and how you get it across to policy makers can be a couple of, can be very different things. And I don't think that we know that. My instinct is to say look for evidence-based ways to resolve these issues. If we can say, the empirical evidence shows this is the best way to get this result that we need. And that's why I started out by encouraging people to really try to find ways to make visible and to quantify the impact of over-securitization. Because it's only through doing that that we can have a conversation about the right ways to do this that's not political. Because we're talking about something that is inherently so easily politicized. Stacia, did you wanna talk? Yeah, I would just say, I mean, definitely in supporting efforts like Frontline Civilians which is trying to raise awareness to this issue. But I also, all of us, hopefully all of you in this room will be able to leave and continue the message to others to share these stories. And when people talk about our military colleagues who are serving in some very dangerous environments, which they are, say, and by the way, did you know that actually there's DOD civilians who are out there? There's State Department officials, there's USAID officials. There's many people who serve in these environments that are putting themselves at risk to be able to serve our country. And so it's, is it gonna change the country overnight? No, but as Becky was saying, narrative is important. I hope you'll go home and you'll talk to your friends and your family and say, you know, there's people out there who actually work in development and actually work on terrorism issues and are working in these spaces and want to be out there. And when I hear about Benghazi, instead of thinking about it is a tragedy that these people were killed, but also I know those people who are out there and they were proud of the work that they were doing and that we should not allow that peace to be extinguished from the narrative. So I hope you'll also help us to carry this narrative forward because it is, it's personal for all of us and it's important that it get out there because a lot of people aren't aware. Go ahead. I would just add though that, you know, we can testify before committees on the Hill, the agencies can advocate, the NGOs can advocate, but unless Congress hear directly from the constituents that this matters, that it is unlikely the result and I think in anything, we could reel off a number of things that should be done that the agencies all know and the NGO community know must be done. But sometimes I think the focus has to be on how we build better grassroots awareness across the country of the work and sacrifices of frontline folks and put the pressure on Congress that way. I'd flag a really small tactical example of that. The veteran's hiring preference is a very well-intentioned idea, but the way it ends up working out in practice is a civilian who was a contractor or an AID implementer or such could have been spending two years running around Hellman Province, getting shot at every single day, riding in convoys outside the wire every day. They're not a veteran. A guy whose job was to run the dining facility at Bob Graham Airfield for a year or actually nine months Air Force short tour is a veteran. And so guess which one gets the job? I think there's something, we don't have a concept of a civilian veteran and I think that's something, it's not just a question of how we inculcate that communications wise, there are policy ways we can pursue that as well. I'll just chip in two quick cents and then we'll go to the next question, which is, you're right, the Benghazi was unique in many ways in terms of how the media talks about this Doug. You guys have a problem and I'm part of the machine and maybe part of the problem, but the press is looking for stories that are like other stories that everyone already knows. So there is I think now a hair trigger to find, I'm not saying this is how I think about it or try to think about it, but I think it's pretty safe to say people are looking for the next Benghazi. Benghazi was a hot story, there were books, there were movies, web traffic, off the charts. And so unfortunately, I think that's probably how a lot of the media is thinking about this subject and there has probably been, people probably now think that there should be basically no risk tolerance and if something goes wrong, it's nothing like how we think about military operation. And I don't, and so part of the reason I think you're all here is because you know this and you're trying to do something about it, but just to chime in from my seat inside the beast and I would underscore, though I'm not really here to give advice or advocate, but just as a general principle, narrative is really powerful. It's hard to get people to read an analytical policy story and if you have human beings doing extraordinary things in unexpected places and unexpected things, you know, the man bites dog and I can't think of a great example at the top of my head. I think you guys know all this, but I just thought I would chime in for a moment and we'll take another question here in the, actually I think we've had all male questioners, so I'm gonna bump you for a moment for the woman in the flowered jacket. Thank you. I'm Veronica Cartier, Independent International Conflict Management Initiative. Listening to all of you, it is obvious that there is a gap to fail and you have mentioned about education or training and I think Americans have to take this balancing the risk and the mission is into the next level and I wonder if it's security intelligence including cyber crime, training, it's required for the frontline, management and leadership and so, you know, to overcome bureaucracy, everybody become a security intelligence. It's just like in a summon of different conflict countries, everybody require to be soldiers. For that concept, I was thinking that probably Americans should do. You know, take it to the next level. Everybody become a security intelligence aware of the cyber crime and how to overcome communication and to become confidence. Thank you so much. Buddy, I'll react. Just on the intelligence side with what's going on, things have evolved so dramatically with big data analysis on threats and everything else. If, I mean most of us, but including the NGO development community, if we had a budget for this, we'll go well beyond the standard old security audits or threat assessments that people do and really dig deep and peel the onion back on accessing technology that base our security posture on our threat in a much more robust way. I'm hoping it's coming and I hope the cost come down, but it's, and cyber is another key issue that a lot in the NGO and development community are very acutely aware of a problem. Not necessarily cyber crime, but cyber espionage, terrorism, everything. When we're out there working in the field using our iPads or iPhones or whatever, you gotta be paying attention to who's picking up those signals and it's gonna be people that may want to do you harm. So it's a critical issue. It's only starting to be fully recognized at this point. Okay, you and then I'll go back to you who I bumped before. Thanks for your patience. Hi, thank you. Actually, I don't really have a question, so sorry. I just didn't there. I wanted people to know, and this is the perfect obviously environment, that my name is Ellen Milner and I am at the State Department. I'm actually the Chief of Deployment Stress Management Program. And I don't know if people are aware of our program and it's totally what we're talking about. The program is specifically for people, foreign service offices, who are going overseas to a high threat post. We do presentations at the familiarization classes. We meet with people when they come back from post. We offer services to families while their loved ones are overseas. So my two colleagues are here and I just felt it's important because mental health of course is and we're social workers is one of the most important things. We talk about resilience all the time. I mean, they really are going into not only the danger part, but being away from family, being away from whatever's familiar, being locked, some people have told us it feels like a prison. And so we really have been reaching out to a lot of people. So the thing with us we find is so often people don't know we exist and we try and try to do as much marketing as we can. So that's my kind of thing here, but I'd love to be able to work with all of you because we're all trying to do the same thing. I mean, we're coming from the mental health side, of course, but that's just as important of course as security. Tell us the name of the office again in case anyone's watching online. It's called the Deployment Stress Management Office. We are part of Medical Services, part of the Employee Consultation Service. I know we've talked with Rusty before, so. Thank you for that, Conju. Thank you for that. Did anybody, did you want to respond to that Rusty? Yes, to underscore yes. That was, we looked at your program, we looked at USAIDS, we looked at others. Enormously helpful. Enormous strides have been made in terms of how to prepare and care for people. I would just underscore again, I don't, and we're constantly tweaking new ways, new tools to help people operate more effectively in the field. But I think the onus or the balance of effort has to go more on the enabling environment for them to do their job, once you've provided that kind of, it's just in general, I think we're making a lot of strides on that side of the equation. But in terms of creating the political environment where we can fulfill these missions, because as Rebecca and Sasha were talking about in the broader contest, the risk to national security, the risk to our partners, the risk to the world of restraining, the constraining diplomats from being able to be more engaging at ground level, and not just diplomats, but obviously the aid workers as well, I think that's where the balance of effort has to go. And I know people have come back. And it's the harder one. I'm sorry, I just want to add one more thing that people might not be aware of. There are social workers, there are no social workers anywhere except for NDC. And we have a social worker in Islamabad, in Kabul, and in Baghdad. So that's been a really, really great help so that there's a right there. And those social workers will see everybody, contractors, LAS, local staff, so that that mental health is provided on the ground. And we're here also to back that up. Thank you. I just want to be sure. That's so interesting. I promise I'd go to him and then we'll go to you. And if we have time for a couple more, I haven't gone up to the back yet, maybe we'll get to you and that might be it. Let's see how it goes. Thank you, hi. My name is Siddharth Shah, Greenleaf integrative. And so I've been a physician for about 15 years and these two groups have some very important similarities. I've worked with the emotional exhaustion that's always being ramped up among physicians, social workers included. I know about DSMP, met the social workers in Islamabad in Kabul. This is a really tight network of people who care about the subject. And when physicians are gonna be seeing people with tuberculosis potentially or just on a ward, you're gonna get a mask. And this is a field in which we have increasing information about the exposures and the costs to the people who do this work, the frontline civilians. And my question is about to what extent is it uncomfortable for the idea that there is risk to mental health of the workforce? How uncomfortable is it for it to be in the discussions of security? In my experience, security professionals are oftentimes the first to identify that situational awareness and mental health are so intimately related. And many security professionals being from the military, it's a foregone conclusion that people should have mental health support. But for people in policy, for people institutionally. And Jim, you mentioned duty of care again and again. I think that really needs, that it's uncomfortable to talk about duty of care. And yet we're here. And all of you have spoken about this subject, I think really bravely, it's progress. But how uncomfortable is it? How problematic is it? That's my question. Thank you. It's very uncomfortable. Personally and culturally. So first of all, so CIDARTH is his organization that wrote the USAID stress and resilience report. So I encourage all of you guys, now you know who he is to find him and talk to him. So I'm going to, so it's very uncomfortable even just personally. So I wrote last year an op-ed for the LA Times about some of my own experiences being deployed and coming home. And it was a thing that I wrote because it was World PTSD Awareness Day. And because frontline civilians, we really needed to get kind of this message out there that this is a thing that happens to civilians too. As I wrote it at two o'clock in the morning and was sort of on autopilot when I wrote it. And I sent it off and it got edited and it got, and then it was in print and I started getting emails from friends saying, you're so brave. And I went back and I thought, oh God, what did I write? And I went back and read it and I said, oh God, what did I write? Like future employers are gonna see this. Are they gonna think that I am gonna have issues if I go back overseas? Are they? And it is a tremendously, there is a taboo around talking about this that is very deeply embedded. I think the military has made some serious strides in this and a lot of the message that they have conveyed is that it's an extension of the buddy system. So it's really a peer care message. So when you go through basic training, you'll have a battle buddy and you always need to know where the battle buddy is and that person is your responsibility. And they've extended that into a mental health context. But the battle buddy metaphor transfers less well to a civilian context. I don't have a battle buddy when I'm deployed. And it's a culture, it's got its own sort of cowboy culture. When you look at journalists, for example, the journalists who take the biggest risks are lionized for the risks that they've taken. And that's analogous in a variety of different fields. Wow, you're really tough. You went and interviewed the Taliban or what have you. And so we have to figure out a way to decouple the cowboy culture that says, I'm always okay, even if it's obvious that you're not okay from the ability to do the work and the professionalism. So I would just add, I think there's an important gender dynamic behind that also. So you have men who don't wanna speak up that there's an issue because they're supposed to be strong and they go into war zones and are big and bad and whatnot. And then you have women who can't speak up because then you're being a woman, right? You're just soft because you're a woman. And so you don't wanna speak up because you don't want people to see you as weak. And so you have this double duty of both sides not really being able to come out for different reasons on why they're, on how they're feeling. So again, it's really important for leadership. I mean, we will actively, you know, I call staff in the field and I'm like, how are you doing today? It is very stressful, the fact that you're dealing with this, let me tell you about how I felt when I've been in this environment, right? And just being very proactive in creating open spaces for us as leaders to talk about what's happened with our own experiences so that people feel comfortable speaking up to us and making it more the norm rather than the exception. Excellent point, Jim. If you wanna make a quick thought, and I think we'll have time for one last one, I apologize to others. Yeah, the NGO development community is woefully behind on appreciating the need for mental health and in these situations. It could come down to costs, et cetera. And a lot of its leadership, I'll give you just two quick examples to finish off. I'm not trained as a mental health professional whatsoever. When I was country director in Iraq for the NGO, I did try to pay as much attention as I could to the mental capability to all my staff, local and national and local and expats. And one day I got reports that one of my program officers, expat, walked out of the compound because he wanted a nice cream cone. And this is in the red zone in Baghdad. It was a very dangerous time. And he just was tired of the blast walls and he walked out. And after I got reamed security about letting him go, I sat up, I got him back and sat him down. And it was obvious I couldn't put my finger on it, but he needed to go. And so the expense of doing that in arranging a special convoy to the buy-up, spent getting him on the plane and then talking to headquarters, say I'm sending somebody back, please tell me you've got something back at headquarters that you can give him. There's nothing, there's nothing. You had another one of my expats, I noticed starting wearing, he had purchased a very, what he thought was a good armored vest. I mean, we'd spend a lot of money on getting really good armored vest. And it could maybe stop, maybe a BB gun, that's about it. But he was sleeping in it and he was walking around with our very secure compound in it on a regular basis and had the windows closed everywhere, even when the, you need those tell signs. And not enough senior staff, country directors, others are trained, you're not gonna have health professionals in your compounds like this, in the NGO development community. So part of this I'd love to see is more appreciation and training for senior program staff and leadership in the NGO development community that can at least pay attention to some of these tell signs before it's too late. Okay, very, very quick comment, just to say that also how we talk about this care, if you're calling it trauma counseling or trauma and resilience, it kind of connotes that, okay, you're traumatized and that is where it ends. I think we've found that it's much more productive if you frame it in terms of helping you get back on your feet and back to work, back to deployment. And I think that's an important aspect of how we deal with care and counseling. I apologize to our questioner on deck, but we are over time. So I think we need to wrap it up. Clearly, there is a lot to discuss and we could go on, but I wanna be respectful of everyone's time and the schedule. So I apologize to you, sir. And I thank all of you, Becky, Jim, Stacia, Rusty and John for a great panel. It was my honor to moderate it and thanks so much. Hi, everybody. Thanks for sticking around. My name's Catherine Brown. I'm the Executive Director of the Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. I also wanna thank the panel. It's been a privilege to work with them all in different capacities. John Mongan, who I first met in Gosney in 2004 and Rusty Barber and Stacia George, Becky Zimmerman and Jim LeBlanc are part of a working group that we conducted with the USIP last year. And also Mike Carly for coming back. He moderated one of our discussions back in October, 2014. We first got this conversation going. My colleague Chris Huntsman and I had been fortunate enough to work with Doug Wilson the last few years. We've also had the honor of working with the Truman Project on this initiative. And I'm very honored now to introduce my good friend, Mike Breen. Mike is the President and CEO of the Truman Center and the Truman National Security Project. He leads a nationwide community that was created after 9-11 of more than 1500 veterans, policy experts and frontline civilians who worked together to ensure that our defense, diplomacy and development communities work together to advance our national security. Prior to this, Mike led Soldiers in Combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he served in his service as a US Army officer and he attended Yale Law School and served in office of the White House Council. It's been an honor to work with you, Mike and also with Carrie Kramer and the frontline civilians initiative led by Angelique Young and Becky Zimmerman who you just heard from. So, Mike, thank you and I'd like to welcome you to the stage. Thank you and thank you all for being here. And thanks especially to the great Truman members who've led this frontline civilians initiative. Angelique Young, Becky Zimmerman, the great Katherine Brown, our dynamic and irrepressible chairman of the Board of Advisors, Doug Wilson, is also here with us today. Frontline civilians is important to the Truman community not only because it's an essential component of American foreign policy and strategy for this century, but also because of the lived experience of our community. As Katherine said, we're a community that came together in the aftermath of 9-11 and for the last 15 years have been on the sharp end of American foreign policy and a whole range of capacities. There's nothing abstract about this and Becky nailed it when she said this is about stories in some ways and about conveying the truth of what's been out there. That's why we're launching frontline civilians story bank later this week. I think that's on Thursday. And so I'd ask you to come with me on a little bit of a story now and just imagine yourself in your house tonight at about two or three in the morning asleep. I have a two year old daughter so this part's easy for me to imagine and imagine that one of your kids, a little girl in this case wakes you up and says, Daddy, mommy, there are guys with guns outside, there are guys outside the house. Now, I live in Tacoma Park, Maryland, right? It's probably not true if that happens, right? If my daughter says this to me, but imagine you wake up, you kind of groggy, you're thinking it's probably not happening. And you look out your window and you see a couple of dozen people with automatic weapons coming across your front lawn. Now, in my case, in your case, you might reach for a cell phone, call a neighbor, call the police, call 911. But in this case, your house is in Afghanistan at the mouth of the Khorongal Valley where the Khorongal meets the Pesh and there's nobody to call and there's no cell phone and you can't see your neighbor's house from your family compound. But like any good frontier farmer, you've got a gun over the mantelpiece. In this case, it's a belt fed Soviet PK machine gun. So you pull it down. And now imagine for a second, you're not that farmer anymore. Now you're a 24 year old Marine rifle platoon commander on his first tour of duty. Until about a month ago, you thought, because it's 2005, you were headed for the height of the Iraq war, but you're not there. All that pre-deployment workup is out the window. You're in Afghanistan. You have the same mission that I had that the whole US military had at that time. And I still remember it verbatim, extend the reach of the Afghan central government. And the tool you have is a Marine rifle platoon. And so you extend a piece of what government means. You extend security and you follow your company commander's orders and you do it by going out on a night patrol. And your platoon is passing kind of close to a mud hut compound with a heavily very thick outer wall. Somebody yells something at you in Pashto. You don't understand it. You turn to your interpreter. You try to start the conversation and then a belt-fed machine gun opens up on your platoon. So you do what you've been trying to do. You hit the dirt, you execute a battle drill, you return overwhelming fire, and you isolate the compound. You could assault it, but instead of doing that, you don't want to risk the casualties. So you make a very defensible call. You pick up the radio and you ask for a 2000 pound JDAM. I was a lot luckier in Afghanistan than that Marine commander. When I went out, I usually had in my Humvee myself, a fellow paratrooper, a State Department Foreign Service officer who spoke Pashto, who knew the area, and a contractor through USAID. For two of the only four frontline civilians in Kunar province at the time. That mission, extend the reach of the central government, that's not a mission for a military. That's a mission for a nation. And the face of America is so much more than the best military in the world. What we have to offer the world is so much more than security no matter how well provided. And we are blessed as a nation that we have men and women, civilians, who are willing to stand up and walk those same hills. Not only in conflict zones, but in the places where conflict looms, the places we hope never to have to send a Marine rifle platoon. What they need, what we all need them to have, are the resources, the training, the support, the responsible mission oriented risk management, the recognition that comes with doing a dangerous job that our country desperately needs done. Well, it turns out that family got lucky that night. That Marine officer got lucky that night. Son came up before the B-52 came on station, farmer looked out, saw he was dealing with a hell of a lot more than a local militia, then they talked it out. But all that stands between a 24-year-old Marine and a decision that will haunt him for the rest of his life, and all that stands between an Afghan family and an all too common tragedy, has to be more than the grace of a well-timed sunrise. We need a comprehensive approach to our foreign policy, even in the most difficult places, and that takes men and women on the ground to get it done. It takes frontline civilians. Thanks. Thanks so much, Mike, for that. And to close this out, I just want to first, this is the last event I will do in my job, and I want to take a second to thank our commission members who lead and guide the advisory commission on public diplomacy. Our chairman, Simfarar, who cannot be here, Bill Hibble, our vice chair, Ambassador Penny Peacock, who was here a little bit earlier, and our new member, Georgette Mossbacher, and Anne Wendner, who's here, and going to help close us out. So I'm honored to introduce Anne. Anne's been a member of the advisory commission on public diplomacy since 2011, and she's a former Foreign Service officer. She's an expert in finding private sector funding for the public sector, and is especially passionate about bridging the gap between urban youth and global audiences. She's been very critical to this initiative from the beginning, working with who we hope will be our newest member, Deb Wilson, hopefully be confirmed soon. And she's worked with us from the very beginning of this project, so Anne, I'd like to welcome you to the stage, and thank you for being here. Well, I don't think anyone wants to speak after Mike, so I'll be quick and just thank everyone. On behalf of the commission and the US IP, we'd like to thank all of you for coming this morning to discuss this vital topic. Supporting the agility of our civilians abroad is essential if we are to meet some of the biggest national security challenges this century, especially since we must develop and maintain networks with non-state actors who are increasingly shaping their societies. We have been fortunate to work with US IP over the past two years to determine ways to better prepare and care for civilians before, during, and after their deployments to high-threat environments. I personally like to thank Nancy Lindberg and Linwood Ham for their diligent work and attention to this issue. We'd also like to thank Deputy Secretary Higginbottom for her leadership on creating a more, a new, more agile path towards civilians working in these spaces. Our panel of frontline civilians who have sacrificed so much in the past 15 years. We'd like to thank Mike Crawley for moderating the discussion, and Mike Breen, of course, for his leadership at the Truman Project and ensuring that a network of frontline civilians continues to push for reforms. And most of all, to Doug Wilson for initiating and working with us on this project for the last two years. I'd also personally like to take a minute and just, it's not in my notes, thank Catherine Brown, whose leadership has been unreal for the commission and really brought us a new place in many of these discussions we hadn't had before. I'm gonna miss Catherine so much. I think we're all gonna miss her. I know she's gonna still be deeply involved in this space, but she's built a team and done things that I think are absolutely extraordinary. And I know that Congress and the White House are very, very pleased with her contributions, and I hope stated the others are too. So we can take a moment and applaud Catherine. So thank you all for coming and have a great afternoon.