 Once again, good morning, and our first panel that we have, we have substituted our moderator and rare Admiral Lars Sons graciously took the helm and decided to be our moderator until we have Dr. Burbick who comes from the gate. So, without further ado, I will provide a brief intro to Admiral. Admiral Sons is a professor and CNO distinguished international fellow at the US Naval War College as chief of the Royal Naval Norwegian Navy from 2014 to 2017. He is retired now as the chief of the Royal Norwegian Navy. And in August 2017 he returned to the Naval War College where he graduated in 2004. His role as professor and CNO distinguished fellow includes co-leading the Newport Arctic Scholar Initiative. Admiral, we welcome you in your panel. Thank you. Thank you so much and welcome to all of you today. You have such an exciting panel today and it sort of make me, you know, honored to be able to step in for my friend Walter. But also because I've been engaged in strategic planning and military operations as J7 at the National Headquarter, but also at the chief of defense staff as part of my career. And just to give you an example, so our head of operation division in my country is Admiral Sulwe Kray. She was the first submarine commanding officer in the Norwegian Navy. So it's kind of a thing when we have gone through and made plan for participating in UN operations in Afghanistan with our NATO allies or supporting EU in anti-piracy operations. Part of the planning is always to also look at the gender perspective. When we look at the SOAR or the resources to use, we really see the effect that Sayra was presenting this morning. But today you will have the opportunity to get the experience from esteemed panelists. You will find their bio in the program and I will encourage you to read that. But we will start looking at the Russia-Ukraine war and gendered approach to strategic competition by Dr. Olga Shiriak from the Joint Special Operations University, and Lieutenant Colonel Jahara Matissek from the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Naval War College. And I will introduce the panelists as they take the podium. The floor is yours. Thank you Admiral. Thank you. Good morning everyone. I'm sorry I couldn't be there. I'm actually in a senior working continuing to work on this research. Thank you for the introduction and thank you to Dr. Yamin and the Naval War College for putting this together. We have to do it every year and the more often, the better. So I'll get straight to the point. I know we're short on time. And before I start, I just want to say that both my co-author and myself, I hope we hope that you receive this as rather directions for constructive discussion and analysis because it's a very complex topic. And I also hope that it will contribute substantially to mainstreaming women, peace and security. So to the article, we've tried to explore the Russo-Ukrainian conflict through the gender lens, specifically how gender was actually weaponized in the global information war against Ukraine and NATO by Russia. Implicitly, this affects strategic competition, the strategic competition taking place not only between the U.S. and Russia but also China. Our methodology combines fieldwork. We've both done in territory interviews in Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, as well as analysis of Russian media, both conventional and social media. Next slide, please. So I'll quickly go over four dimensions that I think are important. It's a very complex paper, so I hope you'll enjoy reading it. And then my co-author will go over our recommendations and conclusions. So the first I mentioned of our analysis was culture and the vital distinction between culture and ideology. If you follow Russian discourse, they frame this conflict in Ukraine as an ideology conflict as a cultural clash between what they call the collective West. And they portray themselves and they perceive themselves rather as defending Eastern Orthodoxy, Christianity and traditional values versus the immoral West. So in this frame, the West, I think it's important to note that it's not just a geographical space. I think it's more important to underline that it is the ideational space. It's manifested through rules, norms and institutions. And at the core, we have the universal human rights but also political rights like the right to vote, the right to free speech, social rights like equal access to education and healthcare and workers' rights. So if we look at the whole situation in this lens, then we can conclude actually that Russia lost the war already because in Ukraine, the large majority of the population have clearly chosen to join the West, whether they're Ukrainian speaking or Russian speaking, Romanian speaking, Georgian speaking, all ethnicities because Ukraine is a very diverse country. The best way to actually see that they've chosen that is to look at their armed forces. I think at the number 60,000 women in the Ukrainian military, that amounts to 22% of the forces, 5,000 serve in active combat versus 41% women in the Russian military, which is just about 4%. And I think this is the perfect example where institutions, the Ukrainian people have chosen to join the West institutions. There's been a lot of institutional change all the while nurturing and maintaining Ukrainian culture. There's actually a paradox because if you look at history and at the USSR during World War I, the Soviet Army, which included Russians and non-Russians. Or two rather, I'm sorry, there was 800,000 women who served, including in combat, the famous bomber pilots and female snipers. They were actually, they gained a lot of notoriety for outstanding performance on the battlefield. 41% of the doctors on the front line during World War II on the Soviet side were women and 100% of nursing staff. And if we think back back then in the West, not many Western countries had the right to vote for women. Not many women were able to pursue a career like medicine. So in this whole frame, Russia actually went a little bit backwards and I think we need to be cognizant of that and to understand it in order to leverage that in our strategic competition. Next slide, please. The second dimension that we looked at was the difference in battle space and we took a closer look at how that affects resilience, both individual but mostly societal resilience. So old versus new battle spaces. And one of the conclusions that we've come to is that in spite of tremendous technological advances, human security and people are still at the core of everything. So human security is a prerequisite for societal resilience, relationships like informal security force assistance, NGOs, civil society, volunteers, NAFU, all that contribute tremendously to fostering societal resilience. Next slide, please. So the third dimension we looked at was at the intersection of narratives and information warfare. And our analysis was multi-dimensional, not just the technological side, not just the cyber operations and information warfare, misinformation and disinformation. But also the narratives as they apply to human cognition, development of the brain, the way that we're socialized in our early years, our traditions, our values, the way that impacts the way we perceive the world and what effect that has on resilience, societal resilience and how that is applied in the battle space. Because narratives are foundational to how individuals and individuals understand and perceive their environment, as well as their personal experiences, they make a huge difference. I quote, I'm not going to go over all the definitions, but the key I think is in this quote that it is the foundational framing of human ways of world making. Russians call that making meaning, so different wording, same thing. Next slide, please. The final dimension was refugees. This is also a very complex thing. And yesterday, I was going to talk a little bit about trauma and violence and how that informs post-conflict societies and how we should be more cognizant of that. But yesterday, Dr. Yamin talked about naysayers and how she often gets the question, why should we talk about women? Well, I looked up the UN statistics and I'm just going to leave a few statistics up there. Maybe that will help us to think why. So 70% of the world's refugees are from five countries, Syria, Venezuela, Ukraine, Afghanistan and South Sudan. 36.5 million of these are children. 69% of these refugees are housed by their neighboring states, not by the US and not by the wealthier western states. So these are just statistics, food for thought, put them into the context that I talked about earlier. And out of the though, in conflict, post-conflict women are both subjects and agents of change. So I'll let Frankie go over the conclusions and the recommendations. Thank you again very much. Big picture of what's going on here is we have to be willing to engage but also reject a lot of the Russian narratives about them being sort of the ideological defenders of Christianity. And that means, you know, getting the western media and governments to be more explicit in calling out a lot of the Russian propaganda because, you know, unfortunately in many ways, Russia is a dying country. I also wanted to call attention to a phenomenon that some people may not be aware of. If you've ever heard of NAFO. It's like an internet joke trend about these Shibu dogs, the upper right hand corner people engaged in getting a profile picture and basically pushing back against Russian propaganda. And what I think is actually really sort of a good sign that there is an interest in pushing back against Russian narratives is that this is very much an organic response. And it is almost like the counter trolling to Russian propaganda and masculinity because NAFO is welcome to all and encourages everyone to, you know, define Western values as inclusive. So in that frame, I think there's still a lot to be done about this. And as we think about future conflicts and crises, military planners are going to have to think more explicitly about the sort of domestic regional and international narratives that an adversary may try to exploit and thinking through about having a diverse enough team to think through the consequences of how do you compete against that. And, you know, from a Western perspective, transparency is usually the best aim, any kind of future conflict or crisis. So thinking through that, and what it actually means and how to actually translate that into actionable objectives, I think it is going to be a crucial element for a future crisis. Thank you. Thank you so much to Dr. Shiriak and Lieutenant Colonel Matissek. And just for the online or Zoom audience as a preparation for the Q&A session, you can actually post question. I think there's some chat already on chat. And so we can take that up in the Q&A. And also a pleasure now to introduce Captain Almont. Christa, she is bringing women to the helm of strategic plans and operations in the US Navy. Good luck. Oh, thanks. First of all, I want to start with a disclaimer that I've been told to say that all of these things I'm about to say are my opinions and I don't represent the DOD or the Navy, although they shall also be at the opinions of the DOD and the Navy. In my opinion. I also want to thank the War College for putting this on. And especially for the audience that's avoiding the front seats like the plague I think this message is extraordinarily important for you guys and I'll get into why a little bit later. I did my first tour here in the Navy in 1994 at the Naval Academy Prep School across the river so it's pretty amazing to be back I also met my husband here about a decade later. So far so good on both fronts. We'll see. So the guys in the audience. I want to address you I want to do this a little bit differently than I've seen the panels being done so far because you're the most important people people to the culture of the United States Navy you're the most important people people to the culture and the environment of anything because frankly you outnumber us in environments like this. This is incredibly important for you to hear and for you to take on because you're the key to all of this you're the key to women being included in military service. You're the key to women feeling like they belong in military service, and you're the key to your daughter's ability to succeed and achieve whatever goals she has set for herself. I know there's going to have one role, but you guys as you raise their children and as you move on into the careers where we serve alongside you. You're the, you're the main force behind us. First of all, thank you second of all. There's some of you that need some, some re keying and I hope that your neighbors and your colleagues next to you can do that as we move on, but I'm not going to tell me see stories until the very end. So Dr. Mariano said, Master Chief why are you laughing already. Oh, I get that. So Dr. Mariano said yesterday that in his opening remarks that inclusion is not just a leadership issue it's a parenting issue. And that's why I alluded to earlier he's exactly, exactly correct, because at home is where a young boy learns that he needs to respect and include women that he needs to value them and a young girl learns at home that she needs to respect herself and value herself. So please please take that on board. And that's exactly why I'm so grateful to have you in the audience to have the opportunity to tell you not only that you are a young woman's greatest champion. But you are the Navy's culture. We talk about Navy culture as if it's some cloud above us and it just happens. It's not true. The culture is the human beings that are sitting amongst us right now you are the culture. If it's bad, we're bad. So we can fix that very easily by fixing ourselves and adjusting our attitudes and how we treat one another whether it's men or women it doesn't matter. So like I said you ensure the inclusion of women. At every rank. And that's especially true about the eight to 10 year mark in our careers because frankly we start to thin out pretty dramatically. The average woman doesn't want to put on combat boots she wants to be a mother. That's just, it's nature you can't fight against it you can be offended by it if you want can't be, you know, it's a fact. I remember many times in my career where people say they couldn't understand how a woman's mind works when she could trade a family for the military, which is interesting because I've never heard a man be accused of trading his family for the military it's just the women. But it's, it's something that basically weeds us out by ourselves and there's nothing at all wrong with it's fantastic. I don't have kids and by the way that's also fantastic so either way is worse. As we start to leave the ranks we no longer have the support mechanism of one another and we certainly don't have very many female mentors at the higher ranks. So we do rely very, very heavily on you. And the inclusion of women in any organization isn't about replacement it's not emasculating to the organization is, as I've seen in the media recently incorrectly. The inclusion is about building a combat force from your entire field of candidates. It's 100% of the field of candidates being drawn upon to build the military service, not 47% of it or 48% of it. And that's what makes us are very strong. It's not because there's a woman in it I don't make a meeting better or an organization better because I come in as a pants suit. I make it better because I come in with X number of years of experience in different locations in different failures and different leadership roles and different mentorship roles. That's what makes the team stronger. Not what I put on in the morning or, or what kind of bra I have to wear when I get up dressed. So what I see around the globe is pretty bad. And to make the strongest team that we possibly can you have to draw on 100% of your culture and you have to draw on 100% of your people no matter what their differences really are. So, people are concerned about the inclusion of women because they say well it's not really suited to warfare and we talked yesterday about the changing art of warfare and Gus you mentioned that well warfare in the future is in space it's in air air power which I choke on a little bit as a surface warfare officer, but it's true. And women can play those roles every bit as well as a man can it's not about your gender it's just about your own capability. So the application of strategic planning of adapting problem solving skills to get at the Navy's missions. Strategic challenges of the Navy are completely without gender. So why are we concerned that a gender inclusion process would be threatening to us. That's a rhetorical question just something I'll ask you to think on. So the field of the leaders of the Navy the field that we have to draw on to bring leaders to the forefront of the Navy should be as broad as possible as we do face that future it's a very bizarre future we got coming along. So that's an interesting example of going back to an older style of war older I'll say style of warfare but as we look at great power competition is that we look at near peer threats. Those aren't ground wars. It's not a joke that if you're fighting a land war in Asia you got a major problem. It's that's why it's going to happen in cyber it's why it's going to happen in space. And again, leadership of those is critical. The best possible leadership pool is critical. So the culture you create guys, the culture you create either ensures or eliminates the Navy's options for leadership for leaders. The women have a little bit of a role but you have a much bigger role we have to be competent we have to be professional and we have to be confident in ourselves. And that's that onus is on us but you accepting including us that onus is on you frankly. So, I can tell you in this culture to be successful and competent and confident as a woman it's not easy. It takes a little bit of stamina. Not only are we our own greatest critics. We face the headwinds of a civilian culture and the questions of why are you in the military what does your husband think of that what does your father think of that why don't you have children when are you getting married. Just a very very very small number of the questions will face. And then there's the stressors you face in military service you face them alongside men. It's the same exact problems it's the same exact loss of time with family it's the same exact time away from something else that you might want to do it's the long hours. Those are just inherent to what we do. And then the women have the added fun of stressors among shipmates and detractors among shipmates, and that's where one of the difficulties comes in that I keep harping on, and coming back to you about at 27 that's when someone asked me, you know, I, he said I don't understand the mind of a woman who can, who can serve in a navy and abandoned her family. I wasn't married yet. And by the way, my mother said nice girls don't join the military. My father said that's exactly why she should go in so I had that. I had that even at home that's, that's absolutely true. He was all for the military my mother was absolutely dead set against it. But then my dad told him I was told my brothers I was the son he always wanted so that's the kind of, that's the kind of girl I was. But to the women I put it this way, if you can weather all the stressors you place on yourself all the stressors that community puts on you and then of your shipmates and of service, then you'll come out the other end. Pretty amazing you come out with a seat at the table that you deserve, not because you're filling a quota, or because you're helping tick a gender box, but because you've earned that seat. And that's a very important thing for females to remember because we really are our own worst detractors. So I'll paraphrase something that Dr. Rome said yesterday because we have made so many vital policy changes over the years it's been fantastic couple hundred years outdated but they've been amazing and dire in dire need of them she said culture. Again I'm paraphrasing culture eats policy for breakfast. And that's exactly true so you can make as many nice little Congress congressional notes and as many GAO reports as you want but if the culture doesn't change. Your military isn't going to change based on policy that's that is entirely up to us to do it so this is why you guys are the key to it. Your confidence in an inclusive team and your support of your teammates all of them, no matter what they look like no matter what they are. That helps us all that requires us all to fulfill the oath that we have all taken to serve. You didn't swear an oath every time you enlist or every time you're promoted you don't swear an oath to the servant, or to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic and exclusive of the teammates around you because they don't look like you or they aren't like you or they don't come from your background. It covers every gamut you simply serve the Constitution and you simply protect the Constitution, and you should be able to do so very comfortably alongside whoever is next to you. I've never had a female mentor. It just didn't didn't come up and I can tell you the men who've mentored me, either by slamming the door and screaming at me because I might have deserved or not, or grabbing me by the collar or giving me quiet cultural career advice. One of them told me I needed to relax, he was wrong but the rest have been fantastic. I have relied on men entirely for my career to be the guy that I needed. I mean it was very very strong but they also said don't ever come home I was the youngest of six. So when they got rid of me it was it was open season at the house for my parents. So they say go out and have an adventure in your life and never come home do the most difficult things you can and do it as far away from support as you can because I'll make you stronger. And so I turned to the military and the people around me to make me stronger and the good ones did it and the bad ones did it. It's been a learning experience all of the way. But to the women in the audience. The right to lead the accomplishments you can make the opportunity to serve. And the, the once in a while when someone looks over at you and says I want to be like you you inspire me that's worth everything you can possibly face when you serve in military that's worth all of the enemies for an end domestic that you can find. That's a fantastic feeling. And men will contribute to that all along the way please look to them please look for their guidance don't just seek out women and guys please seek out the young women around you. To be their guide and their mentor, I had a couple of bosses who would send me was I was in my department head roles. There's a female crying in the state room please go talk to her. And the first time I did it. And the second time I said no. The second time I said you've got to you know you're my X O I wasn't I was the department head. I said you got to go face this. She's crying over something you know you have done, frankly, and you need to go talk to her about it. And it was interesting. I've seen more than one man refused to talk to a crying woman but I can tell you I've talked to crying men in my in my career. So please reach across. It's scary when a woman starts to cry but please reach across and talk to them. And so for the women again, take detractors with a grain of salt. Take attackers by the throat or wherever and press forward. It's really really worth it each step of the way and leadership isn't at the highest ranks leadership is at every possible rank it's one of the great things about the military. An ensign is a leader a JG is a leader. So every step that you make every step that you progress it's absolutely worth it. Just push forward. It sounds. It sounds a little aggressive and it sounds like you're pushing aside some of the things but that's where the grabbing by the throat comes in. So I did I spared you almost all my C stories but I'm going to share one and because it's very important about the culture and where the Navy has come since I started serving in 1994 and that's the command Master Chief. And I had to look up your name because all I can remember was broken Joe after those ladies yesterday who who ruined your name for me. Master Chief Ferney made probably the best in presentation I've ever seen about inclusion and women that I've in the Navy we don't see a lot of them so far as low. But he made a spectacular brief yesterday and I wanted to thank you and this is why when I checked on board my first ship and I think I was 23 years old. My command Master Chief came up to me on a pre deployment picnic on the flight deck, and he said I think we should have women on ships at sea, and then he proceeded to tell me why he thought women would be useful on ships at sea and it wasn't because we contributed to the mission it was very vulgar and it was very direct. And now my command Master Chiefs I see around me are like you, and I can't thank you enough, because, again, you are the culture, you have you are what has changed. I'll shut up now. Thanks Captain El Monte and it's great seeing you again and then that's for me personally speaking that's a you're very inspiring, and you are a great leader and I like to now transition and turn it over to first lieutenant Morgan Fleming, who, who's with us, who she helps she served in task force bliss and helped Afghan refugees and provided housing and immigration services to them, and actually started the first domestic a female engagement team here with in the US for the US Army so without further ado, over to you thank you. Good morning and happy Friday to everybody I hope you're all excited to be here I most definitely am. Thank you Dr Birbuk for the introduction as he said I am first lieutenant Morgan Fleming I'm with the US Army. I'm here to talk to you today about my time with the female engagement team and operation allies welcome. Before I start just a couple thank yous want to say thank you to my parents, my friend Wyatt will always keeps me going I would have loved to join us today. Dr you mean for guiding me through this process and answering every last minute question that I had. First thank you to miss Tiffany Phillips, without whose guidance and relationships I would not be here in front of you today. And then of course thank you to everybody here in the audience, both physically and virtually it's always very affirming to be invited to speak somewhere and then to have people show up and know that they are interested in what you have to say. So, with that, I've already met so many great people here and so many important people in just every kind of mission. So many people working at the operational level so the joint staff DoD State Department. My operation that I'll speak to you about today is a little bit smaller it's more at the tactical level really the smallest unit size that we can implement WPS structure in I hope to give you kind of a general working knowledge of at least my experience you could easily ask somebody who is at the operational level and operation allies welcome and they may have seen something drastically different than I did but from the tactical level I'll talk to you about the challenges and some ideas and suggestions that I have about moving forward and if you'd like to implement female engagement teams in your own units and practice so I'd like to begin with a story and as all good military to start. No kidding there I was. We were about three months into operation allies welcome we had just finished our command and staff sync for the day out at the Donna Anna village which is where we are housing refugees. We were going around the room, everybody from rank of specialist to commanding Colonel was in the room and as is normal for the end of those meetings the commander said okay we're going to go around the room I'm going to ask if anybody has any questions or anything that they would like to bring up and so I said sir I do. We have about three very pregnant female Afghan refugees here at the camp. This was met with silence. I said so I would like to get some sort of midwife and or labor and delivery nurse or somebody to assist to be on site for when it comes time for those women. This was met with more silence. One of the other young male lieutenants in the room spoke up and he said, well, we could just have everybody practice catching football. God be about the same right. So, I tell you that story, not as a slight at all on the team that I worked with at operation allies welcome which was an amazing team but to demonstrate how when we enter these operations that are rapidly changing and often a type of crisis management, women's issues and other marginalized groups issues are so often the first priority to go, and thus the last thing to be thought of, if we even have time to think about them at all. So to give you a little bit of a history on female engagement teams they have been utilized for over a decade. The Marine Corps was the first branch to be able to implement these. In fact, the female engagement teams in the Marine Corps are more operationalized, they're more permanent organizations and they have more formalized models of structure than we do in the army and compared to the army and many of our FETs are ad hoc. They're a little less permanent and they dissolve quickly after very specific missions such as operation allies welcome. We as the FET service about 10,000 guests for just over six months in 2021. We worked at the Donna Anna range in New Mexico which was about 45 minutes away from Fort Bliss in El Paso. I had a team of 50 females and at our highest strength in numbers we had five female lieutenants as our leadership so that was the team that I commanded to make or have enough people for these teams we had to pull from several different periods because they're just not very many women in brigade combat teams. And our goal was to gather atmospherics from our population, and we constantly man so 24 hours a day, seven days a week for this operation. Of course this came with many challenges. First of all, as I said we struggled to find personnel and so that cross unit coordination that you see up there that became challenging because as the highest ranking leader on that team. We had to kind of navigate and negotiate with company commanders of all of the women from across different decades on what responsibility I was taking over these women and what responsibility, they still had over their soldiers. So that communication did get a little bit sticky and we never quite got to hash out you know exactly who belonged to who who is op con who is take on that kind of thing. We also had a gap in mentorship and that was through nobody's fault but you know what is a mentor will mentor is someone with more experience and something than you. Simply by nature of everyone's gender in my unit the highest ranking combat arms female was myself, just a lieutenant. I had never been on a female engagement team before and so I had a lot of great and strong leaders but none of them had been female engagement team leaders because they were all men so we didn't have that to fall back on in this unprecedented mission. Personality this was a big one the army has something called KSVP which stands for knowledge skills behaviors and preferences it's something that we're trying to utilize to determine whether or not potential people would be a good fit for their job. So, just to give you an example some of the qualities that are listed for the armor branch if you want to be a tanker are physically fit, mentally tough, hard working, ambitious and enforcing standards. And these are all great and needed skills, but which one of these truly helps with the empathetic communication of a population. What are our blind spots. What was our purpose now the original female engagement teams that the Marines used were a solution to the culturally sensitive body searches that needs to be performed to ensure everyone's safety overseas but in our domestic operation. There was no need for that and what that also meant was that there was no natural opportunity for us to be alone with the female population and so those natural conversations really didn't start so we really had to transition our focus and training and moving relationships and gathering Intel rather than that crisis management and emergency mode. So, addressing these problems in the future and moving forward. How to solve these things in the future first of all knowing your audience is critical. And this is two fold. So, first, what I talked about earlier what was the nature of our mission for an operation allies welcome. It was a domestic mission so again it's more about communication gathering Intel than it was about crisis management. And secondly, how to pick the soldiers that are going to be on your female engagement team or simply engagement team. As I talked about those KSB PS, we know that women are usually more relational and pathetic and nurturing, but women in combat arms are unusual. So, if you are already for a reason, most women that are interested in joining a combat arms unit did not expect relational communication to be at the forefront of the job that they're doing. So, if you are trying to erect a FET in a VCT may need some training that you didn't expect to need because communications is is not where we strive we strive in standards discipline and directive and so that relational cyclical reflective communication is something that we could use assistance with often consider personalities consider giving pre test to soldiers that you want to potentially be on your team. And if nothing else. Please include men on the team males need engagement as well. And how can we possibly expect men or anybody for that matter to understand if the engagement team expressly excludes them. If they're not involved, they have to be doing the same things in my personal experience at operation allies welcome we struggled because my female soldiers were taken away from their regular units just to work on the female engagement team. All of their male soldiers did not see them, sometimes for days at a time so they weren't aware of what we were doing and the information that the FET was gathering never got down to that lowest level of those, you know, specialist male soldiers and so their impression was well the female engagement team isn't doing anything my leaders aren't doing anything because I don't see them. So that's why we have to involve men and especially men at the lowest level. Also, if this symposium is any indicator, we have men in the military with fantastic communication skills, we have to recognize those and teams such as engagement teams are a great way to do that in the military. We talked about doctrine, we talked about how there was lack of mentorship experience earlier and what do we do in the army. When we don't know what to do and we need to say standard, we fall back on doctrine. So there needs to be some and it needs to be readily available. Additionally doctrine and standardization is the language of the army and it is what is impressionable on many people of high ranks within the military and is what they respond to it is their language and so we need to have that standardization to some degree for female engagement teams. We're implementing female engagement teams permanently so not just interaction with foreign allies, there are many people to engage with domestically as well so just like the family readiness group programs and the single soldier boss programs. That's something that can be on a slide and every weekly command and staff meeting the female engagement team does not need to be dissolved after missions like this we can kind of build that base knowledge so that when something like operation allies welcome we have the team available and they're ready and practice and they know what they're going to do. Additionally, the knowledge share systems to widely have that available it is something that we can't assume that new soldiers and new NCOs have the research skills, the educational background to be able to dig deep enough to find good engagement team resources as they stand now and connections to other army personnel and resources as they're just setting out their career but it is feasible to expect that they have been through basic training and a it and they know to fall back on doctrine and everybody knows army pubs.com. So we should have something on that website. And the last thing that I will talk to you about is the transition of the female engagement teams as we transition from counterinsurgency operations to large scale combat operations. We know that as our operation scale gets larger. So then will the number of women that these operations directly affect the need for engagement will never go away. In fact, into pay calm has many collective as societies. We as America are the most individualistic society on the planet. So we think very eye oriented. We take care of ourselves and our immediate families. We value individual achievement standing out and independence. We value the societies value the we the in group is everything and a person views themselves as part of a unit. The most important thing that you can learn is not independence but respect. So, imagine, if you will, how important engaging a population that is so deeply embedded in such a unified community could be in gathering intelligence, understanding how our adversaries think, and thus, giving our soldiers and leaders. And the communication skills to make accurate decisions based off that knowledge to win our nation's wars. Thank you. Thanks to us end up climbing. And I'd like to now turn it over to Mr. Jody Prescott of the University of Vermont it was retired us army judge advocate is going to talk to us today about the role and influence of gender and kinetic operations. Good morning everyone. From the perspective of operational risk that is risk to mission accomplishment gender is not always relevant in military operations as a way to illustrate this let's consider a recent study on humanitarian demining operations. Humanitarian demining is very dangerous and to be done effectively personnel need to be well trained and have proper equipment. Based on the study conducted by one Canadian NGO in 2019. The global workforce involved in demining appears to be about 80% men, about 20% women, using the metric of square meters cleared of mines per day. A later study evaluated the operational efficiency of women versus men. Statistically, there was no meaningful difference between the two sexes stated differently. There was no operational risk to mind clearing accomplishment posed by gender. It was not relevant. Likewise, in the military context. I believe that gender is not relevant from the perspective of operational risk and equipment heavy force on force engagements. Outside the presence of civilians whose perceptions, attitudes and behaviors have a role to play and whether operations like counter insurgency or stability are going to be successful in the end. On the other hand, when you get to the other end of the operational perspective, the other end of the operational spectrum. I believe gender is especially relevant in civilian centric operation where the important terrain does include the attitudes perceptions and behaviors of people, roughly half of whom are women and girls. I believe that it's relevant not just because there are civilian women around. I believe gender is relevant from the perspective of operational risk, because the success of these missions likely depends on understanding that the population is gendered, and that different genders can have different security needs. If in one of these civilian centric operations, you are not addressing different people's different security needs, you are not doing a very good job of understanding your environment. This presents a threat to your mission. To be most actionable, however, these gender considerations need to be normed in the currency of operational risk to the mission, just as other threats are. Gender is not something special in this regard. Gender is not something precious. The implementation of the Women, Peace and Security Act of 2017 sets out these three primary objectives that DOD reports against when it makes its reports up in terms of how the implementation of the WPS strategy is going. These are good things. Looking to improve gender equality in our own force and the forces of our partners, and helping our partners militaries do a better job of protecting women and girls and their defense and security sectors. From my perspective, however, they are woefully incomplete. The Women, Peace and Security Act of 2017 focuses on increasing women's role in preventing deadly conflict and on women's role in helping resolve deadly conflict when it's over. It does not focus on the situation of women in the deadly parts of deadly armed conflict, particularly when we're talking about the application of deadly US force. Going back to basics, UN Security Council Resolution 1325 called on the member nations to work with the entire range of the law of armed conflict in finding ways to better protect women and girls from the gender differentiated harms of armed conflict. Now, when we say low act, we're not just talking about the Geneva strand of low act, right, protection of victims of armed conflict. We're also talking about the Hague strand, the conduct of armed conflicts. The Women, Peace and Security Act of 2017 basically avoids dealing with this. And it appears to me that the implementation plan hues closely to the legal authority. The attorney and me says, thank you for following your legal advisors advice. The feminist in me says, maybe we need to reconsider this a little bit, because in doing so, it sidesteps the application of gender considerations to the low act principle of proportionality. So for example, it should be a surprise to know one that when you look at the very recent NATO joint targeting doctrine, the US reservation finds no meaningful role for the gender advisor in the execution of joint targeting under US doctrine and practice. Instead, it appears the US would rely on low act and are we in civilian centric operations like stability encounter insurgency. When we conduct strikes that go awry. When we end up killing people who are protected persons under low act. We damage our security efforts on the ground. We turn people against us on the larger stage of public perception of our efforts. And our commitment to low act as part of the rule of law. Now, I did not realize this until my tour in Afghanistan 2008 2009, but strikes can have gender differentiated harms that create friction against lines of effort to build stability in a war torn nation. You might characterize these harms as second or third order effects, which quite frankly are not the things that we are generally taught to consider when conducting or explaining a proportionality analysis under the law of armed conflict. I think it's fair to say that our ordinary approach has been to lump all civilians together in doing so, and to consider only immediate casualties. In some senses, a civilian is a civilian is a civilian. In 2022, however, DoD issued an ambitious plan to reduce the harm our strikes cause to civilians and to respond to instances of harm by affirmatively making reparations. The civilian harm and mitigation response action plan, which I now know from attending this conference apparently is called chimera. As I read it, the plan calls for steps to gather and analyze more and better data about what it terms the civilian environment and to provide this to operators in the field to reduce casualties. For me, one of the most important parts of the action plan is this expanded notion of what constitutes the civilian environment that which requires protection and repair. This makes it go quite far beyond just civilians and their property, and to start considering second and third order effects of our kinetic actions on civilians. To me, this provides an opportunity to start including gender differentiated harms in our planning and conduct of kinetic operations, thereby addressing this current gap in the coverage of DoD's women peace and security strategy efforts. The ChimRap contains a disclaimer that it goes beyond that which is required by LOAC. I would argue for a different approach. I say that gender differentiated and more severe harms of armed conflict to women and girls need to be explicitly tackled in our operational understandings and applications of the principle of proportionality. If I could ask those of you in the audience, please give me a raise of hands. Who have we got out there that has done target hearing and weapon hearing? Thank you. What I'm also talking about, and you know this from your experience, it's not just LOAC, it's not just ROE. It's the shadow ROE that we have in our SOPs. This is where we can truly make a difference. Thank you very much. Jodi, and what I'll do right now is just kind of stitch together a few different key points I think that the panel really drew out and then we'll transition to Q&A, both folks that are here present and also those joining us virtually. So, you know, our first two speakers really remind us of the impacts of how crises and conflict can increase gender-based violence. And Russia's invasion of Ukraine has forced millions of women and children to flee their country overnight and has put them at increased risks of trafficking and other forms of exploitation. In Syria, in Afghanistan, throughout the world, all of these conflicts women face additional threats to their bodies, their livelihoods, their safety, and as we know for every woman who reports these horrific crimes, there's so many more out there that remain silent. And that are many incidents that are unreported. And as we know, right, women kind of make up half if not more than the total population for each of their communities. Women are, in many cases, essential caretakers for their families. And so excluding them impacts not just their family but everyone. And all of our panelists remind us that women are also warfighters, right? At the tactical level, Lieutenant Fleming reminds us of the rise of female engagement teams, of cultural support teams, gender support advisers, gender field advisers. Together, these teams have improved situational awareness, have helped us gather intelligence. And by engaging local women, these teams have empowered local women to take advantage or to seize the opportunity and improve their own situations and to improve their own communities. But if we're being honest, right, I mean, these ad hoc female engagement teams, these gender advisers and promoting women just to prove a point, just simply won't cut it. And as Captain Almonte reminds us, right, true gender equality, fully integrating women into strategic plans and military operations requires a culture change, right? I believe women don't need to change but the culture needs to change. And it's a heck of a lot easier to change that culture from the beginning on the on the outset than waiting for it to be well established and entrenched. And if we want to, you know, if we want to strive towards gender balance teams, and if we want to fully integrate women into the strategic plans and military operations, right, we need to adapt this culture from the from the very first moment right from recruiting to retention to promotion to all the way to the end to retirement and when we say culture right it's the words and actions that we take but it's also the norms and tools that Mr. Prescott mentioned as well. And this this this change is hard right it takes time. But it also takes courage and it takes leadership and inspiring leadership and leader in leading by example. And I believe it that leadership right it comes from the top, and it requires a strong effort in a persistent effort but it also requires us to align senior so that they understand the need for change but they also have a shared vision on on how to implement it. And then finally it really requires all of us to, to hold our leaders accountable right and to hold each other accountable so that we can see the progress and we can adapt and continue to align so all of our panelists really highlighted all all the great progress that we've made which surely we have a lot of work to do and and I appreciate all the all the all the hard work and and thinking that went into this.