 Good morning everybody. It's nice to have you here bright and early this Monday morning. For those of you who have not been here before, let me welcome you to the United States Institute of Peace. USIP is an organization devoted to making peace possible. It was created by Congress in 1984 as an independent, nonpartisan, federally funded organization to work to prevent, mitigate, and resolve violent conflict around the world. I'm Steve Hadley and I chair the Board of Directors of USIP. And we have a terrific program for you this morning. But first, let's pause for a word of remembrance. We are gathered today in the wake of the 15th anniversary of the attack of September 11, 2001. I was in the White House on that momentous day and it is seared in my memory. For my two young daughters, that day changed forever how they view the world. And for our nation, it began a struggle against terrorism that is still with us. We must always remember and honor the lives lost at Ground Zero in New York City, at the Pentagon, and in that barren field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Fifteen years cannot bring back the innocent lives lost on that day, nor ease the pain of their loved ones. But on this anniversary, while we mourn their loss, let us also remember the bravery and heroism of our first responders. Let us honor the courage and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform, our diplomats, our intelligence officers, our aid and humanitarian workers, and our development professionals who have given so much in service to our nation since that day. Please join me now in a moment of silent remembrance as we hold the victims of 9-11 and their families in our hearts and lift them up in our prayers. Thank you. The program today addresses a problem closely related to the problem of terrorism that thrust itself on the national consciousness so dramatically after 9-11. For the purpose of the program today is to roll out a report that I believe is incredibly important. It is a report on fragility. What do we mean by fragility? Let me quote the report. Fragility is the absence or breakdown of a social contract between people and their government. Fragile states suffer from deficits of institutional capacity and political legitimacy that increase the risk of instability and violent conflict and sap the state of its resilience to respond to these disruptive shocks. How big a problem is fragility? More than one billion people live in fragile states. They live in countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Colombia, Myanmar, Nigeria, the DRC, Sudan and South Sudan. Nearly half of the world's poor lives in these places. So why do we care about fragility? Let me again quote from the report. Fragile states lie at the root of today's global disorder from the chaos in the Arab world to the refugee crisis from pandemic diseases to economic malaise. Fragility has contributed to the spike in violent conflict since 2010 with a record 65 million people displaced from their homes by the end of 2015. Fragility can make it more difficult to address public health emergencies as seen with the precipitous spread of Ebola and to counter transnational criminal networks that deprive citizens of their dignity and economies of their potential. In short, in a world that is more complex and interconnected than ever, fragility is pushing us closer to a new normal of unpredictable instability. This is a problem that has preoccupied the last three administrations. Yet as the report concludes, our efforts to prevent fragility and mitigate its consequences continue to fall short. This report was undertaken to try to figure out why and what to do about it. It analyzes the problem and presents some thoughtful and innovative recommendations that I hope will capture the attention of the next administration. For if we do not develop the planning, relationships and resources we need to address the fragility problem, we will not escape the current cycle of recurring crises. We will not defeat terrorism and we will deploy our military over and over again with all the cost and blood and treasure that entails. The report we roll out today is not the end of the story. There will be a series of follow on policy briefs that will discuss the implications of fragility for a variety of issues including gender, security assistance and corruption to name just a few. And following the first panel this morning, we will hear from the authors of three of these policy briefs as a preview of what is to come. That panel will be moderated by Alexa Courtney, the Executive Director of the Fragility Senior Study Group. This work was undertaken as a collaborative effort among three preeminent Washington institutions, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Center for a New American Security and the United States Institute of Peace. Also about the study are the three leaders of these institutions who will participate in our first panel this morning, moderated by David Ignatius. I cannot think of three better people, more qualified to lead this effort. And let me introduce them now and at the end of the introductions, invite them to the stage. Ambassador William J. Burns is the President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He retired from the U.S. Foreign Service in 2014 after a 33-year diplomatic career. He served as Deputy Secretary of State from 2011 to 2014. He previously served as Under Secretary for Political Affairs, Ambassador to Russia, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, Ambassador to Jordan, and Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Near East and South Asian Affairs at the National Security Council. An eminent diplomat, the best of the Foreign Service and a wonderful person who happens to be a close friend of mine. Another close friend of mine is Michelle Flornei. She is Co-Founder and CEO of the Center for a New American Security. She served as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from 2009 to 2012. She was Principal Advisor to the Secretary of Defense in the formulation of national security and defense policy and oversight of military plans and operations. She led the development of DOD's 2012 Strategic Guidance and represented the Department in Foreign Engagements and Before Congress. Finally, is USIP's own Nancy Lindbergh. Nancy Lindbergh is President of the United States Institute of Peace. Prior to joining USIP, Ms. Lindbergh served as the Assistant Administrator of the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance at USIID. Ms. Lindbergh led USIID teams in response to the ongoing conflict in Syria, the droughts in the Sahel, and the Horn of Africa, the Arab Spring, the Ebola Emergency, and numerous other global crises. She was busy indeed. Prior to joining USIID, Ms. Lindbergh was President of Mercy Corps. And to moderate this first panel, we have David Ignatius, known very much to everyone in Washington. David Ignatius writes a twice a week Foreign Affairs column and contributes to the postpartisan blog. He joined the post in 1986 as editor of its Sunday Outlook section. In 1990, he became Foreign Editor. And in 1993, Assistant Managing Editor for Business News. He began writing his column in 1998 and continued during a three-year stint as Executive Editor of the International Herald Tribune in Paris. I think it is fair to say that David Ignatius is one of the most if the, not the most, respected columnist writing today. So with that, let me invite the panelists to the stage for our first panel. So, Steve, thank you so much for that introduction for all of us and for the remembrance of the anniversary. This is a powerful report as you're going to hear and it's a group of the people I find the most distinguished, most worth listening to if you wonder whether there's still a nonpartisan foreign policy center in American life, you're looking at it with the addition of Steve Hadley. I want to ask Nancy Lindborg to lead us off by giving us a brief initial guide to this study and what's in it and then she'll turn to her fellow principal authors. Great, thank you, David. Thank you, Steve, and great to have everyone here with us this morning. We, this was a report that we launched this effort in January of 2016 coming at it from three very different disciplines and perspectives. But as Steve laid out, seized with the idea that this was an issue that we really needed to tackle and set up some recommendations for the next administration, especially given the tendency of many lessons and learnings to be lost as administrations change and at a time where the level of crises was increasing at such a precipitous rate as we heard from Steve, the level of global displacement, the number of unresolved conflicts. Thank you to the 23 members of our advisory committee and the many, many people. Thank you for those who have joined us today who contributed their wisdom. This report didn't try to do new scholarship, but rather to bring together the collected wisdom, many lessons, lots of learning over the past decade and a half. And take that and look at what is a policy framework that can guide thinking on tackling fragility and organize then three lines of recommendation that are organized as compacts. So let me just quickly cover what those are. The collective wisdom which was really drawn from a number of studies and a decade and a half of wars that we've engaged in as a country really come down to five principle lines of effort that I think thread through almost all of this last decade and a half of scholarship. And the first is that sustained efforts are absolutely critical, that there needs to be action that is driven locally with local solutions, a focus on justice and security, on the emergence of legitimate governance, more inclusive politics, greater accountability and reconciliation, and inclusive growth. That these are the building blocks of how fragility can be best overcome and how countries can emerge from what are often cycles of conflict. And we looked at a policy framework that was guided by what are called in the report the four S's. A strategic approach, a systemic approach where we bring together all the statecraft in a more organized and coherent fashion. A selective approach where we look at where can we have the greatest impact and a sustained approach where we don't wait until a country is already in collapse and we don't leave after the first election. And we organized it into three compacts, a series of recommendations that look at a domestic compact, a compact among the various parts of the executive branch and between the executive branch and the Congress, as absolutely critical for having a shared understanding of what the problem is and how to bring our tools and resources to bear against that problem. Secondly, is an international conflict, compact so that there is greater coherence among all the international actors who come in to provide assistance and response when we have a crisis so that rather than having a cacophony there is more alignment of effort. And third is a compact with the fragile states and that focuses primarily on increasing our tools and our resources that are most relevant for addressing fragility, things like improved security sector reform, greater tools for addressing corruption, a focus on civil society. And some of the papers that you'll hear discussed in the second panel take a deeper look at that and that is the focus of some of the papers that will be put forth as a part of this. That's the light overview. Bill, Michelle. I mean, all I was going to say first, it was a great pleasure to work with both Nancy and Michelle and our colleagues at all three institutions on this issue. I spent 33 years in the State Department but to show that I haven't lost the State Department bureaucrats ability to restate the blindingly obvious, all I would add is that this is all a lot easier said than done. We're not the first group that's talked about the challenge of fragility or the importance of prevention and resilience. Bringing about or encouraging the kind of compact that Nancy was describing between states and societies is a tough task and finding the particular alchemy that works in different societies is not easy. Second, outsiders, whether the United States or any other outside player, whether governments or international institutions are always going to find limits to their influence and without that kind of local ownership and local leadership, history shows it's very difficult to make progress. It's also the reality, I think, that international diplomacy, not just American diplomacy, inevitably suffers from a kind of attention deficit disorder. As Nancy was suggesting, it's difficult to focus amidst all the kind of crushing immediate problems coming into people's inboxes on the importance of prevention and looking ahead and anticipating challenges. And it's equally difficult sometimes to sustain focus once a crisis or a particular challenge recedes from the headline a little bit. And last but not least, I think what I would emphasize is the particular challenges in our own society and our own system of governance right now at looking at long-term problems like fragility and sustaining an effective focus I mean as our current election campaign demonstrates and the mood in the country I think underscores, a lot of people for in some ways understandable reasons given the difficult record of the last decade and a half of the United States overseas and the challenges we face at home don't take as a given that the kinds of sustained engagement we talk about in this report either make sense or worth the effort on the part of the United States. So that's why I think focus and discipline on the part of an administration in ensuring coherence across executive branch agencies and also working with the Congress which is I know a tall order today given the amount of suspicion and skepticism that exists about an administration's capacity to sustain that kind of focus to be able to prioritize and to demonstrate the long-term significance of some of these fragility challenges and then build the sort of compact that different administrations, successive administrations over the course of nearly two decades now have managed to do with regard to Columbia for example. Now that's not easy to replicate but it's a reminder I think of the value of the kind of approach that Nancy was describing. I would just add I remember wrestling with this in my first tour in government in the Clinton administration and so this is a persistent problem. Demand always exceeds the supply of response. There's a lot of progress that's been made over many administrations but also some real lessons still to be learned in terms of how we are more effective in this area. So one of the things that interested me most is how do you ensure an anticipatory approach an approach that focuses on prevention that doesn't wait for some of these situations to explode into crisis? Can you institutionalize that anticipatory approach inside the processes of the U.S. government? Can we articulate a set of principles, this 4S framework, that ensure that we take a more strategic approach that we don't try to be everywhere but we really focus on the areas where we think we can have the greatest impact and where we can work with Congress to build the support to sustain that effort over time and so I think this is, we hope that this will get some attention. Most of the attention and a transition will be pulled to the crisis of the day but we thought that given our collective experience across multiple administrations it was really important to try to capture where we are today on this and some recommendations for how to move forward and be more effective. Let me turn now to a discussion of some of the issues that this report raises and I just should note that one of the things that I liked best about it was that it combined the talents of three Washington think tanks, if you will, three of the institutions that try hardest to do independent non-partisan analysis and for you all to come together on this was really important. Let me start with you, Bill. In the report as you'll see there are two case studies, Columbia and Myanmar, of how to do it right and they're encouraging to read how U.S. power was used and over time was more effective but Bill, honestly, Columbia and Myanmar are pretty far from the places that you and I and probably most of the people in this audience have been focused on most certainly for the last 15 years in the Middle East and in Southwest Asia. So talk for a minute about applying your four S's, this basic model to the crises we've got. It would be nice to have the crises we choose but we've got the crises we've got, we've got the fragility that exists. Speak a little bit to the practical realities of those places. Well, you're right. Across the Middle East and Southwest Asia now the United States faces enormous challenges and there are an awful lot of societies and governments that are extremely fragile right now. I think if you apply that four S framework it's not impossible to see at least a few opportunities at places where there's a chance of getting things right over the next few years. This is either that are in a state of post-revolutionary transition having come out of, you know, the Arab Spring and the upheavals of the last five and a half or six years or places that are trying to reform themselves ahead of that wave of change. Now I would be the first to admit that there's not a long list of examples but I don't think that should make people fatalistic. I mean I'd offer one Tunisia, we've done tried to do some work at Carnegie over the course of the last year the significance of a place that on the face of it with a population of 11 million people probably not the most strategically significant country in the Middle East but one that precisely because it was the first of the Arab revolutions at the very beginning of 2011 and precisely because there's a leadership that's demonstrated for all the continuing problems that they face, a capacity for compromise that's worth investing in and there's an opportunity here I think not just for the United States but for the European Union with all of its other preoccupations right now it has a stake too in anchoring people on the other side of the Mediterranean in a sense of possibility and stability. So I mean I just use that as one example of a place where the kind of concerted effort over a period of years taken on not just by the United States but our European partners and potentially some in the Arab world in cooperation with a local leadership that's demonstrated that it gets it that there's a chance of success there and that's a case I think that can be made to the Congress and across the board. You and I have talked Bill about the need for what I sometimes describe as a 1944 moment in thinking about the post-ISIS Sunni world. I think back to Franklin Roosevelt in 1944 a year of tough fighting still ahead who had the foresight to think how are we going to keep stability in the world that follows 1945 so he begins creating the IMF the World Bank the structure that became United Nations the Atlantic Charter and I just keep thinking that in that fragile part of the world let's start thinking now about those issues not later. Especially I think I remember Steve will remember this going back to Secretary Baker's time in the Bush 41 administration after Desert Storm a focus on the creation of the Middle East Regional Development Bank that's never gotten off the ground but the Middle East is one of those rare regions where you don't have that kind of regional institution again I understand that's easier said than done but that's the sort of kind of longer term institution building that I think is really important to consider as you look at over the next decade or more in that part of the world. Michelle when we think about tools for our national security toolkit our antifragility toolkit in the context of your report we know from practical experience that although there's nominally a wide range of tools the way our government works we turn first and most emphatically to the military tools in part because they're so good because the COCOM structure is established efficient has the resources to get people and equipment to places in a hurry how do we thinking about national security broaden that toolkit better for real every report I've ever seen has talked about the need to use the whole of government but how do we actually make it happen? I think it will take a tremendous education effort with congress because this spoils down to the color of money the only tool in our toolbox that we fund to be expeditionary at scale is the United States military and so when we get into a pinch and we need to reach for something the only thing that's fully funded ready to go is the military and even when that may not be the appropriate tool or the best tool or a tool that could by itself have the desired effect and so it really comes down to having a conversation I think we have to make it very concrete to people and I like to tell one story that really brought this home to me is sort of more trying to prevent future fragility and when we were looking at a post-conflict Iraq we were trying to come up with an integrated plan that had police training, ongoing diplomatic engagement, ongoing development you know some sustained security assistance and we put together this and Bill will remember this beautifully integrated whole of government plan and we were very proud that it really worked and it hinged on the State Department footprint and that was kind of what we all fell in on we sent it up to the hill it got chopped up into its little jurisdictional pieces to go through the relevant committees and then it came back and the DOD part was funded 100% the AID part was funded maybe 70-80% and the State Department got less than half the money it asked for so we had no plan the whole thing fell apart because it was incoherent the piece parts no longer worked together it was like trying to sit on a stool with different leg lengths and so I think helping Congress understand how these pieces fit together is really really important and getting some authorities that allow us to either pool resources or share resources which has been very difficult to get them to agree to but helping them understands the cost of not doing that because it really does cost us the coherence of our efforts and the effectiveness of our efforts Nancy one of the interesting things for me when I read through the report was it talks about legitimacy it talks about the need for social contracts that are coherent it talks about a number of other ways of dealing with the problem of fragility but I did not see the word democracy very often in this report and that fascinated me because ten years ago as we all remember that was the sort of automatic response that we had I think as a country where we encounter fragility democracy will be stabilizing democracy builds the kind of strength and integrity that will produce security I'm sure you thought a lot about this issue in drafting structuring your recommendations maybe you just share a little bit of your thinking with this group about why you chose the words that you did as the resilience words the counter fragility words most of the component parts of what we would think of as critical for democracy are noted in the report and called out as the the preconditions for emerging from fragility part of what we're seeing on the international stage is the importance of talking about it in terms that are clear and acceptable by a lot of the countries that are currently fragile and there is a wonderful initiative called the new deal for engagement with fragile states that was adopted in 2011 by a collection of self-proclaimed fragile states and the international community and a lot of what that framework talks about are things that are in the report legitimacy, accountability these are all the component parts of democracy but they're broken down into the various ways that form the building blocks often times democracy gets equated with elections and we wanted to actually not rest only on elections in fact one of the recommendations is that state made do a more comprehensive study of when the timing of elections is most useful both because sometimes elections can be pushed at the wrong time and can actually lead to greater instability in a country but also unfortunately often elections can signal job done and the U.S. begins to disengage because it's seen as the flag of democracy has gone up they've had a successful election rarely is that the case as both Bill and Michelle have noted these are generational changes these don't happen on an election cycle either in the fragile state or in our country we successfully tackle these issues take the longer term frame well past one election cycle it should note that the U.S. I.P. is one institution in our government that actually is looking at this problem of how to create resilience how to bring people together how to start conversations that are necessary that doesn't get much attention but just from what I've learned it deserves more because you're out there trying to do this work one of the points that's I think going to get most attention in this report and I'd like to start this discussion with Bill but anybody else who has comments please jump in is your discussion of the need to prevent or mitigate future crises in other words as you see the fabric beginning to rip and the fragility develop do something and that sounds right but I have to note that we are a country that's increasingly allergic to intervention so I want to ask you in this preventive mitigating work how do we think about that is that overt is it covert is it done by government institutions is it done through NGOs how do you imagine this early preventive work being handled in our country which has had the experiences it has had for the last 10 years I'll just start and then turn to Michelle and Nancy but I mean I think one step is to make clear at the beginning of a new administration that this whole set of issues occupies a high priority so that at the NSC staff for example one of the things we talk about in the report is setting up a small cell which helps to focus the administration at every level on this set of challenges kind of looking ahead and continuing to take stock of crises that have already emerged so that you can adapt the kind of tools that the US government is bringing to bear I mean the other thing that I'd emphasize is the importance of making good use of embassies and country teams overseas which are led by our ambassadors but then made up of the senior agency representatives I found over the course of my experience in government that you can do an awful lot in terms of anticipating problems if you know smart ambassadors are challenging their country teams to look ahead and be proactive in trying to identify ways in which they can deal with those challenges and they have the kind of connections back in Washington that people are going to pay attention to that also. Bill and Michelle and Steve and I were at a conference last month talking about the structure of national security policy and it was noted that we talk all the time about whole of government approaches and getting everybody to work together and there's an elaborate interagency process but it actually works best and sometimes only in these embassy country teams where a strong ambassador sits everybody down every morning and hammers out how the whole of government is going to work that day in the host country Michelle I just want to ask you if you might be willing to briefly tackle this question of how we think about preventive action how we structure it and frankly sell it to a country that's pretty skeptical. Well I think we have to think about prevention in a couple ways. There is prevention that gets at a state that has some of the early warning signs of fragility is not yet in true crisis and it's really how do you make discreet investments in that country that keep it from slipping into crisis and then there are countries that are at risk of either moving into crisis or being destabilized by a crisis next door to them that we really care about because if they slip into true fragility they will destabilize a whole region or could potentially destabilize a whole region and there are probably other cases but you know there's a dilemma here or paradox in that the U.S. government doesn't tend to mobilize to really address a problem until it's a crisis and yet once it's a crisis your options are more limited and you tend to be more risk averse in terms of what you know putting people in harm's way and so forth so the question is how do you move the decision making to the left of this and to make investments in places that really matter to U.S. interests and to regional stability in assess do I have a viable partner to work with you may not and there may not be much that we can do to change that but really in a clear eyed way assess do we have leverage do we have a partner can we make a difference and then to try to build the political support for getting in there is bringing Congress along and I think the best way to pilot this in a new administration will be to take a couple of cases maybe a handful to sort of say here's the strategic rationale for why these countries we want to try to go after a very preventative sustained effort to keeping them out of crisis because it's so much in our interest to do so and you try to get Congress to make the kind of investments we've seen in Columbia and Burma and these other places I think that to me is one of the ways forward. David I would add to that in that we're seeing right now the escalation of our humanitarian budgets the need to send our military back into places because there hasn't been that kind of sustained investment in trying to help states get ahead of or move out of fragility and you know I've long been a proponent for healthy humanitarian budgets but they are going their skyrocketing right now and it's starving some of our other critical budgets that are more focused on the upstream getting to the left of a crisis and so part of it is making the case to the American public of the cost of inaction because when we don't act in a more positive way and address things like resilience and fragility then we're left with these gigantic bills on the other side of the crisis, number one and on the whole of government approach I would add that one of the challenges we have is even when you've got a comprehensive plan sometimes we're not sharing the same understandings of what is the nature of the problem and we end up having parts of our government working across purposes USIP Stanford and Chatham House did a long review of the Afghanistan effort looking at a decade with scholars and former military and diplomats and Afghans and Europeans all together looking at this and what emerged was that in fact we had three separate lines of effort going on there was the intel effort that was going on in Al Qaeda, military was fighting Taliban, the development side was trying to rebuild the state and they were actually undercutting each other and so part of what the report looks at is how you balance the short term with the long term, what are the short term imperatives and how do you not invest in those in a way that undercuts what you must accomplish on the longer term to avoid the continual crisis spiral. I just have one thing and that you know we've been talking a lot about the US government's focus and effort but I think one of the big themes in the report is that in most of these cases we're going to be acting in coalition with others and there may be other countries and other multilateral institutions that have even more leverage and more ability to have real impact and so we really need to think international in terms of how we put together coalitions to help particular cases. I want to turn now to the audience and ask you for your questions and I want to ask the panel in your responses through our next almost 30 minutes. This is a country that clearly is weary of engagement and intervention and to the extent that you can say here this morning or in any of your presentations why the United States should care about this to a country that increasingly says you know let somebody else worry about it. I think that goes to the heart of where the country is. I want to call on if she's here Sarah Wheaton Sarah I know you've been following these issues so I'm going to ask the microphone runner to give you the microphone first and please identify yourself. Sarah Wheaton I'm a White House reporter with Politico. A couple questions first Ms. Flourno you mentioned going the idea that the new administration could go to Congress and present a few options for early intervention and I was just wondering if you could name a few specific countries that you have in mind that would benefit from that early intervention. Also your report talks about sort of some cultural problems within the executive branch people working at cross purposes and as far as dealing with that in the new administration we're looking at a decent possibility that there will be an unusual continuity of political party. Should we expect to see continuity of political appointees from the Obama administration to a potential Clinton administration or is a shake up necessary? Yes I think that was directed to Michelle Flournoy I don't know why Michelle I really can't say anything in response to the second question except to observe historically that the record is even with same party transitions usually there's a new team that comes in but there are also usually some exceptions of people who are asked to stay and so forth so I don't think anybody can answer that question very clearly at this point. You know we mentioned several examples in the report of countries where that from a U.S. strategic interest perspective merit further attention and I think these are all countries where the current administration is actually investing significantly and it's more of a what more can we do question. Ukraine is one of them given its situation and strategic location. Nigeria is being a critical bellwether in Africa and Tunisia as Bill mentioned. You could also imagine other states that I think are on the periphery of the Civil War in Syria like Jordan and that really need to make sure that we shore up. I have a great privilege of sitting on the Board of Care and just to give us a sense Americans don't tend to understand the degree of pressure on a country like Jordan but I remember the Syria country director briefing us and saying the proportional number of people coming into Jordan from Syria it's as if the entire population of Canada were to move to the United States and we are infinitely more capable of handling that kind of influx given our wealth and infrastructure and so forth but that's the level of pressure that is on a critical strategic partner like Jordan and so I think that's another one I would nominate for again building on what the administration is already doing doing everything we can to shore them up. And the only thing I'd add to that we also I think mentioned in the report is the ongoing effort through the Central and regional strategy as well which you know has obvious strategic importance to the United States where we've found some local partners with whom we can work where it's not only the United States it's engaged in this you know in one of life's welcome ironies Columbia is actually a contributor now to security in Central America drawing on its own experience as opposed to an object of people's concerns so that's just one example I'd add and I think the only other thing I'd say is that again you know I think an administration has to be able to prioritize as well not all fragile situations are created equal in terms of American policy and so it's valuable to try to keep applying those four S's in a sense what's strategically important you know places as Michelle was suggesting that happened to lie on geopolitical fault lines where their future is going to make a big difference for regional order to be selective because you're not going to find effective local leaders or local partners every place and you know to be able to you know to sustain that effort as well depends in part on making the case that you know you've been disciplined and focused and you've identified just just a few at least early projects in which you're going to try to demonstrate the value of this kind of approach or continue to I would add to that because this was something we actually discussed quite a bit is the recognition that we do need to be selective and we do need to understand that we don't have the influence and the resources to tackle fragility everywhere but it increases the importance of the partnerships the regional entities and the international partnerships that create a greater number of institutions and states that are thinking about and acting on this issue and some of the initiatives of the current administration like the open government partnership we call out as initiatives that work to create that normative expectation globally that should definitely be considered and continued. Yes, so I see yes you and then sir in the next question I think we have a question from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I'm kind of intrigued by the discussion of Congress. Just a quick question. I guess what I see is an enormous differentials in the powers of the committee. I also see erosion of resources and authorities for the State Department. We saw this in security assistance and good governance, human rights kind of overall view of what is happening in a country when we give military assistance. Those authorities are creeping over to the Department of Defense. So I guess in this I don't mean to be difficult but I think we can't be passive about this. We can't say you know authorities are coming to me what to do. Everybody loves more power generally in the systems that I've observed and so we have to have a I believe and I'm interested in your views what is the strategy by the Pentagon to increase resources, increase authorities by State Department which is being eroded and it's impacting our overall effectiveness globally. I'm not trying to be difficult. I do this all day long and I'm just sort of stunned by what occurs. Well I think one of the things you'll hear later on the second panel is a holistic look at security assistance that really makes a very strong case for taking a comprehensive approach. You can't just train military forces. You have to create the capacity around that for overseeing it, for governing it, for ensuring the ministry capacity, the human rights sensitivities, the larger police and judicial components that are part of security and you're right there has been I think that erosion of that migration of authorities has been in part because much of what we've been doing has been in a wartime context with Iraq first and then Afghanistan and also because DOD ends up being better resourced, better able to deploy things capacity and capability and so there has been this sort of migration. I think it's worth doing a comprehensive sit-down to look across the departments and I would also include an ID in this because they have some very relevant capabilities to look at how this all works and again I think in addition to sort of making sure the authorities and monies are appropriately distributed, in almost every situation in practice there comes a time where you need to pool effort and you need to pool resources so finding ways whether it's something like the Transfer Authority that Secretary Gates and almost all of the four stars went up to Congress to beg to be able to give money to the State Department to make our efforts in Afghanistan and elsewhere more effective or whether it's actually a pooling authority where agencies both contribute funds and go after a shared mission. Historically congressional committees don't like that because it complicates jurisdiction, it complicates oversight but from a perspective of what you need to be effective on the ground we need to move more in that direction. I'm sorry, that's all I was going to add is and that's why I think it's very important for the executive branch to lay out a kind of comprehensive strategy which deals not only with the big issues of why it makes sense to in selected areas use foresight and try to act preventively but also why a lot of flexibility Michelle was talking about can actually make for a lot more effective policy and more effective strategy. You know better than we do that not going to get very far on the hill unless we make clear that the executive branch has its own act to get on these issues. So let me turn to this side of the room and this gentleman here and then we'll come back to the other side. My name is Rufus Phillips. I'm a former practitioner in this area. It was some time ago but I've been studying this very intensively in recent years. And what I see lacking in this report so far is what I would call a practitioner's point of view. In other words, how do we actually implement this on the ground? And do we have the people on the ground capable of implementing this? And do we have a military political strategy which with local buy-in that has some chance of success? And if we look across our policy we find for example Columbia had a political military strategy not one suggested by us but one which was generated internally by President Uribe basically. And so I see all this is missing and I don't see a special effort being made to actually train, select and deploy the people on the ground both military and civilian who could actually influence local actors to undertake the things that we want to do. Good. Nancy, you want to take that? Sure. We included the Columbia and Burma case studies specifically to take a look at what does it look like when it's had some success not to suggest that those are done deals tied up in bows but to look at how these principles these frameworks these approaches in practice what do they look like. Your point about the importance of personnel is actually something we talked quite a bit about. There are several recommendations that specifically talk about the need for greater cross-training for people to be able to migrate throughout the parts of the administration so there's greater mutual understanding of the tools and create that shared awareness of the framework and what the shared goal is. There's some discussion about the importance of having greater deployment and greater freedom of movement once you are deployed especially for civilian personnel. This is not meant to go deep into serious details but rather for policymakers at a fairly senior level to be able to understand the key precepts and make some of those brush recommendations. Can I just break in to ask Bill Burns? I've probably visited over the last 10 years a dozen or more provincial reconstruction teams in Iraq and Afghanistan and almost every time I did I was impressed by the people by the mission and yet I would guess that those people and that expertise today is scattered to the forewinds that the payoff for doing that hard work if you were a young State Department officer was limited and I remember so often you couldn't get State Department officers they didn't want to go so they were Air Force Air Force majors or whatever. Here was an effort to deal with fragility head on in two war zones. What came of that? Why can't we do that better? I think over the last 15 years just looking at the State Department and the Foreign Service in particular you have a skill set and expertise that's been developed especially by the younger generation of Foreign Service officers that's extremely important to preserve and sustain. A much clearer and stronger affinity for working for the U.S. military and with development professionals in very complicated conflict zones then I think the service had developed before and you're right one of the big challenges is how do you continue to invest in that the lessons that get learned and the experience that people have doesn't get lost over time. So I want to go to the woman here on the side of their hand up. Yes right there. Thank you. My name is Barbara Platt Usher. I'm with the BBC State Department correspondent. When I was in Pakistan the period overlapped between the Bush and the Obama administrations I was struck by the really strong anti-American feeling there to the extent that USAID had a billboard saying look this is what we're doing for you which I think didn't have much effect because most people were focused on the fact that the U.S. was bombing the tribal areas with drones. So I guess my question is how do you deal with the situation where the perception in the country is that an element of U.S. policy in this case security strategy is creating fragility or more broadly where there is a resentment against sort of an imperial whatever type intervention to build up a government even though that would be in U.S. interests. Thank you. Great question. Who would like to lead off in answering that? Well I'll tackle the billboard part of that because this is a long held tension that is important to have a different kind of conversation about and that is the report talks about the collective wisdom part of which is the importance of local solutions and so when our development assistance or our help is predicated on a policy of gaining friends that often backfires and it often doesn't have the desired result of helping that country move out of fragility because the legitimacy cannot be built up and it's done so with the credit accruing to another country and so this is a huge tension that plays out over and over again within our government about you know you've got a brand you've got a billboard it's all about telling them how good we are as opposed to helping that country develop its greater capacities, greater legitimacy. I actually remember in the early Obama Administration the point at which all of the supplies that had had you know coming from America, AID supplied, all of that branding switched to coming to you from your local tribal authority to try to build the legitimacy of that authority to be seen as delivering for the local people so it reflected exactly that shift of mindset. What about the questioners the other part of this question that in seeking to combat fragility and its effects such as terror we create more fragility. I mean that's a powerful critique and I think it deserves some response. Bill? Yeah, no I mean I think there's a basic tension there see it in Pakistan, see it to some extent in Yemen where you know as Michelle and Nancy remember very well we worked very hard to bring in to balance the kind of counter-terrorism assistance with longer-term development assistance but there's always attention there between you know the kinds of steps that we're going to want to take as a government in order to help ensure our security and deal with some very real terrorist threats and the impact that sometimes has on a society and I don't have a neat answer for how you resolve all those contradictions except to be aware of them and to do everything we can as Nancy was saying before to invest in local leadership so it's their vision and what they're driving toward you know that we're trying to reinforce and support as opposed to some kind of made in Washington US prescribed set of solutions which you know for which our track record is not great. And just a final point on that the report does talk about the importance of not sacrificing the longer-term harder to accomplish goals by only standing on the short-term objectives which are often more security related and to be very aware and that's part of what the foresight the fragility foresight sell and having the the NSC conversations look at if we keep doing X for a short-term security objective how will that have the impact on the longer-term goals if we agree that this country needs to move out of fragility gentlemen here in the second row thank you Darryl Staniford Syria is a country where I think it would be correct to say that Iran and Russia failed to anticipate the fragility of this important ally of theirs Turkey is a country that is important ally of the United States are we or should we be concerned about fragility there and if so how would we apply the concepts of fragility? Good question. Nancy, Bill? Well I'll start on Turkey as you know obviously there are a lot of concerns I think in Turkey not just about the sort of security challenges that we share in a sense in Syria and elsewhere but also concerns that the administration has not been shy about expressing about the sort of direction of politics in Turkey and the tendency to close out or squeeze out you know large parts of what used to be the opposition there as well and so I think you know there's no easy fix in a complicated relationship like that between the United States and Turkey but as Nancy was suggesting before it's really important to keep in mind the sort of longer term challenges to stability and security and to try to build up the kind of relationship in which you can have those sorts of honest conversations and look for ways in which you can help to the extent any outside partner or ally can help to mitigate some of those risks but I'm not trying to suggest that it's easy in that case it's going to be complicated for some time to come. Nancy, did you have a thought you wanted to add? Only that by any measure Turkey is moving deeply into the territory of high on any fragile indice because of the exclusionary politics increasingly exhibiting. So let's just if we could just take this one step further take Turkey as a case study of a country that has increasing fragility with enormous potential costs to the United States but for historic reasons is very wary even resentful of U.S. interference or even influence. I welcome thoughts about how we get past that threshold. The very countries that most need the assistance that we would provide may resent it. Pakistan's another obvious example. Yeah, in Egypt was an example during the last 10 years or so of Hasmimbo Barg's rule. I mean, you know, when people read the Arab Human Development reports of almost 15 years ago now you could see the seeds of what became the Arab Spring and the Arab Revolutions very clearly. We actually had and have a lot at stake in Egypt today. The reality is that a lot of us I think were lulled by the reality that Egypt's economy was growing at something like 7% a year for much of that last decade of Mubarak's rule. But the problem of course was obvious. The benefits of that growth weren't being shared across society. It wasn't inclusive and it bred a greater and greater sense of indignity on the part of lots of Egyptians in the early 2011. So, you know, the lesson there I think is that we need to be more focused, more disciplined more sustained in expressing those kind of concerns over time. It's not to say that different administrations didn't try to do that but I think the broader lesson is that societies that don't make those adjustments become brittle and break. So, yes, the woman here is a necessary... Hi, my name is Netra Halpern and I want to follow up on the question of the BBC reporter. Is there a possibility that the people that come to this institute the diplomatic community can have an influence on the fact that as she pointed out that the perceived imperialism the drone bombings are actually creating, and I would agree a lot of the fragility, can this community do something about it instead of having programs to be kind of mop up and deal with it after the fact or try to stop it? Can this community stop some of the over militarization of our foreign policy? I would like to take that. Michelle, you want to start with that? Let me just start by saying I think if you look at President Obama's NDU speech about how, you know, the whole approach of imperialism, there's in that speech, a lot of the seeds of trying to ensure that we're certainly mindful of the trade-offs but also making them appropriately and, you know, there are trade-offs and there are going to be situations where there is an imminent threat or there's a cell that's actively planning attacks against the United States and if we have a partner on the ground to address that, that may will likely be the preferred option if that's not available. There may be other steps the United States has to take but I think understanding the fact that, you know, that some actions may contribute to the environment that perpetuates the radicalization cycle, how we get after that, how we, you know, I think the first people in the world who would tell you that you cannot kill your way to victory in the counter-terrorism campaign are the soft operators who are deployed all over the world trying to disrupt active plotting and so forth but I think we have to have an interagency approach that tries to actively and continuously weigh these trade-offs. I think the Obama administration has made an attempt at that. People can decide whether that's been how effective it's been or not but I do think that it's very, very important again, getting to the left of the problem. How do you prevent certain states from becoming having areas that are wholly ungoverned and therefore becoming attractive to terrorist organizations to make their home? One of my things I would like to see in the counter-ISIS campaign is much more attention to getting ahead of the problem. Where is ISIS trying to go next and how do we take that geography off the table? Not through a big military intervention but through shoring up the capabilities of those states to deal with the problem locally and my favorite current example is Southeast Asia where I've had at least two ministers from the region comment and say here's what I'm seeing we can get after this, we can prevent it if we coordinate our law enforcement and policing and economic development efforts and I get there before ISIS shows up in force and it's a more preventative approach. It's also preventative even in the midst of going after Daesh and Iraq right now we're seeing as the Mosul campaign is gearing up that it is imperative that the politics the reconciliation that the preparation for what will happen in Mosul after Daesh is cleared is fully in gear and it's preventive in that regard as well. So we have time for one more question I want to recognize Mitzi Wertheim near the edge of the row for a last question. I'm Mitzi Wertheim with the Naval Postgraduate School this has been a very interesting morning I look at life as about it's about relationships and that's what really counts in life I came to the Pentagon 40 years ago where the whole story was technology is our force multiplier it seems to me the real challenge today are social issues and I recommend a book for all of you to read called The Jobs War and when you have such a large portion of young people across the world men mainly who don't have jobs and have no prospects and someone offers them a thousand or two thousand dollars a month a truck a gun a purpose it gives them something to sort of think maybe I have a place in life and I don't think we spend enough time on that the other question I'd like to raise is how do we develop we walked into Iraq got rid of the leaders got rid of the army and then said magically democracy is supposed to emerge grief we had brilliant leaders in this country took them 13 years to come up with a constitution what is wrong with the way in which we look at these problems and how do we educate the American public to recognize how tough it is how long it takes and so much of this is about education and social issues and not about who has more planes or guns these good so I'm going to ask Nancy why don't you lead off in your response on each of you offer some brief final thoughts well amen Mitzi I think a lot of what the four S's talk about are certainly that need for sustained generational change and that it won't happen in one election cycle and that it matters you know this idea that what happens in these far away countries has no impact on us is just not viable as a concept anymore so you're absolutely right on all of that I would just say as a sort of final note that we talk about this very much in terms of the absolute imperative of US global leadership that it matters deeply what the United States does around the world and the goal of the report is to use more wisely and more effectively the extraordinary capabilities resources and credibility that we bring globally and do so in a way that changes the frame that says what we're really trying to do is help these countries move out of cycles of conflict by helping them become more legitimate inclusive and accountable to their own citizens and that there is a lot of scholarship and a lot of lessons that tell us that that is absolutely critical we cannot get there just because of what we want or because we have greater ability to fight I would just add you know why this report now in a moment in our political cycle and heading into transition where there is an opportunity to step back and take stock of the lessons we should be learning whether it was how Iraq began was prosecuted and ended or whether it's in terms of what actually works in development what actually works in job creation you know a lot of the evidence suggests that it's investing in women and girls and their ability to become entrepreneurs and lift whole families and villages out of poverty but what are the lessons from the use of our various instruments and how do we then reflect those lessons back into our policy approaches going forward both as the United States and as a global leader of coalitions I think all I would add is that just as you were reinforcing we have to try to keep focused deeper drivers of change many of which you just described that create greater and greater fragility around the world second especially in the current mood in our country we have to be focused and disciplined which is the virtue of what Michelle was describing is trying to come up with a few kind of pilot projects where we think the combination of factors can create a possibility of success and creating some models where you're able to ease fragility over time and I think that becomes extremely important because we're not capable of dealing with every fragile state situation in the world but we are capable I think of trying to look ahead a little bit and bearing in mind that in this case more than most others you know an ounce of prevention really is worth a pound of cure and if we can deepen some of the examples of that around the world I think we can build a greater and so my apologies to those who's questions I wasn't able to recognize there's another wonderful panel coming up so I hope you'll jump to the top of the queue there please join me this is a wonderful report I hope you'll read it join me in thanking our panel Thank you David and thank you to our report authors and our chairs Ambassador William Burns, Nancy Lindborg and Michelle Flournoy I hope you all will stay for the second panel we have a wonderful treat who will be engaging some of the issues that our chairs teed up in greater level of detail my name is Alexa Courtney and I'm the CEO of Frontier Design Group and have had the privilege of the last year serving as the Executive Director of our Fragility Study Group I've been humbled to be a part of this study and appreciative of all those in town and capitals worldwide who have generously shared their expertise okay now it's on can you hear me in the back wonderful thank you for your attention during this transition period I appreciate it wonderful well let me start from the beginning because I know there was a lot of noise as people have moved out my name is Alexa Courtney I've served as the Executive Director of the Fragility Study Group for the last year and have truly been humbled by the expertise in this town thinking deeply about Fragility and the generous insights that many of you in the audience today have shared with us from Washington DC and the consultations that we've done around the world I think this first panel teed up a really juicy question and I'm not going to attempt to summarize what was a really thought provoking wide-ranging conversation but the question that was formulating in my mind as I heard our chairs brief the report is in an age of predictable instability and in a system that is conditioned or rather addicted to crisis response in some cases how might we all of us here in this audience and participants in the national security community develop smarter strategies and begin to institutionalize as Michelle shared an anticipatory approach so that we may all make better decisions while also being smart stewards of our precious resources it's a really tough question but you're in for a treat because our next panel is going to engage this deeply but first I'd like to show you the range of policy briefs that we have in store for you we will be publishing these in twos or threes beginning next week at our website usp.org backslash Fragility Policy Briefs and that URL is in your agenda these dive more deeply into discreet areas that the chair report tees up and there's really a wide range but I think they fall into two categories the first are around investment areas for capabilities that are traditionally under resource but that we find in the evidence suggests is particularly important to meet the needs of fragile states and those are broadly smarter security sector reform more innovative civil society support strategies meaningful anti-corruption initiatives gender fragility and the relationship to resilience and we also have another broad bucket of categories focused on new strategies and tools for how we as a US government can collectively develop that shared consciousness that we heard this morning is so important to an effective response and under that broad theme we will look at a critical look at new interagency tools to facilitate that integrated planning we'll think about how we as a national security community can be more learning and adaptive to be better prepared as we think upstream in terms of preparedness for complex emergencies and in particular how that all comes together into a new case study which we highlight in the report but have the privilege of doing in greater detail on Burma so this morning and they're just being miked now wonderful I'd like to ask you to welcome three wonderful scholars and practitioners to the stage and they will share both their why fragility matters to them and to the United States government and speak to very specific issues will be joined by Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld who's a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and she will share her work with us on smarter security assistance strategies. Dr. Kleinfeld is the founding CEO of the Truman National Security Project and has consulted on rule of law reform for a wide variety of institutions. She will be followed by Dr. Maria Shulman who's a senior policy fellow here at the United States Institute of Peace and she will be speaking to us about civic movements for peaceful transition. Dr. Steffen is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and previously served in the Bureau for Conflict and Stabilization Operations at the State Department. She will be followed by Lauren Shulman who is the deputy director of studies and a senior fellow at the Center for New American Security and she will share her thoughts on more coordinated, transparency cooperation, the importance of transparency in a hundred days plan. Wonderful. Rachel, if I can ask you to kick us off please. Sure. Okay, well we've been talking about fragile states as if they're very far away and very abstract and I just want to bring us back into reality. We have a fragile state on our southern border, Mexico, and two years ago we had fragile states in Central America sending unaccompanied children into our borderlands. I just came yesterday from New Mexico. These are problems that affect us here in the United States just as much as they affect people in the Ukraine, in Nigeria, in Tunisia and elsewhere around the world and I think we really need to keep that in our mind as we're looking through these recommendations. Now this report has been historic and it's been a huge pleasure to be a part of it because things that seem very obvious to those in the academic community are not always obvious to those in the policymaking world who have to implement right now at the moment of crisis. And one of the big challenges in this report was taking something that's common wisdom in the academic world and translating it into policy speak and that's the basic premise that it forms this report which is that state weakness is a problem. Hobbes said state weakness was a problem. Modern research confirms that state weakness is a problem but why state weakness is where we've fallen down. We've assumed that states are weak and therefore we need to shore them up largely through security sector reform building partner capacity and that's why we're having this panel. Your state's weak, your security sector can't fight people who are violent, you're having insurgencies, you're having civil war, let's build your security sector. Well it turns out that's not what's going on. There have been a number of large N case studies, there have been a number of quantitative researches that have been done on security sector reform. Our security sector reform is absolutely uncorrelated with reducing fragility in the Middle East and Africa and has extremely low correlation with reducing fragility in most of the rest of the world where there are not inclusive governments already and fairly high state capacity. That is damning for that assumption that the problem is weakness. The problem is this report states so clearly which in regular human terms means the state is run by various people who are not running the state for the benefit of all of their citizens they're running the state for the benefit of some of their citizens or for the elites alone and when you have a society like that your security sector gets skewed instead of a security sector that's there to protect the people from violent actors your security sector is there to protect elites, to protect particular political groups, to provide jobs, patronage employees for various people so you look at Honduras which recently sent a lot of children to our border unaccompanied fleeing the violence and the highest homicide rate in the world Honduras has 8% of its police force that shows up on any given day well why is that? It's because the police force is full of patronage employees and it's a political job. Those are the sorts of problems that we're dealing with here and so when we apply a very simple solution let's build the capacity of the security sector it's as if we're polishing a jewel in a ring but we're paying no attention to whether that jewel is held in by anything substantive in the setting and if the setting isn't good the jewel won't stay, it won't work and what you have instead are coups which we had in Mali, in Thailand, in Honduras in multiple countries where we've helped train the security sector. What you have instead are countries where they move around security leaders because the security leaders get too powerful or too threatening to the political leaders so Colombia which is one of our great examples until quite recently treated their best officers that would come to our trainings as people to move around in different places so they couldn't do their jobs particularly well when you had the blue cartel the Air Force serving as another drug cartel back in the 80s. It took a political compact it took in Colombia a movement to have a new constitution that made that country more inclusive before Plan Colombia could really catch on and so that's what we're talking about in real human terms. It's one thing to get that idea right, it's one thing to say okay let's have the compact between the state and society and frankly it's the most important part and it's what Maria's going to talk about and Lauren's going to talk about so I'm not going to take up too much of their airtime but you also do need a functional security sector a professional security sector, one that answers to civilians and here America has a much deeper problem because our implementation of that is broken a number of the questioners talked about implementation and it's hard and what you have in security sector reform are fragmented authorities that have grown and grown over the last 15 years since 9-11 many of them have migrated to the DoD as people have talked about and so even when we really want to get our arms around a problem and address it from a whole of government as Michelle said we can't do it. What happens is for instance in Yemen when our people on the ground are low level folks in the trenches trying to do the work said let's figure out what security programs were actually running in Yemen it took them months of effort just to name the programs so it's not that the ambassador doesn't have the ability to do that but if it takes months well things have happened on the ground they did the same thing in the Philippines huge, huge heroic effort on the part of regular staffers again it took months and they still don't think that they got all the programs that's what's happening with this kind of fragmentation of authorities and so on so what can we do and I'll just end here because we really want time for Q&A systemic strategic, selective, sustainable so systemic we need to reduce the fragmentation and authorities we had for a short period under Secretary Gates and Secretary Clinton an attempt to do this that Michelle spoke about Congress was really the hold up here and I think educating Congress Congress made the State Department not only cut their budget in half but also made them report to seven different committees so it slowed everything down whereas DOD didn't have to do that we need more than just educating Congress as if Congress is a school child that we have to take their hand and walk them around you need a real constant engagement with Congress I spent a decade working very closely with Capitol Hill and there are intelligent, thoughtful people there who don't like to be lectured and so what we really need to do is bring them on board throughout the whole of our discussions and make them feel a part of these discussions rather than the end result of these discussions but we need a better systemic reduction of authorities and bringing together we need a strategic locus of responsibility the report calls for a sell at the NSC and that's exactly what we need someone who can knock some heads together and force some planning we need selectivity and in my part of the report or my little section I talk about starting countries at zero right now we give security assistance to 192 countries in the world we only recognize 195 countries in the world so maybe that's Vatican City I mean there's a handful of places that we don't give assistance to but that's not very selective or strategic and so we need to start countries at zero do multi-year planning and justify why we're giving the money rather than treating it as a party favor or treating it as we've done this in the past so we'll keep on doing that that does require a lot of education of those countries because they'll be upset but I think part of what we need to do is start saying we have the greatest military in the world it's an incredible honor to work with our military and we should treat that as an honor and use it as an incentive to and this is really the sustainable part an incentive to change expecting the change to come on the back end through the engagement this is a long discussion with the military about does the engagement create change or does incentivizing change create change and in my own research I've found the latter and engagement does create some change but the deep systemic more political change that's incentivization and so we need to use it that way there are cash on delivery programs that we've tried in development aid which we could try in security sector reform you want to do this let's try some change on your end first and then we'll backfill the money it's something we don't talk about much that plan Columbia America's large contribution very large contribution was 3% of plan Columbia the rest came from Colombians many of the fragile states are not poor they have resources and we can just incentivize them to use those resources well and then finally I suggest some simple compacts that we can use for life thinking so that when we're in the moment of crisis and change really needs to happen quickly and we need to act we don't do things that are silly so simple things like let's not let's not incentivize coups by providing more funds after a coup for instance with Turkey and if we have some of these heuristics we can always break them people get very scared about having rules of thumb in the US government we can always break them but we have to justify breaking them and that requires a little bit of extra intellectual effort on our parts I'll turn it over Thanks very much Alexa and Kudos to the drafters of what is really a great report that has a lot of meaty recommendations the study group report really helpfully highlights that state fragility is really at its essence an issue of political legitimacy and societal inclusiveness and the report also makes a very strong point that local actors and local solutions are critical to addressing the challenge of fragility so my central thesis this morning would be that those that are best positioned to forge inclusive and accountable political systems are the citizens of these states and specifically social and political change happens when ordinary people organize women, youth, religious leaders trade union leaders and the like when they form broad based coalitions and when they undertake collective action to challenge power asymmetries and to empower reformers in government. Citizen led collective action in other words is the antidote to exclusion and supporting it should be a central feature of US policy. In Colombia local communities engaged in self-organization and nonviolent action to create peace zones in the midst of a civil war in Burma although the so-called saffron revolution led by monks in 2007 was violently suppressed by the junta this mass mobilization which crossed ethnic divisions paved the way to the political opening that we've seen today in Mombasa, Kenya the Muslims for Human Rights organization otherwise known as Muhuri pioneered a very effective five-step social audit mechanism to counter corruption at the local and national levels. We now know empirically that nonviolent resistance is more effective than violence in achieving major political goals including in highly repressive environments. We also know that this method of collective action has contributed to more peaceful and democratic societies yet at the same time engaging in nonviolent citizen action in fragile context is highly challenging civil society is often weak, social trust is diminished, effective mobilizers are often the first to be targeted especially in authoritarian context and donors furthermore are often not comfortable engaging with fluid decentralized, leaderful campaigns and movements and often frankly for very good reason however at the same time a 2015 civic study found that local civil society groups and organizations received a paltry .2% of official development assistance that's unacceptable if your goal is to strengthen the resilience and resolve of local actors. So what to do let me offer three policy points that build on the recommendations of the study group report. First a truly strategic and sustained approach to addressing fragility requires patient long-term support for peaceful democratic transitions and democratic consolidation in priority countries and we heard Ukraine, Tunisia Nigeria mention this morning in the earlier conversation. Returning to an embrace of authoritarian stability in the Middle East and elsewhere is incompatible with a strategy to address fragility. Burma is a good example where the US government did not back down on democratic principles while engaging with the military junta. Compacts with fragile states should incentivize democratic progress and DNG funding should not be cut in an era of authoritarian resurgence and shrinking civic space around the world. Second a stand with civil society initiative and the presidential memorandum on deepening US government efforts to collaborate with and strengthen civil society are important initiatives that should be continued into the next administration and they should be strengthened very specifically in building on Rachel's excellent points and papers associated with this initiative. Security sector assistance should be integrated with both these civil society initiatives and the initiatives that are being calibrated to focus on governance and the protection of civic space. The current US presidency of the community of democracies and the new democracy and security dialogue spearheaded by secretary Madeline Albright and the Tunisian Prime Minister Juma should help hopefully put this issue further in the spotlight. And I'll end my remarks with where I would like to point out that the US government and other outside actors should embrace what I would like to refer to as a movement mindset. This means specifically devising strategies and tools to amplify the voices and efforts of local grassroots actors at the local regional and international levels. State and aid should work with other donors and private foundations to provide flexible funding and training for movement building for local organizers possibly through a pooled movements fund if you will and help to build strategic alliances between grassroots actors, traditional NGOs and government reformers using multi stakeholder initiatives including the civil society innovation initiatives regional hubs and the open government partnership. And I would just conclude by saying that I think part of making headway and addressing fragility will involve increasingly bringing together in strategic ways the grassroots together with the grass tops using the tools and approaches that we have at our disposal. Thank you. Thank you. Lauren. Thank you, Alexa. And I have to say that it's also really nice to be part of an all-female panel, something of a rarity in this town. So I'm going to take it back to a very processy, wonky level after those two excellent briefs. A key theme that we return to over and over again in the primary fragility report is the need for a shared vision of what we can reasonably achieve in fragile states of concern. Key word shared. But what was striking to me as we went through the study group process is how poorly the United States government is set up at a very practical level to enable anything like a shared vision. Quite often the problems that people raised in our study group meetings was not about lack of good strategy, though that's its own problem or good intention, which is a separate one, but about lack of information. Nine times out of ten they raised problems about accessing information and understanding that the US government already has in its possession. We're just not accessing it appropriately for whatever reason. And I would argue this is because unintentionally the US national security apparatus functions as the stovepipes are the most effective way of organizing as though we don't need to access the tremendous breadth of knowledge and experience that our experts already have. And as though some advances in IT information technology and real-time collaboration don't exist. This is not on purpose, it's just out of bureaucratic habit. Whether intentionally or not, controlling information and hoarding information is a dominant theme of how the US government operates in a lot of areas. And you've seen this brought up time and time, 11 commission reports and since there's been a lot of effort to reform some information sharing and through the intelligence community, but there's a lot of work still to be done. This weakness is particularly important for fragility challenges. As the report lays out, our fragility approaches have to be systematic and integrated to be effective. Access to local knowledge is critical to success of those efforts and fully understanding the rationale and prioritization of our efforts in the field is absolutely vital to all actors. So my report highlights some practical challenges I see in our ability to actually generate that shared vision. Internally, as I said earlier, our national security apparatus conducts businesses, though every issue it works on is a highly sensitive government secret, instead of something that requires intensive collaboration. Meetings are only accessible to a small number of people. Quite frequently, our best hope of actually producing a shared vision is getting 30 people on an email chain and hoping some poor soul is working on track changes appropriately throughout that process, and that's a good outcome. That means the right 30 people are in communication. And you regularly encounter frustration with lack of visibility of what other agencies are doing in particular countries, as Rachel mentioned, lack of understanding of what U.S. government tools actually are and which ones are the most effective, lack of assessment of past years, lack of clarity on what funding is available or how quickly, lack of understanding of the full cost or necessarily the length of a particular initiative instead of just what it takes to fund that year. And then find a lack of information about who is an expert in or has contacts in a particular country. And you see these challenges echoed in our work with external stakeholders as well, where you continue to hear about that it's tough to get a sense of what our partner countries are doing elsewhere or what their comparative capabilities are. And it's rare, though possible to do, that you actually see joint assessments developed with our partners or with the countries that we're working in. So the root response to these sorts of challenges in Washington is usually to set up a task force of some kind or rearrange the deck chairs of our interagency collaboration. I took a different approach inspired by some of the work that Stanley McChrystal did at JSOC when he was there and the work he's done in the last few years to ask about what shared consciousness or radical transparency might mean to the national security establishment here in D.C. Or at least the parts that work on the fragility challenge. Something he says in one of his books really resonated that when organizations stop protecting information, they spend a lot less time talking to one another about what they are doing or what they can do and a lot more time talking about why they are doing it and whether they are doing it. So based on that thinking, my report makes several proposals, some that are incredibly mundane frankly and others that are quite radical to drastically increase the transparency of our bureaucratic functions, both among policymakers but between policymakers and implementers as well. These include anything like live streaming senior interagency meetings to anyone who wants to access it in government, creating a standard of joint assessments, monitoring and beginning, creating this LinkedIn-like function that we've talked about for at least a decade of what policymakers and implementer experiences actually are, who their contacts are, where they have experience in what countries. Requiring that capacity building efforts be fully costed and presented in a way that transparently highlights the interdependent requirements. Like as Rachel alluded to, enhancing civilian oversight at the same time is one of the most important priorities. And then lastly launching a series of exercises that are not about what we would do to prepare for a particular crisis but are much more about familiarizing policymakers with the tools, less crisis oriented tools that they have in their toolkit. And the resource and personnel tradeoffs that come with a sustained commitment to a fragile state. But all of you have had different vantage points on these challenges and I would welcome your comments. Thank you so much for your provocative comments about how we as a U.S. government and a partner community can be better. And I just want to take this opportunity to note we've talked a lot this morning about 3Ds, development, defense and diplomacy. But importantly in our senior advisory group and in our thinking in this report we had a number of former intelligence members, as a part of our critical thinking and I see some of those familiar faces in the audience today. So we're really thinking about ways to develop a shared consciousness across the interagency. Both 3D but I would add critically plus the intelligence community. And Lauren, I'd like to start with you. You talk compellingly about transparency as being critical to building this shared vision and this shared consciousness. And I wonder in a post WikiLeaks, post Snowden environment, I think we can agree that transparency is important, but how would you advise the next administration about thinking about transparency and it not being a risk? First let me say that I am by no means an expert on the why and how a people conduct leaks in the national security establishment. And it is not a small concern. But at the same time my instinct is that when you see leaks about national security information their origin stems far more about well put it this way. It's much more about controlling information than sharing it at that point. People are trying to demonstrate that they have access, that they are able to share this information with people on the outside. But at the same time I have to think that and fragility challenges, there's so much that should be discussed with the general public that it's less of a problem of leaks and much more about how do we have a more transparent conversation with the American people and with our international partners about what is it we're doing and why. Ambassador Burns spoke compellingly about people as well as David Ignatius about people are more skeptical about use of military not military, about American engagement overseas these days. Having more transparent conversation, not through leaks but through deliberate engagement about what it is that we're doing, why we're doing it, whether it's effective and how long it's going to take is something that I see is absolutely critical to this debate. Wonderful, thank you. Rachel, if I could ask you, you started your remarks thinking about our partner on our southern border, Mexico. And in your policy brief, which we will publish it's forthcoming, you mentioned a principal level position at the National Security Council focused on security sector assistance in order to elevate it critically. I wonder if you could tell us, let's imagine that position is in place and it's six months from now and he or she is talking about Mexico. Could you walk us through how you would want them to think about partner engagement and smarter security sector assistance strategies but also implementation options in a country like Mexico? Sure, it's a fantastic question. If I can two finger Lauren's question. So one of the issues with transparency is that we provide security assistance but we don't tell the civilian leaders of the other countries how much we're providing. So how are they supposed to provide oversight of their security sector if they don't know how much of their budget is coming into that sector. It's just very basic things like that. On the Mexico question, it's an essential problem that we start taking Mexico and its fragility seriously. It's right on our border and while Latin America perhaps hasn't been sexy since the 1980s, it is a pretty important part of our country's security. I would think the first step is to realize that the successes we've had in quelling the violence that grabbed headlines just a few years ago are largely not our successes. They're largely the successes of various drug cartels who have sorted out amongst themselves who controls what routes. And because of that, we have a fragile piece. But in a forthcoming book that I'm writing, I call these dirty deals, this is not a stable situation. This is a bunch of thugs who have decided amongst themselves who's going to win and we helped one side by taking out one of the worst cartels. What we really need to do is start going and working with the people of Mexico and Maria is absolutely right to help them affect their government. If you're a Mexican citizen and your brother has been kidnapped and you're scared to go to your own police force and report that kidnapping because the police might be complicit in that kidnapping. How do you deal with the violence that is going on all around? You can't. And so we need to start, and Mexico of course from the security sector reform standpoint is very suspicious of the U.S. for some deep and historical reasons. So, step one, we need to engage the citizenry. We have Plan Merida. We need a much, much more concerted and we do some of this much more concerted building in Mexico against the violence and for a more functional democracy. You hear Mexicans occasionally, particularly in the elite, talk about the pre-days back when it was a one-party rule with a lot of nostalgia because they miss the lack of violence or what they saw as the lack of violence of that time. We need to stop that by helping these movements clean up their governments and they need to do it themselves. All we can do is provide some money, some assistance, some corralling and so on. Second step, police reform. This is the less sexy part of security sector reform, but it's really important because when a country's police are broken, the country turns to the military. But militaries aren't trained in policing and they tend to use too much force, which is what happened in Mexico. And then citizens turn to vigilante movements to protect themselves. The vigilantes then become thugs on their own right and you have a worse problem. And so we need to get much more serious about police reform. Right now this is the stepchild of American security systems. It doesn't get the money. It doesn't get the attention. And one thing it really doesn't get is any assessment of whether it works. And Congress has just got a bill on its plate right now to start doing some measurement and assessing of whether our security sector assistance works. We need that. The other thing we need is better personnel in those programs. There are lots of good police in America who know how to do smart community policing. They're not always called upon in those programs. We used to have something called the Civilian Response Corps that started for a few brief shining years and then died out for various reasons. And we need that again that knows where the expertise is around the country and can pull that together so that when we send cops out to help their counterparts in other countries we're sending the right people who know what they're doing and can help. So those are the places I'd start. Great. On the spot guidance. Thank you. Maria, if I could ask you, we've spent a lot of time this morning thinking about the U.S. government responsibility and also in some cases the limitations to our influence as an external third-party actor. We haven't talked a lot about, as you suggest, grassroots and grass tops. What the grassroots to grassroots learning and inspiration cycle looks like. And I wonder if you could share a little bit about any compelling examples out there where civic movements are actively informing one another across a region or perhaps across continents. Sure. That's a great question. I think one of the most exciting areas in this area of grassroots movements is actually in the anti-corruption space. So some of the most interesting learning that's happening now in peer sharing has occurred between leaders of grassroots movements. For example, from Afghanistan from India and increasingly in Kenya. So the right to information campaign and the fifth pillar campaign was a highly successful grassroots campaign to target bribery and corruption in India. The leaders of that campaign supported by an international NGO went on to consult and train Integrity Watch Afghanistan, which has been watching the spending of donor funding and has helped curb corruption associated with donor funded projects in different parts of Afghanistan. Those leaders went on to advise and support the leaders of the MUHRI Muslims for Human Rights organization in Mombasa, Kenya which has pioneered this social audit campaign which has in turn been replicated in other places. So it's one area where in thinking of what external actors can do effectively supporting opportunities and venues for grassroots leaders to learn from each other and importantly to engage with traditional NGOs, CSOs that have skills, knowledge and know how and access to international fora that grassroots actors typically don't have because they don't speak the language they don't know how to use log frames they don't know how to communicate in a way that often folks at the international level. So it's important to help convene and build bridges between these different civil society groupings. It's nice to hear that some of it's happening organically already. Wonderful. Well let's open it up. We have a very patient audience here and I see some hands in the air so we'll start here as mics are migrating down. This gentleman in the yellow shirt I'd like to ask you to keep your questions brief so that we'll have plenty of time to take several and engage in it. Yes, Lee Rosenberger, I recently retired from the US government after 36 years, the last eight years I was posted at CENTCOM in Tampa dealing with the Middle East and I've worked for four star generals and admirals for the last 18 years and one of the things that I find fascinating about this discussion is really two types of leadership and the US military is used to top down leadership for the most part the four star gives an order and people follow it. In the civilian sector it's very different. This is especially true if you read the Professor Heifetz from Harvard talks about a lot of the stuff you guys are talking about grassroots leadership or what I call horizontal leadership which is much more difficult but is actually more sustainable if everybody gets on board. My question to you is as you move around the world I imagine you also come across the same problem when you deal with militaries in other countries that are even more used to top down leadership and you're telling them to move toward what I call horizontal leadership and to me that's a huge challenge and I embrace what you're doing but also the obstacles that you must face. Thank you. Thank you Rachel. If I could ask you to address that in terms of two styles of leadership, military top down. Sure it's a terrific question and I would challenge it a little bit. I would say that within the US military you have the top down but you also have how the NCO is a very horizontal sort of a way that when that relationship works well leads to very much better platoon leadership and lower level leadership and so I think there's a number of kinds of leadership that function at its best in the US military and one thing that when we do security systems abroad we share most effectively is that relationship which most countries don't have and most countries you have an officer level very far separated from your rank and file and it works much worse as a result. I have never found a way in any top down country and it's not just the military in a lot of these former Soviet countries and former autocratic countries that top down fear of making any decision at a mid level or lower level is deeply ingrained within civilian leadership too. I have never found a way to break that. I have found the only way to break that is generational and through western education and there's actually a great deal of research showing that having leaders undertake liberal arts education in the West basically go into university in the West it doesn't make everyone good I mean otherwise you would have lots of dictators children who are attending fancy Ivy League schools turning the other cheek and we know that doesn't happen but for those that do wish to learn leadership skills the give and take of that kind of education actually plays a huge role in helping them learn how to do it. I think it's important as a former defense official and someone who spent a lot of time at the NSC there any observations you'd like to offer? Only to echo the point that you made Sir that it is an incredible challenge to deal with the horizontal and the horizontal immigration as well as the non top down is far more difficult than just you know applying different terminology sounds and I think both you and Rachel said it well in terms of like this is what sets us apart in terms of how it works as a US government and as a society but it also makes it significantly harder and we need to both recognize that but also embrace that as we think about interagency reforms to pursue. Let's go to this side of the room the woman in the back right there perfect thank you Thanks very much Andrea Koppel with Mercy Corps Rachel I'd like to pick up on something that you referred to in your remarks and actually open it up to the members if they'd like to comment one remark you made is that we can't cut our DNG accounts I'm sorry was that Lauren? Marie but I agree Violent agreement on that point Yes In point of fact we Mercy Corps has a report coming out later this week that does an analysis of the 2014 OECD DAC numbers and shows that a one maybe two percent maximum of all ODA is going to prevention and conflict mitigation that begins with the president's budget request we haven't been seeing those the right requests being made for money going into the complex crisis fund going more into USAID's pods and we've had a lot of discussion about that and we've had a lot of discussion about that but what are your recommendations what are your ideas as to how we can get the next administration and frankly other governments to more than double increase the amount of money going into conflict mitigation and prevention and that organization has done some really excellent research on these budgets and particularly in the Middle East area where the money is going and I hate to say it because I like this administration but they have not been the best at putting the money where their mouths are in terms of these issues and I think the only way to do it better is to put it in the budget request and we're trying to do that frankly through this kind of a panel through getting very high level individuals who served on the study committee to take these issues seriously to think through them with us to understand why it's so important and to advocate you know that's how things happen in Washington there's the official channels and the unofficial channels and you need to work both and to advocate through the unofficial channels that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of care and there's really no other way around it but to put the numbers on the paper if you want the numbers to come out in the budget on the other end. I mean just linking to that because I actually see between violence prevention and support for democratic development and I think in this town especially you know supporting further funding for democracy is not necessarily the majority view and there's a lot of skepticism about how effective the US government can be in supporting democracy abroad and I think part of that is that a lot of the examples that are used to supposedly show how ineffective the US government is Afghanistan, Iraq the Arab Spring the first two were cases of military led regime change with democracy being an afterthought at the end of the day. The Arab Spring was less the case of the US government screwing it up with democracy support and more a case of perhaps not doing enough or not being effective with that assistance and so I think to be able to turn the tide you have to be able to demonstrate the value of this type of support and be able to link it to critical like state fragility to corruption to all these issues that I think are more door openers in this town in order to justify further allocation of resources in this space. Here at the front Melanie. Good morning I'm Melanie Greenberg from the Alliance for Peace Building and first I want to congratulate you on a groundbreaking report. It's really fantastic and also for this really really wonderful panel and I was struck this morning by the new report by Century which focused on South Sudan and that basically called out the President and Vice President for enriching their families but also recouched the narrative of the war not as an ethnic conflict between Dinka and Newark but really as a competition over future mineral rights in South Sudan and the raises I think two questions and maybe an opportunity the first question is what does the whole of government process look like when you start bringing in free justice and the kinds of arms of government that are working on corruption Maria for you, how in the midst of a conflict like this can there be any kind of organization at the grassroots against this driver of violence when their people are fleeing for their lives and third and I think you just alluded to this is there an opportunity for a new narrative to the American people who might not understand a remote Newark-Dinka conflict but really understand what it means for leaders to plunder investment that the U.S. has made in their country some really important questions who wants to tackle one or two of them I'll answer this first one and I wish Sarah was here to address it in more detail but one of the striking things and I think it was an interview that we did for our study group was somebody talking about in the interagency meetings how the structure and order of the agenda very much impacts how people are perceiving whatever challenge it is that they're dealing with in the interests of the country because you tend to have whatever is the most threatening thing you're dealing with that up front whether it's the intelligence community talking about that or the defense department or others but that tends to shape the flow of the rest of the discussion and who you have in the room shapes the ultimate outcomes of what options are ultimately considering so by bringing in others to be a part of that discussion but not just having them in the room will have I hope have positive impacts on how we're approaching that challenge overall that's not a be all and all but by all means having different folks at the table and asking them for their views up front rather than just focusing on it from a CT lens or from a security lens may ultimately impact what options you're looking at downstream so in terms of what can be done in civic mobilization in South Sudan I think one thing to point out is that when it comes to collective action and nonviolent action there's more to it than just street protest demonstrations and the like and in many contexts the name of the game is civilian protection and in local organizing just to maintain resilience and fortunately there are skills involved in movement building and community organizing that can help communities remain resilient in tough situations like South Sudan I would note though we had someone who came in who had just come from Juba has been there for a long time he used the example of I asked him what are examples of civic mobilization happening now and the example he gave was that apparently there's a lot of carjacking going on in South Sudan militia groups and the others stealing of cars and that issue because it was affecting daily people's daily lives and causing grievances was the one issue that brought people together across like you know gender, age, sex, whatever and to protest this happening and it stopped for a time I don't know if that continued but the essence is finding the issues that affect people's daily lives that they care about and that they would be willing to mobilize around and sometimes audacious street protests and demonstrations are not the answer and the quiet organizing that goes on behind the scenes is the more important in these contexts. And I think importantly Rachel if I could ask you to address how do we compellingly frame the why fragility matters for an American public? Good. I think your point is very well taken that frequently we in the policy community try to mystify these issues and we make it as if we have to have so much expertise in so many degrees I don't know how many doctorates between us but a lot of these things are not that complicated and people on the ground do understand them and actually a lot of the American people could understand that narrative and it would be a more true narrative than saying these people have primordial hatreds they can't get over themselves poor them you know they're no more primordial hatreds than our Democratic and Republican fights here they're simply that we're framing them as if they're the other and as we stop doing that and start treating people as if they have real interests and real fights over power in their own countries I think that's very understandable and people can get behind it. Now whether the American people will want to do anything is a whole different question and there I think Maria's point on success is really important. I was part of a bipartisan group that was trying to frame international intervention for a more conservative audience by looking at where were their successes that we could point to things like polio intervention and Burma and democracies that and we have a lot of successes and we don't tend to point to them and I think having those at the tip of our tongue when we're going home for Thanksgiving and Christmas and talking to regular folks outside of the country is really important. Stay tuned for the policy brief. Fragility is not rocket science. Yes, back here on the left. Hi, Joe Krause with the one campaign. We are doing some some of the educating that's been talked about with Congress and the next administration and potentially with the American people so thank you for this report and this really helpful conversation and I really look forward to the recommendations coming in the policy briefs. Quick question around what was mentioned around the importance of working with and through local groups on the ground. I'm just wondering to get your reaction to a couple of potential challenges. One, how if the U.S. government is helping fund those groups, how is that done in a way that does not potentially erode their legitimacy with their local communities and two, in countries where potentially the government is not the most democratic does not allow groups to effectively be independent and work at the grassroots level. How does the U.S. government engage in situations like that? Thanks. Okay, so on the funding question I actually don't think that direct U.S.G. funding for grassroots actors is appropriate or strategic in many cases and your point about local legitimacy is spot on. Movements succeed and thrive because they have local legitimacy and because they have ownership and because they rely on the resources, skills, knowledge and know-how of members of a movement much more so than financial support from the outside. At the same time I think there are important roles that external actors can play perhaps not the U.S.G. but other foundations, INGOs in providing quick surge funds in moments when movements need them. The thing about that is they aren't linear. They go in ebbs and flows, peaks and valleys and $10,000 to a social movement over the course of a week is more important than a million dollars over a year and so having the mechanisms to provide that type of assistance is critically important and often skills matter more than money so outside actors are in a good position to link up leaders of movements to share, to learn and for me I mean the greatest advantage when it comes to supporting grassroots actors and movements would be to actually support an infrastructure of support for movements. Providing sustained coaching and training helping them learn from each other giving them access to international fora so that the stories of what's happening at the grassroots level to challenge fragility are being amplified in regional and international fora. These are much more important things frankly that outside actors especially U.S.G. can play particularly on providing financial assistance. In certain cases the financial assistance will work you have to consult with the local actors to hear what they say about is this going to delegitimize the movement, is this going to imperil our activists, they should be making the call in these cases but it doesn't mean stepping away from engagement with the local actors because money is not the entire thing. I'd like to ask to take maybe two questions and then invite the panelists to respond because we're a little short on time. How about here Karen and the gentleman here in the red shirt back there. Thank you. Okay. I was really struck by Maria's really specific examples and so I wanted to put a challenge to Rachel and Lauren about Michelle in the earlier panel was talking about potential pilots to really test especially in the domestic compact area of your 4S framework. So I'm really curious about we have been talking about the interagency unity of effort stuff forever but I'm really curious about what that pilot would look like and what kinds of structures and practices you would be your best and breed in beds into that for building shared understanding of the operational environment, aligned action unity of effort and like that adaptive leadership and learning that we know needs to happen for sustained involvement. Wonderful. And then let's take this question back here and then the panelists will respond to both. I have an association with SAIS and with Elliott School. One of the organizations in town that has studied state fragility and failure for the last decade and measured it in 175 countries every year is the fund for peace. I've been quite surprised not to hear that organization even mentioned in either panel and particularly it's the 30 or 40 or so factors many of them grassroots that identify the complexity of state failure and state fragility and the complexity of the conflict mitigation requirements that are there. I'm surprised not to hear it mentioned. Is there a reason for that? There's no reason at all. In fact, we consulted them in this process and I really appreciate you highlighting their excellent work. We are fans and they were very instrumental in teeing up a number of perspectives for us. I think the fund for peace is probably well positioned to support the type of grassroots actors and mobilization that we're talking about and getting pooled funding in this space can be tricky so it would be good to learn more and see how that could fit into this. If I could just add, we are very aware of the privileged position of being able to stand on the shoulder of giants in this effort. As Nancy mentioned, we didn't do a lot of new empirical research so we heavily relied on those who are distinguished in the field who do have that evidence in those perspectives. So what about domestic pilots for building a shared consciousness and specifically asking about how we could make interagency coordination finally after so much attention to it work well and in our interest. It gets to what Michelle's pilot effort may look like and this is detailed in the overall fragility report is having policy makers dedicate time regularly to a discussion on fragility is much harder than it sounds if you don't do it up front. The report makes the recommendation of I think we say quarterly but it can be on any kind of sequence of time having we recommend a deputies committee level meeting where you're looking at a priority group of states of concern that have interest in the United States and talking about what it is that we're doing there, what are possible challenges that we see and looking at it from a variety of perspectives not just the threat lens not the CT lens but from the economic perspective the gender perspective the development perspective and focusing policy makers attention to them when they have time and not just doing it on the side and not doing it whenever a crisis occurs. I'm sure that every policy maker in the world would say yes absolutely we have to do that. If we don't do it up front and we don't kind of build it into the ecosystem of this is an expected battle rhythm for policy makers to be in at all levels it would be really hard to build that in later because they're urgent getting in front of the importance that's been a perennial refrain for I don't know how many years but it's very hard to get around unless you force yourself into your own schedule and battle with them. I would just offer to stay tuned for one of the policy briefs written by USIP's very own Andy Bloom who was previously the Vice President for Learning and Evaluation here at the Institute will be writing a policy brief focused on learning and adaptation in the policy kind of strategy and implementation cycle and I think that will be really fruitful conversation as well. Wonderful, well before I thank the panelists and those of you in the room I just want to note that pulling off anything like this like a senior study group with so many brilliant minds and all of this energy never happens without the people who oftentimes don't get to be on this stage so I want to recognize a couple people in the audience who have been absolutely instrumental and critical to producing the report that's in front of you and teeing up all of these policy briefs and the wonderful thinking and keeping the trains moving. Lynn Woodham is the Director of Policy Studies here at USIP and he's in the back stating next to Noah Shinebaum who's been the special assistant for the study group and I'd like to give a big round of applause to both of them without whom this would not be possible. Wonderful and there could never be too much applause in Washington. Please join me also in thanking our wonderful panelists, our chairs and many of you who contributed to this. Thank you so much. Thank you.