 The U.S. Naval War College is a Navy's home of thought. Established in 1884, NWC has become the center of Naval sea power both strategically and intellectually. The following issues in National Security Lecture is specifically designed to offer scholarly lectures to all participants. We hope you enjoy this upcoming discussion and future lectures. Well, good afternoon and welcome to our 10th issues in National Security Lecture held here in the virtual world. I'm John Jackson and the coordinator and will be the MC for this event today. And to kick off the evening, I'd like to ask Admiral Chatfield if she would have any welcoming remarks. Admiral? So I'm with you and it is so good to be back. I missed our last session due to some official travel that I was on and I always love to fit this into my week whenever I can. I wanna welcome all the members of the community who are here. I see Brigadier General Chevalier also, is it Admiral Stark out there? Wave hi, if that's you. President, so good to see you. And so many members of our Naval War College Foundation, our spouse network, our students, our faculty and staff and who are delighted to have from our Naval Museum here today, other members of our community. So I'm just grateful for this time together. It really energizes me to see people pursue these academic lectures outside of their normal workday or study sessions. And this time together really renews me and my husband David with that kind of energy and community feel from this opportunity. So I'm just grateful to be here. Over to you, Professor Jackson. Thank you so much for performing your role today. Thank you very much, Admiral, appreciate that. As I usually say, just like to highlight the fact that this series was originally established as a way to share some of the academic experience of the War College with our greater community. And we've expanded it to make sure that anyone who'd like to participate from foundation, from civilian employees from Naval Station Newport and anywhere around the world actually is welcome to join us. So we'll be doing another eight lectures between now and May of 2021, about every two weeks. And so we invite you to come back and do those. An announcement detailing the dates, topics and speakers of each lecture has been posted by the Public Affairs Office. Looking ahead on Tuesday 9th, February, 2021, we will hear from Professor Rick Norton, who will speak about Feral Cities. Okay, onto the main event. And I remind you to please feel free to ask questions using the Zoom chat function during the remarks, and then we'll get to them at the end of the presentation. Before I introduce our guest speakers, I'd like to set the stage for the discussion to follow. Many of you may be aware of the work done by a small cadre of U.S. and British experts who at the end of close of World War II followed closely behind the combat forces to locate, identify and preserve thousands of artists, artistic and cultural treasures that had been threatened by the global conflict. Their remarkable efforts had been documented in several books and in the 2014 movie The Monuments Men, which starred George Clooney. Our presenters this afternoon are from the Naval War College Museum. Ms. Jessica Wagner, former director of education and Mr. Blake Rewind, the collections manager. Jessica recently departed as the director of education and public outreach here at the college. As a heritage sector professional within the U.S. and International Museum and nonprofit communities, her career has centered around community outreach, engagement and development within cultural institutions. Her current research focused on threatened cultural heritage, the relationship between tangible and intangible heritage and the role that relationships play in safeguarding cultural property in conflict zones. As a Navy wife and a recent mother, she will be moving overseas in the coming week. So congratulations, Jessica. Blake serves as the collections manager here at the Naval War College Museum, where he's responsible for roughly 20,000 artifacts, dozens of display and storage spaces, including packing, shipping, environmental controls, research and outreach. He is an Air Force veteran with 10 years of experience in the arts, nonprofit education and museum sectors. So I'm pleased to pass the digital baton onto our monuments man and our monuments woman. Over to you. Thanks, John. We're glad you're here, everybody. I'm Blake Rewind, collections manager at the Naval War College Museum. And I'm Jessica Wagner. As John said, the former director of education and public outreach at the museum. Firstly, thank you for joining us today. We're gonna be discussing the United States military, our role in cultural heritage preservation and the new monuments men unit, the Army Reserve Civil Affairs 38 Gulf Program, which Blake and I are both currently candidates for direct commission as 38G 6V or heritage preservation officers within the unit. Just a little run through of what we're gonna talk about today. First, Blake is gonna walk you through a short exercise to illustrate and place heritage in context of our everyday. Next, we're gonna briefly discuss our personal backgrounds and our motivation for joining the 38 Gulf Program. Then we're gonna lead into cultural heritage. We're gonna discuss its importance, its destruction and manipulation. I'm gonna give an overview of the World War II MFAA or monuments men as they were known, as well as the post-war international agreement, the 1954 Hague Convention. And we're gonna conclude Blake is gonna discuss the new monuments men and outline the 38 Gulf Program and their role in contemporary heritage protection. So take it away, Blake. Thanks, Jessica. In a minute, I'm gonna ask you to imagine something with me. But first, let me say this. When human beings stay in one place for a while, we tend to surround ourselves with things that are meaningful to us. Sometimes we create these things and sometimes we acquire them in various ways. Oftentimes what has deep meaning to us looks to anyone else like ordinary things. We place our meaningful items, where we live and work and where we spend our time. What have you surrounded yourself with? Here's where I want you to play along with me. If you're willing in order to help with the visualization, close your eyes. Hopefully no one's driving right now. I want you to mentally go through your home or work or your happy place and pick out something that has deep meaning for you. I'm gonna give you about 30 seconds right now to really think about it. Okay, open your eyes. What was it? How would you describe it? Is it big? Small? Does it travel easily? Maybe it can't be moved at all because it's physically a part of the space. If you were picturing something and you're willing, I'd like you to type it in the chat box and share it. Go ahead and do that now. And while you're doing that, I'm going to ask a couple more questions. Did you have many meaningful things that came to mind? Pick one if you wanna share it. Maybe you had trouble coming up with anything at all. If that's true for you, don't worry. It doesn't mean nothing is important to you. This was a pop quiz and maybe you've never thought about the stuff you surround yourself with in this way. Or maybe it's worth asking this question. What have you surrounded yourself with? And what really is important to you? I'm seeing some great answers come in, some honorary, some awards that we're giving, a shadow box flag. We've got some great answers in here, photo albums, more photos. And this is the beauty, right? Everything, everyone's gonna have a different answer. Well, for me, one answer is a painting hanging in my home. It's one of the first artworks I ever bought. I got it on a road trip years ago with my dad down south. We lost my dad last year and I have fond memories of that trip and I have it hanging over my bed. I bought the painting because I like the way it looks. I like the imagination it evokes. And it's very meaningful for me now because of the memories attached to it as well. So for many of you who thought of a meaningful item, yours probably isn't a painting and if you saw mine, you wouldn't think it's anything special. And I'll tell you it's hanging over my bed and not in the living room because my wife doesn't think it's anything special either. Now, I want you to consider scaling this exercise up a level. Do you think there are objects that could be very meaningful to an entire group of people? Now scale it up again. Do you think there could be items with deep meaning for a whole region? How about an entire nation? Now scale it up one last time. Is it possible that there are objects that could be full of meaning to people all over the world no matter who you are or where you come from? If you've answered yes to any of these questions, you're beginning to grasp the importance of cultural heritage and why Jessica and I have made our careers in this field which Jessica is gonna tell you a little bit more about. So briefly a background, I'm gonna give you some of my personal background and Blake is going to as well just so you understand some of our motivations for working in the arts and heritage sector for coming on board with the 38th Gulf. So I've spent the last 10 years working in the arts and heritage sector. I started with a BFA, a Bachelor of Fine Arts. I'm a painter and a printmaker but I really found my passion working within museums and the heritage sites. I relocated to Hawaii in 2012 and I worked with the Education Department at the Honolulu Museum of Art but I also developed a massive interest in war histories just being quite literally surrounded by that history on Oahu. I then began contracting with the Pearl Harbor National Monument in the US military bases developing tour and educational programming. So working both of those roles simultaneously really led me to be interested in the intersection point of art and war and military histories. I studied World War II, the mass looting of artworks across Europe by Hitler and the Nazi regime which we're gonna speak more about a little later and the recovery and restitution efforts of the MFAA or the Monuments Men which again we're gonna speak more about a little bit later. Ultimately led me to graduate school and I wrote my thesis in research, spoilation or looting in the restitution of cultural property during armed conflict. So the 38th Gulf really serves as a collision point of my backgrounds of art, art history, war, military histories and ultimately it's fantastic to be able to put my money where my mouth is so to speak, spending almost a decade making, displaying, talking about how important cultural heritage is and now to be able to assist in physically protecting and preserving threatened heritage is really wonderful. For me, I was in the Air Force a long time ago. I joined right out of high school in the year 2000. It was while I was in the military that I decided to pursue a career in the cultural heritage sector. It wasn't a job that was available to me in the Air Force but even if it was, I didn't have the qualifications for it back then. This is why after completing my enlistment in the Air Force, I went to art school. Thank you, affordable state school in the GI Bill and then got a master's in art history. Thank you, affordable state school in the GI Bill and then began an adventurous career in the culture sector. With the ratification of the Hague Convention by the US in 2009, which Jessica will elaborate on, the door was open to combine these two important values in my life, serving something bigger than myself and helping people improve their lives through engagement with culture. And if you ever need to prove that patience is a virtue, just remember, I had to wait 20 years for the confluence of these values and the opportunity to become a heritage and preservation officer in the military. And patience is a virtue and so was hard work. And both are how we got here and when the Army put out the call, Jessica and I found ourselves willing and able to answer it. I'm going to share my screen for the presentation portion of our lecture. So here we go. What you're seeing in our introductory slide here is on the left, US soldiers with a painting by Manet found in the Mercer's Mine in Germany from World War II. And on the right, General Coggin, commanding general of the US Army, Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command Airborne with Dr. Richard Kern, Smithsonian Distinguished Scholar and Ambassador at large. They are signing the agreement between the Civil Affairs Command and the Smithsonian in October, 2019 to train and support US military personnel working to protect cultural property during armed conflict. And so heritage protection is important to more people than just those who work in this industry. As evidenced by the amount of headlines you can see. Every day, there are new stories popping up, new studies, new discoveries of something being found or something being lost or something in danger. And anywhere you look, you can find examples of these popping up. Not just in the news, but popular culture has a lot of titles whether it's documentaries or feature films or books of different kinds. It's a topic that is of interest to a lot of people. And so it's one you'll see in a lot of different areas. And this subject is not a new one. The idea that art has much deeper meaning than the stone or the paint it's made out of has been around as long as art itself. You could apply this idea to shell made jewelry from the Paleolithic era or cave paintings up to the present day. But why does cultural heritage need protecting? The controversy over protecting cultural heritage enters the discussion when you understand that the meanings it may contain change over time, often in very short periods of time. When we talk about the destruction of cultural heritage in a historical context, historians often use the word iconic class, which is the eradication of imagery. It comes from the two Greek root words, icon meaning image and class meaning break. And it describes the prohibition and destruction of works of visual art, usually because they're considered inappropriate in some contexts. Now, this term would not apply to intangible cultural heritage like music or histories or dance, but just will describe the intangible qualities of heritage a little bit later. One place where these controversies are easy to identify is ancient Egypt. And what's better, I'll give you an example of how the iconic clasms of ancient Egypt continue to pulse through the lives of people to this very day. One of the biggest collections of Egyptian art in the United States is at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City. The most common question they get about their Egyptian collection is, why are so many Egyptian sculptures and carvings missing their noses? And the answer is down here. Ancient Egyptian belief systems describe the spears of the dead living on in the artwork created in their likenesses. While physically the ruler might be gone, their legacy and even their power remains intact as long as the stone or the clay does. The nose in particular was seen as a doorway allowing movement of the spirits in and out of statues, which is why that part of the anatomy has been a common target. This idea from the ancient Egyptians wouldn't be surprising if you were familiar with the practice of mummification, where some internal organs were dragged out by long hook through the nose, or if you are familiar with the nasal swab for the COVID test that many of us have endured. So in order to establish their legitimacy and authority, rulers would target the icons of previous regimes like the statues or monuments they left behind. And this was not an Egyptian phenomenon. The Middle Ages witnessed deep divisions over iconoclasm too. What you're seeing here is a page from the Kludov Psalter. A Psalter is the book of Psalms. This one as often happens named after its one-time owner, Kludov. It was created in Constantinople, which today we call Istanbul in the 9th century, which is right smack dab in the middle of the Byzantine Empire, both geographically and chronologically. This page shows an illustration of Psalm 21, a Psalm that describes harsh judgment against God's enemies. On the right, you see the scene from the New Testament when Jesus is hanging on the cross and the Roman soldiers offer him vinegar on a sponge attached to a pole, often interpreted as an act of mockery. At the bottom of the page, you have an illustration of a known 9th century church leader named John the Grammarian in the red robe who opposed any religious imagery. He's shown with a pole, with a sponge at the end soaked in white paint, which he's using to whitewash the circular image of Jesus. This comparison paints a condemning picture from the minds of medieval religious scholars, drawing strong associations between those who would destroy religious imagery and those who tormented Christ. Likewise, in the 16th century, following the Protestant Reformation in Europe, you have various divisions of the church, some advocating and acting on the removal and destruction of any religious imagery and others advocating for religious imagery as an aid to worship, meditation or prayer. So these problems are not unique to one culture and they are not new. In more recent news, we could cite the well-known incident of the Taliban destroying the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001. Many people around the world are familiar with the headlines telling about the looting of the Iraq Museum and Baghdad in 2003. In the wake of the roughly 15,000 items looted from the museum, the amount of stolen items that have been recovered typically range from one half to two thirds, but the result is more than just a home come for that small number of artifacts that were lost and recovered and the many other artifacts in the collection that remained. For years during the regime of Saddam Hussein, the Iraq Museum was not open to the public. Though everything was where it should be, the citizens could not engage with their own cultures in that way. After the 2003 invasion, the museum remained closed for rebuilding and renovations until it officially reopened in 2015, this time with a big difference, open and accessible to all citizens and visitors. And here's an idea that is not often talked about in discussions of heritage protection but gets to the very core of preserving culture and that is providing access. If a community's culture isn't being destroyed and it hasn't been stolen, but it isn't available to that community, the protection needed is protecting and providing access. More than restricting access temporarily, we could also look at the rampage from ISIS on cultural heritage sites across the Middle East since 2014. It was almost two years ago in March, 2019 that ISIS lost most of their territory in the Middle East, but the damage they've done will be evident for generations. If you discuss the idea of protecting cultural heritage in armed conflict, you're inevitably going to face the question of prioritizing loss of human life over loss of cultural heritage. However, I would challenge you to think of this issue, not as competing priorities, but as priorities that are inextricably woven together. The question is not, is preserving human life more important than preserving cultural heritage? The question is, what is worth preserving at any cost? The answer, human life, yes, cultural heritage, yes. As any student of history or anyone who has joined the military like myself can tell you, there are some concepts worth putting yourself in harm's way for. Democracy for one is demonstrated by the American Revolution. And for another, the freedom to participate in the cultural life and traditions of your community. As stated in Article 27 of the Declaration of Universal Human Rights from the UN. And the US is not alone in fighting for these rights. There are numerous organizations that take up this cause. Blue Shield International, which is an international and non-governmental organization often billed as the cultural equivalent to the Red Cross. ICOMOS, International Council on Monuments and Sites, an international NGO. ICRUM, the International Center for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property is an inter-governmental organization established by treaties where the members are sovereign nations. And that's not to mention the other nations with military units dedicated to protecting cultural heritage, like the UK's CPPU or Cultural Property Protection Unit or the French Army's work in Heritage Conservation or the well-known Caterbignetti Command for the Protection of Cultural Property from Italy. These are not exhaustive lists because there are a lot of international, transnational, inter-governmental, non-governmental and governmental agencies working on these important challenges. But as we've just heard, not everyone believes in those securities and freedoms as unalienable rights for all people. Jessica is gonna tell you some of those stories and the responses that led to the current climate regarding cultural heritage protection. To start us off on our discussion of Heritage Protection and the US military, we're first going to explore the original Monuments Men, the Monuments Fine Arts and Archives Unit of World War II. As you can see in the photo here, the Monuments Men, including the famed James Rorimer in the center there, a curator and eventual director at the Metropolitan Museum of Art the Met. Supervising as artworks are carried down the steps of Nushwanstein Castle in Germany, a stronghold of Nazi-looted art during World War II. Now, many of you have heard of the Monuments Men. As John mentioned, if anyone has watched the 2014 film with George Clooney, Matt Damon, was it entertaining? Yes. Was it completely true to history? No. But the Monuments Men book by Robert Etzl is great. My personal favorite though, The Rape of Europa by Lin Nicholas really takes the cake. I highly suggest that book for those that are interested in learning more about the MFAA and the looting of art in Europe. The Monuments Men were really a call to action, a reaction to the mass looting and devastation of cultural heritage in World War II. Though both European and Pacific region suffered, Europe bore the brunt of the destruction. The ravaging of monuments, archives, libraries, and the spoliation and saluting of cultural property occurred in mass magnitude. But who were the MFAA? In 1940, as a response to the threats to cultural property in World War II, the American Defense Harbour Group, which was an organization of artists, librarians, professionals, scholars, alerted the American government to the potential destruction of European cultural heritage sites and artifacts in the wake of the Nazi occupation of Europe. As a result, in late 1943, the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas, or Roberts Commission, a little shorter, was established by President Roosevelt. From the Roberts Commission, the Monuments Fine Arts and Archives Unit or the Monuments Men were born. The World War II MFAA consisted of a joint collaboration of American and British service members. Initially, the operation was chiefly focused on aiding combat troops in the protection of cultural property by identifying protected monuments in various European countries during the advance of the Allied forces. To achieve this, MFAA officers served in both an organizational capacity and as field officers. Field officers were embedded within frontline battle groups during the invasion of Western Europe. MFAA officers on the frontline were tasked with the following. Advising commanders on protected heritage within or near the battle space, recording conditions of protected monuments following combat, supervising emergency repair work, and preventing further damage and looting of monuments. Change my slide. Though of particular interest to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime were the artistic masterpieces throughout Europe. If anyone was familiar with Hitler's original dream of becoming an artist versus a dictator, Hitler had a very strong desire to build a cultural empire in Linz, Austria, one to rival Paris, France, and push German forces to establish a systematic method for plundering and looting artworks, particularly in Western Europe, to build that empire. Again, you can see in this image that Blake showed in the beginning a manne painting in a mine in Merckers, Germany, a site that Nazis had stowed away many, many art pieces during the war. Thus, because of this spoliation, as Allied forces advanced across Europe, the MFAA had increasingly focused on the rescue and recovery of art and artifacts looted by the Nazis. By the end of 1944, the MFAA consisted of more than 350 men and women deployed to 13 countries tasked with, quote, the greatest treasure hunting history, end quote. Throughout their time in service, the unit rescued, preserved, and returned five million pieces of art and other cultural artifacts. But how do we transition from the 1940s, 1950s MFAA to the modern monuments men? What happened in the time period in between World War II and now to the reestablishment of such a unit now? Firstly, we have the 1954 hate convention, which I'll explain. Signed in 1954, so just post World War II in the Hague Netherlands, the convention for the protection of cultural property in the event of armed conflict was the first international agreement that explicitly focused on the preservation of cultural property during times of war. A good agreement really burst from the ashes of the devastation of cultural heritage during the Second World War. The Hague convention details many things, the terms in which signatory nations are respective tangible, so physical cultural property should be identified, safeguarded against future conflict and protected during times of armed conflict. But most relevant to what we're speaking of today, the 38 Gulf, the agreement directs nations to undertake specific military measures, which you can see here on the slide. First, to introduce in times of peace into their military regulations or instructions, such provisions that may ensure the observance of the present convention and to foster in members of their armed forces a spirit of respect for the culture and cultural property of all peoples. Second, to plan and establish in peacetime within their armed forces, services or specialist personnel whose purpose will be to secure respect for cultural property and cooperate with the civilian authorities responsible for safeguarding it. Therefore, the convention directly outlines a requirement for each nation to designate cultural heritage specialists within their military forces to ensure the protection of cultural property and armed conflict. But the Hague convention was signed in 1954. Why just now a modern MFA unit? Despite the Hague conventions post World War II signing, the US did not officially ratify the treaty until quite recently, March 2009. Due to Cold War complications. So that ratification alongside really substantial loss of cultural property which Blake spoke a little bit about earlier in recent Middle Eastern and Northern African conflicts pushed the US response in 2019, the Pentagon announced in 2019, the forming of a modern monuments men unit, the 38 Gulf program. But what about the time in between MFA of World War II to the new unit? What's been the US response, the military response in that time period? And Blake is gonna dive into that effort. After World War II, the collective force of the original monuments men was discontinued as it was a response to the specific cultural heritage dangers of that war. But in the years following, cultural heritage still needed to be protected, even though it needed to look differently than how the MFA did it in World War II. And the army did continue to make those efforts and it did look differently. No longer was there a cohesive unit but rather individuals within the military with the relevant training and experience were assigned to the work of cultural heritage preservation. One example we could name is Kareem Wagner, retired army reserve major and currently head of the Smithsonian Institution's cultural rescue initiative. As an officer in the army reserve, Ms. Wagner assisted the Iraq National Museum after the infamous looting in 2003 during the invasion. These heritage experts in the military were also given the important task of training soldiers who often had no idea how cultural preservation efforts impacted their operations. In that regard, you could also look at the work of Dr. Lori Rush, cultural resources manager and army archeologist at Fort Drum in New York. Among other contributions, Dr. Rush and her team create mock archeological sites and design field exercises that test the unit's awareness of what to do when encountering instances of heritage and danger. In the Navy, we can point out the Naval History and Heritage Command or NHHC, which is essentially the naval history arm of the Department of the Navy and which the Naval War College Museum is a part of. Among the other important branches, NHHC has an underwater archeology branch that monitors over 3,000 shipwrecks and over 14,000 aircraft wrecks around the world. NHHC's conservation branch trains the Navy Combat Documentation Unit on disaster relief in emergency salvage of cultural heritage. The conservation branch also offers guidance on how to rapidly survey and document heritage in a disaster environment, as well as creates immersive training environments that include a simulation of an earthquake damaged museum. And they use these tools to evaluate participants on their ability to deploy artifact assessment skills and test skills in moving large fragile artifacts. And it was while the military was doing this work to preserve cultural heritage that the new monuments officers began to take shape. The 38 Gulf program lives within the Civil Affairs branch of the Army Reserve. Civil Affairs is designed to engage the civil or civilian component of the operational environment. The operational environment could be described as both the physical and virtual environment, as well as the social, political and cultural environment. Core competencies for Civil Affairs officers include, among others, civil military engagement, civil information management, and military government operations. This complex understanding of the operational environment as why the new civil affairs specialists, the 38 Gulfs will operate within four sectors and occupy 18 different specialties. The four sectors are economy and infrastructure, government and administration, rule of law and civil security, public and social services. And within those four sectors, the 18 different specialties are seen here. Although the 38 Gulf identifier has existed now for several years, the specialty was limited at first to officers holding a position in another Army branch that also had the relevant expertise to qualify for the new position. With some highly qualified officers transitioning into the new 38 Gulf designation, there were hurdles to fulfilling the required numbers of these new specialist roles in the Army Reserve, which is where the Army Reserve found solutions through the direct commissioning process. The idea being that you are expected to bring the expertise you've gained through your civilian career into your role as an Army reservist. The direct commission process is most often used to bring in doctors, lawyers, clergy, as commissioned officers. And this new direct commission avenue came with its challenges as well. To some extent, civilians that qualified to become a civil affairs specialist in one of these 18 specialties were often too old to join the military. And professionals that were young enough to join the military didn't have the experience to qualify as a specialist in one of these areas. The balancing act illustrates just one of the challenges for the Army to fill these roles. While not one of these 18 skill identifiers is more important than any other, there is one that has been pushed out front as the vanguard of the 38 Gulf program. And that is the 38 Gulf 6 Victor or the Heritage and Preservation Officer. The job description of the Heritage and Preservation Officer includes advising and assisting on cultural heritage assets from the national to the local levels, providing expertise on analysis, planning and implementation of systems to safeguard cultural heritage, conducting ethnographic research and engagement and more. None of these officers could take on the challenges of their roles alone. The institutional partners that have come alongside the military are crucial to the mission's success. One example is the Smithsonian Institution, which has provided their world-renowned experts to train Army personnel, including the new Heritage and Preservation Officers. Another example is Fresno State University's Jordan College of Agricultural Sciences and Technology, which has trained over 2,500 members of the military in the past decade. And this month began to collaborate with the agribusiness and food officers of the new 38 Gulf program. And Jessica is about to tell you a few points of comparison between the World War II monument spend and the 38 Gulf officers. Thanks Blake. There are quite a few differences between the MFA unit of World War II and the modern 38 Gulf program. As Blake explained, firstly, the 38 Gulf consists of a much more diverse set of expertise, not only those from the arts and heritage sector. The unit contains and will contain professionals across a broad spectrum, as Blake had mentioned, from agriculture to energy, education to technology, and of course, heritage and preservation. These various special seats will then assist in transitional governance responsibilities in civil military operations and conflict zones, with an overall objective of utilizing their experience and skill sets to assist commanders in strategic operational and tactical level problem solving and analysis. Thus, unlike the MFA counter parts, the 38 Gulf will not solely focus on the protection of physical or tangible cultural heritage or cultural property, monuments, buildings, artworks, archives. The unit will also evaluate the cultural climate of a conflict zone, considering the intangible aspects of heritage. Now, tangible heritage or physical heritage refers to material heritage, sites of cultural significance, monuments, libraries, churches, movable cultural property like archives, artworks. Intangible cultural heritage is a little bit harder to grasp. It's non-material, non-physical heritage, things like religions, traditions, languages, as well as the emotions and meanings placed on physical or tangible heritage. These intangible aspects of heritage will be considered by the 38 Gulf as well. Evaluating intangible heritage within a conflict zone will allow for a holistic approach to heritage protection and the identification of potential sources of cultural friction within a battle space. There are many gaps in our story about the military's role and the protection of cultural heritage. Our goal was to tell that story from beginning to end because that story is still being written. And maybe you wanna be a part of that story. If you'd like to learn more about becoming a Heritage and Preservation Officer with the Army Reserve, you can go to the Army's Talent Management website. I'll leave that up for a few seconds so you can snap a quick pic with your phone or write it down. And if you have even more questions, feel free to reach out to the Capabilities Development Manager of the 38 Gulf, Major Koyanga at the email address listed here. How does any of this relate to issues in national security as the title of this lecture series would lead us to ask? If you read the current national security strategy published in 2017, it advocates for, quote, a world of strong, sovereign and independent nations, each with its own cultures and dreams, thriving side by side in prosperity, freedom and peace. If you listen carefully, you'll find within those words the goal that the national security strategy or any conflict based on that strategy is designed to achieve, thriving culture. I think of the motto of the State of New Hampshire, live, free or die, or a quote often attributed to Patrick Henry, give me liberty or give me death. Essentially, let me be free to live life my way, engage in my heritage on my own terms, to shape my identity on a thriving culture of my choosing. And that's why cultural heritage is protected by international law and why cultural heritage will continue to be protected by the United States military. Thank you so much for tuning in for this lecture. We will be holding future online lectures and discussions concerning cultural heritage preservation and the 38 Gulf with various experts and leaders within the heritage protection sector, ultimately leading up to a cultural heritage protection conference, COVID pending in the coming year. We will be announcing the online presentation, specifics, dates, times through the Naval War College Museum and the Naval War College social media channels and websites, which you can find the museum online and see on the screen, yeah, at Naval War College Museum. So we'd now like to open up for any questions you may have, which you can type in the chat box. Well, thank you very much. That was a very, very interesting presentation, both looking back and looking forward. A number of questions have come through. So let me start out with one that might be kind of a hot potato, if you will. And that question has to do with the destruction, removal of Confederate memorials, statues, et cetera. How does that fit into your concept of cultural preservation and heritage preservation? That's a great question and one that has been discussed in recent years in particular by the various communities I'm a part of, military, civilian, museum world and just the general public, right? It's not one that the members of the Monuments Man and Older New would really engage in since it's more of a domestic issue. But one that needs to be discussed nevertheless because it is our own heritage that people have various opinions on. And not only do people have their own heritage that they like, but even within a small community, people are gonna have different opinions about it. So this is a really interesting topic because I don't think we've found the answer to this question yet. A lot of people have opinions and a lot of people have great ideas, but I think it's gonna be in the next few years that we're gonna see some people on different sides actually come together to find solutions that will be workable. So I don't think we're there yet, but it's an important question and one that people are working on. Good, thank you. Looking back, you talked about the Monuments Man efforts in Europe, was there similar action taking place in Middle East or in the Pacific? Or was it mostly limited to the European theater? You know, I was thinking about this question. I was perusing the chat box earlier. And because the vast majority of the looting and the destruction did take place in Europe by the Nazi regime, really, really that focus of the Monuments Man was Europe. They were under the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force Europe. Honestly, if I'm gonna answer completely honestly, I'm not 100% if there were individuals operating in the Pacific or the Middle Eastern theaters. Okay, thank you. A question. How do the cultural preservation officers do advance planning when you have no idea what theater you might have to operate in? Do you develop contingency plans that says if we were to operate in area X, these are the sites we'd be particularly concerned with or is that level of planning been done or is going to be done? That's a great question. There are a couple of answers to that. One being that I mentioned institutional partners that the new 38 Gulf program works with, one being the Smithsonian and the agribusiness officers working with Fresno State. And a great strength of this program is the networks that the officers in it have available to them. So yes, advanced planning is done by being prepared for generalities and within your specialty, but also being able to call on people when specifics do come up that do have that specialty and have the latest information. Very good. You mentioned the underwater artifacts and I just wonder how you feel about efforts to raise these artifacts such as the case of the turret on the monitor that was raised or do you believe they're best left in place and should not be moved? Jessica, you got thoughts on that one? I mean, I think that it's a very interesting question. I think that particularly when there are, there's loss of life involved. Occasionally it's a very tense subject. It's always a question of preserving it for the future versus leaving it lie as a respectful. And I think that that's a tough question to answer. I know that they're similar when I worked at Pearl Harbor, there were similar questions around and obviously that was mass loss of life on the USS Arizona, but there were questions about it leaks oil and do you stop the oil leaking or do you leave it alone because it's such a sovereign place? It's such a respectful place because so many individuals lost their lives and the answer so far has been leave it alone. So. And I'll say from my own experience, there are varying answers to that as well. I used to work at the 9-11 Museum in New York City, which part of that museum was built around human remains that are still in place. And obviously that has to be treated with a lot of respect. And yet there was a museum and a memorial built around it in order to show that respect and continue to tell the story and give life to that space. So there are a lot of different answers to that. And like we already said, people have various opinions on it and you'll find examples on both sides of the spectrum, some who do it great and some who are still figuring it out. Going back to Jessica's point, I was stationed on a destroyer in Pearl Harbor and whenever we leaked oil, we blamed it on the Arizona. It was convenient. Oh, that wasn't us. That must have been those guys on the other side of the harbor. So question, how many billets are we talking about and are there potentially enough to have an impact across the huge army population? That's a great question. I would say an answer to the second part of your question easily is yes, because if we're talking about preserving heritage and it's one small artifact that was stopped from being looted from an archeological dig in the Middle East, say for example, then that little artifact is no longer lost in the black market or in some private location, but it's making its way through the proper channels to a museum or a collection where it can be studied and displayed and preserved. So very small impacts can, or one person can make a big difference in this field because you're preserving something that, even if it's tiny. And the second part of the other part of that question, the size of the field, we're at the very beginnings of it and it's from the ground up. It's kind of recreating this from hasn't been done in 75 years since World War II. So it's small to get started. They're actively recruiting. If you're interested, go to that army talent management website I listed or reach out. And the civil affairs is a big field, not in comparison to the army in general, but there are a lot of opportunities. So if you're interested, I encourage you to reach out. Thank you. We have a question here about, have the academies begun teaching this aspect of heritage? And the basic thought being, if we don't talk to the officers at a very early time in their career, are they going to be sensitive to this stuff? Or when they get more senior is the cultural preservation person just going to be a pain in the neck that they don't even want to deal with. So is there an effort to educate young people early in their careers in this area? Not that I am currently in Blake might answer this differently, but not that I'm currently aware of in the academies that they are teaching heritage and preservation specifically, particularly with the 38 Gulf involved in that because it's so incredibly new. I do know that we have plans. I say we, I'm not at the Naval War College we use anybody longer, but there are plans in the works to potentially have the Naval War College have an elective course in heritage preservation which Blake would be working with. I'm too able to be in to teach those, those ideas of cultural heritage preservation. So I know that as far as the Naval War College goes we're trying to work on that, but at the academies, I don't think unless Blake you know differently. No, and though you won't find it as part of the core curriculum of the academies or most colleges around the country, you'll find instructors at the academies and at the Naval War College that do engage with these topics because they see it as related and it is important. And then also providing that instruction. Like I said, the 38 Gulfs and there are Army personnel who it's their job to train people, specifically military people who are going on deployment or who are going to use this information. So they're getting the information or that's the idea of the program. I'll just note there's a number of statements in the chat here that talk about units operating in Asia, et cetera, after the Second World War during the Second World War at the end of the Second World War. So some good information there. Here's a good question. It's interesting that John Nicholas Brown, one of the founders of the Naval War College Foundation was one of the original monuments men. Do you have any additional thoughts on John Nicholas Brown's participation during the World War II period? Pretty specific question, but do you have any visibility on this? I did see that in the chat and that's wonderful. Honestly, that was a link that I did not know existed, which further solidifies the link with the Naval War College and the new monuments men, the 38 Gulf program. Something I was unaware of. Good, I see another comment here about how the heritage and preservation seems like a natural path. And maybe that's a great place that you tell officers early in their career. At some point after you become the world's best armor officer or the world's best surface warfare officer, this is a subspecialty that you might want to consider because it has really long-term implications on what can and cannot be done. Any other thoughts about the international relations that are involved in this process? Does the United Nations play a strong role in cultural preservation? They do UNESCO, which is the governing body for the UN that engages with cultural heritage. They are active players in the field that engaging with all of the organizations I mentioned like the Blue Shield and Ikram and Ikamoos. And they are a part of the discussion where people who are at the tops of these fields get together and they coordinate topics or events that need addressing. So they are a big player. Very good. All right, well, we've got just a couple of minutes left. So Blake, I'll leave it up to you and Jessica, if you have any closing thoughts that you'd like to pass along and we will proceed after that with our family discussion group. So any wrap up comments you might have. Thank you again, everyone for joining us and the 38 Golf is really, as far as we're concerned too, we're very new to all of this and we're candidates for the program. So as it develops, we'll be able to answer a lot more questions or a lot more questions will be answered about the 38 Golf program. But we really appreciate everyone tuning in and joining us for the presentation. Yep. We love talking about this stuff and we love engaging with it. So thanks everybody for being here. Thank you very much. As I said, wonderful presentation and an important subject that we don't think enough about because the actions we take or don't take today may last the next century. So I'll turn to Admiral Chatfield and David to see if they have any thoughts before we take our break. I would like to say thank you so much. I wasn't aware of the Army's robust program but I wanted to talk a little bit about the Navy's robust program in areas where we are identified as the property owner or as the interface with local populations. Having come from Guam, I am deeply aware of the attachment and regard for each cultural artifact and the Navy in the Pacific Fleet has a great deal of responsibility to notice, to train soldiers, sailors, airmen and marine who come to Guam so that they don't inadvertently destroy or take away an artifact which has deep cultural significance to that population. And I can only say that no matter how much money we put toward it or however much time or attention we put toward it, a single failure leaves a lasting loss to a family and a community. So I'm very, very grateful for the amount of attention and time that you've given today to talk to us about our role and your particular expertise in this kind of preservation activity. Thank you so much. Just thank you, Admiral. Just I read an article today about a new law or a new process that's been established to protect Neil Armstrong's footprints on the moon and the stuff that was left behind by the lunar landers and whatnot and the notion being that, you know, increasingly numbers of people will eventually go to the moon and it would be very inappropriate to tramp around behind where these pioneers went and whatnot. So it's cultural preservation on a huge scale, on a not only international but outer space basis. So, okay. Well, thank you very much. I just wanted to say one last thing, John. I wanted to thank you both because you're giving a lot of background and understanding to something. And we, of course, this was all popularized by, you know, the movie, The Monuments Men. We had our time in Belgium here and we made it to Little Town of Bruges, a small canal town, and made it to the cathedral that houses the Madonna and Child. And on our third try, it took us three tries. We finally got access to the church and saw it in person. And it was just, it's one of those wonderful things. We have great pictures and I just, I love what you do. Thank you for sharing it with us and giving us the background because we learned a lot and the cultural importance, it just can't be stressed enough and we got to chase it a little bit ourselves. So I want to thank you for what you do and sharing it with us. Thank you, David, I appreciate that. Okay, we will take a five minute break, come back at 5.35 and we'll have our family discussion group meeting. And we hope to see you all back here in two weeks for the next presentation on Feral Cities. Thank you.