 I just wanted to welcome everyone to the 2017 Women's Peace and Security Conference. It's really great to have you here. So I, in my career of 37 years, I fight wars for a living. And I do it on behalf of my nation when they ask me to kill other people. I'm thankful to God that I did my duty. But it creates turmoil in my heart and my soul because I always wonder about our ability to prevent the conflicts. And when people ask me where would you spend another dollar if you had it, I used to think about why we need another destroyer or another flux capacitor or another hygromulator to carry us over the edge. And then I participated in a lecture series that was created by our great faculty here at the college. We have an evening agenda for the spouses of the students. The very first lecture was taught by Professor Mary Rahm. It was about women and security. And now my answer is completely different. I don't need any more hygromulators or flux capacitors. We certainly do as a nation. But if I personally had one more dollar to spend, I'd spend it on educating a woman or a female child. Because that's where the future is. That's where the most impact would come. It's extraordinary what the statistics show about the potential in our world if we just together reach out and grasp it. Conferences like this I know will illuminate some of those ideas. And it's a great privilege, and it's quite humbling honestly, having the opportunity to address this group from all over the world. People like-minded in their perspective of this quest for peace and security. So it's real privilege for me, but it's also a privilege in an honor to introduce Professor Mary Rahm. So the professor's been doing these conferences for quite some time now, God bless her. And this week we elevated her professorship up to be the chair of Women's Peace and Security. Thank you. I'm thrilled that Admiral Harling could stop by the president of the Naval War College to address all of you folks. I keep this very short, and I would like you to know, Commander Andrea Cameron in the corner is going to be your emcee for today. So Andrea, thank you. We have a very special guest here, Ambassador Judy McClennon, who is the first ambassador to the UN in women's issues. First representative to the Commission on the Status of Women that had the rank ambassador. Great, and she just flew in from Ireland. So we're really happy to have her come. Welcome everyone. We have several nations represented this year. We have NGOs, we have academics, and it's a great group. I love your genuineness. I love your work, and it's really good to have you all in the same room. And I'm going to turn it over so we can get going with panel one, Commander. Thank you very much. Good morning. My name is Andrea Cameron. I'm here to help you get whatever you can out of this event. So if you ever need anything, please don't hesitate to come see me over here on the side of the room. I want to take care of a few notes of administration, and then we'll get right off into the event. First, I'm going to be your timekeeper. So we have lots of panels and lots of great discussion today. The general rule of thumb is 15 minutes. We have bathrooms, so our first break will be after our first speaker and the panel. The bathrooms will be to your right, and then there's a hallway to the left. The women's bathroom is on the second floor, and the men will go up or down to the third deck or the first deck. And if you want a refreshment during the break, you'll go to the left, through the flags, up the beautiful flight of stairs with the red carpet, and I believe most of you saw the coffee and refreshments that'll be here. That's also where lunch will be served this afternoon. I want to make a quick note about the speaking rules for this engagement. We are under nonattribution, which means that the presentations of every panel speaker is not to be attributed to them. The Q&A will be under Chatham House Rules, and if you are being interviewed, it will be a one-on-one, and you'll be fully aware that you're being interviewed and that you could possibly be on the record. Our schedule is very full today, so we will have the first guest speaker, Rosa Brooks. I want to introduce her in a moment. And we'll have our first panel, then we'll have a break. We'll have our second panel, and we'll have lunch. And lunch is a two-fold event. We have all of the food that will be provided in the Maham Rotunda, and we'll also have a voluntary showing of a movie here within this room. After lunch, we'll have a couple more panels, and then all of us are invited over to the Admiral's Quarters for a reception, which will also include food for a light meal. Before the evening guest speaker, we have a lecture series here at the Naval War College, and we have Noble Peace Laureate Lema Gabawe, who will be speaking to everyone, and we are all invited both to the reception and to the event tonight. So as you can see, it's a very, very full day. We start today with our speaker, Rosa Brooks, and I get the honor of introducing her. She has had high-level positions both within the Departments of State and the Department of Defense. She's worked for international human rights NGOs. She's a tenured law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and a proclaimed journalist in print, radio, and television. Her most recent book, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything, shows how she has become one of the top experts on national security and the changing nature of modern warfare. She has traveled the world, and she brings all of these perspectives to her call today, so we are looking forward to your insights on our theme of women, peace, and security. Rosa Brooks. Thanks so much, Commander Cameron, and thank you to Mary Rown for inviting me into Admiral Harley for kicking off this conference. It's a real honor to be here. I think the excuse for having me here is that years ago, in the early days of the Obama Administration, women, peace, and security were part of my portfolio in the office of the Secretary of Defense. So at one time, I was very up on all of the details. It hasn't been my main focus in the last few years, but it's terrific to get back to thinking about it. And I just wanted to say how, looking around this room, how happy, how happy and proud I am to see all these amazing, tough, smart, creative, experienced women sitting here in this room, and a few men. And just how delighted I am when I look at the list of speakers to see the incredible range of tough, smart women experts on this issue. I'm so happy and proud of that. I'm also just heartbroken by that. I'm heartbroken that here in 2017, at a conference on women, peace, and security at the Naval War College, almost everyone on all the panels are women and almost everyone here in the audience are women. And I salute those of you who are men who came here and talk a little bit more about why. And it's very similar to the things that Admiral Harley raised in his short opening remarks. It is incredibly depressing to me, so heartbreaking to me, that 402 years after some of the first feminist manifestos were written, 225 years after Mary Wollstone Kraft, nearly a century after women's suffrage, 54 years after Betty Friedan wrote the Feminine Mystique, 25 years after the United Nations proclaimed International Women's Year. I remember standing with my own mother on a stage at International Women's Day in 1975. It remains true that when most people hear the phrase women, peace, and security, the only word they registered is women. It is still for all the unbelievable work of people in this room and in so many other rooms around the world have done. This remains something of a fringe issue on the security agenda, something for the girls to keep busy with, something for the women to care about, something towards which senior leaders make occasional rhetorical flourishes, well-meaning rhetorical flourishes, but generally feel that they do not need to make central to their own lives, central to their own objectives, that they can leave it to the women to do the vast majority of the studies of the impact of gender on security, of the impact of gender on economic development, and so on and so forth, the impact of gender on conflict. I don't mean to be overly grim this morning, particularly so early in the morning, it's never good to depress people too much when they haven't had enough coffee anyway, because needless to say, after all, there have been unbelievable achievements as well. 200 years ago in most U.S. states, they were considered largely a form of chattel. Women couldn't own property in their own name, in most U.S. states 200 years ago, they couldn't sign contracts in their own name, their husbands, or their brothers, or their fathers had to do it for them. They couldn't enter the medical or legal professions. Less than a century ago, there were virtually no women doctors or lawyers, no women in the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives. The only women who would have been here on a U.S. naval base would have essentially been the wives and the occasional maid or cook. Marital rape was lawful in most states in the United States. Things are pretty different now. We have female four-star admirals. We have female Marines and FBI agents and police officers and physicists and CIA agents, wrestlers, Supreme Court justices, members of Congress. We've had women secretaries of state. You name it. There are women who have done it. Not quite president, right? But we're getting there. We've had women national security advisors. The majority of university students in the United States today are now female. And the same, we've seen similar progress all around the globe, needless to say. Remember, it was only just over 100 years ago that women first got the vote in Norway. And since then, the change has been unbelievable. When you think about the last few millennia in which women were essentially second-class citizen or men were often not considered citizens either. But the rise of human rights in general has been a rising tide that has lifted all boats and we've seen substantial improvements in the status of women around the globe. Today there are women leaders all over the world. Today we have seen dramatically increased attention to these issues in virtually every country around the globe. So that's all good. So it's not all bad news. It's been a lot of progress, particularly in the last century, needless to say. But I don't want us to kid ourselves. I know I'm speaking to the choir here in this room, but the challenges that remain are just staggering. You know, I think of Malala, the Pakistani girl who was shot by the Taliban just for speaking out for women and girls' rights. I think of Saudi Arabia, our ally in which women still can't vote in national elections, can't drive, can't get passports without their husband's consent, can't swim in the same swimming pools as men. I think of Northern Nigeria where it remains lawful for men to use force for the purpose of correcting their wives. I think of the Russian parliament's recent actions reducing the protections for victims of domestic violence by eliminating criminal penalties and making it a civil offense. I think of the Syrian and Iraqi refugee women in refugee camps in Western countries and in France and in Greece and in Germany who say that they can't go to the toilets in the camp or the showers for fear of being raped or sexually assaulted. Globally around the world, women make up 70% of victims of human trafficking. Nearly half of female homicide victims are killed by members of their own family compared to only 6% of male homicide victims. And, you know, I could recite the statistics I'm sure you could too until we get even more depressed, but globally women are more likely to go hungry than men, women and girls. They are less likely to finish high school, finish secondary education. They constitute 40% of the global workforce but women around the globe still earn less than men for the same work. Only a quarter of national parliamentarians around the globe are women. Women make up only about 10% of heads of state around the globe. Sexual violence remains rampant particularly during armed conflicts and women suffer disproportionately in all sorts of ways during armed conflicts. When I worked on the National Implementation Plan for Resolution 1325 when I was at the Pentagon only seven or eight years ago, however long ago it was we were obviously focused on identifying things that the US military and the Defense Department could do to advance the women's peace and security agenda. And I think that we have made progress. I think that the US military in many ways has actually been a leader in this area. That being said, globally things are still pretty grim here too. Women are still often shut out of peace negotiations. The statistics on the inclusion of women in peace negotiations still suggest that although things have gotten substantially better women make up a tiny minority only 2% of chief mediators and all peace agreements negotiated between 1992 and 2011 had women as chief mediators and women made up only 90% of all negotiators. Here in the United States too for all our women secretaries of state and women national security advisors and female generals and admirals women also are a small, small minority in the national security field and foreign policy generally. The ratio of men to women in national security jobs in the US government is roughly 3 to 1 when you get to the more senior levels that ratio gets a whole lot worse. The percentage of women in the US military shot up after the creation of the all volunteer force but has been largely stagnant in the last 20 years. We haven't seen a substantial increase and this may change and actually quite optimistic about this with the lifting of the combat exclusion rule. You know, I'm very hopeful that this will bring a new generation of young women into the US military now that they see that the career paths open to them are the same as those open to men. But nevertheless, I do think things are going to get worse before they get better actually on most fronts here. I think most of us sitting in this room were probably very inspired and in January we saw the women's marches around the world right after the presidential inauguration. It was just amazing to see women in almost every US city and Antarctica in cities around the globe women and men turning out to say hey, women matter too, we need to fight for this particular agenda and other agendas that have to do with women's issues and other forms of equality and fairness around the globe. It was unbelievably inspiring but of course what inspired it was not terribly inspiring, right? I mean we have a US president and I won't make a partisan comment but I will note that his record on women's issues is not stiller. We have a president who has used disparaging terms like slobs and pigs and dogs to talk about women with whom he has disagreements and who during the campaign team emerged in which he suggested that sexually assaulting women was an acceptable form of behavior that you can get away with if you're a powerful person. And that is staggeringly depressing and I think we've also seen for those of us who thought, well you know we've got a whole big US government and whoever's president doesn't matter that much well it turns out that whoever's president doesn't matter quite a lot in all kinds of ways and I'm sure you're reading the news with as much attention and anxiety as I have but we've also seen things that in very concrete ways are damaging to the women's peace and security even a global gag rule to slashes across the board or efforts to dramatically slash budgets for diplomacy and development which are going to have a disproportionate impact on women and efforts at the State Department for instance have cut some of the very programs that are most vital to pursuing women's peace and security agenda from the community of democracies to the position of the ambassador at large for war crimes issues you name it these are cuts in policy decisions that will have a disproportionately damaging impact on our ability as a nation to continue to take a leading role in pursuing women's peace and security agenda and here's the irony right this is not about us ladies as Admiral Harley said the women's peace and security agenda is not about doing a little something for the girls this is about the difference between winning and losing when it comes to conflict it's about the difference between peace and war it's about the difference between prosperity and poverty between success and failure in almost every endeavor of humanity and again I don't think I need to tell this group of people about the evidence and obviously causation is hard to tease out but correlation is pretty darn persuasive women's participation in peace processes for instance studies find that if you have women involved in the peace process that you increase by 35% the likelihood that peace agreements will hold for at least 15 years one 20 year study of the percentage of women in parliaments around the globe found that when a nation increases the representation of women in parliament by 5% it becomes 5 times less likely that country to use violence as a response to international crises gender equality is one of the top predictors of peaceful communities and meanwhile gender inequality conversely gender inequality is a top predictor of conflict both within states and between states this is true when you look at economics and development as well on studies of wall street investors female investors tend to make less risky investment decisions than male investors and over longer periods of time of higher returns when you look at global development the single biggest thing the single strongest thing that is most strongly correlated with economic growth in developing countries is investing in education for girls you don't need to be an essentialist you don't need to think that women are just smarter, better than men you don't need to think that at all in order to think boy these correlations probably are trying to figure out this is the message that we should be heeding and maybe it's as simple as something we also know from study after study which is that diverse groups diverse teams groups that have gender diversity consistently make more creative and better decisions than homogeneous groups when you shut out half the global population from vital decision making venues whether it's economic decision making or whether it is war and peace now there's war and peace you're losing a whole lot of talent and a whole lot of different perspectives and even if you think it is entirely nature rather than nurture and that many of these differences would disappear over time in a more equal world and perhaps they would but where we are right now women's perspectives are different than men in fairly systematic ways across every country and including those perspectives has indisputably positive impacts on everything from economic development to the reduction of conflict to success during conflicts and I think others will talk at different points one of the things that we worked on when I was at the Pentagon was documenting the evidence that things like female engagement teams in Afghanistan and efforts to empower women in places conflict zones in which US military personnel were engaged just made our jobs easier it's purely pragmatic even if you didn't care about fairness you didn't care about equality you just had a purely pragmatic perspective that says we want to be successful here we don't want to fail here we want to succeed here that one of the best things you can do is work on including and empowering women across the board it's always just struck me as a real oddity the way in which this issue has always been so marginalized it's funny nobody thinks that the only people who should do studies on cancer are cancer patients and nobody thinks that the only people who should do studies on incoming equality or poverty are poor people we all get that there are issues that affect all of us and that the wealthy as well as the poor need to care the healthy as well as the sick need to care so it's always struck me it's so very very strange and sad as I said it's heartbreaking that when it comes to issues of women peace and security that by and large most people particularly most men not all so this is an issue that only women need to care about when in fact I think as we all know it's an issue that we all need to care about I'm going to stop in a moment to see if people have comments or questions and I also know where we started a little tiny bit late but I think the the theme I wanted to end on is really just we've got our work cut out for us those of you who are in this room do amazing work and that includes the men who have taken the time to be part of this and to care about this I'm not talking to you guys where you get it and that's why you're here and it's incredibly important but I think part of the the biggest challenge that we collectively face male and female alike is getting past that tendency when people hear women peace and security to sort of edit out the last three words and not hear only the first one because until we can make sure that conferences like this have an equal number of men and women in the audience like this have an equal number of women on the panel and I don't mean that it's not about some sort of affirmative action on this issue it's simply about are the most monumental part of our job and I know the people during the course of this conference will be talking about all kinds of issues from training to role in the media but I think the most monumental challenge that runs through all of these is getting this issue to be seen as what it is which is, as I said, not about helping women but about helping all of us not about helping women but about winning wars as opposed to losing wars about having peace instead of conflicts about succeeding rather than failing thank you very much I'm happy to take any questions or comments or we're not just in case they think so you said you had documented the evidence that that's an improved outcome where is that report I don't know if there's a report what I do know is that one of the things that we've worked on and I'm sure there is data somewhere as well as lots of anecdotal evidence that the work of female engagement teams and similar efforts were often vital to getting information on surgeon activity to getting information on who is and who is in part of the Taliban as well as to figuring out how to have successful development projects successful education projects successful justice sector projects and that in a culture where it remains the case that often it's culturally inappropriate for men to engage with women just from an intelligence gathering perspective you shut yourself off from vital sources of information if you have no way to talk to the women who often are able to say this is not about female engagement teams but I did come across this study recently and if you google it I'm sure it'll pop up that women were often vital sources of funding, caches of small arms because they sometimes knew where they were and the men didn't know where they wouldn't say that women had a better sense of the local geographies so there have been studies of the importance during conflicts just of the information intelligence that women have found in my listening process I'm hearing that we don't like the name women's case and security we need to change people think it's just about that it's just about women and some suggestion now I'm talking on the military side to maybe call it something else maybe gender perspectives so that the culture that we're dealing with the culture that we're working with the culture that we're educating whether it be on the ground or on the military that they are more accepting of the subject matter that connects to what we're doing in conflict yeah, you know I have mixed feelings on the one hand I think that I don't know if you're going to say gender piece of security which sometimes people do necessarily makes a difference I think that the same people who tune out when they hear women tune out when they hear the word gender what I think we need to do and I think it's beginning to happen and Mary's work here is an example is essentially mainstreaming this information so that it's not just taught in a separate course on women in security or a separate course on women's issues like development or governance reform or security or peace processes that it is integrated fully into because again, I sort of think of it this way I imagine going up to a senior military official and saying hey guess what general or guess what secretary depends I'm an academic, I've just done some research and it's practically magic I discovered this thing that will make your peace agreement so much more likely to succeed do you want to know whether or not I kind of want to know about that actually I do worry about language in the way it makes people tune out I don't know that there's a simple solution to that other than continuing to in every way possible to be making the point that this is not a special interest hey, Wall Street hedge fund manager I got something for you that's going to be comfortable, it's easy get a few more women I can prove it how about that initiative on this and it turned into a 20 page article on how women equality needs to be pushed into the military ram down the throat of AOR countries and my first comment is when I'm looking at this as she said about the name it's peace and security using gender mainstream to improve peace and security again I can see from the civilian side versus the military side because I do both as a preserver, contractor and previous government so throwing the word in there kills you on the military side of the ass if you go peace and security agenda and one of the subcategories of increasing peace and security is the initiatives for women and gender mainstream and gender analysis and all of that you get a little further with the military as far as understanding yeah, and my own experience when I was working on this issue within the Pentagon was I think actually very very receptive and indeed I remember one Army colonel who came to one of our early meetings as we were starting our information gathering for contributing the DOD part of the National Action Plan and we did a sort of data call and we said if they can help us get examples of good things DOD or why this is important and this guy I don't remember his name but he came in and he after the introductions he said I just got to tell you working on the lady issues was the best thing I did in Afghanistan and I thought well okay maybe that's not the terminology I would prefer him to use but you know he was incredibly passionate he said when we started working with women's organizations it changed the outcomes and I can't even remember anymore what it was that he was working with agricultural stuff or justice sector stuff or counterinsurgency stuff who knows but you know I think that we do have a generation of younger military personnel male and female like who have seen firsthand in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan that it actually it just helps and getting those voices out there particularly when they're male voices I think just given the nature of things is really important I read the first half of your most recent book on the plane here and I'm hoping to finish it on the way home and I really appreciated what you had to say in your analysis about the way that war is changing in the military's scope and job is changing and I'm curious within that thesis what you see that potentially meaning for this agenda and what sort of challenges and opportunities you see for security given that's a great question I don't know if I have a complete answer to it but I do think that in some ways just in terms of the US landscape it opens up a lot of opportunities for women I mean the the 19th century model of warfare and indeed it took us through the first half of the 20th century you know when warfare is all about mass all about throwing bodies against weapons against the other guys bodies and it's all about physical strength and endurance and involves mass casualties too there are some historic and compelling reasons to make it a young man's job biologically speaking young men are relatively dispensable you need women if you want to keep your society going you don't need that many young men historically speaking and when it comes to sheer physical strength and stamina on average as we know and as we are increasingly seeing demonstrated by the courageous women going through ranger school and reading basic course and so forth successfully as we know that there are plenty of women who can do it too but just in terms of averages that was a form of warfare that it was advantageous to be young and male and increasingly the forms of warfare that occupy the United States even though both old fashioned forms of warfare are very much still with us when it comes to cyber warfare when it comes to a lot of the kinds of tasks involved with counter terrorism or counter insurgency and so on these physical strength and stamina are close to irrelevant in those particular forms of warfare and I think it opens up a lot more space for women to become senior leaders in addition to just getting rid of anachronistic and archaic rules that said even if you're a woman you can do these tasks you can't be a ranger whatever it may be so I think that in that sense there's some room for optimism on the other hand there's always an on the other hand I think that the ways in which the securitization of everything does tend to push these issues off center stage simply because by force of habit people think of this you get this reversion to sorry girls we gotta think about North Korea nuclear weapons, we don't have time for this ripple of stuff about gender equality again it's a thing we hear over and over ask me again when the war is over and then we'll have time to get to that as opposed to being able to see these issues as absolutely central to prevailing so I think it cuts both ways Black and white talk about women who and then it's a philosophy to go away together and then you spoke about that things make it worse which one could see as in order to have to win you also have to have the other side of it you have to lose too, that's how we evolve and so having things are gonna get worse we put that out there we wanna put out the positive piece but we're also being transparent or down to earth that that darkness that we may go through is an opportunity for us and we have to look for those opportunities and that's an opportunity for us to move forward is it possible that we can think about the philosophy of this a little differently in a life of that and the philosophy I have is that there's a down side of our nature and there's a masculine side of our nature we all have some of it whether we're male or female we're male or female charts we're all people some of us have more of one some of us use it at different times no matter what country you're from and what sector you are and if we oppose it in that sense we'll be built from that baseline perhaps we could put it into the public maybe it would be the world more open to it well I guess two thoughts in response to that I don't really know what it means to have male sides and female sides or to be feminine or to be masculine I mean I, you know, obviously there are huge debates within the scholarly community whether it's any such thing and I think it's actually really interesting in which the issue of transgender rights has brought this up again the fight that early feminists made was for, you just say there's no such thing as women are like this and men are like that aside from the roles that society has forced us into you open up true equality and a lot of that will go away it's interesting you know, as someone who grew up in a feminist household thinking about the transgender rights issue and I am a strong supporter of transgender rights I think it's completely irrelevant to everything, every job that matters whether somebody had surgical procedure to change their gender or sex at birth or not, but that being said when I hear statements like well I never felt like a girl I think it doesn't mean to feel like a girl I never felt like a man or I always felt like I was really meant to be and I think I don't know what it means to feel like a girl I don't know what it means to feel like a woman I know what it means to feel like me with this particular bundle of personalities some of which may be more stereotypically female some of which may be more stereotypically male and I myself would like us to get to a day where none of us talk about what it is like to be more feminine or more masculine where we just accept that there is a vast range of human traits and we all have an interesting mix and some of us have biologically different forms than others of us and who cares you know one slightly ambivalent reaction I suppose my other reaction is I in dark times there are challenges certainly were it not for the darkness we wouldn't have gotten the women's marches and the mobilization of many people who don't normally consider themselves politically engaged or active that's a good thing I think Martin Luther King's famous the moral arc of the universe is long but an arc towards justice the only thing I would say is no it doesn't necessarily it doesn't arc anywhere in particular unless we make it arc in that direction and yes what does not kill us makes us strong but only if we determine to make ourselves strong again I think I'm preaching to choir but the minute we sit back and say well the general trend line is upward that's going to continue the moral arc is sort of arcing happily in the beneficial direction of years has been overall a good one but the minute we think there's something inevitable about that continuing forget it we're doomed there's nothing inevitable whatsoever about progress in this or any other area of life if there's going to be continued progress it's going to be something that we have to fight for