 very much conditions based creeping vulnerabilities. Now, what do I mean by that? A vulnerability in and of itself does not create a threat. It is something that adds as an enabler. So when we talk about water and sanitation, if I went to the Pentagon and said, look, we've got a real concern in Africa. We have the threat of water and sanitation. I'd be laughed out of the room. Look, we've got a real threat in Africa. It's poverty would equally be laughed out of the room. Look, we have a real threat in Africa. It's the impacts of climate change, natural disasters would be laughed out of the room. Why? Because those are creeping vulnerabilities. However, much like if you took those each as an individual card and began to stack those cards to create a house of cards, what would happen if you pulled one of those cards out? Well, the house would fall. Now, what we don't know is how fast the house would fall, which direction would fall, would it burn, all this fall, and would it spill over, knock over the house next to it while it was falling. Yet these are the vulnerabilities. These are the security concerns that African militaries face. Now, why is this important? Let's talk security sector reform from an African perspective. When we discuss security sector reform here in the United States, we talk very much about, well, reforming the military, reforming the judiciary, reforming the police. Yeah, when I talk with African military leaders in Africa, they discuss reforming a military away from traditional kinetic-based defense and more towards the security concerns of that country. Many times I've talked with African leadership, many times I've talked with African generals and some others, and they've said, we consider ourselves predatory. Now, why is that? And at first I thought, okay, well, because a lot like what's going on in Eastern Congo, there's a lot of pillaging and plundering and attacks on civilians. No, what they meant was, they were no value added to the society because of the way that they're structured. They understand that. One of the greatest and most coherent arguments that I heard was from the Chief of Defense in Angola. He was asked, a number of out of shades were sitting around a table and he was queried on. General Furtado, we've been told, or you told us that you were going to reduce your forces from 180,000 men under arms down to 100,000, 120,000, yet you failed to do that. Why have you not done that? And General Furtado, without batting an eye, looked and said the only skills that these individuals have are pulling a trigger. How would that help the stability and security of this country putting them out on the streets? The following question I ask is, General, how do you view? How, what do you want your military to look like? He said, I view the military as a vehicle for social development and social change. This is an opportunity that we have, but again, we can only achieve those things for which we have words. And right now with a kinetic based paradigm, right now with the way that we traditionally view security, traditionally view the armed forces, it is very difficult for us to get our minds around the idea of militaries as vehicles of social development and social change. Yet when you look in a number of African countries, particularly those that are just coming out of a civil war, about the only functioning and viable organ of government is the military. Why can we not look at this through an African lens and understand that there's a real opportunity to use the military as that backbone for the vocational skills, the backbone for the training to provide for the civil service and the skills required to build a viable country. When you look around Angola, you see a lot of Chinese building things. You see a lot of resilience building things. You see a lot of Portuguese building things. You don't see very many Angola. Why is that? Because the social or the vocational skills are lacking. What are the threats, the vulnerabilities in Africa? It's things that could very easily integrate women into the military, which could then be trained on these kinds of skills. When you talk with African militaries, they want training on water and sanitation. They want training on infrastructure development. They want training on health. These are things that could very easily have women integrated into the military, again using that platform as a platform of social development, social change, and then allowing them to go out into the civilian workforce and to build a more stable and prosperous country which would then allow for more economic viability. Yet a lot of these things can't happen because we are hobbled by a lot of our views of security here in this country. Now granted, a lot of the programs that we have, the ECOTA program is fantastic, very, very much needed. But a lot of the other things that could be done are seen as peripheral simply because that's not our kinetic view of security. Yet, if you look at the two greatest attacks on the United States, they happened at the beginning of the 21st century and neither one of those came from a state-based threat. Hurricane Katrina and 9-11. So the question is, until we have the words, until we have the language, we will not be able to achieve the success that we need in this country. We will not have the words that we need to be able to partner with and to understand the needs of our African partners and also those of the developing world. So understand, we have a very limited time here. I'll stop with that. I look forward to engaging each of you in further discussions. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you for framing our discussion today and really helping us see it from a much broader perspective than only gender but really setting it up for the discussion about gender. Colonel Diop, would you mind taking the podium? Thank you very much. We have 10 minutes, you say? Presentation will end after 10 minutes. Good morning, everybody. I'm Colonel Diop. I'm from Senegal. I'm in the Senegalese Air Force. I'm very happy to be here with this wonderful panel and I'm seeing very good friends who are in the audience, I say hi and hope we're gonna have a wonderful session of Q&A. Since we have only 10 minutes, I will skip most of things I thought could be very interesting and relevant to discuss and we will still have time to discuss those issues during the Q&A session. I would like first to share with you the context in which the gender mainstreaming is happening in the military. This context is first of all about the fact that our president is someone who is known as interested in gender issues. So the political involvement, the political will. And we also have a country where at least 50%, some people are saying 52% of the population is composed of women. We also are witnessing the wake up of women. Women in my country are trying to be involved in the issues that are the issues. They're waking up. We can see, we can feel that. We also have witnessed many practices in our neighboring countries. We're aware of the fact that in many military, in our surrounding countries, the women are not very well treated. And this is also a concern for us. And finally, I happened to be working in an institute where we have been these last months trying to explain to people that the security concept has been evolving recently. From the physical security, we're moving to the human security. And I think Bibi talked about that earlier. I happened to be in an institute where we also work on professionalization of the military. I am in an institute where we're working on conceptualizing the security sector and the military in particular. And finally, I am working in an institute where we are closely working on civil-military relations. How we can improve the civil-military relations. And the work we are doing on gender issues has to do with the governance. Because we think that if we make sure that we improve the governance within the security sector in general and within the military, we will improve the civil-military relations. And to improve the governance, we think that the best, the first thing to do is to make sure that all the personnel, women and men, are treated the right way. So this is the context in which we are working on gender mainstreaming in the security sector and in the military. So to make sure that the gender mainstreaming in the military is going right, we have followed the following process. First of all, we have taken time to review all the existing legal documents that organize the Senegalese military. And we have found that most of the articles were not relevant anymore and do not allow a good presence of women in the military. So we gave in the 57 pages document recommendations to fix those weaknesses. And we have also in a platform gathered people from the civil society, people who have worked as former ministers, people who were former chief of defense staff in the diverse platform. We have for about one month and a half discussed all the issues we found that needed to be fixed. We also undertook interviews with the first pioneers woman. We have undertaken interviews with people who were the first one to receive the first woman in the military. And we did not wanna be pretentious to be the only ones to give our opinion on what needed to be done. So we decided to organize a conference during which we shared our opinions with a larger audience composed of people coming from all the components of the security sector. And we validated our recommendations. And from there we went to the Ministry of Gender and showed them our work and confronted our work with the national strategy on equity and equality on gender issues at the national level to make sure that what the military are doing in Senegal is in line with what is being done at the national level. We have also worked with them to make sure that we were in line with all the conventions our country signed and ratified at the regional level, at the international level also. And finally we worked with the Ministry of Gender to make sure that we had a realistic roadmap that will allow us to empower the Senegalese military in a way people at all the categories will be able to deal with gender issues. And we also worked on a policy or sectorial policy on gender to do the theory that is needed to make sure that the practice will go well. So these are the things we have done in Senegal in this particular context I described earlier. And I think that we were very successful. Our hierarchy is very happy about what we have done. And to me, I think that the reasons why we were successful have to do first with the political will, the strong political will, which was there. Our president was the one who said we need to have our military mirror our society. Our Minister of Defense told us we need to make sure that this process will be done in the right way. So the political will is there. We were also very inclusive. We had a platform, as I told you, composed of diverse people coming from diverse backgrounds. And one of these people was the one who wrote most of the legal documents. So we were able to understand the spirit of most of these documents and work on that. We undertook, as I told you, interviews with people coming from all the components of the security sector and shared their experiences. We have partnered with specialized organizations because we told ourselves that instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, we just need to go and partner with organizations that have done very good work on gender issues and try to see what we can learn from them and just make sure that we adapt what they have done to our context. We also were, we made sure that women were part of this process because we have the tendency as men to decide on behalf of women. And this is wrong. So this time, we made sure that women were part of this process. We were also able to contextualize. We have learned a lot from other organizations from other countries. When we were organizing this conference, we invited a general woman from the US who shared the experience as a female officer in the American military. We invited a general from Gabon who shared her experience. We invited officers from Mali, from Nigeria, from the Gambia who shared their experiences. But we made sure that what we heard from them was contextualized because Senegal is different. We have our own culture. We have our own history. We have our own mindset. We have our own people. And contextualizing is something which is very important and cannot take recipes from somewhere else and apply them without contextualizing them. So I think that the fact that we have taken time to contextualize was also very important. And finally, we conceptualized because I'm a strong believer that what is not well conceptualized cannot be well practiced. You need to take time to do the theory to make sure that you know where you're going to set your objectives, to think of the capacities you need, to see what ways you will be using to take your capacities to reach your goals if you want to be successful. If you don't do that, you will not be successful. We also have taken time to conceptualize the process we were going through. These are the things I wanted to share with you and I will be more than happy to go into the details during the Q&A session. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Colonel Diop, for very clearly laying out what you all have done. And I think it will stimulate a lot of discussion. Thank you. Thank you. Can you bring this into our room here in the United States? Well, good morning. Thanks for having me here. I'm honored and humbled to be part of the panel. I'm clearly, they're very credible. He's published. He's a voice of authority on the subject and Major Ahern is both a female and in the military, so beats me on both counts. Yeah, so I'm probably the least credible guy. I feel like I'm trying to get out of jury duty here, but so I don't speak with a lot of authority on this subject, but I think that's okay. And I'll explain that. About 18 years in the service in a decidedly non-gender integrated field of professional work as a special forces officer, there are no female green berets out there. I served the first half of my career without ever serving in a unit with a female. And to be quite honest, social justice issues to include gender mainstreaming are not on the top of the list of things that we teach. Special forces guys. This is not one of those things that we focus on, maybe to our demise, and I'm certainly open to discuss that. But despite my lack of credentials, I think sometimes having that person with a separate point of view or something from outside the group is good. Now I'll explain to you why, a case in point, my neighbor was stealing my chicken eggs. Like I keep chickens and they're wonderful, great pets. But my neighbor was stealing my eggs and this is a true story, honest to God. And we thought to ourselves, that's just not right. Something must be done. So my wife and I were discussing, clearly we have to post a sign on the coop with explain why it's wrong to steal our eggs. And my wife and I sat at the dinner table and a half an hour of proposing different things to put on the sign to determine what would be the best way to keep our neighbor Pam, Pam, from stealing our eggs. And we came up with various incantations and finally my son, 13 years old, clearly not an expert in anything but video games, turned to us and said, dad, why don't you just pick a sign that says, Pam, don't steal our eggs. So just like that, someone who is not an expert in getting anything to video games had the right answer. So there's value I think in having someone who's clearly not an expert, participate in the discussion. I'm gonna talk to you a little bit today about what we do at the Special Warfare Center and why that's important to this group. Talk to you about what I call operationalizing gender mainstreaming and then a little bit about our cultural support team program. The, at the Special Warfare Center, Fort Bragg, we train Army Special Operations Forces. On any given day, there's 3,000 students in my school. As of this morning, I think we were in 66 countries around the world, Army Special Operations Forces, male, female, mostly Green Berets, some civil affairs and some military information support operations, the old psychological operations folks. So we're around the world. Pre-9-11, we were in over 100 countries, I think by the end of the decade, we'll be back up to about 120 countries. So we're a relevant force. We are where these issues are important and we're there every day and we're influencing those issues. My courses last anywhere from a few weeks to up to a year, so I have a lot of student contact hours. So I have an opportunity to influence a student's view and then make that person operational and put them out in the force. So I'm in a good position there. But I have a lot of things I have to teach these folks. So it's gotta be important so I have to show value. So I have to show the value of why is gender mainstream important. I think all of us here, we agree, it's important for any number of issues, but to explain that to a group that I have to train on so many other tasks, many of them hard skills, many of them things that no kidding will save their lives, shoot, move, communicate, and medicate, I have to show value in why gender mainstreaming training is important to them. So to me it comes down to operationalizing gender mainstream. What I'll tell you is that having read the UN mandate and this will smack in the face of a lot of you is I think we're doing it incorrectly. I think that if you create gender mainstreaming as a separate issue and you tackle that issue and you solve that issue, that's great, you solve that issue. And maybe by proxy of having developed some strategies to solve that issue, you may have solved one or two other issues. But for every issue, for right now there's another group of folks somewhere in DC that are meeting about something else, human security or environmental security, resource security, human trafficking, whatever it may be. And they're just as passionate about it as you are about gender mainstreaming. They think that if you solve their issue that the world will be a better place and everything else will fall into place. And it's a house or car just like Shannon said. So what I will tell you is that I think that isolating gender mainstreaming as a separate function is the wrong way to go. And I think it's extremely inefficient. And as a guy who has limited resources I got X amount of time, I got X amount of dollars and I got X amount of guys. And at the end of the day, I have something to produce. I'm in a business where results matter. In the American military, we are here to fight and win the nation's wars. As a vehicle for social justice, maybe not so much. But I think, Shannon, that's a very apt metaphor to make that I don't say quite as eloquently, but the military is a vehicle for social change is important because the social environment, the structure there is the road. And the vehicle literally is the military. But if you build a car and it doesn't handle well on the road, you don't rebuild the road. You rebuild the car. So you have to rebuild the military. And it starts with the individual. And this is really where you gain that efficiency is that if I can teach, if I can build a better person and this is one of the soft truths, one of the special operations truths that humans are more important than hardware. So if I can build a better person, I can build a better military who will then help me build a better system. And that's kind of touchy feely and it's not a popular notion and it's very hard to quantify. It's very hard to say if you give me a million dollars and at the end of the day I'll produce this product. But building an operator that I can put on the ground that is more aware of their biases, whether it's gender or whether it's race or whether it's social economic status. If I can create an operator that recognizes their biases and they can operationalize that, it's okay to have biases. It's okay to be biased. When I stood up here this morning, oh you said that guy's a military guy, he's a doppelganger, probably not real bright, probably got nothing important to say. So that's a bias, we all have that. Some people are biased towards blondes. Some people are biased towards redheads. I came with two of my colleagues, one blond and one of the redheads. So that's why he's biased. So it's okay to be biased. As long as you don't let that bias affect the way that you're decision-making process. So to be able to recognize that bias, separate yourself from what that bias, how that affects your decisions, and then continue on with the mission, that's okay because you're never gonna get rid of those biases, okay? You can't do it, you can't, you can spend all day long, you can't beat it out of a guy. It just won't happen. So I think it starts with building a better person. Build that person because that's the threat that you're gonna face in the future. Soon as that person leaves your care, it's gonna go out in the world, whether it's a military guy or whether it's an international developer, they're gonna be faced with problems that you never could foresee. So if you prepare them before they leave you, by recognizing their own biases and send them off on their way, I think you're better off. So and while that may be unpopular to say that we're doing it wrong, I think we can do it much better. And I think I'm right. So I look forward to discussing it with everyone. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Well, Stephanie, Airherd, you have the difficult task of bringing all of this together here this morning before we start the Q and A. It's actually a distinct honor and to be on the panel with these in the audience. I just, I appreciate the opportunity. So three things I think I wanna focus on and the one kinda goes with Colonel Walton is that I am in the Army. And of course these are my personal views with all of us. I consider myself mainstream. So, I mean the topic is fast eating and it's needed. But I think that in some ways I graduated 15 years ago and 15 years before that women were at West Point. And so I think this has been, it's to me it's a good thing for the US. It's a good thing for the world. But I think that this is a time that we can have this conversation and actually help make a difference. And so I think at a base that's something that we've all, the panelists have all tried to say this is something that we can and should be dealing with. But the second point is, is that I think it's critical not to project the US values and biases on others. And so it came across with the panelists, all three of them. When I was in Iraq, one of the things that the Iraqis, the folks that we were dealing with on the Iraqi General Staff was they're like, it is great that you're in the army and we're just glad our women aren't. And it was like fair enough. But I think one of the challenges are is that it's making sure that we're also not projecting our own biases on what other states should be doing. And so one of the challenges within the DC, within the US is, should our military be used in nation building? A valid argument. But the question is, is that if you're going to countries, like Colonel Beebe said, that are saying, we want to do this, how do you balance that? And it's going back with the context matters. And so with Colonel D.O.P. is that you have to understand the situation, you have to understand the people. And with Colonel Walton, you have to understand your own biases in order to be able to move forward. And so part of this is just learning, part of it is understanding, but part of it is not projecting what we want others to do, but having that dialogue so that we can help them help themselves. The other thing though with that is that whenever you're changing society, whenever you're changing the institutions, there are winners and losers. And so sometimes the people without voices aren't going to have the opportunities to have the changing dynamics. And so I think Colonel D.O.P. has dealt with a lot of these issues where the folks with voice are able to make the changes that should be. Again, understanding that context matters. And sometimes societies and cultures aren't yet ready for the changer or don't want to ever. And so I think the last thing that's just to bring up is that a lot of what the gentleman brought up is there are real practical challenges ahead. And with Kathleen with this panel is that we are getting more in the mainstream, but there's a lot of work ahead and the question of whether do we isolate this topic? Whether do we bring it into the context? There is a real challenge in the fact that with the military, excuse me, from the US side, is that we are good trainers and there's a lot of us and you can send us on a moment's notice to go do a job. And we will vigorously execute it, not the people, the mission. But the idea is, is that we are able to do things pretty well and to learn, but is that how you want to use your people? Is that how foreign countries should want to use their people? And so that's a legitimate discussion and I think it's something that as we go forward, you need to have all sides discussing it. The challenges that Colonel Diep has done with as far as his interagency within DC, it's a huge issue. Who has power? Who has the right perspective? Who gets funded? The regional issues, the international issues, a lot of topics, coordination, hard work, there's no shortage of need for that, but it's difficult. Another challenge is that everyone needs development. I mean, poverty, education around the world, everyone needs it. We're in a time where there's a finite number of resources. How best do we want to pursue the US foreign policy, other policies in a time where there's just not enough to go around if there ever was? And then I would say though, is that at the end, and this came out very clearly with all three, is that at the end, we're trying to build better people, individuals, better societies, better institutions, and what's the best way forward? And so how do we deal with the gender issues? How do we deal with the bigger government issues and where do these intersect and how do we move forward? So I thank you for the opportunity to discuss. Thank you so much. We're gonna open it up to Q and A. We have microphones on each side of the room and if somebody would like to begin. Otherwise, I will take the opportunities in my position. I was quite struck by Colonel Dill, your comment about political will. It's certainly one of the issues that UNSCR 1325, which is the resolution that focuses on women, peace, and security in the world, has been most criticized for, that there is the lack of political will in the UN to carry out this integration of women at the peace table, for example. Could you talk a little bit more about political will in the sense of how critical a role this has been in Senegal and how you see it in the UN context with 1325? And then I'm going to take another question while Colonel Diop is thinking. Go ahead and please introduce yourself and any. Sure, my name is Chris Holshek. I'm a retired civil affairs officer, like Mike Hess, and those old Army civil affairs colonels, except not quite as old as Mike. Shannon, I really appreciated what you had to say because, and as well as Colonel Diop and Colonel Walton, because contextualization is so important in this. And David, your point about making sure that gender mainstreaming is under a larger rubric is extremely critical. One of the things that I did, and I consider one of my peak experiences as civil affairs officer, was as the chief of CIMIC, Civil Military Coordination, or the United Nations Mission in Liberia for 18 months. One of those rare Americans that actually wore a blue hat. One of the things I did when I was there was incorporated in my idea of CIMIC, which has also become very helpful to the UN policy on CIMIC, is incorporating gender mainstreaming as a subset of what CIMIC was doing in with respect to security sector reform. And one of the things that we did is recognizing that I was the only trained CIMIC officer in all of Liberia, I started a course. And I brought in members of the Armed Forces of Liberia and the police, the national police, to teach them CIMIC. And as part of this gender mainstreaming, we had a few events. My question is with regard to an idea that I've been kind of mulling over for some time now. And that is I think one of the greatest contributions AFRICOM, the United States can be making with respect to building partnership capacity and contributing to security sector and defense sector reform. It's helping our partners build a CIMIC capacity because it touches upon all of these different things that have been, and I just wanted to get your opinions on it because, and I think the US is particularly well positioned for this, not just because we have the most robust civil affairs capability in the world. And I think that's no coincidence considering that we're also one of the most robust democracies in the world, and that reflects on civil society. But we are in many ways the largest, single largest and most successful multicultural institution in the world, the United States military. And that is incredible soft power. And it talks about the threats and things that you're talking about. So I think that's a very largely untapped resource. I'd just like to get your opinion on that. Thank you, Colonel Shah. Please introduce yourself. Hello, my name is Jimmy Antian. I'm with Synexis. I'd just like to thank the panel. I found your discussion very interesting. I question in two parts. The first one is for Colonel Beavey. You talked about developing the language, and if you don't have the language, you can't address the problem. I was wondering if you've ever given any thoughts of how the process that goes into developing that language and what it looks like. And I think the panel as a whole mentioned, you know, non-traditional security things, becoming security things, things that we mainly think of as being development like health and welfare, infrastructure development. And I was wondering how do you address the concerns of development practitioners who have been doing that work for the past, you know, 40 to 60 years and are now apprehensive because they're seeing it becoming securitized. And I was wondering how you have worked with them if there's any success stories or unsuccessful stories and kind of what is the strategy for working in a field that was traditionally not defensive-appropriated and is now being seen as by the people who are experts in it as becoming more militarized. Thank you, Jimmy. We're gonna open it up to the panelists and I would ask them to keep their remarks short so we can entertain some other questions or comments. Colonel Diop, would you like to start us out and we'll move through the panel? It's on. Thank you very much for the good questions. First question has to do with the political will in Kathleen. I think the political will is key. It's key in the sense that it will at least allow the right advocacy to be done. So if there is a good and strong political will, politicians will take time to communicate with their people because if you don't communicate with your people, nothing can be done. So I think that the political will can help in this regard. The political will can also help make sure that you get the right resources. If politicians are convinced that this is the right thing to do, they will be willing to allocate the right resources. There is no way you can be successful in the gender mainstreaming if you don't have the right resources. It has a price. You have to pay for that. Now, the political will at the UN level is more difficult to get because of the number of countries you have in the UN, because of the really contradicting interest most of them wanna protect because of the differences in ideologies you have. So it's a lot more challenging for the UN to get the political will. But they know that they need to have the political will to do certain things. Just to give you an example to vote for the easiest resolution it can take forever because in the Security Council you have these five permanent members who have their different agendas. So these are the challenges I think for the UN. And now for the gender mainstreaming helping for the CMIC capacities, I think you're absolutely right. CMIC, I will even say more than CMIC because civil military collaboration is something that is done temporarily. It's not on a permanent basis. I would go for more than that. I would go for military just being involved in development activities. On the permanent base in quotation marks I don't like to say permanent base but when the civilians decide, the civilian leadership decides that the military can be involved in development activity. As I'm used to saying in Africa the public sector in most of the countries is not ready yet to undertake all the activities. It is supposed to undertake. The private sector has no interest in being involved in many activities. So you have people who have their urgent needs and in front of them you have two sectors. One is not ready, the other one has no interest. While in the barracks you have capacities that can help fulfill these needs. This is the debate. To me it's the military or nobody. So we need to work concomitantly on making sure that when there is nobody the military can fulfill these needs but at the same time make sure that the public sector and the private sector are in positions that allows them to be interested in those kind of activities. And for Jimmy military and development and it's a continuation of what I was saying, successful stories, I can say that in Senegal we have a successful story. In Senegal we have developed what we call the concept Armée Nation. The concept Armée Nation was built right after our independence because our leaders at that time understood that the challenges had to do with development. Not to do with dealing with threats related to a potential invasion from our neighbors. We had to develop. We were coming from centuries of colonization and we had to build new countries and the military could not be out of this process. So we created the concept Armée Nation which allows us up to now to keep the military operational. Meaning ready to fight a war if there is a war. The specificity of war is that they're unpredictable. So we have to be ready for that all the time. But when we are not at war, while our populations are starving, are confronting these natural disasters, can we be useful to those populations? Yes, we can be useful. But we just need to make sure that we have created the right framework in which we do those activities. That's what I wanted to say, thank you. Thank you. Shannon, would you like to? Certainly, yeah, and I will follow on with what Colonel de Gaulle mentioned because again, the importance of developing the language and how do you develop language? Well, I wrote a book on it. So, I mean, that's how you start. But again, the challenge that we have I will critique the book in saying this, that there has been a challenge to the book on the humanitarian, the developmental community has said this is an invasion of humanitarian space by the military and attempt at a humanitarian space invasion. And then the military in the five-sided puzzle palace at the Pentagon, it's been, well, this is banging swords into plowshares. And the answer to that is yes, if you are looking at this through a 20th century defense lens, absolutely. But just like Colonel de Gaulle has articulated as so many other African leaders have articulated, those challenges are not the traditional security challenges. So until we stop telling Africans and other developing nations what is relevant for their secure, so what is right for their security and start listening to what they say is relevant for their security, we're not going to be able to understand that. And that again is a process of language. So that's the reason that we're discussing this in human security terms because this is what we're hearing from the field. It is very much going to be the challenge internal here in Washington, D.C. and getting everyone on the same sheet of music so we can at least, we can at least disagree with the same language as opposed to speaking through one another. As far as success stories and these kinds of things, again, going back to Angola, a lot of the military as Colonel de Gaulle has pointed out is the only viable functioning element in that area. So I visited a hospital, a military hospital, and there were probably 20% of the patients in that hospital were military. That would mean by Arkansas math that would be about 80% were civilian. And so when we queried the commander of that hospital, why they were allowing civilians in the hospital, the answer was this is the only facility within 100 miles around. So again, we have to take off that American lens of oh my God, the military invading in developmental community space or traditional space better done by someone else. The answer is yes, because they are the only ones potentially and possibly that can do that. Now, am I saying that it should continue to be a military mission? Absolutely not. Am I saying that we should not reach out within the United States military to the NGO, the development community and integrate them in apps of positively Lutely because whoever has the best subject matter expertise, the best corporate knowledge, the best advantage in preparing that society for those challenges, those are the ones that should be doing the training. Those are the ones that should be reinforced and enabled. And so again, it's a matter of shifting that language away from defense and more towards the idea of security and human security. Yeah, I would caution you about creating a separate language because you create a separate language and you have to have translators for that. So keep an open dialogue, but again, extend that dialogue, that language across all the sectors. Don't just focus on one thing. I think it's a little naive to say that development and security are exclusive of each other. I don't think they ever have been that way. As a security guy, I've never viewed security as a sole function. It's always been in Congress with development. And so I think that for those out there that say, the military's getting into places they don't need to be, I would say you can't do it without us and we can't do our job without you. Lifelong international developers will tell you, I think that there have been most successful when they've been able to integrate more functions into their projects as opposed to less functions. So that isolationism is probably not appropriate. In terms of political will, I would ask you, do you really want, do you need the political will to be there? Do you need to have overwhelming political support for a process in order for it to function? I would tell you, you probably don't. You can certainly operate in an effective social marketing campaign while outside the political realm. And if you wait for political will and you give the politicians a vote, then you have to count that vote. So be careful what you ask for. And finally, soft power. Sir, I think soft power versus hard power. I think that's a, of course that always brings up a big discussion. The military, certainly the American military, nobody can beat us at the military stuff. Nobody's as good at fighting wars as we are. We've proven that time and time again. We have the best technology, the best training, the best logistics functions. We're really, really good at what we do. Nobody can project forces the way we can. But that's a traditional war. That's a traditional 20th century threat and we're not facing that like we used to. We still need to maintain that capacity, absolutely. But so viewing the military as only hard power, as only a force of coercion is I think a dangerous step to make. I will tell you that the military doesn't recognize that. Within each component of the military, you wanna find your little niche. And if your niche is kicking in doors and blowing the stuff up, you're only gonna get brought out of the closet when someone needs a door kicked in and something blown up. So you have to show that sort of that, that ability to operate outside the traditional security role. Stephanie, and then we'll take our last question. Just one quick point on the CIMEC part. I think one of the challenges with the military and the Army is that in addition to being a professional organization, we're also a large bureaucracy. So we have 1.1 million people-ish. And one of the challenges of setting up more CIMECs is making sure that, again, the countries actually care about wanting to promote this. When it was in Iraq, they had a civil affairs section that was set up in the Iraqi Army staff and they had no idea what to do with them. What would we use this for? And so I think just making sure that we're going back to the context in what does that country need? What do those institutions and those leaders need? And if we can keep that component in, that I think you can actually be a useful change for the Army, for the military. But a one-size-fits-all often doesn't work. Thank you for that. And finally, you could introduce yourself. Hi, I'm Greg Karnschweiner, Colonel of the U.S. Air Force, retired. Currently at the White Consulting, with my previous life, I was a security cooperation and I'll be the first to admit that gender mainstream is not a priority and it guides in the city of Point of course to your campaign plans. So looking to you, especially in light of the Secretary of State's commitment for national action plans, it's made to implement U.N. Security Council's resolution 13.5. What should gender mainstream look like in DOD and State Department Security Cooperation programs? What practical steps should be taken to both mainstream women as participants and also mainstream women's issues and education and training programs? And also, Colonel D'Aff from a member recipient of U.S. military engagement, what sort of programs would you benefit to Senegal and to other states in your region? Thank you so much for that question and we'll end on these last comments so if you have any final remarks that you'd like to make and I'll start again now with Colonel D'Aff and we'll move through the panel again. Thank you very much for your question. I think what we're already witnessing a lot of benefits from the collaboration and cooperation we have with the U.S. at least in this domain. When we were done working on the roadmap, we will be following to make sure that we empower our military on gender issues. We have worked with the U.S. Embassy in Dhaka and the Office for Security Cooperation, will be helping us run certain of the events. And the fact that also we had a senior officer, female senior officer, coming to Senegal and sharing her experience with the Senegalese military was extremely helpful to us in the process we are in now. And for the 13, 25, I think that all this support we're receiving from the U.S. can help us succeed on the gender mainstreaming process and make sure that our military will be better regarded by our society and will have their trust. So this will positively impact for sure the violences that is a fight against the violences we have been witnessing, generally from the security sector against women. I have the tendency to say, I hope I'm right, that if the society can see that you are taking good care of your woman in the military, the society will have more respect and more confidence in you and will be more willing to work with you on issues like violences against women and against girls. Thank you. Just very quickly, again, going back to how better to mainstream women in the military. Again, if we are to believe that the security concerns of the developing world are those of inextricably linked with development and that the militaries can be used as that vehicle for the social change and social development, you don't look at the women's issues as this is a feel good exercise or this is just sort of what it should be. What you start realizing as Colonel Diop had pointed out is you are losing 50, sometimes over 50% of your economic capacity because you have excluded that portion of society. Whereas if they were included in the training, in the vocational training, in the educational programs, and then released into the civilian workforce, which is direly needed in many parts of Africa, what you're looking at is the ability to increase your economic base through leveraging one of the things that Africa has a lot of, which is human resources. So again, it's not a feel good exercise from a human security standpoint. It's very much about understanding that the security and development are inextricably linked and how do we best get to a solution that matters for that specific area. And I think that's probably a better way to go about it. Thanks. I'd ask you, a priority of what? A priority of effort. Do you make your intervention a priority of effort? A priority of funding? A priority of personnel? If you ask a commander on the ground to make something a priority, then something's not gonna be a priority. Something's gonna lose. And I will tell you that in most military operations, gender mainstreaming would not appear on the top five for the priorities. So because it's very focused, it's very narrow, civil military interaction is something broader. And that's something that they can, that can actually get some horsepower behind it. So I would ask you when you're interfacing with the military, don't ask for one specific thing. Ask for a broader range and you're more likely to get some support behind it. And it's more easily trainable. And that speaks specifically to my initial point that if you make gender mainstreaming an issue, then you're sort of rebuilding the road. I'm telling you rebuilding the road is the wrong way to do it because then you have to rebuild every single road that you go down to. You need to build a better car, build a better person, make your people more adaptable, make them more trainable. One of the things I did not address in opening comments was our cultural support team program. Operationally, we recognized that we had a fault in our military, particularly in Afghanistan. In the Afghani culture, you cannot, males outside of a particular family group are not, it's taboo to speak to a female within a separate family group. It's not done, it creates huge rifts, it creates issues. While special forces teams are traditionally all male teams, so when they go on to an objective to find a guy or to gather intelligence, the entire sector of that population is excluded. We can't talk to the females. So we developed a program where we took female special operators and gave them particular training in cultural aspects of female Afghani culture. And we had a task organized them to, down to the operational, the tactical level, and put them on targets with folks. And that first set of ladies is just deployed. We'll be getting reports from them from the field soon. I'd certainly welcome anyone coming down, looking at our program, seeing how we're training that. But I will tell you is that in developing that program and deciding how do you teach someone to be a female Afghani culture expert, the one thing that we started out with was teaching them about themselves. And that's the same step that you take in any single social issue is learning about yourself first. So that's the first step you take and that's building the better car. Thank you, Wally. And finally, Stephanie. There are quite a few studies that are analyzing this issue as far as what should the role of the military, women in the military. So I'm not privy to any of those, so I don't wanna comment specifically on that. The only thing I do wanna say though is if things happen quickly in the military, often it's not good. So having deliberate thought through processes is not bad at all. I think one of the challenges that I've seen though is that the 21st century challenges, whether we're talking about the human security, whether we're realizing there's no longer a front line that there used to be, women are engaged in many activities. As a company commander, I was valued because I could do my job, not because I was a woman. My brigade commander was a logistician. She helped push in the logistics, the supplies at the very early stages of conflict, and she was valued because she could deliver at the mission. I think this time is ripe to focus on this issue. I'm glad that from a scholarly perspective, at the practitioner's perspective, that this dialogue is happening and again, I appreciate all of you working on this issue because I think we can't help make a difference but we need to definitely move forward smartly. Thank you. Well, I think we've heard from an excellent and multiple and diverse perspectives on the role of gender mainstreaming in the military. We are gonna take a very brief break only to exchange panelists because now we're gonna hear from the civil society side of this conversation and try to bring these views together but before anyone steps up, I hope you will join me in a really warm round of applause for this fabulous panel. We'll reconvene in four minutes.