 Awesome. Okay. So our first panel will cover the role of private organizations in supporting international stability operations. History of non-governmental organizations in peacekeeping and nation-building efforts is a storied one that spans nearly every continent and many regional conflicts for decades. Doug Brooks is a special advisor for response business practices at the Fund for Peace, FFB. He leads FFP's responsible business practice, including implementation of security and human rights projects in partnership with natural resource companies, governments, and multilateral institutions. He also represents FFP at the international level of the VP SHR and coordinates FFP's human rights and business roundtable. Prior to joining the FFP, he was founder and president of the International Peace Operations Association, now the International Stability Operations Association. He also serves as adjunct faculty for the University of Fiji. Now, without further ado, Mr. Brooks. Thank you. Where are my screen here? Thanks for having me today. Looking forward to talking on this and hopefully we'll have some good questions at the end. Just a quick disclaimer. Everything I say, of course, is my personal perspective and not necessarily that of the organizations for which I'm affiliated, mentioned. Some terminology and I assume most of the audience here has some background in this, but weak failed and fragile states are essentially states that have weak or non-existent governments, lack of rule of law, rule of law. There may be an ongoing war or insurgency or just a large humanitarian crisis. If you're interested in that sort of stuff, I do recommend you check out the Fund for Peace Fragile State Index, where they keep track of state fragility. They've been doing that now for almost, what, 20 years. And it's for research, I think you'll find it as a very interesting tool. The difference between refugees and IDPs are internally displaced persons. A refugee is essentially somebody who's had to flee their home internationally across the border. An IDP is essentially the same refugee, but internal, not crossing an international border. Contingency operations or complex operations or stability operations or peace operations, essentially these are all basically the same thing. They're international stability operations that are in areas where you have near wars or low intensity conflicts. Sometimes I think the Pentagon calls them complex contingency operations or CCOs, but essentially in all these operations, you have a simultaneous requirement for security, humanitarian relief, and reconstruction efforts. The stability operations industries contractors, basically the private companies you hire to do things. And finally, when we start talking about employees for our industry, they will be sometimes called expats, which are Westerners in general. LNs are local nationals or local people that you hire to work in the companies. And TCNs are third country nationals, so people you hire from other countries that you bring into the operation. The theme I'm going to be talking about here is any military that plans to be relevant beyond its national borders from invasions to peacekeeping will be working with the private sector. This is just a general rule for all militaries everywhere. A little trip to the past year. If we go back to 1999, before most of you were born, there was no stability operations industry. The academic community was interested in mercenaries as a Frenchman named Bob Denard, who was essentially carrying out French policies as a private person. You had an interest in banning the private sector, essentially banning the war profiteers and the mercenaries as they called them. There were two private military companies that were fairly prominent at the time, executive outcomes of South African company and Sandline International British Company. They were essentially involved in carrying out wars or helping their clients, states fight wars. The reality at the time was that you had a private sector that was already supporting international peace operations, that these private military companies were in fact doing jobs at the international community wanted to have done, but they didn't want to do them themselves. In countries like Sierra Leone and Liberia, you had these private military companies operating and essentially doing what the international community wanted to have done by doing it in the private sector. Forward 20 years and we have a stability operations industry. ISOA, the International Stability Operations Association, the trade association I founded 20 years ago, is essentially representing this industry of companies that work in conflict, post-conflict disaster relief. There's an academic interest in something called the Wagner Group, which we can talk a little bit more about, which essentially is a Russian private organization but working for the Russian government. There's an interest in regulating and accountability for private companies. We'll talk a bit about the Montreux document in the International Code of Conduct Association for private security providers. There's an interest in maximizing competition and efficiency in the private companies that work in conflict, post-conflict environments, and there's still an interest in mercenaries because some things never change. In fact, the private sector roles much larger in international peace operations than it was in 1999. Private military companies are still doing jobs that the international community doesn't want to do, and we see them now in Mozambique and Small Yen, but fairly recently in Nigeria as well. What does the private sector do in wars? Well, some photos, some are my photos, some are from the companies or whatever. Top left corner, we have companies building housing for peacekeepers. We have them doing landmine removal and exploded ordinance disposal. Center top photo, they're doing training. That's actually from Afghanistan a few years ago. That is a private company training Afghans to be prison guards. Top right corner, that's Karzai back in the early days of Afghanistan, and that guy in the far left there is actually an American who served with Delta Force, and then became private and became a bodyguard in Afghanistan. The lower right corner, that's a really interesting picture from the days of Iraq, where you have a lot of private security companies working. Those heavily armed guys are in fact not Americans or Iraqis. They are Nepalese, and they are working for a British company and an American operation from Iraq. So just think of the legal ambiguities on that one. Lower center, obviously just moving things around. Logistics is a big part of the private sector, and lower left is a fairly recent photo of a company called DAG which was working for the Mozambique police fighting against the insurgency at Mozambique. If you want to take a look at the whole industry that works in conflict, post-conflict, and disaster relief operations, it's sort of four general sectors, and academics will split in parts in different ways and describe it different ways. This is sort of how the industry sees itself. On the left one, the logistics and support companies, probably 80 percent of the industry is this. They're doing logistics, they're doing construction, they're doing medical services. Essentially a job that would be fairly normal in any developed country or any developing country, but they're doing it in really dangerous places essentially. The second category, the private security companies are the ones that I think raises the most hackles and interests from a human rights perspective, but essentially they're private companies that are hired to protect them now in a person, place, or thing. They can be armed or unarmed, but they're just there to protect things. They are not private military companies, which we'll talk about a little bit later, but they are security companies and they can protect people in places and things. The third sector is the security sector reform and development sector, which I think is the most interesting sector. When you have a peacekeeping or stability operation, you need to have a long-term plan. Where are you going? What are you trying to do? Ultimately you're trying to stabilize a government or stabilize a country. You're trying to create a democratic system. You're trying to create a functioning bureaucracy. You're trying to make sure that the power plants are working, the phones are working, that the things are being done. And so there's a whole sector that used to be done by governments, but now is hired by governments to do this sort of stuff, security sector reform, training police, training military, training lawyers, training judges, all sorts of things, but basically preparing the country for to be self-sufficient again. In the last sector in our industry, the industry support organizations is the only sector that really doesn't go into the field. It's law firms, insurance firms, it's public relations firms, it's staff augmentation firms, but they generally support the industry but don't necessarily go on the field. Why do we look to contractors? Eventually they bring value to militaries and government. The reason we hire contractors is because we want them there. Number one reason is just simply surge capacity. The contracting industry is global. It's able to bring in resources from other countries and other places. It has huge capabilities or niche expertise. If you need somebody who has a really specialized capability, language skills or whatever, you can go to the private sector and just pull them off the shelf. They're also able to deploy really quickly. Militaries actually take a little hung time to actually deploy in any numbers or in any capacity. The private sector essentially is off the shelf. Everything is basically available in two weeks. Construction operations a little bit longer, but you're able to go to a private company or put out a proposal and get bids to do all sorts of things under very short notice. You have a lot of control over private companies that are required to follow all relevant laws. They're subject to legal systems. They have contracts. You design a contract, you write into the contract, what you want companies doing, what you don't want them doing. It's easy to control them. By the way, you can fire them. In peacekeeping militaries, you can't fire. US military, Bangladesh military, unfireable. There are political advantages to using the private sector. Contractor numbers and casualties are not generally viewed the same as soldiers from the country that sends them. There's less political risk in vital but obscure or unpopular missions, but ones that need to be done. They mostly use local employees. We'll talk a bit about that later. And of course, if things go wrong, you can shift the blame to the private companies and your government didn't really fail, right? So contractors to follow obviously. International peace operations, the private sector is revolutionizing these operations. No mission could be seen without having private contractors there. Let me just put a little bit up to the private side to the international side and just emphasize that the UN is irreplaceable when it comes to peacekeeping or peace operations. The UN provides observers, monitors, peacekeepers, peace enforcers. It has a reputation or a reputation. It's a reality that it is neutral and it has international legitimacy and that's something that the private sector cannot replace. The UN can end ongoing conflicts. It can support post-conflict stabilization operations. It can provide legal mandates and sets of rules on how an operation is being done. And most importantly, perhaps for Americans, it shares a burden among members. So a UN operation is being funded by the entire world, essentially for the US, which of course is a richest country. I think the peacekeeping budget is about 25 or 27 percent. I can't remember what it is now. It goes up and down depending on Republicans or Democrats. But essentially the US is only paying a fraction of the cost and the UN does things cheaper anyway than the US operation. So a lot of the stuff the UN does is stuff that if the UN didn't exist, you probably have to have Americans or some other Western country doing the peacekeeping. So the UN saves us a lot of money. Regional organizations often do similar things to the UN. They have similar capabilities. ECOMOG was a West African peacekeeping force back in the 90s and 2000s. ECOMIG is one they have, I think still going on, maybe a thousand West African soldiers in Gambia right now. Amazon is the peacekeeping operation in Somalia. And Samim is a new one they've just created in Mozambique. These are regional peacekeeping operations. Not quite the same we're going to see as the UN, but the same idea of sharing the burden using militaries in personnel from all the countries. There's an ugly reality of peace operations. There's going to be, I can almost guarantee you, when you put thousands of young men or young soldiers into another country, there's going to be a sex trade. There's going to be organized crime going on. There's going to be corruption. There's inefficiencies. There's injustices. This is pretty much universal in all peacekeeping operations. To a greater or lesser extent, the UN tries to address this with more effect or less effect depending. I like to say stability operations are sometimes only a marginal improvement on the actual violent conflict, but they are an improvement. So when we think about peacekeeping operations, they're not saints that are doing these things. They are interesting places and they are improvements of what was there before, but they're not pretty. Footprint size, when you put large numbers of troops, peacekeepers or whatever, you're going to have big problems as a result. Sometimes they're anticipated, like the ones I mentioned, sometimes they're unanticipated. Some of you may be familiar with Haiti, where UN troops ended up polluting the water with cholera, killing thousands of people, unanticipated. International peacekeeping is often western-less, which means that the most capable militaries are not there. You're using militaries from developing countries. They don't have the same resources that the larger militaries have. They often need specialized support. And when you have any sort of military, you want them really focused on the core mission. If they're supposed to be there to keep sides apart in a peacekeeping mission, you want them doing that. You don't want them essentially cooking their own meals, doing their own truck driving, things like that. That's stuff that can be done that can be outsourced. So it makes a lot of sense to bring in the private companies to do the outsourcing. And again, the private sector uses mostly local workforces. So you're not bringing in people from outside of the country. You have far fewer problems. They speak the local languages. They're a lot cheaper. There's a lot of reasons to do that. Well, how do you get accountability, especially with private companies, when they're operating in war zones? Well, private sectors always subject to local laws. So when you have a company operating in Congo or Somalia, they're actually under Congolese law or Somali law. If the local country is not capable of handling a legal issue, the home countries of the firms often have legal options to hold the firm or the individuals accountable. And ultimately with the private sector, if you stop paying companies, they actually go away because the whole point of having a company is to make money. If there's no money, they disappear. There are limitations. Obviously, host countries may have weak or failed legal systems, so they may not be able to hold people accountable inside the country, the peacekeeping operations going on. Home countries may be reluctant to address the problems that their contractors are creating in other countries. And of course, if you actually had a crime that occurred in a war zone, who's going to go and gather the evidence to prosecute the case? Well, there's problems, but there's ways to get around these. The U.S. has a number of laws, but their contractor is in line legally. The UCMJ, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, square peg in a round hole. It doesn't really work well, but they do. Technically, companies are under the UCMJ. The UCMJ is really designed for military people, so it's a whole code of behavior, how military soldiers are supposed to behave or sale or whatever are supposed to behave in uniform, but it's not really designed for civilians. And in cases where it's become a very serious court case has been brought against civilians under UCMJ, the Supreme Court's Toss Development Pass. So a better option, we now have something called Media Military Extra-Territorial Jurisdiction Act, which originally was test for Department of Defense contractors, but that was expanded to include all U.S. government contractors working in support of a DOD mission. And it generally worked. It does mean you can bring, you can extradite personnel, bring them back to the U.S. and charge them and put them in prison, which they have done. Again, it's not a perfect fit, and there was a law that keeps getting brought up now and then called CJA, Civilian Extra-Territorial Jurisdiction Act, something that the industry supports, which would be much more, much broader and essentially cover all U.S. contractors working in conflict, post-conflict environments. There have been scores of prosecutions under media, but the Department of Justice for some reason does not publicize that. So we know of a number of cases, but they don't actually have a webpage you can go to to find out who's been charged under media, but they haven't until recently. Internationally, there's ways of holding companies accountable as well. The Swiss government, the International Committee of the Red Cross, NGOs, International Community Industry have come together, and there's the number of results in 2008. There's something called the Montreux document. The part one of the Montreux document clarified that international law applies to contractors, and it says, you know, you can be held to account, as I said, either by the local government, by the sending, by the country where the contractors are from, or where the individuals are from can actually be hold people accountable. More than 50 states are signed onto the Montreux documents, a very active document. They have a webpage. It's pretty interesting. It just makes sure that when you have peacekeeping stability operations, there's some way of holding people accountable, even if they're in the private sector. In 2010, something was created called the International Code of Conduct for Private Security Providers, ICOC. Over 300 companies signed on to that private companies, and this is, again, just for the security companies, but I remember I talked about the four different categories. The second one was the security companies, maybe five or 10 percent of our industry. The ones that perhaps are the most direct relevance to human rights. So there's over, they've signed onto this code of conduct, and there's something called the ICOCA, the Association for this Code, and it's the members of the ICOCA include industry, governments, and human rights NGOs, and so on. And basically, they hammer out rules, guidelines, and also address issues that are raised when private security companies are operating these areas. Again, this is strongly supported by the industry and the idea is that you want to be comfortable when private companies are operating in areas of chaos. Let me talk a little bit about the armed civilians that you might find in a peacekeeping or stability operation. Yeah, obviously, the normal thing in the upper left corner is you have regular militants. That's a Kenyan military there, and that's what you would expect in a peacekeeping operation. But in the upper right corner, of course, you have private security companies. Those people protecting people, places, things, they can be armed, they can be unarmed, they can be locals, they can be international, third country nationals. But again, they're there just doing defensive protective work. Lower left corner is a picture of the old executive outcomes, which was South Africans at Angolans, and they worked in Angola and also in South Africa and a little bit in Congo. And they were essentially hired by the government of those countries to help them fight against an insurgency. They were legal, they operated legally, they wore the uniform and were under the command structure, but they were, in fact, foreigners. The lower right corner is Wagner Group, which is this Russian group. We'll talk a little bit more about what Wagner Group is, why they are not personaries and why they are not PMCs and why they're not private security companies. The security companies legally contract to detect a noun, a person, place, or thing. They operate under something called the rules for use of force. That may vary the name, but basically it says that if you're an individual doing private security, you're allowed to do self-defense, you're allowed to protect yourself, you're allowed to protect that noun that you've been hired to protect, and in most cases you're allowed to defend civilians under mortal threat of boredom. These are public companies, they're licensed to operate. Again, self-defense, they're civilians, some are barbed, some are unarmed, and they're generally funded by government or civilian entities under contract. Military companies, also legal, also is working for government clients, often deputized by the governments. They are allowed to use lethal force proactively, so they're not as defensive, they're allowed to use lethal forces if they were military. They can do offensive operations, they're generally a force multiplier, so they'll have a small number of them and a much larger force of local military, and they're funded, the funding may be less transparent than you have with a private company, because they are in fact working for a government. Little quick bows, and this is a new term that's being thrown around, but one that I worked out with someone else, but it's a quasi-governmental military organization, and this essentially is when a government hires a private entity to do its bidding. Back in the 60s and 70s, there was a guy named, a Frenchman named Bob Denard, who helped overthrow the government in Comoros several times. But one of those times, he was basically doing it with either the permission or the behest of the French government, but the government didn't want to be involved with it, so they hired Bob to do this, and that's what he did. Now it is, you have the Russian Wagner group, there's actually several groups, not just Wagner, and they're operating in Ukraine, Syria, Central African Republic, where they were in Mozambique, but they got a bloody nose left. They extensively are private, but the reality is, they're pretty much just doing Russian government policy. Not clear where their funding comes from, not clear what their rules for use of force are, or their rules of engagement, it's pretty opaque. Hard to do accountability with these guys, they're anonymous, the government often protects them, they're super interesting, and I think in the academic sphere, this is pretty perhaps is the most interesting sector of all to study, especially in peacekeeping and stability operations, look at Central African Republic for the largest deployment of the Wagner group for these quick moves. Overall, these people, mercenaries, well, we actually have a definition of what a mercenary really is. A mercenary is a person who chooses to fight in a conflict that actually does fight in that conflict, that they're motivated to fight in that conflict by personal gain, that they're not from the area of the conflict where it takes place, they're not sent by a state to fight in that conflict, and they're not a member of a military fighting in the conflict. So as somebody pointed out, that if you've ever actually convicted of being a mercenary, you know, you shouldn't be hung and so should your lawyer for being an incompetent. It's a derogatory and worthless term. A lot of people say, well, I know a mercenary, when I see a mercenary, that's fine, but the real definition as we learn from the New York Times is a foreigner or a business person we don't like. So that term gets thrown around, I'll be not so useful. What's the future for private companies? The ability to operation exists not because it wants to exist because we want it to exist. It's not a big industry. At peak, it was probably about $20 billion a year, which seems like a lot of money, but industry size, it's nothing. In fact, there was an Australia once and one of the big Australian mining companies announced their profits for the previous year, and for one mining company, the profits were $20 billion in size of my industry at the time. So yeah, it's a tiny industry when you really look at it. It operates legally, it follows the contracts that it's given, easy to control, it accepts regulations, sometimes it supports regulation, and it will always require the realities that any sort of peacekeeping is going to require these companies to be there. The industry actually does support regulation and guidelines because there are bottom feeders, as we call them, companies that aren't necessarily following the rules that are always trying to undercut the better companies financial, and it's easy to do with the clients are not paying attention to see that the companies are operating the way they want them to. The private military companies, again, that one interesting sector are not their in demand, but they're largely unregulated because academics and policymakers don't like to admit they exist or don't like to use them. They can be guided and regulated, but right now they're they're unacceptable. So they exist, they're going to be there, but we're not really regulating them. That's a bad thing. A little background on myself, the International Stability Operations Association, ISOA, I founded that originally as International Peace Operations Association in April of 2001. 9-11 happened shortly after that, and my little association of six companies that were all working in Africa quickly brought in their their competitors and their subsidiaries. I left the association in 2012, I'm President of Maristown, but the association that gets over 130 companies from all over the world that support peacekeeping stability operations and so on. The Fund for Peace, where I also work, is an NGO. It's not a funding agency. It develops practical tools for reducing conflict. It finds that nexus between human security and economic development. So unlike many NGOs, the Fund for Peace is quite happy to work with the private sector to come up with rules and guidelines for how best to minimize damage to civilians or to employees or to people that where the companies are working around. For example, your projects on ethical mining. We do work with ECOWAS and other places on state regional early warning systems. How do you know when something bad or conflicts going to or civic unstability is going to happen? We have systems for developing early warning for that. They do a peacekeeping peacebuilding project in the major Delta, which has been very successful, and they're involved with voluntary principles on security and human rights, which works with extractive companies around the world. It also includes human rights NGOs and so on. It basically tries to develop a means that where commercial operations are not harming, but are in fact benefiting humanity. They may be, FFP may be best known for their annual Federal States Index. You can find it online, federalstatesindex.org. Every year they come out. It's a great way to see how countries are doing. There's many of these now. This is one of the first ones. I found the first one that really started to look at the entire world and just track how countries are doing from a stability perspective. FFP uses a lot of interns. People looking for internships. It's pretty interesting stuff. It's all been remote now, of course, for a year and a half, but the interns do a lot of hands-on work. I think it would be quite interesting. That's it for me. Happy to talk to people. I'm happy to answer questions. Also, if you want to get in touch with me, that's my contact information. Doug Brooks at Hoosera84.com. I'm from Indiana originally. That's it. Happy to do questions now, Jackson. Awesome. Thank you so much. Okay. For all attendees, you can click the Q&A in the bottom right and type in questions and I can see them. I give them Mr. Brooks. I'll start off with a few of my own. I was very interested when you were talking about the Wagner Group. I was wondering how you see the role of these quasi-governmental military groups in the future changing, possibly, now that we see countries like Russia embracing their uses? It's a great question. That's worthy of some lot of academic papers. I don't want to like skull the beans early, but these things are going to be around. I think, I mean, France sort of pioneers. I guess if you go back in history, you'll probably find a lot of these sorts of things going on. The Russians have really, really bought into it and it gives them some plausible deniability when they invade Crimea. When they try to control the mining resources of Central African Republic and you'll see that these guys are huge down there. There's lots of them in there. They provide like the bodyguards, I think, for the president and CAR and things like that. I think the international community is also a little hesitant to try to go after them as well because if you didn't have these Russians down there doing the body guard work and whatever, who would be doing it? It's a touchy issue. I don't think they're going anywhere. There's always ways to keep these sort of vague entities operating. I think the more developed, more westernized, more democratic countries aren't going to use them too much, but other countries certainly will. I think that makes sense. I feel like it'd be hard for the U.S. to plausibly use those kinds of companies. They kind of have. Go back to Vietnam, for example. There was a company called Flying Tigers, which was a transport company. It did operate privately, but it was essentially set up by the CIA to help do things like drop supplies to insurgents and things like that as well. There has been some of that in a slightly different way, ideally for better reasons, but not so much right now. Let's see. A small follow up to that, actually. Do people in the industry who tend to be working in these regions, do they view those groups as just another kind of arm of states? That's also a really good question. Probably. I don't know enough about Central African Republic to say one way or the other. I think the academics probably have a clearer view of it than the people in the field. Actually, well, here's a good point. For a private military company, executive outcomes, when they operated in Sierra Leone, again, it was mostly South Africans left over from the Apartheid era military and Angolans who had been on the side of South Africans at the time, but it was mostly Angolan. They went up to Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone's assumed that they'd been sent by Mandela to support them in their time of need. They kept thanking Mandela for sending these Apartheid era warriors up there to help them out. It was a little confusing. Yeah, I don't think that's very clear. Yes, great question. I think that's very fascinating. It's a very interesting topic that I think a lot of you are going to focus on, especially now. We have a question from the chat that says, with climate change potentially driving increased flows of refugees and especially IDPs, how do you see the role of the private sector evolving to continue to support international peace and stability in the face of this expanding challenge? This is fascinating. When Kosovo was attacked or when the Kosovo situation happened in the 90s, there was a company that had a contract with the U.S. Army called the log cap logistics. I forget what it all stands for, but essentially this massive contract to support the Army, whatever the building basis, feeding the troops, transporting things. And so all of a sudden, we had these refugees flying across the border from Kosovo and being pushed by the Serbs. And the U.S. government, the Army was able to wave its magic wand and tell KBR, which was a company that was running it at the time, build a refugee camp that has lights, plumbing, cafeterias, rec halls, everything. And almost overnight, boom, you had probably the best refugee camp ever built. For 20,000 refugees or whatever it was. Pretty amazing. That's super rare. The reality is that refugees are not well liked by anybody. You can see that in Afghanistan now where tens of thousands of Afghans are trying to flee the Taliban. Uzbekistan's not allowing them in. Tajikistan's not allowing them in. Pakistan's allowing them in at a trickle. Nobody likes refugees. During Syria, a lot of refugees fled to Jordan. We wanted to build a model refugee camp in Jordan. The private sector, I should say, we were offering plans and so on. Jordan didn't want that. They didn't want a permanent, semi-permanent refugee camp on their border. So they prefer to have things a little bit rough. Yes, this is something that the private sector could do a lot of, including climate change, where you have massive amounts of people moving because of the change in sea levels and so on. On the refugee side, probably not so much just because nobody wants a really nice refugee camp where refugees are well fed and cared for. But IDP, yes. Certainly bringing in companies to build emergency housing or even more permanent structures and things like that, yeah, 100%. And again, when you hire a company, especially in an IDP situation, the people doing all the work are going to be local national. So maybe an international company that brings in the expertise and the capabilities. But it's going to be local nationals that do most of the work. And ideally, it'll be local nationals from the IDP community who need the work and everything after being forced out of whatever location they're in. So, yeah, there's a big role for the private sector. I think it's important to remember that they're not making policy. The policies come from governments and is influenced by NGOs and other academics. But ultimately, once you have a policy, the private sector will bring in services that are faster, better, cheaper than the way a military would do or government would do it by itself. That's really interesting. It's interesting that you mentioned the conflict of interest that countries might have setting up refugee camps. It's like a very complicated. It's pretty horrible. There was, he was named Fred Cooney. You're going to read about an interesting guy, Fred Cooney, really pioneered a lot of the ideas of how a refugee camp should be set up. He was doing the Biafra war in the 60s in Nigeria. He went in and found these refugee camps were disastrous or NGOs bringing food and things like that. But they were basically tent cities with sewage everywhere and so on. And Fred Cooney had an engineering background that quickly set up clean water, sewage and things like it just made the camps a lot safer and healthier. And he really pioneered a lot of those ideas. But he also said, interestingly, he said, don't make a refugee camp too nice or people will never go home. And I saw the Sincere Leone when I was there where you had essentially a very, very poor country. You have a lot of IDPs going to this one UN camp. And in the camp, they were getting medical treatment. The kids were going to school. They're getting three square meals a day. That's something they never got out where they lived in their villages. And so getting them to go home, not so easy. So Cooney said, keep them rough, interestingly. On the other hand, you have refugee camps that full Palestinians that have been there for how many decades now. And, you know, really just they're not going anywhere. They're born and raised there three generations. So it makes sense to have some nicer places. That makes a lot of sense. Okay, we have another question from the chat that says, historically, PMCs have been documented doing problematic things due to their unaccountability, such as their involvement in the Neeser Square massacre, Abu Ghraib and private security companies, Blackwater. Not a PMC, but carry on. How do you see their role going forward in building states rather than undermining coalition goals? Well, they were hired that case, Neeser Square was a company called Blackwater. Some of you may be familiar with it. Run by Eric Prince is quite prominent within the Trump Republican circles these days. We thought Eric had his heart in the right place, but he does things that really differently. What happened in Neeser Square was a private security company that essentially got out of control. There was accountability. The company does not exist anymore. The individuals that were involved, there were four that were actually convicted of the crimes and had served several years in prison before Trump pardoned the last year or two years ago. I think everybody in the industry felt these guys had exceeded what they were allowed to do in that particular incident and that they deserved what they got, and that the company deserved what it got because of the way it did its training and handled its operations. You can debate that, but there's a lot of information out there on Neeser Square. The reality is there's been a couple of academic papers now that have asked, are you safer with a private security company as a civilian where these operations are taking place? Are you safer with private security companies or with militaries? The answer is, quite easily, you're safer with the private security companies. They have different rules of engagement. They can return fire. They can't start a battle. Militaries have something, or the American military, has something they call the death blossom, which is when one of their convoy's is assaulted, the way they get out of the ambush is to fire in every direction with everything they have, and so you get out of the X, so you get out of the ambush. That's probably good from military perspective, but if you happen to be in a town, all those civilians around there, they're probably not as appreciative. It was interesting in Iraq when you had these private security companies, including Blackwater, very, very few of them had heavy weapons. I mean, they had essentially rifle-caliber bullets, and a lot of them, even though their government clients would say you need to use 50-caliber machine guns to do this kind of security, the companies wouldn't do it because of the liability involved. In other words, they had different rules that they had to follow. The militaries, the military liability for throwing around the 1,000-pound bomb, they'll figure it out later. They also have governments backing them up that will either confirm or deny the bomb was there, or pay compensation if the bomb did it the wrong target. Private companies, it's a little different because you can actually sue the private company and has been done when they exceed their use of force, use of force improperly. There's a lot more ways you can control them, and also within the contract. If you are hiring a private security company, you put in the contract, but they're allowed to use in terms of weapons or equipment, and you can minimize the risk to the civilians by designing that into the contract. Now, if the company doesn't like the idea that they're not allowed to use armored vehicles or something, they're not going to bid on the contract. That's up to the client. I think one of the problems in our industry is that the clients haven't always enforced the contracts or enforced the laws. Again, from an industry perspective, that benefits the industry when you actually have laws and you enforce the laws. You have guidelines and you have contract rules and you enforce those. That's good for the companies that are really good at following the rules. But if we do the bottom features, there's always going to be a company that's going to want to cut corners, you know, not maybe not have people the right training or background. And if the government client isn't paying attention to it, then you're going to end up with a poor product with the risks that bring. That's very interesting. That makes sense. And that demonstrates the kind of the need for regulation for these kind of groups. And a similar kind of question. Somebody asked, how do quasi-government military organizations interact with PMCs and PSCs in the field? Do they collaborate on projects? And what happens if they happen to come in conflict with each other? That's a great question. I have to think if they've ever actually... So in Mozambique, you did have a... No, no, they've been actually... So Wagner was in Mozambique, but I don't think they interacted with security companies. There were security companies working for some of the extractive firms that are developing the big natural gas field they have there. Wagner went in, but they were not there very long, because I think basically because I weren't used to fighting in that environment, they were ambushed, I think several times, and I think as many as 12 of them were killed, and then the company or the organization just pulled out and decided it wasn't worth it. They didn't want to do it. Did they interact with the private security companies? I don't know that they did. I tend to think when you have... What I saw in Sierra Leone was that everybody pretty much coordinated, at least all the intervening forces, the UN, and so on would coordinate with each other. The NGOs as well were coordinating with these other companies. They didn't necessarily like each other, at least officially, but the reality was every evening Sierra Leone was a pretty small country. Every evening, everybody went to the same bars, and that's where your trade information hookup would do whatever, and that's where the security companies and the more than security companies and the NGOs and the UN people are able to sort out the problems informally without actually officially talking to each other or endorsing each other. It was quite useful, and it also allowed them to de-conflict their missions during the days because they would work all the stuff out at night and know that somebody was moving here or whatever. It was informal, but it actually worked. I think nowadays with the ICOCA and other things, we've legitimized a lot of these companies, and the NGOs are much more comfortable working alongside them or working in the same area and knowing what the limitations are on the security companies and so on. For the quick moves, quick moves are, especially we're talking about the Russian ones, probably not talking to many people, probably not interested in doing that. Certainly, they're more interested in anonymity on the individual level. They do know that sanctions can be slapped against individuals that are involved with this. You'll see that even though it's in equatorial areas, the Wagner group guys all wear masks. You'll never see pictures of their faces or anything. They're pretty careful to stay anonymous. Security companies, they're usually unmasked except for COVID. They're operating legitimately and so on. So different roles and stuff. I don't know that you have attract conflicts. There was, I think, an interesting example. Wagner group was in Syria. I think they're still in Syria, and there was an incident. You had Russian troops in Syria, you had the Wagner group in Syria, and then you had the U.S. have a small base, this is 78 years ago, had a small base with their U.S. allies in Syria. At one point, the Wagner group along with its Syrian allies actually attacked the U.S. base. The U.S. had a hotline, a telephone number that they could call the Russians and de-conflict because they did not want to have a battle between Russian troops and U.S. troops. So even though they're both operating in Syria, they basically had a phone number. They could talk to each other and make sure this wouldn't happen. So reportedly, the U.S. commander of this base saw Wagner group and the Syrians attacking his base and picks up the phone and calls the Russian military and says, are these your guys that are attacking? And the Russian military said, no, not ours, do you want? And they made several phone calls just to reconfirm that these Russians that were attacking them were not in fact part of the Russian military. And the Russian military said, do you want? And so the Americans did and they hammered the Wagner guys, killed quite a few of them, a lot of the Syrian allies with airstrikes, helicopters. It was a mess. It was the biggest setback that Wagner group had ever faced. Now, why the Russian military and Wagner group were not coordinating or agreeing on this? That's another question. But it does show that there was, I think at the very least, there was some friction going on between the Russian military and the Wagner group, people that had not been resolved. So I don't know if that addresses the question, but that kind of, I think maybe to extend that question a bit, you have a lot of UN troops operating in Central African Republic now alongside the Wagner group. I don't know enough about it, but if somebody wanted to write a held standing term paper, that would be a great topic to look at, the coordination between Wagner and the UN, Central African Republic. That's very interesting. Your example demonstrates some kind of like some level of autonomy of these groups, but I don't know if we could describe them as totally autonomous. Well, you know, I mean, you would have thought, even if there's some hostility between the private sector and the public sector, in the case of Russia, you would have thought the Kremlin or somebody would have de-conflicted that issue there in Syria. I don't know what happened. I don't think that whole story has been written yet. That's very interesting. I think we'll just have you time for like one or two more questions if that's all right with you. And I actually had a question regarding, you talked a little bit about how NGOs respect the law of the, not only the country they come from, but the country that they are working in. And I was wondering what that would kind of look like when they're working in a country that might not have a stable rule of law system or might have a conflicting governmental structure with like two parties, each claiming to be the proper government. And let's say one of them doesn't want the NGO there. How do NGOs navigate situations like this? In general, you have recognized the UN will recognize one entity as the legitimate like in Libya, for example, the UN recognizes this government in Tripoli. And so the NGOs will probably be operating under that auspices. But you have NGOs like MSF and ICRC, which will also work with the other semi-legitimate entities, whatever you want to call them. And they will have a special agreement usually with the UN or whoever that will allow this in Columbia. For example, you had the FARC insurrection the last 30 years or whatever. The ICRC actually had a, was able to meet with and discuss things with the FARC, even though it was clearly not, you know, it was not the legitimate governor of Columbia, but it was an advantage to everybody that you had entities that were able to do that, that were able to cross over this border and so on. So it does take special agreements and so on to be able to do this, but NGOs are actually really good at, some NGOs I would say are especially really good at doing, make sure that the UN and the Korean requirements are addressed, even in areas not controlled by the legitimate government. Okay. I think that makes a lot of sense. Well, thank you so much for coming and speaking with us today. I think we all learned a lot. I've really enjoyed the presentation. That was super interesting. If anybody wants to follow up on it, you're welcome to contact me by sharing my email. That's fine. And yeah, there's always an interesting topic. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you everyone for coming. I'm going to drop the links to the IGL event and the Zoom room for the next panel that's starting at 1.30. So in about an hour and 10 minutes, so everybody has time for like lunch and just to relax for a little bit. Yeah, awesome. Thank you so much, Mr. Brooks. And thank you everyone for coming to this panel. It's a pleasure. Take care.