 Welcome to US Institute of Peace. Delighted to welcome everybody here, and especially our special guest, Admiral Michelle Howard. I think as many of you know, US Institute of Peace was founded a little over 30 years ago by Congress as an independent federal institute dedicated to the proposition that peace is very practical, it's eminently possible, and it's essential for our national security. And USIP works to make a difference on the ground in conflict-affected areas, working with partners to equip them with the tools and the knowledge and the means to manage conflict so it doesn't become violent and resolve it when it does. And we know that all too often women are the invisible factor in looking at issues of peace and of war. And so for the last 12 years, we have really focused on that women's peace and security dynamic and a nod to my colleague, Katherine Kunis, who's the director of our gender policy strategy and has really infused our work globally with that lens. I had the wonderful honor to meet you, Admiral Howard, in Addis, above our last November, when she and I were both speaking at a conference with the African Union Peace and Security Committee, along with my colleague, Susan Stigant. And it was really wonderful to see your presentation on women's peace and security and the way in which that addressed issues of great concern to the African Union and really brought forward these critical issues. So at the time, I was pleased to issue an invitation, and it's always wonderful when these things come to fruition. We are really honored to have Admiral Howard with us, who has been a trailblazer in so many ways and is an exceptional voice to be a part of what is a month-long conversation for us here at USIP to commemorate Women's History Month. And we kicked it off with a public event yesterday called When Women in War Aren't Victims. And we invite you to be a part of events that we'll be having throughout the month. So, Admiral Howard, you have an extraordinarily impressive career in the US Navy. You have a whole series of firsts. You were the first African-American woman to command a ship in the armed services to reach three stars, and the first female admiral in the Navy, and most recently, the first female vice chief of naval operations. You're now currently the commander of US Forces Europe, and she also serves concurrently as the commander of US Naval Forces Africa and commanders of Allied Joint Force Command in Naples, which is mind-boggling for me to think about that array of hats. But so it's a great honor to have you here today as we have a roundtable discussion that's on the record on Women in War. And so I'll turn it over to you and we will have time for some discussion and questions. So I'll be thinking of those and over to you. Thank you Nancy. Thank you very much for those kind words. So everyone, thank you for joining me this morning. I think in relative terms it was short notice, so I know some of you disrupted schedules and there's a number of people here that some I consider family. Some I consider professional friends. It was some common goals and support of our service members and so thank you for taking the time to spend a little bit of me. So before I start my remarks, let me put a little bit of this in context as I'm sure some of you are wondering what the heck does a sailor know about peacekeeping? Because my life of land is sort of like this. But I will tell you my first time looking at peacekeeping like this was I was off the shores of Albania during the Balkan Wars. And women had just moved into amphibious ships. I was the exo of USS Tortuga. And we were carrying the Marines that were in reserve force in case the fighting broke back out in the spring. And so we were patrolling the Aegean Sea. Got to watch the Marines PT clockwise one day and PT counterclockwise the next day. We never did have to go ashore but that time got us very much involved in learning about the Balkans and what was going on and what our role would be. And at one point we did go in Albania to talk to military leadership of what had just happened. And you sit there and you go, wow, how could this part of the world have blown up and might not be aware? Well, that part of the world blew up at the time Iraq invaded Kuwait. So arguably for the UN and many of the nations that went in to push back Iraq out of Kuwait, the Balkans at that time was a sideshow that they expected Europe to handle. So after that my experience later on I did a West African training cruise where I worked with seven nations and then that's part of the Department of Defense where we do training to support stability operations and to help other militaries to become more professional. And on that trip we had Coast Guardsmen who were teaching law enforcement practices. We had Marines who were teaching fundamental, basically soldier skills and then we were providing them fundamental maintenance skills, how to take care of your everything from your people to your small boats so that they could be stronger militaries. And then a lot of this was about who we were and this concept of civilian oversight and the rule of law is all part of the conversation when you do work like that. So in this part of the world, besides the naval forces Europe and Africa, for me that includes on my US side, I have CBs on the ground in Africa, explosive ordnance to dispose of people on the ground in Africa, all involved in training their counterparts or helping them demine parts of their countries. And the CBs are a fantastic outreach mechanism for us, they're out there building schools and digging wells in many different countries. And then under my NATO hat, the current operations I'm responsible for. I have a small training unit in the African Union. I have assurance units, basically integration units to help look at logistic support in Romania and Bulgaria. And then I'm responsible for the Kosovo force. So as the fighting broke out between Serbia, the former Republic of Yugoslavia and all those eight sectors is probably the best way to put it. Eventually we got to the point where the UN said, no, we need a peace keeping force on the ground to provide a safe and secure environment for the civilians. That literally was NATO's first venture into peace keeping. And so NATO provides the framework for safe and secure environment, but there's several nations from around Europe and around the world who also provide everything from medical support to helicopter support. So it's really a very international group. At its peak, it started off with 14,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen from across different countries and militaries. At its peak, it was at 50,000. We're now down to just Kosovo. And Kosovo and Serbia does not recognize Kosovo as a country. There's about 112 nations that recognize Kosovo as a country. So we are still underneath that UN mandate of providing a safe and secure environment. I will tell you there is still low level violence that goes on. My first few weeks in command, the Hungarian unit that patrols and manages the Osterlitz Vig and Mitrovica had a grenade thrown at them. There's, you know, my second month in command, someone shot up RPG at the parliament building when they were meeting in the headquarters or their capital in Pristina. And then there was on the minister of dialogue, there was a formal dialogue that goes on between Kosovo and Serbia. That's managed by the EU. And then there was an attempted suicide, attempted assassination with a grenade in a hotel against the Kosovo minister of dialogue. So because the violence does not normally lead to casualties, that part of the world doesn't necessarily get a lot of attention. It's gotten a little bit more attention in the last month as the rhetoric between Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo has ratcheted up some engineered provocations with some of the presidents of the nations calling for war, no less, again. And the secretary general traveled a few weeks ago and I accompanied him in Kosovo. He talked to the presidents and the prime ministers of the countries calling for basically rational behavior and dialogue, continue the dialogue. And during that timeframe, the EU asked the presidents, particularly of Serbia and Kosovo to come to Brussels to get to calmness, basically. But there's been provocations. Serbia painted a train in national Serbia color saying Kosovo is Serbia in 28 languages and tried to run it across the border. They've been building walls which are against the UN Security Council. And so then they have to go to the table and talk about how they're gonna take down the wall. So it's not, it's a place where there's stability right now but the two star Italian officer who runs the operation day to day, I think he has the great analogy. He goes, it's kind of like Mount Vesuvius in Naples. Puffs a little while, you know, any day, you just don't know what's gonna set people up. So we have 5,000 NATO plus partners on the ground still, still doing patrols. Their biggest mission is the, they maintain the security of the Cicciani Ministry, a monastery, and then managing Mitrovica, this border town between Serbia and Kosovo. And they just do a fantastic job day in and day out. But to this topic, about 5.5% of our peacekeepers are women from around the country. So let me, let me now talk a little bit about, if we could put up the first slide. So I'm sure most of you are experts and understand this journey the UN went on starting in 2000 with saying, hey look, there's, if we are going to get to long lasting peace and security and countries where there's conflict, we have to understand the perspective of women. And we can get after this with making sure women are participating as the peacekeepers, making sure we're protecting women and girls, making sure that we're gender mainstreaming in the military so that it's easier to have women participate. And there was a, and then we gotta make sure we think about prevention of sexual violence before peacekeepers go in and then what their role is in preventing sexual violence. And so then from 2000, there was just this series of resolutions. In 2008, they talked more about the development of women as peacekeeping troops. They talked, the resolution talked about there's gotta be consequences for sexual violence where we refer, if we are aware of activities we refer those breaches to our sanction committee and look at maybe having sanctions when we have cases of that. 2009, UN said, hey we need to develop indicators so we know we're making progress in peacekeeping and particularly women in security in peacekeeping. And in 2015, they said, we need to develop strategies and provide resources. And so since that timeframe, I'm sure many of you are aware of the journey the US went on with the women action plan. 63 nations have developed the women action plans for women peace and security. So there has been progress. Next slide. So for us, the 2015 national security strategy and I know with the new administration this will be changing but the words were we are focused on reducing the scourge of violence that gets women around the globe by providing support for effective populations and enhancing efforts to improve judicial systems so perpetrators are held accountable. While I was on the joint staff in the timeframe of 2010 to 2012, our government created a women peace and security and national action plan that was updated in just June of last year. And it looks at helping to protect women and girls from gender-based violence and then also making sure there's equal access to relief and recovery in areas of conflict. Next slide. So for us, when you talk about gender mainstreaming in the Department of Defense, Secretary Panetta signed the repeal of the combat exclusion law opening up literally hundreds of thousands of positions to women in the military. And then as you open up, and so as I pointed out as a naval officer, peacekeeping is normally done by our folks who are in the Army or Marine Corps. And so when you open up these positions, infantry armored, then you're opening up the possibility of having more women from the U.S. participate in peacekeeping. Next slide. So about the time of the middle of 2007, we had these security resolutions. At the tactical level, the U.S. was on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq. And it became clear that we had a need for all female engagement teams. And so the Army and Marine Corps developed these teams of women trained at the basically higher end of infantry combat skills. And then that gave us access to women in these environments. So they all, female teams could go into homes, talk to the women, gather information, get a better sense of what was going on the ground, and then provide them information on where they could get help and resources. And so we had this sort of strategic level for women action plan. And then it was playing out tactically on the ground because of a need. So it's interesting to me that you know, you can always have referendums and resolutions, but generally I find soldiers and sailors and Marines and Airmen will get to the right answer because they figure out that's just exactly what they have to do. Next slide. From a NATO perspective, it was 2007 when NATO and partners in the Euro-Atlantic Council said, hey, we really need to look at UNSCR 1325. And at that point it was already seven years old. And by the, they said, we're gonna have to look at how we strengthen support to this resolution with partner nations. And then by 2014 at the NATO Well Summit, the Allied leaders agreed that we've got to integrate gender perspective into our three core tasks of collective defense, crisis management, and cooperative security. And they see it as a requirement to provide a more responsive force for NATO. And that if we don't include women, it's hard for us to be ready as a force to take care of the spectrum of issues that happen on the battlefield. So NATO has been working to integrate gender perspectives in education and training and exercises. And up the picture at the top is Margaret Sherman, who's the current special representative of women, peace and security. Next slide. You know, so the secretary general, the current one has said, general equality is not optional, it's fundamental. And allows us to respond better and smarter to the many security challenges we face today. So you know, so when you think about NATO, 1949, and the charter and this article five of if one member is attacked, then we will provide collective defense. When 9-11 happened, that was the first time in the NATO of history that they called an article five. And they provided over the years, you know, literally thousands upon thousands of soldiers, airmen from the 28 contributing nations and then partners from around the world. One of the first groups that was in there was Norway. And my experience has been Norway is probably a leader when you look at gender integration. I mean, I think they had their first women's seal with submarine back in the 90s. And they have had women in their infantry for decades. They too, as they went on the ground in Afghanistan, realized they needed an all-female peacekeeping unit. So they created the Jurger Troopin, or Hunter Troop, an elite special forces unit. They had 317 apply, 88 women were accepted into the program. They put together a 10-month course. And at the end, there were 13 women left who deployed to Afghanistan and could serve right side by side with their male special forces. And the Norwegians realized that across the spectrum from conventional to special forces, you have to have women to be able to integrate with what is literally half of the population, to understand what's going on and to better provide a security environment. It just gives your team on the ground flexibility. Now, from my perspective, next slide. In the operation I've had now that, you know, Kosovo that's been going on, women have been part of the peacekeeping force, the safe, providing a safe and secure environment since the very beginning. But I just wanted to highlight two women we have today. One is Finnish, second Lieutenant Pirma. And she's not only a soldier, she happens to have a degree in law. So part of her job is a monitoring. So she goes around with the team and then they go to different towns and then they look to make sure it is a safe and secure environment. But she's found as a lawyer, the country is still building itself and Kosovo declared independence only less than two decades ago. So it doesn't have all the institutions. And EU is really the leader in trying to build up these institutions. But as a lawyer, she realized there wasn't women advocacy groups. So she's helped establish women advocacy groups, help them figure out how they can set up shelters and then provide what the government would normally do as part of the Kosovo security force. And then on the more probably traditional military end, we've got First Lieutenant Snyder from the U.S. who's an explosive ordinance deposal. So when you look at the Balkans and the number of mines, this will be a mission that goes on for a long time. As civilians find suspicious articles, we have EOD teams that go out and just basically make sure they're either not a mine or if they are mine, take care of it on behalf of the population. Next slide. So here's where I am on this long journey of women peace and security from a military perspective. So I've come to this conclusion. Our framework has always been these three, the three levels of warfare, the strategic level where you've got these broad aims and objectives and it's the art and science of war and it's where policy and then all the levers of government sort of merge and then you say, okay, here's what we want as an outcome at the end of the campaign. And then the tactical level is always pretty easy for people to understand. That's sailors at sea, boots on ground, airmen in the air actually doing the individual missions that gets you to that outcome. The contributing, they're the military arm contributing to get to that particular outcome. What I'm finding, it's the operational level of war, which is where I am now as the head of JFC, where we have, how do we do this? How do we go from linking these grand strategic objectives to what's playing out on the ground? Well, like I said, tactically we have not just the US, but many nations who figured out what they need to do on the ground. But then how do I as a commander, when I'm planning an operation, make sure that this gender perspective is integrated into the planning? And as I've had a dialogue with my staff, it's not like there's a guide out there right now, whether it's in the US or any other nation. So you see at the tactical level, good ideas are flowing up. And then we have overarching policy from NATO. You need to have your people trained. So for example, we went through our last year, my command went through its certification. We were working with Estonia for the exercise. So when we took the advanced party team out, we made sure they went through gender, women, peace and security, basically gender integration training before they deployed. But that's just one simple activity. In reality, I think I have to be at the level of, okay, if I'm gonna go into a country, and I would probably the first thing I would do is survey my entire team and say, who speaks the native language? And yet that's, we do that because we have steps that remind us we have to do that. And then when we build our civil military team that goes on the ground, we would probably look at, even if that soldier doesn't have the right skillset, they have the language, and we would make them part of that team. So do we sit there and look across our entire headquarters and go, before we go into a country, who are the women on our staff? And do we make sure that when we do planning, that there's women in the planning effort? Because based on the percentage of women on the staff, you could end up with a planning group that has no women. That perspective is not included. And so just as we're deliberate about something different, a language capability that someone speaks, we're gonna have to be thoughtful in our planning process about who we are, and how we bring the gender perspective into what we do. And then it gets to, how do we force generate? So if I sit back as a commander and I say, in this particular country, after we've done our cultural planning, I do need all female engagement teams. Do I have a process where I put that requirement into the force generation process, so that the system says, oh, she's asking for this particular makeup for these particular military requirements in order to be more responsive on the ground, in order to achieve stability and security at a faster speed? All of that at the operational level. Right now, it's just, I think commanders who, if they have it on the forefront of their mind, they're doing great things. So I know this is an area where there's, if we're gonna bring the UN Security Council Resolution, the Women Action Plan, to a consistent participation on the ground, and a consistent looking at gender integration. It's this middle piece where I am, where there's still work to be done. And I would think, looking at our own Women Action Plan, that that might be the level that's missing in a lot of our federal agencies. How do you translate the grand language in the national security strategy to the actual things that you're doing when you're looking at trying to achieve security in a place for the goodness of the people and to the benefit of the goodness of the world? So I was hoping today we could have a discussion on this and what I see is the missing piece for where I am in the military and get your thoughts on maybe some things I can look at or things, oh, your experience sets in and things you've thought about as you've worked with Women, Peace and Security. So Nancy, thank you for allowing me to tee that up. All right, thank you, Emma Howard. And I can, yeah, your experiences and your insights on this I think are invaluable for moving the conversation forward. We wanna open it up for conversation, but if I might, I'd love to tee us up by saying or by asking, when you look at that middle operational piece and you identify that as the area that needs the most work, do you, how would you describe the barriers or what are the, why is that the biggest operation or the biggest challenge? Is it structural, is it attitudinal or how do you think about that? So it's, if it's attitudinal, it's because it's based on lack of experience. And then it's also based on, I think, on how we're made up today. So when we were getting ready, we were working our way through our own response force exercise. We have a full-time gender advisor on the staff and he was advising my deputy commander who was playing the, who was gonna play the leader of the group we were gonna deploy. And then they were struggling with this. So in the middle of our training process, I gathered up all the senior leaders on my staff. And so they're admirals and generals and they're different services in different countries. And then, as I gathered them up, then we're at the table. The only woman at the table's me. And I'm at the head. But I started asking them questions. What's your experience in your country with women in your militaries? And then what's your experience and what's your perspective on gender, women, peace and security, the UN Security Council? And so first of all, there was clearly, and God bless them, they trusted me, there was clearly some angst and this is about women quotas, this is about this and that. Some of them had had experience on the ground in Afghanistan. So they said, no, this is about mission. But then they also were struggling with how do we bring it up to the operational level of war? As I started to ask questions and give them my perspective, I said, look, you can't have half of a population's perspective when you're trying to do development, when you're trying to build judiciary systems, when you're trying to bring humanitarian aid to people, you can't only have half of the population's perspective when you're actually in the diplomacy piece and you're trying to set the conditions for peace. You have to have the totality of the perspective. And I said, it doesn't mean it's gonna be an all women's perspective, you have to have the men's perspective, particularly if the country happens to be where the men are the power group. At that point, one of the generals, the light bulb went on and he said, oh, I've been looking at this wrong. This is about getting everyone's perspective included. This is not about bringing women in, this is about everyone's perspective matters on the ground. I go, yes, it just so happens in a lot of places, half of their perspectives are women's voices. And we've been ignoring it. We know now that the work the UN has done is that when we bring women into the actual negotiation part, which is not normally the military part, so that's where folks like you come in. The resolutions tend to last longer by years. So when we bring those perspectives in, we're getting at either facts or truth that an all male group just doesn't see or it doesn't have knowledge about. So conversation and awareness is really important to this. But being military people, we want concrete things. We want process, we wanna have a checklist or a standard operating procedure. We wanna understand how this should be integrated so that as you go from a different mission you're not relearning all over again. And then it's always gonna be different people. So they understand the importance of it and they understand how to get to it. Go ahead and put your flags up and we'll just try to catch everybody we'll start with Tom. Yeah, thank you very much. I'm Tom Stahl from the US aid. I really appreciate what you've talked about here. I think someone wisely said, if you're not intentionally inclusive, you will be unintentionally exclusive. And I think that's part of what you're saying. You have to really actually purposely bring women in in order to get that full perspective. And I think one of the other things you've shown is that too often we talk about hard power and soft power and we say, okay, the military does hard power and the civilian agencies do soft power, but actually the military can do a lot of soft power too. And we need to work together. And that's, I was wondering if you could talk a little more about some of the things you're, with the all female engagement teams, supporting advocacy groups in places like Kosovo and elsewhere. Obviously there are civilian agencies from the US government also working there and other governments, the State Department, USAID and so on. I was wondering how you work with them to do a lot of these things, because we're also working in that same space looking at advocacy civil society groups, especially working with women's groups. So USAID will end up providing the resources, the fundamentals that the country needs until it gets back on its feet. And then when you look at the military and an all female engagement team, they're the link to those women. Because the team on the ground for USAID might be a team that's hired locally. It might be just a few people, you guys are definitely much more streamlined than we are. But the knowledge that they're there or how they get there or what's available, it's gonna be those soldiers, women's soldiers circulating on the battlefield, but the battlefield includes the homes. And they can go into homes and make sure the women know that these resources are there and available and where they have to go to get to something like medical care, taking care of a sick child. They're gonna be the link between, are you aware there's a Doctors Without Borders Clinic over here, because the women are not gonna be able to get that because they're isolated in some cases. And then my experience has been, particularly in the last 20 years, all of the different development groups, but obviously for us, particularly USAID, are lockstep either in the Civ-Mill coordination cell, or more importantly to me, are now at like at the co-com level. At the planning level. At the planning level. So USAID has representation at AFRICOM every day of the week, every day of the week, and every day of the week, they're coming out with here's the different countries we're providing support to in AFRICOM. So then when we go into planning, we could sit there and say, hey, here's sort of our long-term approach. Then you've got the USAID person, they're going whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You may not be aware of it, but this group is pushing food supplies over here. And so can you take this timeframe into account when you're doing your planning? You're like, well, because you don't want to disrupt food delivery, you know, as you're planning to go after a particular group. So then you will lose the hearts and minds of the people you're trying to help. So having an integrated perspective is incredibly important. I'm going to help my information might be a little bit dated, but a senior naval officer who helped establish the female engagement teams at Special Operations Command complained to me a few months back. He's like, I'm still trying to find out who took apart the program of female engagement teams. And separately I asked some other commanders to decide, started trying to find out. And they said, well, look, they were bad for good order and discipline. And once we didn't have direct combat ops in Afghanistan or Iraq, we didn't need them. So how do you, I see the Marines have tried to bring them back in a conventional troop context? How do you get beyond the experience of some commanders who said, yeah, we had the female engagement teams on the ground and we had pregnancies and we had fights between operators and they were in remote locations and they caused problems. And, you know, one bad apple who might have been responsible for that ends up tarring the whole program. Well, when you have, when there's change and then you might be the unique representation of a group, there is that weight of however it comes out, that's gonna set the path for the future. So if individual commanders has specific beliefs that will be hard to counter. That said, regardless of individual soldiers, sailors, airmen's beliefs, we understand the value of what was created at the tactical level and why I believe, you know, if we need it again, it'll happen again. But that gets to what I'm talking about here. There was a need at the tactical level and so you had countries, individual countries, creating these teams to fulfill that need. How do we get to, we understand that when we are planning to go to a particular region that we take that into account upfront as part of our force generation process. That we've gotta pull this up to a level where whatever the requirements are, that that piece is a part of that grand thing of what you look at. You know, do we need all female engagement teams or is how are we threading the gender perspective at that operational level of war? So that if, you know, as we go through and the combatant commanders say, here's my requirements for the next 12 months in terms of, we'll talk about it in terms of medical, we'll talk about it in terms of, you know, combat arms, we'll talk about it in terms of ships. But in the end, and we'll even talk about it down to, you know, I need an explosive, a two man dog team. And then we don't think about it in terms of gender perspective because we're pretty much gender neutral. But then we've gotta step back and go, there's gonna be a knee down the ground for a unit or for women in presence and it's gonna be in these areas. So we've gotta work the process and say, how do we deliberately thread gender integration into the process? Paula, would you like to see female engagement teams as part of the standing force? I would like to see us get to the point across all of our countries where the women are integrated into the forces and then you don't have to set up a separate condition. So, you know, eventually, I think eventually we'll get there. And so it's this period in between that we'll have to be deliberate in our thinking. Thank you. No, well, we can take a couple more minutes. Good morning, Emeril. I'm new to this agenda and the resolution itself and before coming here and reading through it, one thing that surprised me was that the language at the U.S. government level through DOD on the key pillar of ensuring that women are in leadership positions at all stages of leadership positions was missing when reflected internally. The pillar in our document says that we will ensure other countries have women in leadership positions. We don't reflect that pillar on ourselves in those documents. Do you think that would be helpful if we would do that or do you think that the women action plan and other policies already do that for us? I would say where the U.S. military is, we're at a place where we're farther ahead. So it was, I was invited to the Czech Republic to talk with their chief of defense. They're just starting to grapple better gender integration and I was asked to talk to their parliamentarians, the equivalent to this ask and ask on this topic. And then we held a panel of women of NATO. So we had me, we had Brigadier General Winslow who runs the mission in Sarajevo, who's a U.S. Army general. We had Cho Chatfield, who's at the NATO headquarters, who's a Navy helicopter pilot. And then they said, well, we tried to get General Winslow, she's the deputy commander of the K-4 mission. She's Army National Guard. And as you're sitting on this all U.S. military panel and we're all in NATO, we're in NATO and we're all in NATO positions, I realized it's all U.S. representing NATO because there aren't women leaders on the military side in NATO at that point across 27 other nations. And so when I look across my own headquarters, when you look at where are the women next level down, who has the women colonels? It'll be Canada, United Kingdom, but it's predominantly U.S. So we're in a place where we have opportunity and women move up. So I would say it's less of a concern for us. In fact, NATO just hired a new, the NATO Defense College just hired a new leader to the director, Army three star woman general. So I think what I'm obligated to help is as I travel around in my NATO hat and have these conversations, really understand the dynamics in these militaries and where women are. And they are, they're mostly at the O3 level and below. It seems to me as you get farther north into the Scandinavian countries, when I visited Norway and I was in one of their headquarters, their J5 slash J3 is a woman three star who commanded a submarine. And so there are senior women in the other nations. There's fewer of them, so you just don't tend to see them. So size and percentages matter. So we have two, maybe we can just have the last two people make quick questions and you can use, you can decide how long you can answer. Okay, thanks. Good morning, man, Elaine Collins. I work on the Joint Staff and the J5 and we are working to update our implementation guide now that the new National Action Plan has come out. And my question to you, kind of piggybacks on Michelle's, what would you need it to say or to address that the last one did not? And then I guess a follow on question for my aid and state counterparts, is there anything that their implementation guides need to be cognizant of that you might, I guess, see from your seat? My question, I will focus on your request for a discussion about operational art and as a retired Army strategist, I quit to grab that. The campaign plan, to me it revolves around the vision of the campaign plan that you want to pursue and what your vision might be. It's complicated though when you're dealing with an issue such as this, are you seeking to empower women or are you seeking to include women because there are two different tracks there? How would you make that happen within a NATO command? This has resource implications, it has generational implications. I'd just be curious about your thoughts about what your vision for a campaign plan would be. So two small questions. Yeah, yeah, no, so when you look at a campaign plan, you know, when we're working our way and we do all that upfront research and then we sort of sort through our self, our assumptions and our constraints and restraints. When you end up with normally a very deep cultural understanding of the country, the countries you're going into, the areas of influence and I will tell you at a personal level, I have deployed overseas and will send out professors from the War College and the postgraduate school and they'll provide us cultural training. And when I look back in particular one deployment, I suddenly realized they didn't talk about the cultural of what women's role was and how they are and how they're arrayed and what they're allowed to do. And yet clearly in Afghanistan, that became important. That became very important. And so how do we get to make sure that when we're looking at the culture in the campaign plan and that part, we deliberately look at where is this country in terms of demographics and then the role of women and how women are employed and whether women are in any power positions, period. And then where are women, you know, it's surprising in some countries, the medical community is predominantly female. So that should be part of our cultural assessment. That will tell us when the country's in a state of conflict what different requirements we might need for our units that we're sending in if we need to have deliberately add the presence of women to particular units. The other thing we have to think about in terms of a campaign plan is we often talk about, you know, how do you know you finally get to security? And it's interesting me over my lifetime, you know, the guys on the, and gals on the ground always come up with different metrics than what we come up with, you know. Well, we knew we were in a good place when the market reopened. We knew we were in good place when the guy, you know, walked 15 miles to sell his goats. There are probably a lot of indicators that are specifically look at women and girls that we should be saying here's a series of metrics or measures of performance that we know we're at the right level of security, you know. It's not just are the schools opening, but if there were schools for girls before, are those schools of opportunities opened again? You know, if women were predominantly going to the market, are they able, feel safe and secure to go to the market? If the water supply is a river or a well, the presence of women on a daily basis going to and from the well. And then we have opportunities to create all these indicators focused on women. Because I've come to the conclusion in many of these countries, the condition of the women on the ground is your best indicator of whether or not you have a safe and secure environment. And so how do we get that perspective now at the campaign level? And you know, I'm a Leavenworth graduate. Everything I had that the Army gave me, it was lockstep right there for me to think about and include. So we've got to go back and rewicker, and it's not for us to say the steps are in the women action plan. It's how do we go back through and say we should go back through and include this thought process in our doctrine, where it's appropriate. Whether it's, you know, JP3O planning. It's not we need a separate guide on women peace and security. We need to include the thought process deliberately to save heartache and not to put it on our soldiers and sailors and airmen at the tactical level while they're trying to get the mission done. That speaks to wonderful adaptability of the military. What I'm talking about is learning that lesson so we don't have to be adaptable again. We just, it's part of how we get things done. Thank you. Thank you, Adam Howard. We really appreciate both your being here today and the energy and the thought from us that you're bringing this really important topic. So we appreciate very much the opportunity to hear your voice. Thank you everyone for joining us today. And please join us for other of our Women's History Month events. All right. Thank you. That's it.