 I'm Sharon Burke. I'm a senior advisor at New America, where I run a resource security program. And my background is as a defense official. I've spent a lot of years in the Pentagon, most recently as an assistant secretary of defense. So I wanted to change things up a little bit for this panel and ask a different question, which is, can you stop war? Now, to be fair to our panel, when we spoke about the question, everyone sort of rolled their eyes. Well, we were on the phone. But I imagined them all rolling their eyes and saying, you can't stop war. And there's always going to be a military role in war. But what we're going to talk about on this panel is, can you make investments that will mitigate the effects of war, that will keep some people from going to war? So in other words, that will stop wars in some measure. What's really exciting to me about this panel, too, is that we're going to hear from three people who aren't just approaching that as an academic question. They're actually out doing this in the field. And they're using technology and data tools to make this work more effective and more targeted. So this is going to be a great conversation. I just want to start, too, by saying that if you're skeptical about this and about the role of building security as opposed to just fighting wars, I just want to tell you what Secretary Mattis said right before he was in his current job. He said, if you don't fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition. I think it's a cost-benefit ratio. The more we put into the State Department's diplomacy, hopefully the less we have to put into a military budget. And former Secretary of Defense, who I worked for, Bob Gates, in 2007 at Kansas State University, said very much the same thing, that a dramatic increase in spending on the civilian instruments of national security, diplomacy, strategic communications, foreign assistance, civic action, and economic reconstruction and development, these are the things that are important security investments for our country. So this is a different side of the equation. And again, I want to turn to our panel now and talk about what it is they're doing specifically in the field. So let's start with Rebecca Wolfe, who is the director for, tell me the exact, I have it here, wait, you don't have to tell me. Director of Peace and Conflict at Mercy Corps, which is a large organization that's been doing this for a while, but what you're doing is a little different. So tell us what you do exactly. So a question I often get is why does Mercy Corps care about conflict, particularly violent extremism? And we see that those issues as being the leading cause of extreme poverty and suffering today. So as a development and humanitarian organization, if we don't deal with conflict, we are not going to hit those development goals. And so that's why as an organization, we have clearly invested in both conflict prevention, management work and doing some work on countering violent extremism. And so I'll talk a little bit about some of what we're doing on violent extremism is the fact we started this line of research in 2011. And really what we saw was a disconnect between macro analysis, mostly economic data, which we're showing youth bulges and high unemployment rates should lead to what's correlated with civil wars. And so development practitioners were then saying if we employ young people, then we won't have these wars. What we found is that actually looking at micro data and I'm a psychologist by training was that people don't make a cost benefit analysis when they're trying to decide whether to fight. And so using both social psychology and behavioral economics, we decided to look at really why a young person was making the decision to fight. With that, what we also saw was different. And I think this is why we've been able to kind of change the paradigm around CVE is that most data was about people's speculation about other people. So you went to talk to key informants or you talked to the youth leaders, but not to the people actually fighting. And so one of the things we've done both quantitatively and qualitatively is talk to former fighters or people who are engaged in violence. And so the answers we would get from key informants was always kind of instrumental. It was economic. When we talked to people actually fighting, the answers were much more diverse. And it was rarely economic reasons. It was the top reason they fought. I'll start. OK. Now, Meena Chang, you are a CEO of Linking the World. And it is also an NGO that's active in this space. But you're different. And you're taking a different approach. How are you different? So we began as a traditional humanitarian organization. And we've pivoted to now become more proactive, understand the role of development in the context of national security. We do not say that poverty causes terrorism or violent extremism. But we do measure and quantify the role of poverty in allowing these violent extremist groups to further their agenda. And there's many routes to terrorism. And there's so many different parts of that infrastructure that needs to be supported. And poverty, we believe, plays a role in that. And so what we do is use data analytics, predictive analytics. We use resiliency indices and other evaluation tools like MercyCores to quantify and identify what those drivers are so that we can create targeted programming. We're not just blindly going into an area with a solution in a box, hoping that it works, and seeing what the unintended consequences are after the fact. So what kinds of interventions do you do? So every program will be tailored to the individual needs, the vulnerabilities of that community. So one of the most important things that we need to be able to do as an NGO, going into these places, is proper human terrain mapping, understanding the real power dynamics in a community. We've seen so many of the unintended consequences of good intentions, and we want to learn from that. I think when you're going into an unstable area, usually the state is not stable enough to provide the services to the community. There are grievances, the effects of poverty lead to indignities that can easily be exploited by groups with extremist ideology. And so we counter that through providing meaningful choices, and that can be through economic development, education, health care. And it really promotes the collaboration of NGOs, something that we don't see happening often. I'm glad we're promoting the collaboration between NGOs so that every NGO brings their specialty into that community, but also coordination with military and diplomatic efforts of the United States. If we're not coordinating and working on common goals, then we can easily sometimes work against what we're trying to achieve. So now Jake, you're up. Jake Herman is the CEO and founder of Nuru International. And for what we're looking at at New America, we're looking at climate security and the way that various indicators work together to create insecurity, whether it's access to water, access to energy, demographics, governance. And you're focused on a specific thing, which is extreme poverty. But how you came to that, and that as a cause of instability and conflict, and something that you can intervene in, is a really interesting story. So can you tell us a little bit about why that, why you're focusing on extreme poverty, and why you decided how you came to that decision? Sure, thank you. I have a little bit of a different background for this work. So I was a force recon marine, and I did several tours of combat in Iraq, parts of the Horn of Africa, some other areas in the Middle East. And it was really during our time in combat that we began to see what we believed to be a growing gap in our national security. We were going out there every night, doing these snatch and grab missions, and we began to see that as we made gains, it was two steps forward, three steps back. We began to see that a lot of the ways these extremists groups, these insurgent groups were growing was they were recruiting in these local vulnerable populations. They were using them as a base of support for logistics operations. They were using them to hide when we went to do our hits, and the villagers were hiding them because what we found was these insurgent groups, these extremist groups, were doing aid work. They were dropping off food aid. They were building clinics. They were building schools. And so they were doing what DOD was telling us to do, in winning hearts and minds. They were doing it far better than we were. So as my guys and I had started to have this conversation, we began to see this gap in our national security strategy and thought, what if we could step into that gap and build a hybrid? Not a military group, not an NGO, but a hybrid organization that could leverage the best in practice from the NGO community, and build strong, stable economic development models that are long-term and sustainable in these communities to give people real choices as viable alternatives to supporting these extremist groups. And then we thought, what if we could staff these programs with former operators like us who know how to handle ourselves in these environments to be able to go far forward of the wire where maybe some NGOs can't go or don't have access to because of the lack of security? And so that was the genesis of the idea. I left the Marine Corps, went to business school to build a company to kind of step into that gap called Nuru International. And over the next, I graduated in 2008, and over the next almost eight years, I lived in rural villages, first in Southwest Kenya and in Southern Ethiopia now in Northern Nigeria, building and testing this model. And the key is really working with local leaders, unlocking their potential to design really effective, sustainable programming that addresses those target vulnerabilities that are making those communities so vulnerable to the call of extremism. And as has been so eloquently spoken here on the panel, poverty doesn't cause terrorism. However, that extreme poverty creates an environment that makes it really easy for a counter narrative to happen from the violent extremist groups. It makes it really easy for them to take foothold and grow and thrive. And so we build an organization around that concept addressing key vulnerabilities in agriculture and financial inclusion in health and education. And now we're getting ready to, we've launched in our pilot in Kenya in 2008, we've exited that project leaving behind a strong resilient organization that's continuing to scale to thousands of families every year, but the focus is around eradicating extreme poverty. Okay, so all three of you are looking at countering violent extremism and making investments in development and in communities in order to counter it. So a question I have for you is how do you measure success? How do you know if it's working? How do you know if something that doesn't happen was successful? So I'll start up. So one of the ways we do it, and we actually just had a study come out on Somalia about how we reduce both support and engagement in political violence in Somaliland. And so it was an education program that also included a civic education component which was mostly community service. And we found that young people who engaged, who were in school but also had this community service were less likely to support these groups at the end of the program. And so, and we use pretty sensitive measures because we know there are self-report biases that people are often uncomfortable saying those things. Surveys or? So it is surveys and it's using a technique designed by J. Lyle and Kazakei Mai, two academics on what's called endorsement experiments. But it's a way to implicitly test these things so that people feel more comfortable saying their real opinion. Are there other tools you use to measure success of your efforts? So, and I would say those are our direct measures. We also have some proxy measures. And so a lot of what we've talked about is that there's often a community acceptance that happens because of in a sense that there's a lack of governance in those areas. And so these groups come in to provide those services that the government isn't. And so one of the main things we are looking at is more of a proxy measure. Less is around community acceptance or how much stronger is the state society relationship. Do you use similar kinds of tools, Mina? Like how do you know, both you and Jake, how do you know where you wanna put a program and how do you know to tell your donors and the public what's working? So we show our donors the pragmatic reasons of investing now rather than spending sometimes up to 60 times more to do kinetic action or reconstruction, reconciliation work. So you're able to measure that. We are creating a result of work rating. So there's so many stability ratings out there, but there's a difference between stability, which is shorter term and resiliency, which is more longer term. We've learned that extremist groups are incredibly resilient, which is why they can take in these minor shocks and continue to grow. When we take in the data, aggregate the data, and it tells us which communities are at higher risks of instability, it's because they have those combinations of vulnerabilities that would allow them to have weaker societies. Conflict that escalates towards because there is no strong society enough to resolve a conflict through peaceful means. They're expressing it through violence. They feel they're stripped of dignity. They're stripped of meaningful choices and voice and active participation. And so to raise the rating, we have to understand what the root causes of that instability is. If the programs are targeting that cohesively, then theoretically we're raising, we're strengthening the rating, and that's how you can create a measurement tool. What kinds of root causes do you often see as the main contributors? The contributors are everything the NGOs are already tackling, everything from access to clean water to healthcare, good governance, gender equality or inequality. But it has to be tackled. It can't just be siloed and looked at as one issue. You can't just introduce a school and hope that the community becomes educated and better. You can't just tackle agriculture. It has to be done in a coordinated way. And we have to be investing for a long-term, with long-term in mind. We can't expect to see results in 12 months and we can't expect to see the fruits of these investments. Sometimes in five, 10 years, we have to understand this is a longer-term investment. But do you have ways of measuring progress along that journey? Yes, the resiliency rating changes. So, and also there's also a tool that to me is kind of like a kaleidoscope. You change one element of it and the whole picture changes. It also helps us ask better questions when we're designing programs. So before we introduce this intervention, we can consider if we introduce this intervention in this community, what is the second third order effect in the surrounding areas? And even here in the United States, how does it affect us? You know, when the Ebola outbreak was happening and we were looking at it spreading into Nigeria, the international community got involved and the cases were so much smaller than what it could have been. When you look at the connection between the economy of Nigeria and the state of Texas, that is, that's a case enough to invest money into stopping an epidemic from happening there. Fair enough. I've got two questions for you, Jake, and it'll come back to both of you. And feel free, also you can react directly to each other if you feel so inclined, which is both, you know, how do you know if it's working, what you're doing? And also, how do you as a former, well, I guess there's no former Marines, as a Marine, as a military member, and as someone who has lots of friends, I'm sure, who are in the military, how do people react to what you're doing and do they buy it? You know, do you think there's military support for humanitarian interventions for the kinds of things you're doing? So first, how do we measure success? I wish I had as good of an answer as these two women do. I, unfortunately, we've been trying to measure community resilience for a long time and we have not found a good tool. I'm actually really glad to hear that there are some excellent tools now under development. What we do instead is we measure specific outcomes of our programs. So if we find that hunger is the thing that is creating the greatest vulnerability in these communities, we'll design a sustainable agriculture program and we'll measure definitive increases in crop yield versus a baseline. We will measure decreases in malaria rates if there's a certain disease that's causing a vulnerability. We'll measure increases in savings rates, repayment rates on loans that we're issuing in the local community. We've designed what we call a leadership sustainability index that tracks progress of the leaders that we're working with that shows their capability and to be able to run their own organizations and scale those organizations. So we have, when we report to our, we call them investors, we run this like a business. When we report to our investors, we have a series of KPIs, key performance indicators that we track every quarter that we report to our donors to show that success over time. But we are lacking in our ability to understand at a meta level how we are impacting the resilience in the communities. So again, I'll be following up with both, and Rebecca to learn more about that. The second question is, how has the military responded to what we've been doing? For those of you who are in service, especially in the special operations community, you know, guys, operators see this. Which you were, you were in the special operations. Operators see this all the time. And we have a long list of guys who wanna come work for us. I've been really pleasantly surprised. I was not sure as I got out what the response to my new work would be in the old community. But it's been overwhelmingly supportive. And in fact, one of my mentors, as I got out and I started building this organization was now Secretary Mattis, who really believed in this approach, who tried to mentor me and think about how do you build resilience in these really vulnerable communities that are far forward of the wire? And so I found, you know, we've got, we've been able to hire four former operators to come on the team. They've done fantastic work transitioning from a military community to a development community. We found that a lot of the skills that we have had developed in our old job is highly relevant to this new work in ways that we never could have anticipated. Meaning it did a great job articulating about human train mapping. We're trained to do that. We're trained to build out a human intelligence network to understand early warning systems. We're trained to help local leaders train them by, with, and through to be able to influence them to accomplish key objectives. So it's been really a strong response. As a government, as a country, we seem to be a lot more comfortable putting our money into military means, into military instruments. And the defense budget, depending on how you count is $500, $700 billion and the State Department budget is much smaller than that and getting smaller every day. It's just how we tick as a people. But maybe you could talk about that a little bit, both of you and particularly how your community looks at working with the military. And it's not, I think we're lucky that we have people like Jake who've served who are often asked to play this role and they play it well to the best of their abilities, but it's not what they're trained to do. So how do you feel about working with the military? And I think the NGO, the humanitarian aid community, traditionally prevention or post is not all that comfortable working with the military. And so this is a difficult question. It is a recognition that there needs to be a level of stability in order to do work. So we know that there is a role for the military. It's not that there isn't a role. The question of the role of the military to do development in humanitarian is a bit shakier. And part of it is, so Mercy Corps, we will not, I mean, we don't work with any security. And so we go into villages in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and we do not travel with guns. And part of our approach is by having trust with communities, that is our security. And so we will not travel with the military to these areas for that reason, because we don't know how we would build trust with the communities to do this work if we had guns. It shows that it's not a trusting relationship. So that would be our take. We do know that there are people in the military that do realize that state and aid are better suited to do the kind of hearts and mind reconstruction approaches more than the military. And there has memos that have come out that have supported that. And so the question is how do we work together as once an area stabilize that next phase of development should be handed over to the development? So it's a sequencing part. But for our state department, we don't really have an operational capacity that way. But aid does. Or allies. How about you, Mina? How do you feel about collaborating with the military in this? And that, I mean, AID, I would say, still doesn't have itself a lot of operational capacity. It's a pass through more than it is an entity itself. Wonderful place. But so the military still becomes a factor whether or not they're the appropriate tool. How do you view that? Well, private NGOs, you know, NGOs, one of the core principles of what makes us an NGO is that we are neutral, impartial. Neutrality has been an issue within the NGO community, especially when you put us in the context of active war zones or conflict zones. Because the mere fact that you set up shop and an office in one place is almost an endorsement of a side. And we also see the manipulation, diversion of aid happening in the field. And there has to be some sort of negotiation happening with the power brokers on the ground, which may not be the legitimate government in order to get to the people who are suffering, who are in need. And so I think operationally on the ground, practitioners would say that the line is fuzzier. But when you get to a policy level, it's illegal to work and coordinate with the military. But the job is not to stay there long-term. NGOs, we want to stay there long-term. We want to empower and train and stay locally, but also scale locally. And so there has to be some type of coordination in terms of handing off between stability or village stabilization operations to more of the longer-term resiliency building. What I would like to add to that is the blending of military and development reconstruction humanitarian has made the NGO community more of a target in these wars. And that has been, and has limited our operational space to such a degree. It is hard to actually do the humanitarian work that is our mission. And so I- And neutrality used to protect us, but terrorists don't follow the rule of, rules of engagement and- The other two governments these days. But Rebecca, you think that's the fault of our military for blurring the lines? I think mainly Afghanistan and Iraq did blend that to a degree where our space has become limited. I mean, it started earlier, but I just got back from two months in the Middle East focused on Syria and I'm very nervous about what we find when we are able to go back in in terms of the level of humanitarian aid as we see areas in Nigeria being cleared, the level of famine we're seeing there. I suspect we're gonna see something as dire in Syria. Okay. One of the things that we would like to see happen is I mentioned a hybrid. So the concept of taking individuals with a certain level of training who have a security background and training them up to be able to do a unique sustainable international development model is a, I think it's a unique value proposition. I think there's room for a hybrid type of organization in this space, but to speak to the direct involvement in a relationship between the military and NGO, one of the things that we're trying to advocate for right now here is trying to enable and allow the military to provide dedicated contingency support operation for NGOs. Not to be able to roll out in villages with armed up Humvees and chest rigs and then force left your chest, things like that, but being able to have the NGO operating far forward of the wire, but being tapped into the dedicated assets for things like Medevac to be plugged into the theater, search and rescue plan. And in some cases, in really volatile places, perhaps even a QRF that's on standby. So I'm sorry, Quick Reaction Force. That's, sorry about the acronyms. To have that on standby. And that's something that Mina alluded to. That specifically is illegal. And what I mean by that is that DOD cannot task, officially task assets directly to support an NGO and not support an active mission. If there's a tier one mission going on, obviously those assets are gonna get tasked to go support instead of supporting maybe a crisis that the NGO is under. So we're trying to advocate and say, allow DOD to be able to support some of these types of NGOs that are working really in some of these desperate places where no one else can get to. Just with contingency support, not with dedicated full support. That's during active war zones. I think what we're saying is that an investment into being proactive, it's not as sexy to fund and it's not as easy to get funding for from private donors. But to show that if we're proactive now, we don't have to be put into those situations where it's so dangerous that we can't get to the people who need help the most. So the last question for all of you, which you've just teed up beautifully, is that so if we are being proactive right now, where are you worried about? And where do you think we should be as NGO community as a country be focusing effort? Where's your next war and can you stop it? Where? So for me, it's not so much the, I think the next war is actually Syria, but it's a different war that's going to happen. And so it is the, I think there are inter-communal divides that just as we saw in other places that crumble, we're gonna see a long war because there are so many, and I as what was said on the earlier panel is that we have so little knowledge at the local level of what those divides are. And I'm trying to find that information now, but I suspect we're gonna see a blow up once after in a sense, the peace. Okay, should we be worried about? Well, I think the future of war is gonna be less and less state on state. It'll be more asymmetric threats. It'll be the exploitation of vulnerable communities and their grievances being tapped to be adopted by the Jihadi movement. And so for us to be proactive, it's almost, I mean, we have the tools to gain an advantage now because people don't want conflict. They don't want to get to a point where they don't have choices. They'll be the ones essentially fighting on their own front lines. So I think if you are to technically take data and look at the rankings of places that are so vulnerable that they, and it's of strategic importance to some of these groups that we're fighting today, we can give these lists to all of the NGOs that are already doing such great work out there and saying these are the needs in these communities and this is how you can help. You don't have to coordinate with the military or DOD or state, but sharing of information is so important that it's not so siloed. And are there specific places that you, as an organization, are particularly focused on or worried about? We're working in areas where we think the groups are starting to move where there isn't attention now. That's been the difficulty is to get donors to support proactive programs because it's not in the news, right? The places where if you succeed, you won't be able to show what didn't happen, right? Somalia, any place in particular? I mean, we've been working in Somalia. It takes so much money to operate in such a volatile environment and it's sometimes too late because there is a cycle of corruption just to survive for people on the ground. So we'd like to get into areas that are fairly stable now and again, stability is different from resiliency. So fairly stable, but on the fringe of being exploited. Jake, how do you decide where you're gonna invest your time and resources? Where are you worried about? Well, in our humble opinion, we believe Africa is the next front for the fight against violent extremism. The lack of governance, some of these huge ungoverned spaces that CGs of AFRICOM, the commanding generals of AFRICOM, have talked about now for a while, starting with Carter Ham. They began to talk about how this growing problem on the continent, if you look at ISIS as being defeated in Northern Iraq and Raqqa, they're eventually, they're moving into Africa. Al Qaeda is starting to be pervasive throughout the African continent, specifically both in North and Sub-Saharan Africa. So I believe, as Meena said, I think we have to get proactive. We have to get ahead of the extremist movements before they continue to scale into these areas. So I think the next front is in Sub-Saharan Africa. All right, there we have it. Thank you all for the work you're doing on the ground to be proactive. Again, let's thank these folks and recognize them for the action that they're actually doing throughout war.