 Hello everyone. My name is Sim Farrar. I'm the Vice-Chairman of the United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy and one of your hosts for the lunch today. I want you to think about something for a moment. Think about this. An ambassador to Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Kuwait, diplomats in America, Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Ambassador Crocker is currently the Dean and Executive Professor of Public Service at Texas A&M University. He also has an appointment as the James Schlesinger Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia. Ambassador Crocker is also a member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors. He retired from the Foreign Service in April of 2009. He was a career ambassador, the highest rank in the Foreign Service, after a career of 37 years. During that time, he was the ambassador, as I said, to Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Kuwait, and Lebanon. In 2011, he was called out of retirement by President Obama to serve as the United States Ambassador to Afghanistan, a position he held until the year 2012. He also served in Iran, Qatar, Egypt, in addition to Lebanon in 1983 during the bombings of the American Embassy and the Marine Barracks. Among his many, many honors, Ambassador Crocker is a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award. In addition to the Presidential Distinguished Service Award, the Secretary of State's Distinguished Service Award, the American Foreign Service Association Rifkin Award for Creative Descent, and the medal and the Marshall Medal by the Association of the United States Army. I go on and on and on about this gentleman. He was named as an honorary Marine in the year 2012. Only 75 people have been named this honor. That's remarkable in itself. He also has an award named after him in May of 19, 2009. Secretary Hillary Clinton announced the establishment of the Ryan C. Crocker Award for Outstanding Achievement in Expeditionary Diplomacy. Ambassador Crocker, we're thrilled. We're excited to hear your insights on the issue of risk-taking for our civilians in the field. Please, a man of distinction that needs no other introductions, a very big warm welcome from Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Please. Good afternoon to all of you. Thanks to the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy and the United States Institute for Peace for putting together such an important topic. It's been wonderful to be here and look around and see so many familiar faces. It's been a little off-putting to look around and see all those familiar faces and realize they could do a better job up here today than I can. Again, I do thank you, Sim, for that generous introduction. I can be introduced a number of ways. I like the way you did it. Another way would be, pictorially, just to imagine a photograph of every major setback to American policy in the Middle East since 1979. So if you can get that image in your mind, I would be in every single photo, sort of second row, third from the left. You've been dealing today with subjects I have lived with my entire career as have many of you, those of risk, recruitment, retention. And in a context of getting America's jobs done overseas, how do we talk about who we are and what we're doing, taking into account those factors. Let me start off on the issue of risk. I've seen a lot of it, as so many of you in this room have. Risk can be managed overseas by the personnel of civilian agencies. Risk cannot be reduced to zero. You cannot operate and serve this nation's interests if your orders are to accept zero risk. Those of you here who have been ambassadors have been the recipient of letters from the President of the United States. And in those letters, in the first page, there's something that says you have no more important responsibility than the safety of your people. I had that taken out of my letter from the President when I went to Iraq and to Afghanistan. I simply said, you can't expect me to run a large complex mission in a war zone and then tell me that the most important reason for me being there is to keep everybody safe. The world just doesn't work that way. I have stood at dozens and dozens and dozens of ramp ceremonies. I assume everybody in this room knows what a ramp ceremony it is. That's when you say pay your final respects to a dead service member as he or she begins their long journey back to Dover or her space. Each one of those takes a chunk out of you. That military service is inherently risky. And there are no shortage of young men and women who are ready to put their right hands up and swear the same oath the Foreign Service Officer swears to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. They go into harm's way. Often they pay for their pay for it with their lives or serious injury. The nation should expect no less from its foreign service. We have the same operative word as our brothers and sisters and uniforms do service. The modifier is foreign. And I can say this as an honorary Marine. We are the most expeditionary service in the country. 70 odd percent of us are overseas any day of the year. That's what we do. And in a dangerous world, that means you're going to have to take some risks if you are going to get the nation's business done. My friend and colleague, Jim Jeffery, we go back a long way. God, it is a long way. Yeah. But we were together in Kuwait when they built the new embassy. And obviously it was a building designed for suburban Maryland. So we kind of took a look at it and we looked at the wall which just flat topped, not very high, and had some convenient little grooves in it, horizontal grooves. So we asked one of our security guys take a run at the wall and see how long it took him to get over it. I think it was about three seconds. So we said, okay, this is the kind of risk that is in the red zone. It's the kind of risk you don't run. So we worked with our military colleagues and got some miles worth of barbed wire and wrapped that in coils on top of the wall. The people at foreign building operations went completely nuts. So you can't do that. You're destroying our beautiful design. I think our response was something like C out back or Suez or both. So there are ways to mitigate risk but not eliminated. We, I think, as a government, as a Congress, and to a large extent as a people, have worked our way into a corner that says any loss of a civilian overseas is unacceptable. The horrific deeply partisan debate over our friend and colleague, Chris Stevens, when he was killed in Benghazi, sickened me and I know it would have sickened him. Nobody knew more about Libya than Chris Stevens. Nobody knew more about the risks and dangers of operating in Libya than Chris Stevens. Nobody knew better than him that you had to be active, you had to be seen, you had to be on the ground if you're going to be influential and move a tumultuous political situation to a more stable place. He also knew that the center of gravity politically in Libya wasn't triply Benghazi. Things went wrong. No question. Lessons to be learned. Certainly there are. But for the finger pointing to start, because an ambassador and three of his colleagues were killed, and that that is somehow inherently unacceptable, cripples US diplomacy. My heart goes out to the family of every service, casualty we endure. If we are going to be the foreign service of the most powerful nation on earth, we have got to get out of this kind of thinking that any risk is too much risk, that any loss is unacceptable, and will be followed by boards, commissions, subpoenas and hearings. How well do you think our military would fight if after every casualty, a company, a battalion, a brigade, a division commander had to testify before Congress? Yes, I know we're not the military, but we are shoulder to shoulder with them increasingly, and will be going forward. What happens next in Iraq, I don't predict. Jim and I have both served there as ambassador. But it is the beginning of a long story, and if there is to be something successful in Iraq, it is going to require more special forces advisors, more diplomats, all of them forward deployed. That's how you make a difference, because that is where your adversary is. You're not going to beat him from headquarters in Baghdad, or fortified embassy in Baghdad. You have got to be out. You have got to be on the ground. You have got to be talking to the people who are carrying the fight forward so that we don't have to send in main combat forces again. All of that is vital to our security. All of it carries inherently a level of risk. I'm not sure where your discussion on retention took you, and that's related to recruitment. Let me just give you my own take. In my current incarnation, I am the dean of the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. Names count. It's not a school of public policy. It's not a school of public affairs. It's a school of public service. We don't have undergrads, some other professors deserving of beatification have helped these young people figure out who they are. We don't have to do that. They know who they are. They also know what they want to do. They want to serve the public. We don't have a PhD program either. So we have the master's program in public service. Young Americans come there because that's the life choice they've made. Many of them are veterans. Many others are former Peace Corps volunteers. They've been out in the world. They know a little bit about risk. We place a very high percentage of our graduates in the Foreign Service, in the intelligence communities, at DOD. Those who are looking for a concentration of effort abroad, again, I speak as a field guy, 38 years in the Foreign Service, two tours in Washington, and one of them I got cut in half. So three years out of 38, that's a pretty good record. My motto was anywhere but Washington. Hey, it's the Civil War. We got an opening in Beirut. We have a lot of young Americans at the school who are like that. What they worry about as they contemplate futures, particularly in the Foreign Service, is not the risk. It's that America has become so averse to risk that they're going to be trapped behind embassy walls, reading newspapers, and filing reports based on that. That's what worries them. Frankly, that's what makes some decide, I don't think so. If my whole purpose is not to get hurt, there's no purpose at all. That's where young Americans are. Just like those who go into uniform, they're ready to take the risk to serve the nation. What they're not ready to do is live in a world that says any risk is too much risk. So we need to do some real soul searching here. As an administration, as a Congress, and as a people, are we going to play the role of a truly great power overseas because we're not going to do it the way we are now and we're simply not going to do it. Now, does that mean that what the heck? Throw all caution to the winds. Forget about armored cars and motorcades. Just go flag a taxi. Of course it doesn't. It means thinking intelligently about risk and how you mitigate it. What I found worked for me. I'm sure my other colleagues have done the same thing. Nothing succeeds like surprise. Pretty easy to tell in a place like Afghanistan with an open media where a particular governor happens to be, whether he's in his capital or he's out traveling. If you figure out that he's in his capital, you simply rely on traditional Afghan hospitality and you show up because if your host doesn't know you're coming, neither do your enemies. They were perfectly delighted and they actually understood because so many of them have been targets of assassinations. But what that meant is you could have a range of meaningful discussions. You may not be able to get everybody on no notice but you can have a worthwhile trip and by the time Al Qaeda or the Taliban have figured out you're there, you're not. So it's things like this. Less is often more. In Baghdad, we ran some pretty heavy motorcades and they were pretty well known. You could tell when the Americans were on the road or a senior American was on the road by that string of armored suburbans and turret mounted M60s and Humvees. In Kabul, we would use an advance and a two car motorcade. The one I was in and then a follow car. And what were they? Were they be land cruisers or something like that? Did they sprout antennas everywhere? Nope. Did we keep them absolutely spiffy and clean? Nope. If we weren't getting enough mud on them on the road, we would add some. In short, we looked just like everybody else out there. We observed such traffic laws as there were. If we were asked by a policeman to stop at an intersection, we stopped. Nobody knew we were there. So I just cite this as an example. There are a lot of ways to reduce, to mitigate, to control risk. But you can't eliminate it and you cannot operate an environment where the loss of a single official civilian is going to lead to the kind of horrors we saw after Benghazi. So that's my plea to you who occupy official positions, to you who are in government, to you who maintain influence with government. We have got to change our way of thinking and people need to understand that because right now our adversaries, they've got us boxed. They know it. Our policies on security, I'm sure, are the sorts of things that our adversaries would have written because it keeps us caged up. That's not who we are as Americans. That's not what we represent as a state or as a government. It needs to change. Let me say a word about public diplomacy in hostile environments. David Ensar is here, head of VOA. As Sid noted, I sit on the broadcasting board of governors speaking at table. We came up with a novel idea. How about if the advisory commission and the board actually talked? I know that's radical. It talked, again, at tactical levels, but also at strategic levels. Who are our audiences? What are our messages? What are the means of delivering them? We have enormously courageous people in the BBG entities, some of whom have paid for their dedication with their lives, some who are still missing. These are foreign service nationals who probably ask themselves every now and then, tell me again why I am putting my life on the line every morning and I never see an American face. Another part of that kind of rethink that we find, I think, very much our national obligation. I was thinking of Syria, although we've lost people in a number of places. There was a time in the Syrian uprising before the birth of the Islamic State and before Jihad al-Nusra had really taken hold and controlled a lot of ground, where I thought it was possible not to have American boots on the ground but to have American pumps and wingtips on the ground worn by area savvy, language proficient foreign service officers. I think in that early going, we could have worked with allies such as the Turks to get people into Syria under conditions of reasonable, not perfect, reasonable security. We probably could have brought the Turks with us. I made several deployments into Northern Iraq in 2001-2002 before the invasion with no diplomatic security. My protection came from the Peshmerga, the Kurdish forces. And you know who came with me? A couple of Turkish diplomats. So we stayed coordinated. We coordinated messages to the Kurds don't start the war before we send up the flag. You know, there was a time when I think we could have done something similar in Syria far, far too late now. Congress, administrations, and the American people need to think of their diplomatic corps as a force that deploys two of the toughest places. And a handful of diplomats who know what they're doing and have the language and area skills may save the 101st Airborne a whole lot of time and effort and people later down the line if you can figure it out politically. Fashion the coalitions and move forward from there. But you can't do it if you're not ready to do more than run the risk of crossing 23rd. So that's, I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but it's a great choir. I'll just conclude by saying a bit about what brings so many of you here, the question of U.S. public diplomacy. How do we tell our story? At BBG, we spend, as David can testify, a lot of time figuring out, identifying key audiences. Who do we really want to influence? Figuring out how they absorb content. You know, is it television, which it is increasingly, is it shortwave, where it is decreasing, but still there are some areas where that's it. Medium wave, digital communications, the whole range. We work ever more closely with state on the content. Because we're not really positioned to do that. They are. You know, what's the policy message we're trying to send? And again, to which audience and by what means? Some of this can be done remotely. A lot of it requires people in the field to do it right. Based on my experience, particularly in Afghanistan, there's another vehicle that, if properly used, can accomplish more than one objective. And that is training, developing, and supporting local media. You know, for Afghan media outlets to tell the story, you know, that can have a lot more credibility than the Americans telling the story, depending on what the story is. When we are conveying what U.S. policy is to have that conveyed via U.S. international media. But a lot of other programming may be better received and have more credibility if it's coming from Afghan media sources. We worked for some time with Afghan's largest media structure to place, of all things, Sesame Street on national TV. We did a Dari version, and we did a Pashto version. And again, consulted closely with Afghan partners as to, you know, how well did U.S. Sesame Street translate, not just linguistically but culturally, and developing, develop programming on that basis. The producers of Sesame Street were in at 100%. They just thought it was great. It turned out to be probably the single most popular show in Afghanistan. And parents were kind of elbowing their six-year-olds out of the way so they could see it. You know, it was a success beyond our expectations. Everybody knew Sesame Street came from America, but they also knew that it was playing on themes in Afghan culture, dealing with Afghan aspirations, particularly parents for their kids, and it was doing it, you know, not dubbed in. These were Afghan voices speaking the languages of Afghanistan. So the more that we can do to use our abilities and resources to build up an effective or responsible local media, that we then supply content to, maybe some they'll take, maybe some they won't. That's their choice. I think in many respects, the better off we are. And finally, you know, I'm obviously here talking from a U.S. government foreign service perspective. I just want to pay tribute to journalists who may be in this room. I talked to Matt Rosenberg earlier. We're both friends of Alyssa Rubin who nearly was killed in a horrific helicopter crash and has been in every war zone that I think has existed since she was 12 years old. Many of them pay with their lives. All of them risk their lives to tell the story, to tell the story to Americans, to tell the story to local audiences as U.S. international media seeks to do, and they pay the price when they do it. Hundreds of non-U.S. journalists have died in the line of duty. Getting the news, getting it right, and getting it out. And they don't do it from behind barricades. They do run the risks. And maybe, just maybe, U.S. civilian agencies and their overseers could learn a little bit about how journalists manage risk and take risk to get the story, to get it right, and to get it out because that's a lot of what we're about. I can't tell you how much I respect I have for those of you in the profession. And we are all sadly reminded of how dangerous that is through the beheading of Jim Foley, a friend of many years. He won't be the last. But he should not be alone in running the kind of risk that led to his death. These people need a country with them, and we represent that country. We simply need to be unfettered enough to take reasonable risks and to decide in the field, not back in Washington, what a reasonable risk is, how it's mitigated, and how it's managed. So with that, again, thank you for the privilege of being here today. Thank you for what you are doing. Thank you for taking up an important cause. God bless you all, and may we see rising out of this conference some sane thinking, which is in pretty short supply in this town. I don't live here, both in the administration and on the Hill. Thank you very much. I want to thank Ambassador Crocker for being here with us today and for your exemplary career, encouraged, which has meant so much to us who began our careers in service after 9-11. Thank you very much, Ambassador Crocker. Hello, everyone. I'm Catherine Brown. I am the Executive Director of the Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. And I just want to thank you all for coming. This has been a topic that's been deeply personal to me since I first served in Afghanistan 11 years ago as a public diplomacy officer. And it's something that we were asked repeatedly by service members, civilians, to take up when the commission was reestablished last year. And I'm proud to work on this commission with Bill Hibble, Simfarar, Lyndon Olson, Wendner, Leslie Westeen, and Penny Peacock, who are going to be here with us today. This idea of assessing civilian risk and frontline civilians is one that they made a priority a year ago and I just want to thank you for building this effort and also for hosting lunch today. Thank you. Also, I want to quickly thank the commission staff, Chris Huntsman, Senior Advisor to the Commission, who shortly after joining the Foreign Service, took his first tours in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. Thank you, Chris, for all your help with today. And to our excellent staff, Michelle Bowen and Kaylee Westling and John Pope. I want to thank Doug Wilson for helping to conceptualize and lead this project and to be there with us from the beginning of this and for opening up the conference today. And also with the Truman Project with Mike Breen and Scott Bates, Leo Neal, Mary Cramer, Stephanie Dreyer, and so many others. To Kurt Volcker, who also quickly embraced this project shortly after the McCain Institute even launched. And so thank you, Ambassador Volcker. And also, of course, the wonderful people of the U.S. Institute of Peace for all they did to make today possible. We sat down with the chairman, Steve Hadley, a while ago and also with Kristen Lord who was acting president at the time and they really embraced this project and were grateful that Ambassador Taylor helped us run with it and gave us such wonderful people to work with including, of course, Linwood Ham and Sarah Gose and Paul Loge who essentially made everything happen today. So I want to thank them. We wanted to very quickly go over some of the top lines and summary conclusions from the different panels and discussions we had today because this really is the beginning of a conversation and a project that we're going to continue with. I think one of the main themes here was that you cannot mitigate risk. You must mitigate risk because you cannot eliminate it altogether. So in panel one, you have, we saw the remarkable willingness for civilians to take risks and advance foreign policy and humanitarian causes. But we do over protect and under prepare and we must address that. With panel two, we saw really what it was like for management to struggle with the fact that zero security risk means zero foreign policy challenges. And how do you facilitate that? It's also encouraging to see that there is a closer relationship between civil and military communities and that we can work together on this moving forward. For risk preparation, the first breakout session, really we see that the training for civilians the last few years, but especially really over decades has been inadequate and there's a great opportunity to look at different modes and models of training, whether it be Department of Defense or the Peace Corps, for how do you actually prepare civilians for this work. But also just as importantly, how do you care for them after they've returned? And I'm very much looking forward to my dear friends, Angelique Young and Becky Zimmerman advancing this project through their, through Frontline Civilians Initiative. And also thank Rusty Barber for moderating that session. For risk culture, it's Ambassador Crocker just said, you know, if we are going to be the Foreign Service and the Civil Service from its powerful nation on earth, we have to change our culture and we have to change our mindset towards taking risk. So Tom Perriello and Carolyn Waddams talked about encouraging more risk taking and looking at the whole complete experience of how to retain the right people and match the right, and match the right experience with the right assignments and we look forward to seeing what they produce in the quadgenial diplomacy and development review. When it comes to risk management, we'd like to thank Ambassador George Moose and also Arshad Mohamed for talking about the actual challenges that we face within the bureaucracy and within the State Department in particular. And then we believe they came to the conclusion that there's a need for decentralizing decisions and empowering the field more and also rethinking the rewards and punishments for FSOs and regional security officers so that they can work together to move the mission forward. But the theme here is really the final closing is that it's exactly what Doug Wilson said in the very beginning of today, which is that we very much need to have an honest whole conversation about the different risks that civilians take in the field because these risks are going to keep appearing and definitely we're going to continue to have many civilians signed up to advance different foreign policy humanitarian goals and we need to do our best to support them. So at the commission and with our partners we're looking forward to advancing this discussion and we welcome all of your feedback and hope you all stay in touch with us. And on the final note, I just do want to thank all of the speakers who took part of today. We have Ambassador Taylor, Ambassador Blocher, Ambassador Crocker, Admiral Sturridas, Ambassador Jeffrey, Gene Mainz, Ambassador Barton, Ambassador Ramiz, and Tom Perriello, Carolyn Waddams, Eric Lechlem, Barbara Smith, and Stan Byers, and Nathan Puffer. We look forward to staying in touch with all of you and thank you very much and have a wonderful rest of the afternoon.