 Good morning. On behalf of the United States Institute of Peace, we are pleased to welcome you to this virtual event on empowering women to create a more peaceful world, a conversation that comes at a pressing and very relevant moment. The Women's Peace and Security Act, which was passed by Congress in 2017, is a seminal decisive piece of legislation that requires us to do everything we can to create the conditions that will enable and promote women and girls to serve as agents of peace here and around the world. The strategy adopted by the government in 2019 to implement the Act lays out the steps that we need to take to help ensure that women shape, fully participate in any and everything that has to do with peace, whether it's prevention, mitigation, resolution, or recovery. Evidence from all around the world confirms that national security and peace itself are directly linked to women's empowerment. Dr. Valerie Hudson, who is with us today, has shown that virtually every dimension of national security is tied to whether women are subordinated or whether they are empowered. It is also absolutely clear that peace agreements are more likely to last when women are at the table helping to negotiate them. I can confirm this from the 25 years I spent in the U.N., during which time I was either directly on or just behind the front lines in 12 wars and conflicts. The peace processes and agreements that worked the best were those where women had demanded them and shaped them and joined them and were the custodians of ensuring that they were implemented. It's unfortunate, but true, that helping women and girls play these roles now is getting harder. With the COVID pandemic continuing to rage around the world, women are being pushed out of the workforce and into poverty in country after country, domestic violence is on the rise in many places and the burden of unpaid care has fallen largely on the shoulders of women. Despite this, women have been on the front lines of COVID recovery and response, as health care workers, as caregivers and as leaders. The demands on women in places where there is conflict and in fragile states where there might be conflict were already onerous and are now nearly unbearable. This is why it's more important than ever for us to step forward and do what's necessary to fully realize the promise of the Women's Peace and Security Act and strategy. USIP, we take this work very seriously. We're a leading convener on the issues impacting women's peace and security and we continue to sponsor world-class research on these. Last year, recognizing how important it is to honor people who are often underestimated or ignored, we launched an international Women's Building Peace Award to celebrate the countless women building peace in their communities and contributing to a more stable, prosperous and secure world. We presented the first award to Rita Lopidia from South Sudan and as we speak we are finalizing the shortlist for this year's award. Recognizing the central, essential role that the Department of State plays in the Act Down Strategy, we are honored to be partnering this event with the Department and in particular we are honored to welcome Admiral Craig Fowler, the commander of US Southern Command. We are honored to welcome Lieutenant General Thomas Wussier, Deputy Commander of US Strategic Command. We're honored to welcome Lieutenant General Michael Minahan, Deputy Commander of the Indo-Pacific Command. We're honored to welcome Ambassador Andrew Young, the Deputy to the Commander for Civil Military Engagement, the US Department of State and an Africa Command. We are honored to welcome Brigadier General Rebecca Sonkis, Deputy Director for Counter Threats and International Cooperation on the Joint Staff J5 Strategy Plans and Policy. If we can encourage everyone tuning in to engage with us on Twitter with hashtag Women, Peace and Security. Before we begin this morning's panel, we're delighted to share with you a brief video message from Deputy Secretary of Defense Dr. Kathleen Hicks, who returns to the Department of Defense after previously serving as the Principal Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Strategy Plans and Forces. Please enjoy this message from Deputy Secretary Hicks. Hello, I'm Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks. As we celebrate Women's History Month, I would like to thank the United States Institute of Peace for hosting this important event focused on Women, Peace and Security Initiatives. For nearly four decades, you've worked tirelessly to build a more peaceful and inclusive world. Your work today underscores our collective belief that women play a critical role in achieving sustainable peace and security. Around the world, the advancement of women is linked to the advancement of good governance. And good governance often leads to a more stable and less turbulent world, which directly impacts our work at the Department of Defense. Our work on Women, Peace and Security is critical not just for U.S. national security, but equally importantly for the safety of quality and opportunity of women and girls around the world. The Department has taken great strides in advancing these efforts by implementing the Women, Peace and Security Act of 2017 through our first-ever Women, Peace and Security Strategic Framework and Implementation Plan. Today, the Department benefits from an active network of gender advisors at the combatant commands in the services, in the joint staff, and in the office of the Secretary of Defense. And while we have made progress advancing the objectives outlined in this Implementation Plan, we know that there is much more work to be done in the years ahead, including within our own forces as we seek to model and employ the WPS principles we work with partner nations to uphold. That is why I recently stood up the Deputy's Workforce Council, which will bring high-level, sustained leadership focus to topics that include diversity, equity and inclusion. And that is why we are ensuring our personnel receive training on WPS principles. To date, we have trained over 350 U.S. personnel through official DOD training on WPS. At the same time, we know that we can't do any of this work alone. A key pillar of the Women, Peace and Security Strategic Framework and Implementation focuses on how the increased meaningful participation of women in partner nation defense and security sectors helps enhance the capacity of our allies and partners to address our shared challenges. To date, we have engaged over 50 nations through conferences, training, exercises and more on WPS to demonstrate the value of diversity and inclusion on force readiness. And I am exceptionally proud of what the women and men of the Department do every day to champion Women, Peace and Security principles all across the globe. Because, as President Biden puts it, they are often how the world encounters America. Ultimately, as we take care of our people and join forces with our allies and partners to promote women's empowerment and gender equality around the world, we ensure that the Department can perform its number one job effectively, defending our nation. Thank you again to the United States Institute of Peace for hosting today's event and for your continued efforts to advance Women, Peace and Security. I wish all of you a successful event and a happy Women's History Month. Thank you. Thank you, Deputy Secretary Hicks, for sharing with us today your impressive progress across the Department of Defense on the Women, Peace and Security agenda. Highlighting your commitments, moving forward to ensure that DOD personnel receive training on WPS principles is not only exciting, but really sets the bar high for all of us to join in. On behalf of the United States Institute of Peace, I want to welcome you. My name is Kathleen Kienist and I will be your moderator today. As Director of the Gender, Peace and Strategy at USIP, my work is about making the invisible visible. That is, USIP seeks to bring visibility and to amplify women's meaningful participation around the world, especially in conflict-affected and fragile places. For too long, our understanding of war has focused only on men, and as a result, women have often not been protected from the ravages of war, including sexual violence, nor have they been fully empowered participants to help solve our biggest human crisis when it comes to violent conflict. Helping to solve this huge gap, the Policy on Women, Peace and Security was first framed two decades ago with the UN Security Council Resolution 1325. It established two key pillars, one for the protection of women in war and the other for meaningful participation of women in peace. As we heard earlier from Lisa Grande, in 2017, this commitment was institutionalized by the Women's Peace and Security Act, and it calls for the United States to be a global leader in promoting women's participation in conflict prevention, management and resolution, and in sustaining democratic institutions in fragile states. To date, the US is the only country to enact such a law on women, peace and security. Today, during our conversation, we'll take a deeper dive into how the Department of Defense is making women, peace and security more than just a slogan, but how instead the Department is bringing into the leadership and the culture of DOD, and including the commands, the importance of women, peace and security. So let me turn now to the mapping of our event. For the first half of the program, we will hear from military flag officers who are in leadership of four of DOD's 11 combatant commands, including one senior officer from the Joint Staff J5 at the Pentagon. They will discuss their progress on the implementation of the WPS Act, and in addition, they will be joined by one of the most recognized scholars on women, peace and security. For the second part of the event, we will participate in a town hall format with members of the US Civil Society Working Group on Women, Peace and Security, a coalition of over 50 NGOs that are committed to building better partnerships with government around the women, peace and security agenda. As we begin the panel, we have short period of time here, so I will briefly introduce each panelist prior to their opening remarks. Please note that each of the panelists bios are hyperlinked for your convenience on the USIP event website where you did register. So to begin with, I am pleased to welcome our first panelist today, Dr. Valerie Hudson, Texas A&M University Distinguished Professor, and George H. W. Bush, Chair and Professor of International Affairs. Hudson is one of the leading researchers on women, peace and security, and a recipient of many grants including the US Department of Defense's Minerva Initiative. Dr. Hudson has developed a nation by nation database on women called the Women's Stats Database. Dr. Hudson, welcome. We look forward to hearing about your top-line findings in your empirical work, linking the security of women to the security of states. The floor is yours. Thank you very much, Kathleen, and thank you so much to both USIP and the Department of Defense for this wonderful event. I'm very much looking forward to hearing what everyone has to say and the questions that we'll get from the Civil Society Working Group. I do believe it is absolutely appropriate that we talk about my research in this group, because without the support of the US Department of Defense, we would never have been able to undertake the research that we did. As Kathleen noted, it was in fact a very nice grant from the Minerva Initiative that allowed us over the years 2014 to 2018 to undertake the largest ever look, empirical look, at how the subjugation of women affects nation-state outcomes. So we spent years collecting this data and analyzing it, and the results are really very striking. We looked at 166 outcome variables for the nation-state, everything from governance, terrorism, insecurity, conflict, war, economic performance, health outcomes for the nation, environmental outcomes for the nation. You name it, we looked at it. And what we discovered was that the subjugation of women at the household level was significantly, strongly associated with 72% of these outcomes. We had some logistic regression results. I'll mention a few. For every step one takes towards subordinating women, you have twice the chance of being a fragile state, three-and-a-half times the chance of having a government that is more autocratic, less effective, and more corrupt, one-and-a-half times the chance of being unstable and violent, one-and-a-half times the chance of experiencing terrorism and having a nation that is in economic decline, one-and-a-half times the chance of having low environmental quality, twice the chance of having a high fertility rate, twice the chance of preventable deaths, twice the chance of food insecurity, and that's for every step one takes towards the subjugation of women. We believe that the subjugation of women affects these nation-state outcomes through three causal pathways. One, it is a boot camp, that is, there is no better training camp for, say, political violence and instability than lived domestic terror perpetration, lived domestic corruption and exploitation, and lived domestic autocracy. It's also true that this subjugation of women creates chronic structural goods that destabilize the society. So inflationary bride price, prevalent polygyny, sex-selective abortion, such as in China, where about 15% of the girl children have been pulled from the population, introduces a persistent instability into the nation-state. And lastly, one is disempowering women, not only those whose voices might have a very different calculus of what is expedient for the nation to do, but also many tasks in the society are gendered. So, for example, health is very much a gendered undertaking. So when you disempower those who at the household and community level are those who are entrusted to take care of health, then it's no wonder that you would have poor outcomes. So in summary, what I would like to suggest is that all of us, and I'm sure those who work with the Department of Defense, consider themselves national security realists. And I would suggest that in light of these empirical findings, it is difficult to call oneself a realist if one does not admit these strong linkages between what's going on with women and what's going on with nation-state outcomes. Now, some have asked me, well, how would that affect anything? And so I just want to flash you the book that came from our Minerva Initiative grant, the first political order how sex shapes governance and national security worldwide. Again, hats off to the Department of Defense. But think about things such as situational awareness. How can one anticipate instability if one is not tracking the signs of how what's going on with women creates instability, such as inflationary bride price? How will you decide which subnational actors in a contest among subnational actors is most likely to bring a sustainable peace to the country unless you're looking at how each subnational actor intends to treat women if they gain power. How will we avoid the trap of peace negotiations where women's rights are negotiated way and warlords make the peace unless we understand that without women and empowering women, there will be no peace? How will we track which of our own citizens is the greatest internal threat if we do not understand that domestic terror also includes domestic terror perpetrated within the home? How will we rationally approach immigration policy if we don't understand that the big clash between nations is not the clash of civilizations, but clash between those who believe that women should be subjugated and those who do not believe that? How will we know that it's when exporting democracy makes sense and when it doesn't make sense? And I would suggest that the key factor in whether it makes sense or not is whether there's still lived domestic autocracy at the household level. So again, I think from that bird's eye view it's incontrovertible that what's going on with women drastically, seriously, significantly affects things such as instability, violence and terrorism and governance, all the things that the Department of Defense is interested in encountering. And thank you very much, Kathleen, for this chance to examine these important findings which were funded by the Department of Defense. Bravo to you for doing that. Thanks so much, Dr. Hudson. Great way to begin really helping us put our ideas around the significance of the Women, Peace and Security agenda. Your suggestion of a national security realist lens here is particularly compelling and we will look forward to our Q&A session with you a little later in the program. Again, thank you. Our first military panelist today is U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Rebecca Sonkis, who is the Deputy Director for Counter Threats and International Cooperation on the Joint Staff at the Pentagon. Just for many of us to understand where that is located, I would like to note that the Joint Staff, or J5, proposes strategies, plans and policy recommendations to the Joint Chiefs of Staff to support the provision of military advice across the full spectrum of national security concerns to the U.S. President and other national leaders. I'm Brigadier General Sonkis. We look forward to hearing more about how the Women, Peace and Security Act is being implemented across the different branches of the military. Thank you. Thank you for that introduction. Thank you, U.S. Institute of Peace for hosting this important event. We appreciate your institute's focus on advancing critical research and programs which identify and address the root causes of instability and conflict, one of which is gender equality, as Dr. Hudson so aptly noted. I do also want to pause for a second and say thank you to the combat commands. Really strong support for this event today. And every day it's really where our policies implemented, where the relations with the allies and partners are most critical. So thank you, General McMillan, for being up on the net. It's really great to see you all. As a Deputy Director for the Joint Staff's J5 Counter Threats and International Cooperation Division, I oversee the Joint Staff Women, Peace and Security portfolio. WPS is important to the department's mission and national security objectives because it is a tool for smart power. By understanding the security needs of the entire population during conflict, the DOD enhances its operational effectiveness and mitigates disproportionate harm against vulnerable populations that can adversely affect long-term stability. As you pointed out already, we're guided by the U.S. WPS Act of 2017 and the U.S. Strategy on WPS. The DOD released its WPS strategic framework and implementation plan in June of 2020. It took a lot of work to get that across the line, and I'm grateful for the teammates that did. This plan implements WPS guidance through three defense objectives. First, to exemplify a diverse organization that allows for women's meaningful participation across the Joint Force. The DOD recognizes that diversity, equity, and inclusion strengthens our capacity and resiliency as a department. Second, the DOD leverages security cooperation initiatives to advance women's meaningful participation in partner national defense and security sectors. Women remain an underrepresented and underutilized asset in the defense sector, not only in the U.S., but also in our partner nations. And third, for the DOD to ensure partner nations protect the security and safety of women and girls during conflict and crisis. WPS demonstrates a commitment to the values and norms desired and deserved by all people, dignity, human rights, and equality under the law. At the DOD, the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy, Stability, and Humanitarian Affairs and the Joint Staff J5 work together to integrate these three WPS defense objectives into DOD policies, doctrine, plans, operations, and investments that enhance the capacity of the Joint Force. Our team integrates WPS priorities into guidance, missions, and resources. We use funding and programming guidance to combat commands and services, annual data calls to inform WPS programming, coordinate with NATO and UN on policy recommendations, as well as the National Security Council, interagency, and civil society coordination. Through the establishment and facilitation of WPS advisors across the DOD, we've been able to facilitate information sharing and lessons learned for WPS integration into our mission areas. Our team also conducts WPS training to increase WPS awareness and better equip U.S. military personnel to integrate WPS into its mission areas. Lastly, our team integrates WPS principles into joint doctrine and guidance. In FY20, we integrated WPS principles into the revision cycle for 10 joint doctrines. The revision of these publications is significant because they form the foundation for how the DOD conducts all planning and operations. The joint staff also works closely with OSD policy to develop policies and strategies to mainstream WPS implementation across the DOD enterprise. Lastly, and not on my talking points here, I do want to point out that when the men are at the table supporting this initiative, we know we've gotten somewhere. And I really am very grateful for the leadership that's on this forum making a difference in the world. And with that, I will turn it back over to you. Thank you, Brigadier General Sonkes for shedding light on the J5's role in collaborating and coordinating between the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense and the military branches. Indeed, WPS is a tool of smart power and fabulous to hear all the ways that you are moving this agenda forward. Thank you. Our next panelist today is Admiral Craig Fowler. He's the commander of the Southern Command, also known as Southcom. And he's responsible for contingency planning, operations, and security cooperation in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. He's a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy as well as the Naval Postgraduate School with a master's in national security affairs focused on strategic planning. Admiral Fowler has had a very illustrious military career on many military carriers and in commands. Admiral, we look forward to hearing your remarks about the Southern Command's efforts on women, peace, and security. Welcome to you. Good morning and thank you. It's a real honor to be here. And thank you for hosting this event. And thanks for what the United States Institute for Peace does every day to really focus on what our desired outcome, which is peace, and all the factors that go into it, so important. I'd also like to thank our own Department of Defense, which has been leading, not always perfectly, but leading in this important mission area for a long time. And I appreciate Deputy Secretary of Defense's leadership and her words, strong words, and our partnership with our shipmates on the Joint Staff and in the Office of Secretary of Defense. I'd also like to thank my team here, our team here. We have stepped out in this in a big way at United States Southern Command. Ambassador Gene Mainz, our civilian deputy commander, which is an important position. And I think we'll hear from her counterpart at AFRICOM, but it's an important position here where we really integrate Civ Mill at a way that makes a difference. She leads this effort for me, but really I've tried to take ownership for this effort because it needs command attention. And Lieutenant Colonel Dewey Turner is our special assistant for women's peace and security, and she's just a dynamo in terms of getting things done. I'd like to start by way of story with my own journey and the importance of empowering women and how that makes us a more combat credible effective force. In the mid-90s, we instituted, we did away with the combat exclusion law, and we're then able to integrate women aboard many more vessel ships and formations inside the United States Navy. And at the time, I was an executive officer, which is number two in command on a destroyer. And we did all the necessary checklists and preparation. We went from a ship that was all male to one that had about a 20% female cadre over the course of several months, but it was sort of all done at one time. And I remember thinking about it, and I'm pretty good about keeping a journal so I can go back and reflect, you know, this needs to make us more ready and a better ship. And we tried to do all the right things to get there, but it made us more combat effective than I'd even imagined. The differences that each of us bring, the strength of our society can and must be reflected inside our formations. I wrote an article about it at an op-ed to the U.S. Naval Institute proceedings. What I was surprised about was some of the comments I got for the op-ed I wrote. Hey, this is, you're just endorsing something that's politically correct. It's not that at all. It's the right thing to do for the right reason. Our journey continues, and while we've made progress in the intervening 25 years, we have not made enough progress. And there is power to do in this right. As I see how we've tried to integrate it and integrate it effectively here at this command, we've made it directly aligned to the commander. And instead of having separate events, and there is certainly a purpose and need for separate events, we've tried to bake it in to all of our events because it must be there. We think of this as professionalism. Professional military forces have legitimacy to their populations. You can have the best combat power, the best gear, be the best marksmen, communicators, and lose because we don't gain legitimacy with our populations. So professionalism. It equals the profound respect for human rights and an integration of the law of armed conflict and the rules of law into everything we do. And that includes inclusion of women and includes diversity and inclusion of all types. And again, while we're not perfect, we've made progress and we continue to, and I'm proud of that progress. So that professionalism conversation is carried on with each and every one of our counterparts. We, in the mid-90s, installed Human Rights Office here at Southcom. We're the only combatant commander with a full-time human rights team. Our women, peace, and security team is now co-located with that human rights team. And now we're working to install and have gender focal point advisors, not just within our command. We've made that mandatory for every one of our directorates and every one of our subordinate commands, but with our partner nations too. Because the two work hand in hand to produce legitimate forces. A few stories about how this is just so powerful. In August of 2019, we held our commander's conference in Natal, Brazil for all the South American nations. We brought some of our women, peace, and security leaders and we asked for participation in a panel. I wasn't sure how my counterparts, all male, frankly, and that's still the way a lot of it is. Over time that is going to change. I wasn't sure how they would react to this. And we wanted to make sure that it was just enough stories told by our women panelists, including a Brazilian and a Colombian and two from the U.S., to spur questions. The level of questions and the detail in the questions and then the desire for follow up one on one by my fellow chiefs of defense. It surprised me. I'm always looking for things that surprise me. The combat power of women integration on ship was better than I expected. The level of integration with the chiefs of defense way better than I expected. And they wanted to know practical ways to remove barriers and open this up. And as I think in their hearts, I know in their hearts they recognize the combat power of this, the necessity of doing this, the necessity of having 50% of the population appropriately integrated and represented at all ranks, rates, and levels in our formation. Another example, Ambassador Mainz and I were in Colombia and we asked the Colombians to pull together. At one of their large training bases, a session where we would listen to the stories of women leaders, non-commissioned officers and some officers, but principally sergeant majors. Those are E-9, so E-9 being the pinnacle of senior enlisted leadership. And there's not very many E-9 female leaders, even in our own formation, but Colombia for sure. They pulled together a powerful panel. It was late in the day. The schedule was clobbered as normal. My Colombian host, the chief of defense, brought all his chiefs again, all men, to this event. I could say they were nervous about it getting dark and us not being able to get out. There was a suggestion made at a low level that we canceled the event. I looked at Ambassador Mainz. I said, no way, we brought all these wonderful leaders here. We need to listen to them. Powerful stories that elicited powerful questions from the chiefs of the Colombian military, Navy, Army, Air Force, and the chief of defense from Colombia said, I want to do that again. And so the next time down, we did it again. And so by telling these stories and looking for practical ways to remove barriers and illuminate the power of this integration, it has been a good road that we're on. Still more work to be done. Our partnerships with organizations like U.S. Institute for Peace, the William J. Perry Center, where we just recently co-wrote a book, 20 years, 20 stories, Women, Peace, and Security, with the Western Hamasir Institute for Security Cooperation, and other U.S.-based schoolhouses that teach and educate is key to moving this forward. And we're not setting quotas, but we are looking for targets to encourage more participation from our partner nations of women. We've done the data. We know that it's under-representative. So we're encouraging that participation. Ambassador Mainz and I are encouraging that when we go to countries next week, we'll visit Argentina and Uruguay, who are two leaders really in this, who have done a good job of moving forward on integration and empowerment. We'll have roundtables to talk about education and women and women's peace and security. So I think by example, by looking for removing barriers, practical barriers, by embracing the integration and highlighting its success, frankly, really having open, honest conversations about some of our ingrained perceptions and biases, we've been able to move forward. Much work to do, but this, to me, is exactly as the Deputy Secretary of Defense said. This is about defending our nation, and it is the right thing to do. So thanks for the time. I'm really enthused about participating today. Thank you so much, Admiral Foller. I love your leadership idea that surprise can offer so many rich and valuable perspectives and really appreciate your candid and enthusiastic commitment to women's peace and security. Thank you, Admiral. I'm delighted now to welcome our next panelist, Lieutenant General Thomas Boussier, who is the Deputy Commander of the Strategic Command at Offit Air Force Base in Nebraska. I'll just add, when I was a child, my house faced that fence that went around Offit, so I have a little feeling for Offit Air Force Base. He is responsible for strategic deterrence, nuclear operations, missile defense, space operations, and joint electronic spectrum operations. Among the many accomplishments of his distinguished career, Lieutenant General Boussier is a command pilot with more than 3,400 hours in some of the most advanced aircraft known to military. We look forward to hearing more about what the strategic command's focus has been on women's peace and security. Welcome, welcome. Thank you, Dr. Kienas. I appreciate it and thank you to USIP for hosting this. It's an honor to be here and with my esteemed members of the panel. I'd like to spend a few minutes talking about a topic that is very near and dear to my heart. And on behalf of Admiral Richard, thank you for allowing us to be part of this forum. So you already talked about what StratCom does for our nation, and I'll just give one underpinning to your mentioning of strategic deterrence and all the other mission sets that the Command has. I'll offer that US Strategic Command mission set underpins everything the Department of Defense does. And we're very proud that our command motto is peace is our profession. It's probably one of the only entities in the Department of Defense that actually not using it is success. And we're very proud of that. The other thing we're very proud of is what our command is doing, a very unique command, both in makeup and size and in mission, what we're doing as it relates to the WPS Charter. If you allow me, I'd like to talk for a few minutes about what our command is doing, and I think setting the way for the Joint Team for Women, Peace and Security Initiatives. We have a very highly motivated, dedicated and trained gender advisor educated through the Nordic Center for Gender and Military Operations Program. Very unique program as you are well aware. Additionally, one thing the Command has that is somewhat unique is a strong partnership with academic institutions. We call it the Academic Alliance. We have a very close relationship with the University of Nebraska, and we have asked them and they've conducted a study for us on Women, Peace and Security to improve the development of women in the command and our recruiting efforts for greater diversity. Additionally, we also piloted a women in leadership program where members of our team can apply and gain a Cornell University education and certification to better help understand the challenges women face in leadership and the tools to overcome these challenges. Now, we'd like to offer it's not just something we're offering our women in the command. It's open to everyone, and we currently have 50 military and civilians enrolled in the program, 49 women, one man, 10 officers, 32 enlisted members, I'm sorry, 32 civilians and 10 enlisted members. We expect our first graduates in May and the second tranche to graduate in September. Additionally, we brought in education into the command with a course that is operationalizing Women, Peace and Security into all our operations in the command. We're hopeful this course will help us improve our critical thinking and enable our more diverse decision making from our day-to-day engagements. Now, that's using outside sources to account for the WPS initiatives. Another thing we're doing internal to the command is looking at our human resources and how we encourage, develop, mentor and grow our women in the command at all ranks, officer enlisted and civilian and provide them opportunities for professional development. So, we stop using the term that, hey, this is a first. You know, if I had a vision, I'd stop, we'd stop hearing this is a first because it's routine and it's integrated into all our military operations and it's not a unique thing we talk about every day, although it is today. And we're working very hard to make that a reality. So, again, look forward to the discussion and the questions going forward and thank you for inviting us today. Thank you so much, Lieutenant General Boussier and also so exciting to hear about how you are implementing it with this academic partnership and the various courses that you are employing to bring everyone, not just women, up to standards. So, thank you. Hello, Lieutenant General Mike Minahan from all the way in Hawaii, who is the deputy commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, otherwise known as Indo-Pakarm. He directs and enables activities and operations that support the commander's priorities and promotes U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific region. Lieutenant General Minahan is also an amazing command pilot with more than 3,400 flying hours and qualifications for aircraft that have a lot of initials and numbers associated with it. But thank you and welcome. We look forward to your remarks. Well, good morning and my warmest deepest aloha from Hawaii. It's an absolute honor on behalf of Admiral Davidson, the whole Indo-Pacific team to the entire enterprise listening. To Dr. Quiness, to Lisa, to Dr. Hudson, ma'ams, thank you for allowing me and our team to pitch in here. To Admiral Fowler, Ambassador Young, sirs, great to be with you. And then, coincidentally and cool, Reba and Tom, longtime friends of mine and an absolute treat to sit on this panel with you. You listed, ma'am, some accolades about me and to take Admiral Fowler's lead, just a personal note. None of that is true. I'm not sitting here professionally without the amazing women that surrounded me and led me. That there is no mission success. There is no professional accolade that doesn't come without the inclusion of strong women in my life. I grew up in a house with strong women. I live in a house with strong women and I'm surrounded by strong women today and I am extremely grateful for that. Of note, General Lori Robinson will hopefully be on Island here as we conclude Women History Month. And she led me. I was proud to serve under her for many years here in the Pacific and it'll be a real treat to once again thank her for leading me and making all of this possible. You know, to the Institute of Peace, your leadership in getting the legislation and putting us a position where Reba could brief and Secretary Hicks could brief the high level direction guidance, absolutely critical to all of the successes that the Commands are briefing now. I'll start with amazing strong leadership at the very top and your leadership role in that put us in a position today where we can enjoy and expand on our successes and keep that momentum building. I'll be very quick because I know we got to get to the questions and answer part here which are going to be rich, I'm sure. But we consider women peace and security to be the smart power capability for securing a free and open Indo-Pacific. And to put that extremely clear, there is no free and open Indo-Pacific if there is any exclusion based on gender. So any percent of 50% that's not fully embraced and taken into account in this theater means that we cannot enjoy a free and open Indo-Pacific. As was briefed earlier, it's not only the right thing to do, it's the absolute smart thing to do. Just as a kind of a little teaser here for the next section here, I just wanted to say we have really invested into our women peace and security and gender advisor roles. And we are wonderfully optimistic about the future because we're at a point now where the demand for the DOD's leadership in the Indo-Pacific partnering with USCID, partnering with the inter-agency is we're struggling to keep up with it now. So we are absolutely enjoying success. We absolutely acknowledge that there is lots of work to do and this is just the tip of the iceberg. But the demand is so high in our theater that we are at a sprint pace to keep up with that. Our goals along four lines of effort are to institutionalize by integrating WPS principles throughout our strategies, plans, operations and activities, which means we want to lead by example. When we show up in our theater in any capacity, we want to be leading by example and we want to institutionalize part of our DNA, not something we think about as a checklist item or something after we get going. It's included from the very inception and it's just part of our DNA. Our international engagements need to strengthen both ourselves and our allies and partners and then we need to expand our cadre of trained advisors, which means every one of us needs to have this portion of our portfolio, our leading portfolio and we shouldn't have to rely on a cadre that we all individuals from all ranks are the cadre. And then last we want to be on the forefront, on the tip of the spear partnering with Dr. Hudson on the research and the analysis and the monitoring evaluation that keeps us moving forward and makes us more productive, makes us more efficient, makes us more effective and we absolutely want to continue that partnership. So with that ma'am and the Enterprise team, again a warmest aloha from Hawaii and I look forward to the next section. Over. Thank you so much, Lieutenant General Minahan. Again, just your enthusiasm and no doubt your commitment. We're really excited to see what's next in Indo-Pakum region. Thank you. I now want to welcome Ambassador Andrew Young, who is with the U.S. Department of State Deputy to the Commander for Civil Military Engagement with AFRICOM. Ambassador Young assumed his duties with the Africa Command in July of 2020. He has spent nearly 30 years in diplomatic service on four continents, including his most recent U.S. Ambassador to Burkina Faso. Thank you so much for joining us this morning Ambassador Young and we look forward to your comments. Hey, thank you Dr. Coneson. Thank you first and foremost. Of those 30 years of diplomatic service, I have counted U.S. IP as a precious partner. And so let me take this moment to congratulate Lisa Grande for your leadership of this institution that's been so powerful in helping us in this forum and in so many other forums. You know, you didn't have a chance to hear from Admiral Berg, Heidi Berg, who, as Admiral Fowler talked about, was one of those pioneers integrating ships some 25 years ago. But I'm a poor substitute, but I'm going to try to do my best to echo the points and advance our conversation today. But were she here today, she would say, Africa is the theater of operation, where these objectives need to be applied. You know, Dr. Hudson laid out the return on investment to achieve our shared outcomes when we start implementing these efforts to have women heard and women participating in peace and security. And this is the continent where the challenges are so grave that the output for products, productions in these areas will be certainly worth all the inputs. Let me give you a couple of quick facts. You know, as Dr. Cunis said, we're one of the six geographic commands in Africa. We've got a responsibility for 53 countries, 800 ethnic groups, 1,000 languages, a land mass three and a half times the size of the United States, 19,000 miles of coast land. We address this with 0.3% of the U.S. defense budget. We also have some of the most challenging peace and security conflicts on the globe. You know, I'm coming from seven years in the Sahel in Mali and in Burkina Faso. Over that time period, the number of internal displaced people has risen to 3 million. We also in this command, we're looking at the challenges in Somalia and East Africa. We've got the challenges affecting the Democratic Republic of Congo and Eastern Congo. And even today, looking at the challenges going on in northern Mozambique, these issues of conflict that are rising to the news, we should take energy from them, from the work that you all are doing that we're all trying to do together to address women and peace and security to get at the underlying causes, the dry-reservant stability so we can promote more stability and more peace across the globe. So what are we doing about these challenges here at Africa? You know, since 2011, our command is quite young. We've taken a leading role in DOD efforts to advance the inclusion of women in all aspects of peacekeeping and security, and to prevent and reduce conflict, so I'm going to give a couple of highlights for your consideration. I know that greater General Sankis listed a number of issues as well as the remarks by the Deputy Secretary. So we have at AFRICOM 21 gender focal points within the command in our components. We have one full-time gender advisor who works to ensure that women in peace and security principles and a gender lens are incorporated into all the AFRICOM operations, our activities, and our investments. And you know, I'm going to tease Lieutenant General Minnan from... I think they've got a lot more folks in that category than we do, but we were second highest number of selected women's peace and security activity proposals in the last fiscal year for our small command. We have a published instruction as policy responsibilities and procedures for implementing the Women, Peace, and Security Act of 2017 that you all have been such powerful champions to bring us over the finish line that Dr. Hudson mentioned earlier. But you know, we also have to tell the story about what we're trying to do. This forum is an example of that, and I'm going to draw your attention to what we did for Women's History Month. We broadcast a series of social media videos by senior leaders. And if you go to africom.mil website, you will actually have the opportunity to hear a Rerab Malberg talk about these things, and you won't have me as a poor substitute. I'm going to close there, but I wanted to say I'm very, very excited about our opportunity to push this debate further. We have the members of the Civil Society Working Group, these young, new leaders, dramatic leaders who can help push us to the implementation phases of what we're trying to do to get after those objectives that Dr. Hudson approached in her point, and also Lisa Grande said to kind of get after the outcomes that we see. And enhancing women's participation in peace and security so we get the outcomes that improve life and quality of life for us all and help us accomplish our missions. With that, I turn the mic back over and looking forward to the interactions from the rest of the team. Great. Thank you, Ambassador Young, and thanks also for really connecting the dots about the drivers of instability and the need for women's peace and security to help bring those, connect those dots together. Well, as in any kind of fabulous panel, we are now challenged with time. But I know I have a great team here who will help me navigate the fact that we have a number of questions coming from our town hall today. I'd ask the Civil Society Working Group members who are joining us to put on their video now. And we will proceed. First of all, thank you all for joining this conversation. I was very pleased when the Department of Defense said, and we also want a town hall. So here we are in a town hall and we are going to, I think for the sake of time, I'm going to take a couple of questions at a time and then turn it to our panelists. So I'm going to begin with Megan Corrado, who is our Vice Chair of the Executive Committee of U.S. Civil Society Working Group on Women, Peace and Security. And then I'll immediately ask Carolyn Washington of Women of Color Advancing, Peace and Security, a member of the U.S. Civil Society Working Group to ask her question. So two questions and then right to the panelists. Megan, the floor is yours. Great. Thank you so much to you all for being here today and your commitment to and leadership in advancing WPS. Thanks so much to Dr. Keena's and U.S. IPA as well for convening us. Megan Corrado, Director of Policy with Blind Peace Building and Co-Chair of the CSWG. I just want to say please know that we stand ready to serve as a resource for you at any time as you move forward to implement the Act on Strategy. My question is for Greater General Sankis. You touch on this briefly, but if you can stand a bit more on how the Department will be coordinating other implementing agencies. And also you can mention a little bit more about who's overseeing the execution of the implementation plan. Thank you. Thank you, Megan. And I'm just going to go right to Carolyn Washington. Okay. Thank you, Kathleen. My question is for Admiral Fowler. First of all, sir, I'd like to thank you for your leadership and supporting this very important initiative, the Women, Peace and Security Agenda. So my question is two part. What are gender advisors identified? Specifically, what skill sets such as an operations background are sought and exactly where are gender advisors placed strategically within your command, whether in directorates or at the command level. And the second part of the question, what are your plans, sir, for expanding Women, Peace and Security training for gender advisors as well as other key leaders? Thank you. I'm going to turn it over to you now and I'd ask you to make your comments brief. We have a number of other questions. Thank you, First Brigadier General Sankis. All right. Thank you, Megan, for that question. I'll try to keep this brief here. The Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy is DoD's lead for WPS implementation and works in concert with the J5 to integrate defense objectives from the DoD's strategic framework and implementation plan into DoD doctrine. Policy plans, operations, activities and investments. And just a little bit of perspective on that. In the J5, we have all of those different pieces within the J5. So I may be here representing WPS but I'm kind of the integrator on the joint staff to make sure as we're working through different doctrine and policy and plans that WPS is going to operate in that. And then we provide advice to OSD as they're creating the greater policy. Let's see here. A few specifics on that. We covered, you know, the OSD and joint staff integrates WPS priorities and guidance, mission resources through funding and programming guidance to the combat commands. And I know you're going to talk to our full team and also to the services, which is very important. We covered training and education across the DoD enterprise to establish and expand gender networks and synchronizations with interagency and civil society partners. OSD and joint staff also work in concert with NATO and the UN to develop and implement complementary WPS policies and guidance. One of the other pieces of my portfolio in Counter Threats and International Cooperation is the chairman's advisors to the UN ambassador up in New York as well. So there's another synergy piece. Thank you so much. I'm sorry. I'm going to just thank you so much because I'm going to move to perfect. We're going to keep this moving. There's probably a better vignette than me anyway. I'll turn it over to Admiral Fallon. We just have 10 questions to try to get back to you. Thank you so much, Brigadier General and Admiral Fowler for your brief remarks. You might not... Great. We can hear you now. Thank you, the very best people. So it has to almost hurt. These are full-time jobs and we've taken them from within the command. And it has to be the person that people complain the most about, whether it be women's peace and security that is exactly the person you want to put in the job. Energetic, dynamic person that is not afraid to lead and not afraid to pull people along with him or her and I would say him or her. That's important too. And then it has to be integrated into all aspects of the command. So we have it at the directorate level, the special staff level, the component command level and we want our partner nations to, at least in some ways, model the integration of that into their commands. How do you expand it? We expand it by creating this, I think, virtual and real platform. So I mentioned William J. Perry Center Inter-American Air Force Academy is another one of our institutions. I didn't mention them, but they are included in that and ensuring that it's taught and integrated in everything we do. When you check in, you get educated about it as part of our monthly training days. It's included in exercises. Every way we can expand the education as part of the bigger purpose. More combat credible, ready forces to defend our nation. That's the approach. Thank you so much, Admiral Fowler, for your comments. I'm now going to move to Tyler Pry of Safer World, who has a question for Lieutenant General Thomas Boussier. I'm also moving to Dr. Shirley Graham, who has a question for Lieutenant General Mike Minahan, and third for Ambassador Andrew Young. I have a question from Nick Zyrowski. In that order, please, and keep your opening comments brief. Tyler? Thank you, Dr. Keynes, and thank you to all the panelists for your remarks and work on this question for Lieutenant General Boussier. How do you integrate outside civilian input from women's rights organizations, as well as gender experts, gender analysis of conflict, and gender-sensitive monitoring, evaluation, and learning into all of your work? Thank you. Thank you. Dr. Shirley Graham, your question. Thank you. My question is for Lieutenant General Mike Minahan, and my question is, in your security cooperation work with Lieutenant General Boussier, you are strengthening their capacities to create protective environments for women's soldiers that are free from gender-based violence and sexual harassment. That was Dr. Shirley Graham with George Washington University, also a member of the working group. Nick Zyrowski. Thank you very much, Dr. Keynes, and thank you to our panelists for their presence and leadership. Ambassador Andrew Young, what do you see as the main challenge in terms of cooperation and partnerships with African militaries on women's peace and security? And do you have a good awareness on what the different African militaries are doing in terms of women's peace and security? Thank you. And for the sake of time, I want to make sure all our panelists have their question before. The last question is for Dr. Hudson, Texas A&M by Cori Greer. So, please go ahead. Thank you, Dr. Keynes. My question is for Dr. Hudson. Why is it important to ensure that we incorporate a gender analysis that includes men and boys rather than conflating gender with only women and focusing on women and girls? Could you share examples from different contexts on how masculinities and gender norms are fueling conflict and why this could be key to military analysis and response? Thank you. That's an excellent question. Yes, in fact, in our book we suggest that the first political order is actually the character of male-female relations. We extrapolate from that that if we are trying to understand basic power dynamics within a society, we have to look at that relationship, which means looking at both men and women. I think that's absolutely right. In our terms, in order to see what that political order looks like, it's very easily uncovered by looking at the degree of subjugation that women face. So, in terms of identifying where you have problems, that's definitely the case. In terms of looking at solutions, you are absolutely right that you can't simply, for example, as we all know, take and sprinkle them into your command and mix it up and voila, we have issues. As Professor Shirley Graham pointed out, you know, we have a problem of assault within the military on women and that's not coming from the women. That's coming from how men think about themselves, how men think about the relationship between men and women and the culture and the value of the values that the military expresses has too often been placed in the service of those who maintain that men are on top and women should be on bottom. As we change that culture, and I can see here with all of the members of the Department of Defense as well as Ambassador Young, who have spoken here today, there is a desire to change those culture values and I applaud them for all that they are doing in this respect. Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to return then to Lieutenant General Boussier's question from Tyler Pry of Safer World. Yes, thank you. Thanks for the question, Tyler. I guess I'll just say that StratCom again, I think has a very unique relationship with a broad range of academic partners. We have a partnership with over 50 academic institutions, including international colleges and universities and we hold annual academic alliances and request expert analysis as it relates to WPS initiatives, especially gender based conflict. Just the last thing I'll say Kathleen is, I think we found a lot more people we can use as resources just today and listening to both the panelists and the folks asking questions. Thank you so much indeed. This is really a community of practice and we welcome all of you to that storyboard. The next question was for Lieutenant General Mike Minhang from Dr. Shirley Graham. Yes ma'am, I'll be very quick. I understand the time crunch here. We have a never ending mission to eliminate gender based violence period dot. Every single one and we all need to be aligned on that. We are 100% nested with Dr. Hudson and her research and leadership and we are working to institutionalize every aspect. Institutionalize internally. We have a regulation that drives advisors and focal points. In addition to our gender advisor, wonderful lead. We have a curriculum developer, an analyst and a planner that ensures that that infusion I talked about earlier is really not just talk. It's actually action oriented and infused down to the very bottom externally and I'll use a Fiji example. Fiji came to us requesting some tailored curriculum to get after their concerns their gender gender concerns. We tailored the course to them. We worked within the interagency of the US. We worked within the interagency of Fiji and developed three lines of effort from moderators to participants to observers. We used expertise from across that portfolio and then we took it one step farther and brought in our partners and allies with New Zealand and Australia and Japan and that way we had a three dimensional event that was much more than just PowerPoint slides and training and protection aspect. The violence aspect is in 100% of our curriculum and the only way we can get after that is if we institutionalize it both internally and externally. Thank you, ma'am. Thank you for that robust answer and now I'm going to ask if Ambassador Andrew Young might respond to Nick Zyrowski's question to you. Hey, thank you Nick. Thank you so much for that and I'm going to start on to the critically important question. What we're doing I think is we're pushing addressing programmatic efforts to include women in peace and security with our African partners. But I think there's work for you to do there in terms of knowing what the African partners themselves are doing and what models they might implement in their processes. And building on Corey Greer's point in my experience out in the field and what Dr. Hudson said you've got to get after the men and the boys as you address these things and get after that part of the piece so they treat women and girls as peers as equals in order to get a sustainable solution. And let me just close with this other final point and that is how do we get this power of role models? You know when we talked about Admiral Bird being a role model you talked about some of the folks on this call being role models. I've seen some powerful role models with women at senior levels. We've got ministers of defense for example Michelle O'Leary in France or Laurence Parley. The current minister of defense for the Central African public, Marina Well-Coyara, she is doing that conflict zone tough. Talk about a country that has had more than a fair share of conflict but she's incorporating women in larger roles in peace and security. So I think that's critically important. I've seen that with the Burkinaabe police captain who was selected as the International Peacekeeping Women of the Year in 2016 who has played these roles to model opportunities for young women to see themselves in the future as leaders in women in peace and security. So for me that's critically important. Modeling good behavior and I think that as Mike said there's a wellspring of engaged young people here. We're looking to you to help us spring these questions and push the research so that we're getting better in the future. Thanks for the opportunity to chat. Thank you Ambassador. Well we have one minute left and I do want our lightning round Sarah Simmons to ask her question and now I'm going to challenge you you have like two words to answer this question by. So Sarah let's hear it. Good morning. My question is for Admiral Fowler Lieutenant General Minahan and Lieutenant General Buca. Reflecting on your careers would you have wanted in your own personal toolkit to increase your understanding and enhance advocacy of women peace and security principles internally and externally. Thank you. And Sarah I'm going to add everyone to that question and they have two words what in your toolkit what would it have been that would have made a difference and moving forward. I will begin with Admiral Fowler and work through the group. We have one second now go ahead. Two words. This is where being seniors not good as you go first. I would say interactive training with role models so I would have benefited from practical examples from others. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you. And then Lieutenant General Buca. More education. More education. Thank you. Lieutenant General Minahan. Aggressive action. I love it. You're doing really well on this. Ambassador Young. Two words. Role models. Role models. All right. And please Brigadier General Songkis. Show up. Show up. I love it. Valerie you have the last word in this session. Two words. Four words. This particular panel and discussion is even happening is so hopeful. Thank you everybody for joining us today. The U.S. Institute of Peace. Thanks to all the people behind the scenes that made it possible. Thank you very much. And to our President, Lisa Grande Thank you very much.