Irregular Warfare Podcast - From SAR to GFA: The ABCs of Conflict Prevention and Stabilization

Episode Date: April 23, 2021

How can the military and civilians work together to prevent or manage conflict? Two seminal policy initiatives, the Stabilization Assistance Review and the Global Fragility Act, provide important answers by emphasizing an alignment of defense, development, and diplomatic efforts and delineating clear roles for respective actors in addressing violence and instability. This episode examines how they have fundamentally reshaped the way the US government conceives and responds to conflict around the world based on lessons learned from places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

What's interesting about that with stabilization, it's political in nature and we're kind of picking the side. The fact remains that the U.S. government is really seized with managing the relationship with China. And I think stabilization really connects to that because where these competitions happen is often in fragile states. Welcome to episode 25 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. I am your host, Daphne McCurdy. Today, my co-host Nick Lopez and I examine two policy initiatives, the Stabilization Assistance Review and the Global Fragility Act that have fundamentally reshaped the way the U.S. government responds to conflict around the world, learning from the hard lessons in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.

Our two guests argue that these initiatives were important for multiple reasons. They created a common definition for stabilization that emphasized the political nature of the work. They delineated clear roles for various U.S. agencies, and they put money behind testing new approaches to prevention. The impact of these initiatives are not only felt in terms of how we approach conflict prevention and stabilization, but it also supports other policy priorities like great power competition with China. Dr. Francis Brown is a senior fellow and co-director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Democracy, Conflict, and Governance program. She previously

served as director for Democracy and Fragile States on the White House National Security Council staff and managed stabilization and political transition programs in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Africa for the U.S. Agency for International Development's Office of Transition Initiatives. Pat Antonetti is the Director for Stabilization and Peacekeeping Operations in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy. He is a retired Army officer having served in various command and staff positions in Germany, Kosovo, and Iraq, as well as serving as one of the first political military planners for Afghanistan on the Joint Chiefs of Staff J-5 after 9-11. This podcast is a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals.

Here is our conversation with Frances Brown and Pat Antonetti. Pat and Francis, welcome to the Irregular Warfare podcast, and thank you both for joining us today. Thanks, Daphne. Look forward to the conversation. Great to be here. So we're here today to discuss the Stabilization Assistance Review and the Global Fragility Act, which are two frameworks that have been really instrumental in reshaping how the U.S. both conceives of conflict and responds to it. And I know you both have played critical roles both in and outside of government leading on these initiatives. But for our audience that may not be as familiar, could you set the scene and explain exactly what these initiatives are? And Pat, I'd like to start with you. Could you provide some background on the

Stabilization Assistance Review in particular? Sure. There's a good story behind it and some context to understand that resulted in this document being published in May of 2018. But it worked, and it started about two years before that. So my office has a requirement to produce a biannual assessment on stabilization that has been ongoing since about 2009. And we did this in 2016, in the fall of 2016. So we convened a group at the National War College and had a really interesting, eclectic mix of folks from military, interagency, academia, to include the likes of H.R. McMaster, Nadia Shadlow, and some of the giants in the field. And this was in September of 2016,

and we were writing the biennial assessment. A couple of things were ongoing at the same time. We had a campaign ongoing, and we knew that whoever was elected, the Obama administration was leaving. So whoever won was going to be new coming into government, and we'd have to explain what stabilization was all about if they hadn't really been following it too much. And also what was happening was the campaign to defeat ISIS in northeast Syria was in full throttle as our special operations forces and the Syrian Democratic Forces we were partnered with were starting to defeat ISIS. And we were taking many of the lessons learned that were ongoing in northeast Syria,

watching them play out. But we already knew this based on the study of stabilization from Iraq and Afghanistan in the years before. And so theAR did a couple of things that provided a common definition of stabilization that sort of cemented the interagency on what we were talking about. It was really important on the Hill, particularly with our committees, when we talked about what stabilization was and to make sure we were not making some of the mistakes of lessons, learning the lessons from the past in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it also provided this framework for defense support and stabilization, making some of the mistakes of lessons, learning the lessons from the past in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it also provided this framework for defense support and stabilization,

wherein State Department's in the lead, USAID is a lead implementing agency, and DOD is in support. Caveated by the fact that we in DOD can sometimes lead stabilization, particularly when the security environment is such that we can't get state-made folks on the ground safely. And that risk variable is always very much in play in stabilization environments when there's fighting ongoing. partners to create conditions in the aftermath of consolidating our military gains to bring legitimacy to local authorities so that we can get all the things that you need to do when the fighting's over in these communities somewhat back to normal after all the trauma they've experienced. Thanks, Pat. You mentioned that there's a definition that has been cemented under the Stabilization Assistance Review or the SAR.

And I imagine that's a big deal to come to a common definition on a concept across different agencies and departments. Could you share what that definition is for stabilization? Sure. The SAR, this is quote, Stabilization is a political endeavor involving an integrated civilian military process to create conditions where locally legitimate authorities and systems can peaceably manage conflict and prevent a resurgence of violence. So what's interesting about that is that it's political in nature and we're kind of picking a side. Sometimes this can get confused with humanitarian assistance, which is impartial, and we give that to anybody and anyone who needs it, food, shelter, comfort. But with stabilization, we're actually deciding, in this case, it was the Syrian Democratic Forces and mostly Syria and those Kurdish allies as we were reconstituting, getting essential services

going in the communities that we had liberated, and then making sure that ISIS couldn't resurge, come back into those communities and kind of take advantage of the situation because there was this chaos still ongoing. And it's also interesting that as, in this case, when this actual laboratory was kind of playing out in Syria, case, when this actual laboratory was kind of playing out in Syria, some of the humanitarians that will get on the ground and are there as we are, there's a hesitancy sometimes for them not to want to work with people in uniform. And so that's another kind of interesting aspect, because even though we might have civil affairs forces and others that are really expert at those kind of tasks and skills, to those on the ground, they see a uniform and they might think of it differently. So

there can be some tension sometimes between programmers that are working for, say, USAID and the State Department on the ground and the military. And there's some tension sometimes in the variables that are there that you have to be cognizant of and deal with. On this point about civilian-military tensions, I know this is something that the Global Fragility Act also seeks to address by delineating specific roles for DOD versus the Department of State versus USAID. And in many ways, it seems that the GFA really is building upon the great work that had already been laid down by the SAR.

Francis, I'd like to turn to you. I know that you spearheaded the SAR when you were in the White House. And now, more recently, as a scholar, you've been focusing on the importance of the Global Fragility Act and its role in addressing a host of U.S. national security issues. So could you just give us some more background on what exactly the GFA is and how it builds on the efforts of the SAR? Yeah, absolutely. And as you say, I think the Global Fragility Act, the GFA,

really is a continuation of everything Pat laid out, all the good work that occurred under the SAR, the Stabilization Assistance Review. Just to back up the story slightly, sort of my contemporary story as Pat was working in the Pentagon on these issues, there was a lot of interest from many quarters on this idea of learning lessons and not doing business as usual when it came to stabilization. I was in the White House on the National Security Council staff where I had the portfolio for stabilization and democracy. And one of the most remarkable things to both of your points was that we didn't really have a definition that all parts of the

US government agreed on, on what actually stabilization means. So I think there was a widespread recognition we needed to do something to codify the way that we went about this. And as the new, I was there at the end of the Obama administration, but as the new Trump leadership came in, there was recognition that we needed to learn lessons. So there was support from the NSC side. You often hear that victories have a thousand fathers and defeat is an orphan. And I think that was the case with the SAR that after the fact, a lot of quarters rightly claimed some credit for getting it over the line. In addition to all the work Pat's team did, the interagency team drafting it was really tremendous. So led out of State F, the Foreign Assistance Office, as well as State Conflict and Stabilization Operations, USAID. It was a really tremendous

team. So a lot of work was done in those quarters. But then to move it forward onto how this has all led towards the Global Fragility Act, the GFA. The SAR is obviously a policy document, but doesn't lay out anything in law. So there was a recognition that it was also necessary to have a law that basically codified and elevated the U.S. government's response to conflict prevention and conflict stabilization. For many years leading up to 2019, there had been a large coalition of folks on the inside of government and the outside of government really advocating that we put a law in the books about this. This finally was passed after some tremendous work by the advocacy community, by NGOs like Mercy Corps and Alliance

for Peacebuilding. This finally passed in December 2019. And what the Global Fragility Act does, the GFA does, is it calls for the U.S. to fund, develop, and test new ways of reducing and preventing violent conflict by addressing political, economic, and social grievances that so often lead to it in a way that's coordinated between departments and principally USAID, the State Department, supported by DOD and other agencies as appropriate. The GFA also calls for this new approach to be piloted in five countries. So you could say, okay, so you've got a new strategy, but where the rubber meets the road is really in specific countries. So the GFA calls for the US to basically pilot this in five of them. Where the GFA now is, is that there is a lot of effort under the previous administration of sort of laying out a strategy that's called for by law.

But there was not a selection of what countries this would actually be piloted in. Now, with the new leadership getting into place, there is country selection underway. So we will find out soon. Stay tuned. What are the five countries in which the GFA will be piloted? And two last things to say on the GFA for the folks listening at home. One is that some of the countries that are selected are going to be identified as stabilization countries.

So there's an ongoing conflict. Others of them are going to be identified as conflict prevention countries. So places where we're concerned that conflict could escalate or break out. So that's that's the breakdown. And then the final thing to say is that the GFA also authorizes money, which is important. As many of the listeners may know, policy without a budget doesn't get far. So there's three different accounts. This is all to say that Congress really signaled that they want this new law to have teeth. So I'm really looking forward to see how, under the new administration, this rolls out. Just to highlight a couple of things that Frances said, that there was a really good

small coterie of folks from DOD, state-made, consulting with outside folks as well. The NSC and Frances did a lot of great work where she was. When we were writing the SAR, and that's like a good lesson that when you're going to write a document like this, you do have to have this kind of trusted. Your people knew each other. They didn't always necessarily agree, but they knew the topics and knew the arguments that were being made and the give and take that goes on to get a document like this. The other comment she made about the SAR being kind of this document that it's not really binding, right? It's a good statement of what stabilization is, and it's really informative.

And so what we had to do in DoD was we followed the SAR with the update of what we call, apologize for the blandness of this, but in DoD speak, it's DOD Directive 3000.05, which hadn't been updated since 2009, the title of which is Stabilization. That was first written in 2005. It was written, updated in 2009, and then hadn't been updated until the end of 2018. So it was published in December of 2018. end of 2018. So it was published in December of 2018. We had to make the case for Secretary Shanahan, the deputy at the time, that it needed to be a directive, which is a little bit more important at a GCC, let's say, than an instruction where it had been before. But he accepted the reasoning and said, yes, it's a directive. And so that was published in December of 2018,

directive. And so that was published in December of 2018, subsequent to the SAR. It includes a lot of the same language that the SAR has, but then it kind of tasks what we call the components across DOD, be it the services, the commands, different staff elements on the secretariat of staff to do certain things regarding stabilization. So it does have importance that way. And it's something you can look at. It's not quite the same as an execute order or order, but it's very much a statement that people have to pay attention to. And there's things in it that you have to accomplish. And so one of the challenges as time goes on is making sure people are continually educated on that. That's interesting. So this directive that Pat just mentioned basically draws DOD attention to stabilization. And you've both mentioned that these policy initiatives have emphasized how

Defense Department and diplomatic and development efforts are all intertwined. So Francis, I'd like to turn to you. I know you have overseen development programs in the field as well as initiatives from Washington. Can you tell us how the Department of Defense, or more specifically the security component of this equation, impacts development and diplomatic efforts? Yeah, so that's such an important question. And I think it's one that the SAR and then the GFA start to address. I think for a long time, we had this assumption, if you remember the days of clear hold build, basically what we were assuming is that governance progress, progress along the development line of effort, the diplomatic line of effort, that would happen as quickly as military or security progress. So some of our listeners at home might remember the days of government in a box in Marja. I think we all now recognize that was a model that didn't work. But the GFA and the star start really codifying this lesson that actually civilian progress is never going to happen as quickly as some of this military progress. So the SAR discusses setting realistic expectations for progress and rate of change.

in those country strategies that I mentioned, it talks about a 10-year plan for these countries, which when we are real about how long stabilization actually takes, 10 years is appropriate. It's not something that is palatable or popular in the U.S. political sphere, but that's why it's important that the GFA lays it out there. That, from the civilian standpoint, is the most important thing to note. The other thing that I would say on sort of how security factors influence the development and governance front is that, frankly, progress on the development and governance front is limited if we don't have the security part aligned. And we've had a lot of examples from the US efforts in Syria and Afghanistan in particular over the years where we made really good localized progress on the governance and development front. But because ultimately the larger level security factors

were not aligned, that progress was pretty fleeting. So I think the SAR and GFI are both crucial in laying out that all three of these lines of effort are really interlinked. So what's interesting, I think, about both of these documents is that actually, if you read them, neither of the principles laid out here are particularly new. A lot of what you read is common sense and things that you would think we should have been doing all along. For example, unity of purpose amongst various government actors or helping build the legitimacy of local partners and recognizing the political nature of this work. And yet we haven't been doing it. So I'd be curious

for both of your thoughts as to why these sorts of initiatives were necessary in the first place and why it's the case that we haven't been doing these things up to this point that, frankly, are pretty common sense. Yeah, it's a good point that a lot of this stuff, you would think we would be doing. But, you know, when you're on the ground, kind of getting, you know, executing a strategy and doing it at the operational tactical level, and, you know, it's happening in real time, and you're trying to put all these parts together. given a security situation particularly in going back to Iraq and Afghanistan days you know when I was a battalion commander in Iraq in 506 up in the Tikrit Salahuddin region and there were no state or aid folks there was no PRTs it was kind of DOD

trying to do the best it could with you know then we had commander emergency response program money that was being taken away from us as well. And then working with the local Iraqis to try to get them empowered to do the work of just all the essential services, getting elections stood up and executed while fighting the insurgency. You know, it was challenging. So I think that having these documents then kind of codifies all these efforts that sometimes are happening almost piecemeal, given just the nature of how we were executing our work. And then given the timelines of how people are deploying in and out, when you have units changing on different timelines, different times, you have people coming in from different offices, you're plugging into staffs. So it's a very dynamic and people that have been in those situations, you know, appreciate and understand that. So I think having this sort of overarching codified framework that people can rely on is beneficial and helpful to galvanize, you know, the effort and bring some clear understanding to it.

The other thing I would say back to Francis's point is that the military is very much designed, you know, in these environments, we always say we need to work on patience, you know, tactical and strategic, but the military is designed to get stuff done. You know, what's my mission? What are the tasks? And how do we execute? How do we spend our money? You know, what's my mission? What are the tasks? And how do we execute? How do we spend our money? You know, what's the program that we're trying to implement? And a lot of the stabilization development work is longer term. And that's something that you may not see when you deploy this year, 12 or 15 months that is still ongoing, you know, three, four years later. And so that realization is sometimes hard to implement and understand. Yes, I agree with Pat's points entirely. And I totally agree with the premise

of the question. These documents seem like common sense. And yet, we collectively haven't actually pulled them off over our many, many stabilization operations. I would point to a couple additional things that explain that. One is differing chains of command. So we on the USAID side that I served in have obviously a different chain of command from the State Department and our colleagues there and from our colleagues in uniform. What I was thinking back to, I served briefly at the district level in Afghanistan in Kandahar. And I, at that point, think I had six different bosses. I had the head civilian at that DST level, at the district stabilization team level. I had the USAID OTI lead, Office of Transition Initiatives lead at the provincial level. Then I had the O5 who was

in charge of the FOB where I was based, who was obviously my boss too. Then I had the O5 who was in charge of the FOB where I was based, who was obviously my boss too. Then I had the USAID head, USAID person at Kandahar Airfield. Then I had the OTI country rep up in Kabul. And then I had my bosses back in Washington. So I don't even know how many bosses that was, but you can understand how that sometimes leads to differing priorities or mixed signals. In that case, everybody was bought in, in general, to the idea of stabilization. It was all agreed upon at the 30,000 feet level. The problem is that stabilization actually occurs at the ground level, at the tactical level.

And there's a lot of differing opinions on trade-offs and priorities at that level. And so that, I would say, never got reconciled. And honestly, I think the more USG personnel we send into a given conflict, the more challenging that problem becomes. This is not one where you can throw more people at it and it resolves itself. Actually, it's the contrary, where I might have only had three bosses in a different conflict zone, I had six. The other point to mention on that, if our listeners harken back to the 2009-10-11 period in Afghanistan, is there were actually two master stabilization documents out that were allegedly guiding our efforts. There was one coming out of the State Department in Washington, Richard Holbrook's shop in Washington, and there was one that was drafted by Ambassador Eikenberry and General McChrystal

in Kabul. So right there, you can see sort of why we perhaps haven't been executing our mandate as well as we would. I imagine having lots of bosses definitely doesn't help. So you've both highlighted several other obstacles for successful stabilization efforts to this point. But what do you see as the obstacles moving forward to implementing the SAR and the GFA on the ground? And it'd be great to start with Pat. I'll talk about a couple issues. One you always hear about is the absorptive capacity in an embassy when there's a new program being instituted or managed from Washington, particularly in these fragile spaces in this time of COVID where there's order departure in some of

the embassies, that can always be a challenge. Do you have the people and the bandwidth and the office space and access to computers and the ability to get around and those kinds of issues are one just sort of you know the nuts and bolts of doing this will be one factor so that's something that i know the state department's working on closely and i'm speaking about that a little bit out of turn that's more of a state department issue duty can help in some cases but But it's really interesting if you, I was recently in Mali, my last trip before COVID and get around Africa a little bit. And some of those missions are just, you know, not robustly made to do a lot of the work that will be asked of them. So how to make sure that they get reinforcements and folks to help them will be critical.

I talked about it before, but within DoD is how do you continue educating staffs and leaders as they rotate in and out of position? So we work very closely with the joint staff, as most people know, those of us who know SD policy and some of our combatant commands. And as commanders come in and out and key staff officers, some of them haven't been thinking about stabilization like we have day to day. And so getting them up to speed on this and understanding it, given all the other demands that are always out there in DOD is going to be critical. We just ran a pilot program up at the Army World College called the Joint Stabilization Studies Course that sort of

amplifies and teaches a lot of the stabilization tenants in the SAR 2005 within our security assistance programs. It was very much an interagency audience. It was a pilot. We pulled it off during COVID. We tried to do a little bit earlier, but had to wait. And so continuing something like that, this was for folks that are headed out to the geographic combatant commands or to an embassy or where they will employ and use these these tenants but they hadn't some of them hadn't been thinking about that of late and then you know had an interesting conversation with the army general on the in the g357 recently talking with him about stabilization and peace operations and other of this kind of gray zone work. And he's like, you know, the challenge we have is that we have to, when the army gets back

to, we have to define tasks and standards and missions on how we train this stuff. And that's one of the things that was sometimes difficult in this stabilization realm of how do you architect a tabletop exercise or how do you budget some of that valuable training time at a combat training center to put some of these kind of problems before a unit that's out there training? How do you do this at a higher level staff where they really have to be proficient at it? So that's always going to be a challenge that will be out there. I say from my perspective on the biggest obstacles to operationalizing this, I think the big challenge is that often when stabilization isn't working as we had designed it to or as we conceived it, we resist correcting or we're unable to, as a government, make that assessment and course correction. So I have a long paper from Carnegie Endowment looking at Syria local stabilization programs, and particular the stabilization programs, not the ones that Pat was referencing earlier in partnership with the Syrian Democratic Forces, the SDF,

referencing earlier in partnership with the Syrian Democratic Forces, the SDF, but earlier generations that were basically conceived by the U.S. and many other partner nations as providing the government and waiting for when the Assad regime would fall so that we would have some local level governance ready. And so partnering with opposition local councils in particular. with opposition local councils in particular. And what I find in that paper is that for those programs and that support to local councils became increasingly incongruent from the big political and security picture, because as the years went by, unfortunately, from my perspective, Assad became less and less likely to fall when he was emboldened and empowered by a Russian intervention. So I won't go into all the details of the Syria conflict, but I will say that a program that really made sense back in 2011, 2012, when it seemed like Assad might fall,

and we would need local governance ready to step into the void, sort of made less and less sense over the years, certainly by the definition of stabilization that we've agreed to, which is looking at empowering locally legitimate actors and some kind of political endgame. So why did we keep on supporting those programs as the years went on? What I've found is that even as the political endgame that we were trying to support became untenable, even though it looked less and less likely that asset would fall. These programs were also doing really important humanitarian and pragmatic services to their communities. They become good at service delivery. There were good participatory processes that they were standing up. So they had another

objective, which again, doesn't align with what we are now saying stabilization should do, but had their own good in their own way. I would also point out that I think in many cases, bureaucratic competition in our own governments between different parts of the US government kind of perpetuated these programs, because everybody from the State Department to USAID had an interest in saying these programs are doing great things. And they're, you know, they're leading to the day after Assad, which then makes it really hard to have a sober assessment of if we are achieving our top level objectives. And then I would finally say I've found a lot of perception biases fueling undue optimism when it comes to these programs. Policymakers back in Washington are, I think, most guilty of this for always seeing the potential to turn a corner, perhaps. And of course, local actors were also invested in this idea that, you know, maybe, you know, there was a corner to be turned very soon. So we saw a lot of sort of hopefulness that I think maybe crowded our assessment. I think these are going to be challenges.

Hopefully we won't have another Syria, but I think these are going to be challenges in any engagement that we make going forward. So I think it behooves us all to be mindful of them. Daphne, I'd like to actually add one other thing to overcome some of the challenge going forward is that we've worked really hard over the last couple of years to get an authority

in the National Defense Authorization Act called, it's paragraph section 1210 alpha in the 2020 NDAA. And we worked hard with our committees on the Hill, both from the House and the Senate, because they're very skeptical about DOD doing stabilization work so that we don't overreach and do the work of state and USAID. So we were able to get an authority and very much applaud state and aid who came with us in concert to our committees to kind of explain and articulate what we were wanting. So the authority was given for 2020, extended for 2021. It was limited, though. It really wasn't what we wanted.

It's limited to four countries, only for a year, a calendar year each time. The countries are Syria, Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan, which we kind of wanted a global authority to be able to use in other places. And then the other challenge, though, is that it's only an authority. It's not an appropriation. And you do need a little bit of money to make this work. So we've been trying to get $18 million of what's called defense-wide operations and maintenance money. It gets into the pedantics of how DOD spends its money, but we haven't been able to find the money, as you said, to this point out. one of the issues I'd like to just point out. So as we get close to the end of our conversation, I think it's important to note that conversations about the SAR and GFA can get very esoteric and niche very quickly. And so I just wondered whether there are broader policy implications

embedded in these frameworks for folks who are working in the irregular warfare community, but may not be stabilization experts per se? This has been a conversation about how the GFA and the SAR fit into the Washington policy environment, in part. For those who are listening out in the field, you might be wondering sort of how this connects to the rest of the Washington policy environment. And I think if you listen to Pat and me for an hour, you might think that these issues are sort of in their own box. There's a lot of us working on the stabilization and conflict beat. And that's true. There are a lot of us working on the stabilization conflict beat. But I really think it's important to remember that stabilization

and conflict prevention connect to the other policy priorities that we're hearing about in Washington. So military colleagues will have heard a lot about great power competition and whether or not we're calling it great power competition anymore. The fact remains that the U.S. government is really seized with managing the relationship with China and to some degree other rivals. And I think stabilization really connects to that because where these competitions happen is often in fragile states, is often through proxy conflicts. So I think it's important to remember that even though we've been talking about it as its own thing, it really does relate and support other top level policy initiatives that the Biden administration

is now pushing hard on. So I think it's really exciting to see how those policy initiatives will come together going forward. It was interesting, Owen West, who was our Assistant Secretary for Atomic, he convinced Secretary Mattis to write the irregular warfare annex to the National Defense Strategy, which had really taken grip across Washington with the return of great power competition and preparing for high-end conflict and near-peer competitors and readiness and lethality and all those things that are in it. But this gray zone idea or the contact layer below the threshold of the low-arm conflict is where a lot of day-to-day activities are happening all the time so this this is where the SOAR attendance and stabilization 2000.05 very much apply and that's what's happening day-to-day so having this common

understanding of these ideas like defense support stabilization common definition very much guide folks today that are in that gray zone working those hard tasks. And then as we look to pick the regions and countries with the GFA, this will very much be in play as well when the Global Fragility Act decides what it's going to be implementing. Before we finish up, one key takeaway from these frameworks and this conversation is the importance of collaboration across defense development and diplomatic efforts. With that in mind, what is one piece of advice that you would give your respective counterparts that would help or just make your jobs a little

bit easier? Sure. I have basically two sides of a coin on this. One is, as I've noted before, I think it's important to always remember that civilian progress, governance progress will just never happen at the rate of security progress. And I think sometimes we on the civilian side should probably do a better job of setting expectations. But I am taking the opportunity right now to set expectations. That's just the nature of the different problem sets. The flip side of that coin is that in my experience, when I've been co-located with military counterparts at a very local level, we see the same problems that we agree largely on the same solution. So I think there's, for all the ideas of civ-mil tensions

that are sometimes described in stabilization efforts, In my experience, I've had really productive partnerships with uniform counterparts, particularly when we're co-located and can really look at the same map and the same local actors. So I think there's a lot of possibility there. And then the final sort of just general lesson learned that I've come to in my study of stabilization and my practice of stabilization over these many years is that stabilization can make a lot of local level progress and really exciting progress on that front with local level partners. But that will never be durable unless you have a national level plan and a national level strategy and national level conditions ultimately that are conducive to that. Otherwise, sadly, I think a lot of this progress is going to be fleeting and not durable. I think we unfortunately might see that now we've already seen that to some extent in Afghanistan, where some of the places that I mentioned, we really did see local level progress 10 years ago, but a lot of that ends up being overturned by the security situation and the national level

politics. So I think we should all bear that in mind going forward. Great. What I would say, some of the compliments, of course, that Frances said, the big one is back to patience. The military very much is mission-focused and task-oriented and wants to get things done. And in a stabilization environment, that can be somewhat daunting. So for our state and USAID partners would want to make sure that they understand the military kind of mindset and for our military folks to equally understand the programs that state and USAID are out and executing. The other thing is spending time together, particularly when you are deployed or even here in Washington,

we kind of try to do that pretty well. But learning about the other's organization, what tools and skills they bring to solving problems, it's really interesting. And there's really important work that each department and agency brings to the table and understanding what those are and how to leverage them helps everybody. So don't have this reticence to not try to engage and learn. And I think we've overcome a lot of that.

And there's great synergy. If you go to a combatant command these days, there's USAID representation, the State Department, all across your agency, and even even echelons below that so that's really important and then how how can you train and exercise some of these things would be another challenge I would throw out to the 3d community is how how can we we do that you know I think DoD kind of has more natural inclination to do those kinds of things we just ran say for example a TTX on climate change in East Africa scenario. We were able, because we have on the joint staff the ability to do that, planned, executed, but we involved a lot of the interagency to participate. So always learning, trying to understand what the other 3D community partners bring is really important and critical. And I would also tell our DoD personnel to kind of stretch yourself if you have to, to reach out to those teammates in the interagency to really understand what they bring to the fight.

Well, thank you both for coming on. And we're really looking forward to seeing how these frameworks are operationalized. And we'll stay tuned for those priority countries for the GFA. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thanks, Daphne and Nick. It has been a pleasure. Thank you for listening to episode 25 of the Irregular Warfare podcast.

We release a new episode every two weeks. In our next episode, Andy and Kyle will discuss the surge in Iraq with General Neller and Carter Malkasian. After that, Andy and I will speak with Admiral Stavridis about special operations forces against China. Please be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. You can also follow and engage with us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. One last note, what you hear in this episode are the views of the participants and do not represent those of West Point or any other agency of the U.S. government. Thanks again. We'll see you here next time.