Nothing too surprising here. Still, it is worth noting.
The humanitarian airlift deployment will join the ongoing U.S. relief efforts led by the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (USAID/OFDA) and will augment an ongoing C-130 airlift relief operation led by Chile’s Air Force.
The C-130 missions will deliver aid to affected communities near the earthquake’s epicenter in the vicinity of Concepcion.
The C-130 Hercules can carry up to 42,000 pounds and use its high-flotation landing gear to land and deliver cargo on rough, dirt strips.
The two aircraft departed Muñiz Air National Guard Base, Puerto Rico Friday and made an overnight refueling stop in Cartagena, Colombia before continuing their transit to Chile.
Updated: SOUTHCOM announced today it has also sent a U.S. Air Force Expeditionary Medical Support (EMEDS) team.
The Department of Defense is releasing a new handbook [pdf], but inside you will not learn how to transport a tank, plan an ambush, or jump out of a C-130. Instead, this publication is “a primer for the military about private, voluntary, and nongovernmental organizations operating in humanitarian emergencies globally”. In other words, “humanitarians 101”.
The guide is meant to help familiarize servicemen on the in’s and out’s of NGOs, in turn promoting amicable relations between the two, which have traditionally varied between mild curiosity to outright hostility. The guide’s eighteen chapters cover the gambit of NGO topics from “What is an NGO?”, to non-profit bureaucracy, to humanitarian logistics, to international NGO coordination, to physical security. Overall, the primer offers a fair and largely positive assessment of NGOs and their capabilities, portraying them as nimble, creative if underfunded groups and the “the driving force in deploying humanitarian assistance programs”. Where NGOs stumble says the primer, is logistics and large-scale operations. The most NGOs lack the capacity to manage large, international movement of goods and equipment. Limited resources force NGOs to use off the shelf transportation solutions, cheaper but often unreliable in emergencies. Second, the limited resources of NGOs prohibit most from running country-size programs. While there are coordinating bodies, the fragmented nature of the greater humanitarian community means that “[no] matter how much coordination occurs, NGOs are still individual entities, often both small and private, that act independently during emergencies”, preventing unified, cohesive action.
The primer offers lengthy discussions of ‘typical’ NGO personnel. To its credit, it counters the long held stereotype of aid workers as unprofessional do-gooders, observing that “[t]he days of witnessing untrained and young ‘humanitarians’ attempting to get involved are not over, but now more than ever value is placed on professional operations, experience, protocol, training, and capacity to handle extremely technical tasks in difficult working environments. Advanced degrees and program specialties are major rank indicators and most NGOs found operating in humanitarian emergencies can be trusted to meet their objectives”. NGO personnel are portrayed as professional, experienced and independent. They are free agents operating in a loose organizational structure, “often tasked with responding to the needs of NGO beneficiaries before that of the NGO”. Yet, while highlighting the independent nature of humanitarians, the guide cannot resist offering a laughable guide to the aid worker ‘uniform’:
“That is, there is no easy way to identify NGO personnel. Instead, and to generalize grossly, many NGO personnel wear what has become seemingly if informally standard — multi pocketed vest (normally tan or black), khaki pants, chukka boots, and sometimes a badge with an ID card or insignia. Medical personnel often wear or tote fanny-packs filled with essential tools or medicines, and engineers and logisticians often carry small tool belts.”
Where the guide does falters is in local NGO personnel. Local aid workers are only briefly discussed, yet play a major and growing role in NGO operations. Locals are often hired for their ability to move and operate amongst the population (i.e. no fanny-packs). Thus, in many cases they will be the primary points of contact in the field.
The last chapter contains the primer’s core message: that there are areas of potential, value-added cooperation between humanitarians and the militaries. Specifically, the military can support NGO operations by offering physical security, logistical capacity, and communications. In those three areas the military’s capacity dwarf those in the NGO sector. The primer also explains NGOs reluctance to work with the military, highlighting the value of the USAID OFDA as a civilian middleman between the two sides. NGOs are not going anywhere. The number of humanitarian groups has skyrocketed since World War II. In the foreseeable future, the military is going to have to work closer with NGOs, whether during combat operations in Central Asia or disaster relief in the Caribbean. This new primer is both an acknowledgment that NGOs cannot be ignored and an argument for greater cooperation.
You can download a pre-release draft here [pdf].
There will soon be 100,000 United Nations peacekeepers in missions around the globe. Wow. When did that happen? Top contributors: Pakistan (10,826), Bangladesh (10,596), and India (8,759).
The political science blog Monkey Cage has more.
Save the Children’s Patrick Watt recently argued that combining humanitarian and security domains risks the safety of humanitarians:
“If aid is to be effective it must be planned and carried out in close and trusted consultation with affected communities,
It is clear that soldiers involved in the conflict in Afghanistan should not be carrying out sensitive and complex humanitarian work with vulnerable communities.
It is only through impartial aid organisations, such as Save the Children, that essential rebuilding can be done safely and successfully.”
Mr. Watt is making an impossible argument here. There are real benefits to be gained from partnering with the military, but let us put that aside. Strictly from a political prospective, it is inappropriate to expect governments to isolate development spending from strategic considerations while waging a war. If integrating civilian development efforts with the military prevents even a handful of combat casualties, the risks would be well worth it in the eyes of governments.
After the earthquakes in Haiti and now Chile, I cannot help but be reminded of an old idea once posited by my good friend Craig Hooper back in 2005:
“An underlying problem is strategic. America simply lacks a presence in shallow intertidal zones. Had fast-moving assets been nearby, the Bush administration, by getting firsthand information from the disaster zone, would have better understood the scope of the tragedy and avoided making an embarrassingly low initial aid offer of $15 million.
…
Auxiliaries may not capture the imagination. But imagine if 24 American-flagged ships had, within hours of the tsunami, swarmed into the shattered regions of the Indian coast, disgorging helicopters, mobile hospitals and recovery specialists. That’s an exciting enough vision for even Rumsfeld to embrace.”
It is an idea that might be worth reconsidering.
At Foreign Policy, Michael Abramowitz and Lawrence Woocher detail the statements of Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair, who on February 2nd included “mass killing or genocide” in congressional testimony on national security threats. The authors argue that Blair’s comments suggest that the security community is finally accepting genocide as more than just a humanitarian tragedy:
“Genocide’s negative consequences for the United States are increasingly plain. Mass violence destabilizes countries and entire regions, threatening to spread trafficking in drugs, arms, and persons, as well as infectious disease pandemics and youth radicalization. When prevention fails, the United States invariably foots much of the bill for post-atrocity relief and peacekeeping operations — to the tune of billions of dollars. And even as Washington is paying, America’s soft power is depleted when the world’s only superpower stands idle while innocents are systematically slaughtered.”
Civilian casualties in Afghanistan is a hot topic these days. After years of civilian airstrike deaths hurting Afghan public opinion of NATO and its forces, commanders have reined in their use. Killing civilians is particularly damaging in NATO’s new strategy, specifically focused on winning over the trust of the population. To prove the point, earlier this week International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) Commander Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal made a public apology for the killing of 27 civilians during a US airstrike.
Previously on Conflict Health, I discussed a 2008 Madelyn Hsiao-Rei Hicks and Michael Spagat article proposing the brilliantly named “Dirty War Index” as a quantitative means of measuring “particularly undesirable or prohibited, i.e., ‘dirty,’ outcomes inflicted on populations during war (e.g., civilian death, child injury, or torture)”. The Dirty War Index is calculated as follows: (“Dirty” Events / Total Events)*100. It is a quick and umm… dirty measurement of a conflict’s impact on non-combatants. Friend of the site Drew Conway, has discussed DWI at length.
It turns out that since October 2009 a derivative of the Dirty War Index is reportedly being used by NATO to measure operations in Southern Afghanistan. The less brilliantly titled “Civilian Battle Damage Assessment Ratio (CBDAR)” is
“…a method for assessing and tracking proportional patterns of civilian casualties from combat. CBDARs can be applied by both military forces and humanitarian organisations towards the common goal of minimising the civilian impact of conflict. These ratios complement absolute numbers on casualties, are easily integrated into existing assessment systems, and can track proportions of civilians, women, or children among casualties. The ratios can be used for monitoring, and to make comparisons between time periods, geographic areas, combatant forces, and between weapons, tactics or rules of engagement”.
The developers of CBDAR have a new article in the British Army Review discussing the method. The journal is normally closed to the public, but because the authors are awesome (and Conflict Health readers), they convinced the-powers-that-be to allow the article to be available for download. You can do so here.
Have a good weekend!
Sources
Cameron E, Spagat M, Hicks MH (2009) ‘Tracking Civilian Casualties in Combat Zones using Civilian Battle Damage Assessment Ratios’. British Army Review, 147: 87-93.
Hicks, Madelyn Hsiao-Rei, and Michael Spagat. 2008. “The Dirty War Index: A Public Health and Human Rights Tool for Examining and Monitoring Armed Conflict Outcomes.” PLoS Medicine 5(12): e243 EP -.
Soft power supporters stand between two ideological poles. On one hand, humanitarians complain that military involvement in the development sector will taint their work. On the other hand, hard power evangelists complain that incorporating soft power strategies will reduce their warfighting capability to slightly above that of the Peace Corps. Craig Kiebler is one of a few people able to exist, even thrive, between the two sides. In a post worthy of note, Kiebler argues for service delivery as a critical compliment to physical security:
“The foundation of social services sets the stage for market and economic sector development, support to individual livelihoods, public health, and food security, which in the end, supports the efforts of units trying to provide physical security. Services become forms of ’soft infrastructure’, if you will, by investing in the human capital in a region. They are not independent of physical security, nor is physical security effective without services. Therefore, can we devise methodologies to plan and implement security functions in conflict areas with more of a holistic approach?”
Also, feel free to harass him over email until he writes Part II of the post.
