In June 1975, after a military coup in Lisbon, Mozambique achieved independence and FRELIMO took control of the government. The health care system FRELIMO inherited was small and dysfunctional. During the colonial period most health workers were Portuguese settlers and these Europeans started leaving en mass at independence. Within a month, 85 percent of Mozambique’s doctors had left the country. Despite FRELIMO’s attempts to stem the flight of European health workers with offers of Mozambican citizenship, the fledgling state was left with only 30 doctors in the entire country. This exodus left many hospitals and other health facilities abandoned or crippled by understaffing. The problem was particularly damaging in rural areas that were often isolated during the chaotic first few months of independence. Health care in these areas was often provided by untrained orderlies and by the remnants of FRELIMO’s liberation zone health care network.

The new Mozambican government also lacked a pool of skilled and semi-skilled workers they could draw upon to manage the health care system. There were six economists, two agronomists, and fewer than 1000 African high school graduates in the country. The lack of capable senior and middle level technocrats made it difficult for the government to manage the disorganized health system it took over at independence. Decision-making was often deferred to a small cadre of administrators with little room for outside opinion or flexibility.

Despite these difficulties, in July 1975 Mozambique nationalized health care and launched a major effort to transform the disparate collection of private, public, military, and missionary health facilities into a single effective health system. The new health system was to be guided by the Marxist principles of FRELIMO and the health policies started before independence. Health reforms focused on expanding health care to rural regions of the country where a majority of the population lived through primary and preventative health care programs). FRELIMO political leaders believed that the country’s political and economic future lay in improving the country’s largest industry: agriculture. More specifically, FRELIMO hoped a rapid expansion of Mozambique’s health system would improve the productivity of rural agricultural workers and thus the entire economy.

FRELIMO’s post-independence health reforms were based around the concept of primary health care, a doctrine giving priority to the provision of basic health services and preventative care over specialized and curative care. Primary health care was seen by FRELIMO as the only way the government could improve the health of the vast majority of the population that had previously been without any health care access. To accomplish this, FRELIMO radically increased health care spending: from 4.6 percent of the government’s budget to 9.7 percent only a year later. By 1981, government health spending would reach 11.9 percent.

FRELIMO’s focus on expanding health care was rooted in both political strategy and ideology. Even before independence FRELIMO enjoyed widespread support amongst the population. This support was a valuable resource during the guerilla war against the colonial Portuguese Army who “faced fighting in a hostile country against a people overwhelmingly antagonistic to them” (Walt and Cliff 1986, 149). Furthermore, during the war while FRELIMO did receive some support from abroad, it relied heavily on the population for information and supplies. The close connection between FRELIMO and the population during the war had a profound impact on the development of national health policy after independence. Furthermore, FRELIMO’s Marxist roots played a role in the high priority given to health. FRELIMO believed western capitalism and colonialism were the enemies of the Mozambican people, and that improvements in the new state’s health and education systems were the key to escaping that poverty (Robinson 2006).

The FRELIMO government’s focus on the well being of the population was responsible for a rapid expansion of the health system in the years before and at the start of the country’s civil war. Between 1975 and 1982, over 2000 nurses, 110 x-ray technicians, 290 pharmacists, 272 midwives, and 1011 village health workers were trained. Similar improvements were seen in health facilities. In roughly that same period, the government built 593 health posts, 161 health centers, 130 laboratories, and 80 stomatology departments. The government also instituted a national drug formulary to reduce the amount the government and patients spent on pharmaceutical products. Mozambique’s drug formulary was considered to be one of the country’s most important reforms and was credited for keeping pharmaceutical spending significantly lower than other developing states. The effect on the health of Mozambican citizens was significant. By 1980, 30 percent of the population had access to health care facilities, up from 7 percent in 1974. Furthermore, by the early 1980s Mozambique had the highest vaccination rates for children under the age of five years old in any African country.

Last week, Ronen Medzini of Ynet published an article discussing Israel’s attempts to improve its global imagine through humanitarian diplomacy:

So why should a nation that often has a prime spot on the UN agenda, largely under negative circumstances, associate itself with such an organization? It appears that the slogan that stands at the heart of Foreign Ministry efforts to move from separatism to involvement is “If you can’t beat them, join them.”

“We have reached the conclusion that the UN is not a body that makes only anti-Israeli decisions, but also does many other things,” said Eviatar Manor, who heads the Ministry’s International Organizations division. “There are issues such as epidemics, desertification and climate change, which the government cannot solve alone and there’s a need for a global effort.

“We see the UN as an instrument to promote Israeli expertise and financial activity. It’s not a crime to use the positive things that we do to enhance our ’soft power,’ and show that we are not just a burden on the UN. We provide positive aspects as well.”

It is interesting to hear Israel — a state well known for its defiant unilateralism — talking about soft power and the power of international cooperation. Time will tell if their strategy pays dividends.

UN Office for the Coordination for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has published a new report on humanitarian security: To Stay and Deliver: Good practice for humanitarians in complex security environments. The report is a collection of best practices in NGO security in complex environments compiled from interviews with 255 humanitarians and a survey of 1,100 national staff members. While I recommend reading the full report, for your convenience here are the key findings:

The “How to Stay Mindset”

The objective for humanitarian actors in complex security environments, as it is now widely recognised, is not to avoid risk, but to manage risk in a way that allows them to remain present and effective in their work. This shift from risk aversion (or, on the other extreme, recklessness) to risk management represents the culmination of the past decade’s evolution in thinking and methodology for programming in insecure conditions. Key to this shift is the concept of the enabling security approach—an approach that focuses on ‘how to stay’ as opposed to ‘when to leave’—which has been adopted in the UN system and by many organisations. This mindset in turn depends on organisations and individuals accepting a certain amount of risk— the risk that inevitably remains after appropriate analysis and all reasonable mitigation measures have been carried out.

Avoid Bunkerization

The study recognises that heavier protection is often necessary when a clear and present threat of direct targeting exists, which cannot be immediately mitigated through greater investment in dialogue and acceptance, or in cases where violence is perpetrated by economically-motivated criminal groups. In such scenarios good practice points to the development of ‘smart’ protection measures, which add a layer of security to the organisation but minimise negative appearances. In particular, humanitarian organisations need to do more to avoid ‘bunkerisation’ which distances them from the local community, thereby increasing vulnerability and perpetuating a negative cycle.

Increase Security Of National Staff Members

International humanitarian organisations have significant room for improvement in tackling the inequities between international and national aid workers in terms of providing adequate security resources, support, and capacities. The study found that most national aid workers believe that overall security management and the balance between nationals and internationals was improving, but most also feel that they are still more exposed and under a greater burden of risk than their international counterparts.

Neutrality Comes From Dialogue, Not Events

A headline finding of this study is that the greater an organisation’s demonstrated capacity to communicate and negotiate with all relevant actors, the better access and security is achieved for humanitarian operations. The ICRC has demonstrated the most active, effective, and sustained acceptance and humanitarian negotiation strategies. It focuses resources on strategically and continuously engaging with all parties to the conflict as well with as local communities.

Humanitarians Must Stay Neutral

While simultaneously calling for respect for humanitarian principles, in the recent past many humanitarian organisations have also willingly compromised a principled approach in their own conduct through close alignment with political and military activities and actors.

Today Conflict Health presents something different. This week Wikileaks released a quarter million US diplomatic cables onto the internet. Many outside the military and diplomatic communities have wondered just how such a large amount of sensitive missives could have been taken. As a public service, Conflict Health is very pleased to publish a guest article from Captain Nick Dubaz, an Active Duty Army Civil Affairs Officer, explaining in full technical detail how it happened.

A number of commenters on the latest Wikileaks release have questioned how one junior enlisted Army intelligence analyst could possibly have collected and stolen such a massive number of documents unaided and undiscovered. Indeed, the very mention of “intelligence” evokes notions of secure, guarded, windowless facilities under constant surveillance employing the latest biometric technology to secure America’s secrets. This image may have once been partially true in the case of Top Secret and Compartmented information, but the distributed nature of our modern intelligence community and the proliferation of secret network access necessitated by our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has fundamentally changed both protection of and access to classified information. The technical methods Private First Class Bradley Manning, the accused leaker, may have used to obtain and steal the material and transmit it to Wikileaks are simple and demonstrate the intelligence community’s vulnerability to an insider threat.

All mission traffic in Iraq and Afghanistan occurs on computer systems classified at the Secret-Releasable to NATO/ISAF level or above. Historically, mission traffic occurred at the Secret-NOFORN (Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals) level on the SIPR network (Secret Internet Protocol Router) and non-US elements operated on separate networks known as CENTRIX segregated by organizational membership (NATO, ISAF, etc). This caused significant information sharing problems and now lower level U.S. forces are transitioning many functions to CENTRIX to create a common mission network. Regardless, these information systems are now present at every Company-level headquarters and above, providing wide access to Secret-level intelligence and diplomatic information processed and disseminated on the network. Access to Top Secret (TS) and Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) information systems remains much more limited, but is still partially vulnerable to Bradley Manning-like insider threats.

The Wikileaks reports on Iraq and Afghanistan are from a system known as CIDNE (Combined Information/Data Network Exchange) which is the latest iteration of the database of record for all tactical reporting across the OIF and OEF theaters. The release is only a tiny percentage of the actual data contained in the database. Each record in the Wikileaks release is only the initial text report often transcribed from the radio or secret chat rooms. After the incident/action is completed, each record is typically updated with new information, pictures, videos, PowerPoints and other relevant documentation. To allow for transfer into incompatible systems and other software packages, CIDNE includes an “Export to Excel” feature that allows for the rapid filtering and transfer of records to other systems. Bradley Manning likely utilized this feature to export the comprehensive CIDNE database that he would later transmit to Wikileaks. Such an action could be completed in less than an hour depending on the bandwidth available and leaves no signature that would be readily noticed as unusual or alarming.

State Department “Cables” reside on a different system on State’s SIPRnet website, but are no more protected or less vulnerable to aggregation and theft by an insider threat. In addition to the website, Cables are also disseminated through the Defense Messaging System’s (DMS) SIPRnet website known as M3 (Multimedia Messaging System) which rapidly transmits intelligence reports, cables and other messages to designated recipients and is searchable by other users. Both systems provide the capability to export massive numbers of records rapidly and it is likely that the leaker utilized these systems to collect the records now plastered on newspapers and websites worldwide.

Once downloaded on a computer system, removing the files is no more difficult than their export. As an Analyst in the Headquarters of the 4th Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division out of Fort Stewart, but deployed to Iraq, Bradley Manning likely worked in a Secure Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) accredited to process Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information. In the United States and its permanent facilities worldwide, SCIFs are built to exacting standards of secure construction outlined in the Unclassified DCID 6/4 accredidation and TEMPEST electronic emissions security standards. SCIFs often have several layers of security and are regularly inspected to ensure compliance with strict security regulations. In the austere conditions of Iraq and Afghanistan, such facilities are constructed and operated under less-stringent “Tactical-SCIF” regulations. Locations with only SIPR have significantly fewer restrictions and indeed it is not rare to see a mud hut on remote mountaintop outposts in Afghanistan with SIPR network access.

Whether in a modern SCIF in Fort Stewart or a remote mud hut with SIPR access, the responsibility for security for information and physical security resides with the owning unit. The vast majority of units and individuals in these units take security very seriously and self-inspect and police to ensure compliance with regulations for fear of severe consequences should an inspection discover lapses or violations. Nevertheless, it is not unusual to see rules bent or broken and iPods or music CDs brought into a SCIF particularly in austere, deployed locations where oversight is lax. Indeed, in a post-thumb drive access Army, Bradley Manning burning a CD in his workplace in Iraq would have garnered little attention from co-workers and his alleged marking of the disk as “Lady Gaga Music” did little to facilitate the theft of the data. Furthermore, I have seen no distinguishing origination information in the records and had Bradley Manning not exposed himself as the leaker to Adrian Lamo, we may have never discovered the original source of the leaks.

In perhaps less than one hour from start to Lady Gaga-labeled CD filled with Secret records, our post-9/11 information sharing programs and basic information systems technology enabled the greatest theft and public release of current intelligence and diplomatic cables in United States history. Both our information systems security and counter-intelligence programs are largely focused on outsider threats to classified information, largely ignoring insiders outside of periodic security clearance reviews and rare polygraphs. The insider threat to classified information cannot be solved through re-compartmenting access to intelligence information and adding further challenge to the already difficult work of intelligence analysis. These leaks should give us pause to evaluate our failed security clearance system and internal electronic audit and security procedures, but must not precipitate a return to pre-9/11 stovepipes that served our nation so poorly.

Today, Conflict Health presents the fourth in a series of guest posts by Paul Rexton Kan. Professor Kan is currently working on his forthcoming book, Cartels at War: Mexico’s Drug Fueled Violence and the Challenge to US National Security, from Potomac Books.

July was a month of firsts for Mexico. There was the first car bomb in the country’s history that was used by the Juarez cartel in an ambush against police. The first kidnappings of national TV journalists occurred when they were covering the unprecedented story of prison officials who allowed certain inmates out at night to kill rival gang members in the city with the use of prison weapons and vehicles.

In July’s month-full of firsts, allegations were made by the cartels involved that Mexican security institutions have been picking sides in the drug war. Graffiti on a wall of a shopping mall contained a claim of responsibility for the car bomb also included the allegation; it read in Spanish “What happened on the 16 (street) is going to keep happening to all the authorities that continue to support Chapo (Guzman), sincerely, the Juarez Cartel. We still have car bombs (expletive) ha ha.” Another message was aimed at the FBI and DEA which was posted in an elementary school in Ciudad Juarez: “FBI and DEA, start investigating authorities that support the Sinaloa Cartel, if you do not, we will get those federal officers with car bombs. If corrupt federal officers are not arrested within 15 days, we will put 100 kilograms of C-4 in a car.” For its part, the Sinaloa cartel was implicated in the kidnapping of several well known, national TV reporters in Mexico. The cartel’s intent was to force the reporters’ station to air videos made by the cartel that implicated police in siding with another cartel composed of former enforcers who were once members of the Mexican special forces, Los Zetas.

As if to undermine the allegations that the Mexican state had been siding with the Sinaloa cartel, the Mexican military dealt a significant blow against the group when it killed one of the cartel’s top figures, Ignacio Coronel Villlareal, during an arrest raid in western Mexico on July 29. But violence might rise nonetheless if the Sinaloa cartel believes that the government caved into the threats from the Juarez cartel and is now siding with them.

Whether the Mexican government has picked a side as part of its strategy to bring violence under control or whether portions of the police and military have picked sides without the knowledge and consent of the government, the cartels clearly see the state as another “narco”. The result might be an August full of frightening and unexpected new firsts…and the continuing peril of the Mexican state.

Today, Conflict Health welcomes a guest post by Captain Crispin Burke. CPT Burke is a US Army Aviator with assignments with the 82nd Airborne Division during Hurricane Katrina, Joint Task Force-Bravo in Honduras, and the 10th Mountain Division in Iraq. He is a contributor to Small Wars Journal and runs his own blog at Wings Over Iraq.

Every commander has his or her particular pet peeves. Mine revolved around immunizations and preventive medicine. So much so that, to this day, I still carry around my yellow shot record in my wallet.

I used to persuade soldiers to get their regular immunizations by claiming that that wars have been lost as a result of poor preventive medicine, with infectious disease, poor sanitation, and immunizations crippling many an army. In fact, as I read last night, it’s quite possible that America might not have won its independence had the British actually took steps to ensure the health of their sailors.

Most Americans know about the American Revolution from grade-school history books, where we learned of thrilling battles at Bunker Hill, Trenton, Saratoga, and finally, at Yorktown. Yet, like many insurgencies, the war was not won on the battlefield; Washington’s Continental Army lost more military battles than they won.

True, the Continental Army owed much of their success to the strategic posturing of France, and overextension on the part of the British armed forces. After all, the Royal Navy in particular was far too small to cover the breadth of the British Empire. Tasked with protecting assets stretching from the home waters of the English Channel, the Carribbean, and the Mediterranean, the Royal Navy was hard-pressed to sustain a blockade off the American coastline, while simultaneously containing the Bourbons (then the ruling power in both France and Spain).

Although Britain successfully undertook a prodigious ship-building effort, her real difficulty lay in recruiting and retaining enough sailors to man ships-of-the-line, frigates, and corvettes. In October 1778, over ten percent of the Royal Navy’s ships-of-the-line lacked the sufficient manpower to put to sea.

These difficulties were compounded by the fact that, though the Royal Navy drafted some 170,000 sailors into service, over 40,000 deserted. Furthermore, another 18,000 sailors–fifteen times the number which perished in battle–succumbed to disease, with scurvy being one of the primary culprits.

Europeans had known of a correlation between the consumption of citrus fruit and the prevention of scurvy since the time of the explorer Vasco de Gama in the late 15th Century. Later, in 1747, the physician James Lind formally documented the link between citrus and scurvy, even proposing a method of preserving lemon juice for long voyages. Indeed, in 1775, as war was breaking out in the Americas, Captain James Cook of the Royal Navy circumnavigated the globe without losing a single man to scurvy, relying on sauerkraut as a source of Vitamin C. Yet the British were slow to adopt regular Vitamin C consumption, and their naval operations suffered greatly. Nearly one-third of British sailors were hospitalized in 1779.

Scurvy hamstrung the Royal Navy’s operation. Upon France’s entry into the war, the British Channel Fleet was thoroughly unable to venture from their home port and provide a consistent blockade of the French port of Brest, a mere 150 miles from Britain. Scurvy caused horrendous attrition among the sailors of the Royal Navy, forcing the British to conduct their blockade from anchorage off the southern coast of England. This permitted a convoy of French frigates and troop ships, led by Charles Hector, Comte d’Estaing, to slip past the British blockade and land a sizable force in the Colonies.

In 1795, over a decade after the British surrender at Yorktown, Sir Gilbert Blaine petitioned the Admiralty to regularly issue lemon juice to British sailors. Within a few years, sickness in the Royal Navy dropped precipitously, with hospitalization rates dropping from one in three in 1779 to one in twenty by 1807.

A healthier force was able to leave Britain and seal off the French coast through long-standing blockades. It was the ability to stay at sea longer, according to British historian Piers Mackesy, which allowed the British to break the naval power of Napoleon.

Which raises the question: would we be living in a far different world had the British had simply taken their vitamins?

Always a sucker for a good war and health related graphic, I can’t help but post about Nightingale’s Rose. The Rose is a graphical representation of William Farr’s mortality data on the Crimean War, drawn by the one and only Florence Nightingale. The chart visualizes infectious disease (in blue), battle casualties (in red), and other deaths (in black).

While interesting, the Nightingale Rose is, for three reasons, far from my favorite visualization of casualty data. First, the wedges are measured from the center (and therefore overlap), however this is not intuitively derived from the graphic itself and thus can easily lead to misinterpretation. Second, as with pie charts, I find it difficult to accurately compare wedges of similar size. Take, for example, the August 1984 1854 and November 1984 1854 blue wedges. Which is larger? Third, the area of each wedge represents its numerical value, however, since this is accomplished by increases the radius of the wedge, the representation takes on an exponential property. For instance, a wedge representing twice as many deaths as another wedge would not have twice the radius. Again, this takes away from the intuitive interpretation of the graphic. Not to say it isn’t still very cool.

This graphic is republished with permission from its creator, Hugh Small.

Note: This is an old post from 2008 that was reposted by accident. But, given that I enjoy visualizations, I am going to call this a fortunate accident.

Edit: Special thanks to Michael for pointing out that the Crimean War did not occur in the year of Reagan’s election.

Last week, the US Navy deployed USNS Mercy on a humanitarian deployment in the Pacific. The news prompted Kyle Mizokami of War Is Boring to rue Japan’s lack of soft-power humanitarian cruises of its own:

Here’s a question: why doesn’t Japan have its own version of the Pacific Partnership? Why doesn’t Japan have two former supertankers, converted to 1,000 bed hospital ships, and sail them from Africa to the South Pacific, delivering non-emergency humanitarian assistance? With its aversion to hard power and immense reservoirs of talent, technology, and cash, Japan should be the absolute king of soft power. Despite that, it displays an utter lack of imagination and a hesitation to copy even highly effective ideas. Yet again it prefers to just lend a hand to the Americans than do anything on its own.

Japan’s lack of hospital ships has nothing to do with a limited imagination or a hesitation to import good ideas from overseas. In fact, many would argue that historically Japan’s power came precisely from its willingness to adopt good ideas from other societies. No, the reason for no Japanese hospital ships rests squarely in Article 9 on the Japanese constitution.

Amongst other things, Article 9 requires that “land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained” by the island nation. In other words, it is illegal for Japan to have a military. The nation’s Self-Defense Force is a civilian organization, with its members even allowed to quit at any time. Article 9 is a security guarantee to Japan’s neighbors. Without a standing military, the thinking goes, Japan can never threaten other countries with war.

What do hospital ships have to do with military aggression? Nearly everything. Hospital ships are an old concept and until a decade ago they had only one purpose: to provide medical supports to military forces on campaign. Floating hospitals are a requirement for amphibious operations. This is precisely the reason USS Kearsarge and USS Boxer, ships built to conduct amphibious landings, are excellent soft power providers: they contain massive medical facilities. These onboard hospitals were not originally designed to provide free surgeries to Nicaraguan children, but to give first rate trauma care to Marines storming the beach.

The building of a Japanese hospital ship could very easily be seen by its neighbors as preparation for a more militarily aggressive foreign policy. Many would argue the same should be said about China’s new hospital ship. Yes, it could conduct soft power operations, but it could also provide vital medical services during any amphibious invasion of Taiwan.

This is the third in an excellent series of guest posts by Paul Rexton Kan. The first and second articles explored drugs in warfare and peak insurgency. Kan also recently contributed to a special issue of Small Wars and Insurgency.

The ongoing drug cartel violence in Mexico took an ominous turn last month. While the killings of two Americans who were consular employees in Ciudad Juarez was a serious escalation, even more troubling was an event that took place several miles away and several days later. Thirty people of the small Mexican town of El Porvenir walked the 860 yards to the US border, crossed it and went to a small Texas town of Ft. Hancock to seek political asylum from an explicit cartel threat. The threat was simple as it was cruel—leave before the outbreak of a gang war or your children will be targets…unless you provide 5000 pesos per child for protection. The gang was able to purge the town of human obstacles and earn money for weapons from those who could afford to pay the extortion money.

Political asylum cases are not new, but those who qualify are targeted for their political beliefs or ethnicity in countries that are typically repressive or coming apart. Mexico is neither and the reason people are being targeted in Mexico by cartels and gangs is not for what they believe or for who they are, but for what they do—police who investigate crimes; mayors who govern towns; journalists who write about the violence. And now people are being targeted merely because they are in the way, because of where they live.

If such acts of criminal cleansing are repeated and sustained, US communities will feel an even greater burden on their systems of public safety and public health from “narco-refugees”.

Given the ever increasing cruelty of the cartels, the question is whether and how the US should begin to prepare for what could be a new wave of people like those whose hometown of El Porvenir is Spanish for “the future”.

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].