196: Jeffrey Fiddler on the DOD response to COVID 19

Today, Brain Hancock hosts Col. Jeffrey Fiddler to discuss his career and his experience at the Pentagon helping manage the DOD response to the COVID 19 outbreak.  

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One CA is a product of the civil affairs association 

and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.

We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. 

To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com 

or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org

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Special thanks to Natalia Lafourcade for the sample of  Tú Sí Sabes Quererme (En Manos de Los Macorinos). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABLT6hdgEek

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Transcript

00:00:01    Introduction
Welcome to the 1CA podcast. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website. at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes.

00:00:34    BRIAN HANCOCK
I'm Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hancock, and I will be your host for this session. Colonel Jeffrey Fiddler is a civil affairs officer with 34 years, thank you, sir, of combined enlisted and commissioned service. He has a master's degree in strategic studies and a master's and bachelor's degrees in criminal justice. On the civilian side, he is a special agent with the Department of Homeland Security. Colonel Fidler, welcome to the show. Great to be here, Brian. Thanks for having me. I tell you, sir, with all of that experience you have in both infantry and military police, who actually rolls with more firepower than an infantry company, I'm making you think you just like to fire guns. Oh, yeah. Love shooting guns. Fair enough. So I'm going to ask you a little bit about your civil affairs journey in a moment, but let me give out the quick disclaimer here. A reminder to the audience, all of the remarks of the participants are solely ours. Now, sir, I met you here in Europe when you replaced the legendary Tony Vaja as chief of the civil affairs division at U .S. Army Europe and Africa. Boy, a lot has happened since then. It has.

00:01:41    JEFFREY FIDDLER
has. A lot has changed. First of all, Colonel Vaja is great. Tough guy to replace. As you know, Brian, he was the DCO of the 353KCOM when I was in brigade command. So I got to know Tony for two years. We would talk at least a couple of times a week. The institutional knowledge that he has is just amazing. It's unbelievable. It really is. So I still talk to Tony to this day.

00:02:03    BRIAN HANCOCK
Tony to this day. And there's so many rich reasons why you join civil affairs. But the quality of the people you meet on that journey, I think, is one of the things that keeps us in this field. Absolutely. Yeah. So when I first got here,

00:02:16    JEFFREY FIDDLER
we were G39. We had SEMA, Space, IO, Civil Affairs, PSYOP, Brigadier General Ellis, who's... Selected for major general, our old boss, our old boss's boss, he wanted to separate all those divisions out. So we're now fully functional G3 civil affairs division, which is interesting for USRAF because the 06 lead is going to be a comp of three person going forward, which is a little different from some of the other directorates and divisions that you see here in USRAF. Yeah.

00:02:48    BRIAN HANCOCK
Well, given the breakout, I wonder if they're just going to add a G9 shop at some point. I thought about that. The two -star level, certainly we have a G9 shop. Yeah. I'm currently filling a G9 billet for the 79 Theater Support Command. So that would not surprise me, especially given the importance that civil affairs plays in CIMIC and in competition and in all of the setting, the theater and shaping operations that we're doing right now. Absolutely. I went back and forth on that because I had talked to General Ellis about that.

00:03:12    JEFFREY FIDDLER
and forth on that because I had talked to General Ellis about that. The reason why I like being in the G3 is that we have all the integrating cells, the G33, G35. Right. And for long -term planning, we do have an officer, Major George Warren. He's embedded with the G5 downstairs. And the reason why I like being in the G3 is that any organization that you go to, the three shop is the center of gravity. Always. So when those emergent missions come up, like Cyprus or the Greek floods, anything even remotely related to civil affairs, even in an infantry mindset or whatever, they look over to us and then we get the tap on the shoulder, which is pretty cool for the soldiers in the division.

00:03:52    BRIAN HANCOCK
in the division. Well, you must be doing something right to have that kind of demand signal. So well done. It's just luck. I'd rather be lucky than good in the final analysis. So I appreciate that. Yeah. Now, one of the things that I personally love about civil affairs is that since we are a non -accessions branch and Of course, in the Marine Corps, it's a B -billet for the officers. So while they're non -commissioned officers can be a civil affairs officer for their career, they cannot on the officer side. So there's a lot of rotation and change in both the Army and the Marine Corps on the officer side, which basically means almost every civil affairs officer that you meet is different, has different skill sets, has a different career path, a lot of awesome diversity, I think, that we have in the branch. And so let me turn to your story. You commissioned as an infantry officer in the 90s. And now you're a civil affairs officer. How did you get here?

00:04:50    JEFFREY FIDDLER
So I think it was right after the surge in Iraq. And that was when they took a lot of the chemical folks because I was at the time. Made a mayor defense artillery. Yeah.

00:04:57    BRIAN HANCOCK
at the time.

00:05:00    JEFFREY FIDDLER
So I was voluntold like, hey, you're going to go down to Fort Liberty. You're going to go to CA school. And then all started before that, I was in the Massachusetts Army National Guard and very tough to get promoted. Yeah, a few slots. Yeah, a few slots. So after Operation Noble Eagle, when we did all the defense of the bases, I transferred over to the Army Reserve,

00:05:12    BRIAN HANCOCK
a few slots.

00:05:21    JEFFREY FIDDLER
had to pick up a basic branch that the Army Reserve had, which is an infantry. People out in the audience might know there is one infantry battalion in the Army Reserve. I didn't know that. I was thinking the Guard,

00:05:31    BRIAN HANCOCK
didn't know that. I was thinking the Guard, but I didn't realize we had it in the Compo 3.

00:05:33    JEFFREY FIDDLER
but I didn't realize we had it in the Compo 3. Yeah, no, there's one infantry battalion in the Army Reserve, and it's out in Hawaii. A good friend of mine, Alan Perkins, Lieutenant Colonel Alan Perkins, just commanded that, but that's a whole separate story. So you want to talk about IDT travel, he had to fly from Boston to Hawaii for drill weekend. He probably hated that. Yeah, he probably did. But it's the only infantry battalion in the Army Reserve. All right. So we needed those influx of CA officers. So I got orders to go down there and went to school and the rest is history.

00:05:35    BRIAN HANCOCK
Yeah,

00:05:51    BRIAN HANCOCK
Yeah, he probably

00:06:01    BRIAN HANCOCK
history. You've spent most of your career in infantry law enforcement and the chemical corps. How do those fields assist you in your civil affairs work?

00:06:14    JEFFREY FIDDLER
Well, two things come to mind. In the infantry, you have those type A personalities. And I'm not saying I am one, but you have to be aggressive in the infantry. For us as civil affairs to show our relevancy, you have to be aggressive. Agreed. If you sit back and wait for something to happen, you're going to be marginalized. Right. You're going to watch your budget go,

00:06:32    BRIAN HANCOCK
You're going to watch your budget go, dude.

00:06:34    JEFFREY FIDDLER
Yeah. Exactly. So you've got to show some type of relevancy to that maneuver commander. So you don't necessarily have to be infantry to start up, but I think you need to be an aggressive officer. Like we say in the civil affairs division, we're not taking the foot off the gas pedal.

00:06:47    BRIAN HANCOCK
Right. We're just going to keep on pushing forward. You know, that's one of the things I also I've noticed about civil affairs formation, even at the civil affairs. action team cat level foreman and army doctrine. These folks are always volunteering for missions. They're always making suggestions. They're not waiting to be tasked to solve a problem that they think they can help and add value. They're speaking up. They're going to the three. They're going to the fire's chief. They're going to whoever and saying, hey, you know, I think we can help you with that problem. And they're very aggressive. And that makes them one of the hardest working and highest op tempo groups as a slice enabler. to combat arms in combat operations. But that's about a return on investment and earning your pay. So I agree. I think now more than ever, with some civil affairs battalions going away, there's force reduction in the army in general. It's not just civil affairs. I think now more than ever, we have to beat those folks who ship up and add value at every level of war to make sure that we're not only achieving tactical battlefield success, but we're also... achieving operational and ultimately strategic success so we don't keep going back and repeating crisis after crisis. Yes.

00:06:47    JEFFREY FIDDLER
We're just going to

00:07:57    JEFFREY FIDDLER
And I think on the law enforcement side, one of the things that they're looking for for training is negotiation training. Yeah. How do you do that? And I think in law enforcement, if you're a decent law enforcement officer, you've got to know how to negotiate with people. And I think for civil affairs, that's a huge thing for us because we're really that connective tissue between the civilian populace and the military. We saw that just recently down in Cyprus, that you dealt with a pretty big problem set getting humanitarian assistance into Gaza, and you have a lot of international players everywhere. IGOs that are over there that want to do something, NGOs, different militaries from other countries. How do you pull all that together? You have to have some kind of negotiation training, or have done that in the past, and I think a lot of us have in civil affairs.

00:08:03    SPEAKER_00
Yeah. How

00:08:43    BRIAN HANCOCK
I think so too. Many of the most important problem sets, there are ways to solve them other than bullets. And bullets may be expedient, but again, that tends to generate a lot of long -term animosity, which leads to that crisis after crisis, right? So critical skill definitely need more of that. And if we're not going to plus up civil affairs, maybe we need to start training some other people to understand that, or at least how... to utilize the civil affairs assets they have properly. And I think we're going to talk a little bit more about that later. Now, not long ago, the psychological operations groups of the United States Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command, known as USACAPOC, they did that reorganization. They took their separate psychological operations groups, their POGs, and which, by the way, had a broken officer pyramid. They had about 100 captain positions, which would go to 33 major positions. and then go to 505 lieutenant colonel positions, four of which were battalion command.

00:08:57    SPEAKER_00
right?

00:09:45    BRIAN HANCOCK
So it really became hard to have a career in PSYOP. Those are now moved under the KCOM, theoretically integrated within the KCOM. So we have civil affairs and psychological operations not only working together, but actually coexisting the same unit together. KPOC started with some experiments in that, and there's more of that occurring now. You commanded a civil affairs and psychological operations combined battalion. What was that experience like for you? And do you have any opinions on whether combining those two elements is a good long -term strategy for the command? Sure. Well,

00:10:21    JEFFREY FIDDLER
I'm not going to say any psyop jokes because I put my foot in my mouth in the past on that. There's a lot of CA officers that are dual -headed. I am. I'm one of them. Exactly. See? So I didn't do it. It's not going to be there in perpetuity. All right. But I had a CA PSYOP training battalion, Brian. So really, we're training NCOES, wasn't an operational battalion. Still counts as battalion command time for anybody that's out there that's looking for a battalion command. And those CA PSYOP training battalions are, in my opinion, you're not only getting your command time done, but it's also a good broadening assignment because you're running a schoolhouse. Right on. How often do you get that opportunity other than going into one of the more traditional training commands? Yeah,

00:10:28    SPEAKER_00
Exactly. See? So I didn't do it. It's not going to be there in perpetuity.

00:11:00    BRIAN HANCOCK
you don't. You either work for TRADOC or you become a defense contractor for somebody's school, right? Yeah.

00:11:06    JEFFREY FIDDLER
It's a really different experience. I really enjoyed it. I learned a lot about running a schoolhouse. So that was, it was interesting. For example, so my S3 at the battalion was PSYOP. So, you know, you can't do anything without your S3. He didn't work too much with CA. I haven't worked too much with PSYOP, but at the end of the day, we're all wearing a uniform. We're going to figure out a way to make it happen. When I look at 353KCOM, I think they have 2POG underneath them. So now you have three brigade -size commands under there. So I think I understand why KPOC did it. I think we'd have to ask the folks down there, but they were direct reporting, right, to use KPOC before. Yes, or DRU.

00:11:45    BRIAN HANCOCK
Yes, or DRU.

00:11:46    JEFFREY FIDDLER
I think right now, I mean, for exercise support, I think we have some of those folks coming out from 2POG. And I think the fact that we had folks on the ground out here, like our division, were all from the 353KCOM. kind of help massage that so that we can get more psyop folks over here in Europe.

00:12:03    BRIAN HANCOCK
I think from the doctrine point of view, and perhaps from the demands of modern warfare point of view, it does make sense. We look at FM3 Taco talking about multi -domain operations, moving these things together and synchronizing them in time and space for the Gestalt principle, kind of greater effect than you have if you were doing them individually. It goes a step further with information advantage. experimental doctrine, it's not official, where they say we not only need multi -domain operations, but we have things like the electromagnetic spectrum, which is an environment, not a domain. You've got the information, which in Army doctrine is a dimension. In Marine Corps, it's a co -equal war fighting function. And at the joint level, it's a joint function. But we need all of those things. Battlefield relevant, as you said earlier, we have to show that return on investment to a maneuver commander who's going to be a combat arms guard. And we have to show him that what we did made him more survivable, more lethal, more effective in a measurable way. So it has to be a fairly significant change to hit the detection of threshold and be measurable. And as we start adding all of these information -related capabilities together, And CAs is an information -related capability, perhaps not its primary role by doctrine, but is an IRC. Together, we can potentially get after that. So it makes sense to me why we'd want to put a PSYOP and CA together. I think we need to do a lot more than that. Probably need lawfare there and religious engagement there and public affairs there. We're doing things like theater information -advantaged elements, theater information -advantaged attachments, which add... many of those things, but still don't bring in the lawfare or the religious outreach. But it seems to me like KPOC is making a step in that direction. I think so.

00:13:47    JEFFREY FIDDLER
think so. And first time I ever worked with IO was at a CPX functional. Oh, really?

00:13:52    BRIAN HANCOCK
really?

00:13:52    JEFFREY FIDDLER
2022. So my brigade had CPX functional. We had a PSYOP battalion there and we had a IO battalion. Nice. I can't remember his name. I apologize for that. But the IO tenant colonel, he really put everything together. Integrator. He really was. Nice. He did it very well. And he's like, we're going to have information dominance from all the different sensors that we have out there.

00:14:17    BRIAN HANCOCK
So I've seen it work. Nice. I'm not sure we're going to have information dominance against a near -peer threat, maybe windows of superiority to execute missions. Sure. And I think that's a reality that we have to do a little mindset change as we look at large -scale combat operations against near -peer adversary. But absolutely. A good IA officer who can synchronize all of these strong personalities in different subfields towards throw in the same direction is a great asset. It is.

00:14:44    JEFFREY FIDDLER
is. You even saw that here, Brian, right? We had the former G39. To understand all those equities, to find that one person, it's not easy. No, not at all.

00:14:53    BRIAN HANCOCK
all. You worked at the Pentagon for a while, in the Joint Chiefs of Staff office, no less, including at a very excited time during the COVID -19 crisis. What was that experience like? I imagine it was probably a pretty chaotic time to be there.

00:15:09    JEFFREY FIDDLER
It was, but I'm going to circle back pre -COVID. So when I left battalion command, for all the TPU officers out there, I'd never even heard of a TPU unit that supported the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Right. A troop program unit supporting joint chiefs? I didn't hear it either. So I was just Googling around one day. I'm like, all right, where am I going to go next for battalion command? And I called down to the unit. It was one of the first units in the Army Reserve where I actually interviewed for a job. Nice. Once I got hired, I saw their interview process and it was pretty picky. I was surprised by that. Well, the list is long to get in there. So for any of those officers out there looking to get war college done or to get AOC done, or if you're a major above, because you don't want to go down there as a captain because your joint time doesn't start until you hit major. Right. I don't want to say it's a place to take a knee because it's a very busy unit, but it's not like being part of an operational brigade or battalion where you're on a phone call. four or five nights out of the month, or even more if you're in an operational CA, brigade, or battalion. We know that that's how it is. Yeah, daily, probably. Really unique place. I started out in the J35, which is part of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but it's stationed in Norfolk, Virginia. Right. And that was doing CA, PSYOP, force rotation. Somebody said, hey, we need a CA battalion.

00:16:11    BRIAN HANCOCK
daily, probably.

00:16:27    JEFFREY FIDDLER
We'd take a look and see if that's exactly what they needed. Wasn't my cup of tea. But then I went over to J7, which is the interagency lead over there, and I worked in the training section as well, which was a fabulous assignment. And then COVID kicked off, and they needed folks to work down in the basement where all the cave dwellers are. Yeah, the Morlocks from H .G. Wells. Yeah, and you know, what's funny, I mean, we're trained to do everything in the Army. Nobody ever trained us on how to be on a crisis management team. Yeah. Right. Well,

00:16:56    BRIAN HANCOCK
we, well, I mean, we've got crisis action planning and doctrine. Yeah. Right. But that doesn't, we, yeah, no, that's different.

00:17:02    JEFFREY FIDDLER
I showed up there on active duty and I was the senior ranking Lieutenant Colonel. So they said, oh, congratulations. You're in charge. You're in charge of the overnight shift. Oh God. And oh, by the way, you're going to have the SecDef's book ready in the morning, Vice President Pence's book ready and Dr. Burke's. No pressure. Right. And then all the Jaders. Right. And no, but it was great. We had a couple of civil affairs officers there, and the colonel that I was working with, he said, wow, he's like, those folks are really sharp. One of them is Hilda Fernandez. You could put her in any spot somewhere, and she's not going to look for a lot of direction. She's just going to figure it out. And this is what we talked about, right, with being aggressive and those kind of folks. Those are the kind of officers that you want in your battalion and brigade. And she was great down there, and we had a lot of good civil affairs folks down there.

00:17:47    BRIAN HANCOCK
I know it couldn't have been an easy assignment and there were tough questions that Department of Defense had to deal with. We look at all those folks, say, on an aircraft carrier in close proximity who get COVID. We get an experimental vaccine and there are perhaps some concerns about it and tough decisions have to be made to make it mandatory to do immunizations with a brand new vaccine. Were you part of that? I imagine that there were some long nights as that policy was being developed.

00:18:18    JEFFREY FIDDLER
Yeah, I was actually down there when they were leaving. The commander, I think it was the Roosevelt. Yeah, it was difficult. We weren't part of any policy. It was really just making sure there was any GFM actions. That was one of the big things that we did. So as you can imagine, a lot of medical folks were being activated to support the hospital. There were disc commissions for CA. Yeah. Absolutely. Some of my friends went on those. Yeah. So there was a lot of that. And of course, the logistician piece, right? Getting supplies from point A to point B. So we had a little touch in that as well. You had to move some toilet paper. Did you have an opportunity to do that? Because I never could get enough in the store. Never did that. But you want to talk about influence. I had noticed in New York City, the death toll was outrageous there.

00:18:38    BRIAN HANCOCK
Yeah. Absolutely. Some of my

00:19:00    JEFFREY FIDDLER
And we had mortuary affairs companies out there. And you could see the amount of bodies that they're processing. And that was one of the things that we would put on the placemat. The president's placemat? It was for the vice president. I don't know who did the president's book, but I know he did the vice president's, but be brief to General Milley because he was the chairman at the time. And we could affect that in a way of saying, hey, look, this company processed this many bodies. And actually somebody went out and saw that commander on the ground saying, hey, you guys are doing a great job. It was a tough business.

00:19:33    BRIAN HANCOCK
An assignment like that sounds like. a little bit of choose your own adventure. But if you use your time wisely, you can attack some of those serious projects that require a lot of intellectual rigor, which are very challenging when you have a lot of tactical elements that you're in charge of maneuvering in time and space. It seems like in those kinds of environments, we're always just kind of putting out fires. And then when we look at some of the larger institutional questions that have to be solved as we do acquisitions and force management and some of those other things, it's kind of hard to find that headspace. to do that. But it sounds like this is an opportunity. As soon as I started the war college with,

00:20:08    JEFFREY FIDDLER
I started the war college with, I think, three months left of battalion command. Right. And then when I went to the Joint Chiefs, that's where I finished up my war college time. And it allowed me to do it. Nice. It was more reasonable than being in command. All right. Awesome. And let me just cover real quick. If anybody is interested in going down to the Joint Chiefs, if you want to become joint qualified, you need 36 points a year in a J -Doll billet. And you can accomplish that just through drills and a couple of weeks of AT. So, of course, if you have JPME -2, whether you get that through Joint Combined Warfighting School or Resident War College, then you can get your 3LEMA identifier for the health. Yeah, your ASI for joint qualified.

00:20:46    BRIAN HANCOCK
the health. Yeah, your ASI for joint qualified. Yes. It really interests me when HQDA showed the number of joint qualified generals, it was actually a very low number. It surprised me because everything we do that matters is joint combined. And many of our points of friction are when we're working in these federated environments with partners. It would seem to me that this is something that as a force, we just should be getting better at.

00:21:10    JEFFREY FIDDLER
Yeah. Well, the thing is for the COMPO3, right? It's not a requirement to become joint qualified. Totally optional. So I think we're at 5%. Yeah, very low. Joint qualification. But again, it's a good experience. Even though we don't need the joint qualification, it's a good experience to have. It's a small DOD in a way. So when I worked at the J7, Rare Admiral Foster, who I worked for in Cyprus, was one of the bosses down there as a captain. And at the J7, it was Vice Admiral Munch, who's Admiral Munch now, was my boss's boss. So we all ended up working again together on the HA mission in Cyprus and Gaza.

00:21:48    BRIAN HANCOCK
You know, that's the way things happen. Yeah. Relationships of trust. Exactly. All right. Thank you for your time, sir. Really appreciate it. And that's a wrap. Thanks, Brian.

00:21:57    Close
Thanks for listening. If you get a chance, please like and subscribe and rate the show on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you're interested in coming on the show or hosting an episode, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com. I'll have the email and CA Association website in the show notes. And now, most importantly, to those currently out in the field working with a partner nation's people or leadership to forward U .S. relations, thank you all for what you're doing. This is Jack. Stay tuned for more great episodes of 1CA Podcast.