203: Review of The NATO CIMIC Conference

Welcome. Today, we bring Dr. Stanislava Mladenova to discuss the NATO CIMIC Foresight Conference. 

Book: Rambo Meets the Red Cross. Found at: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538187722/When-Rambo-Meets-the-Red-Cross-Civil-Military-Engagement-in-Fragile-States

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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 Ambience Lord for the sample of OKTOBERFEST Music 

Retrieved from: https://youtu.be/Kb_lr32vcrk?si=_V4vM_4BBv2zNxY2

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Transcript

00:00:01    Introduction
Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 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 dot com. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes. Today we welcome Dr. Stanislava Mildanova, author of When Rambo Meets the Red Cross. We met at the NATO Strategic Foresight Conference in The Hague this October. In this session, we reflect on our experiences at the conference and discuss some ideas for the future of civil -military relations. So let's get started.

00:00:56    STANISLAVA MLADENOVA
We tend to very constantly think about civil as a human -to -human function on the ground or, you know, potentially function of the Navy when it pulls into port. And whenever I try to explain this to a civilian and what it means, I have to kind of think logistically through every function that the military could perform, which is any function potentially. And whether they join well, whether a domain joins well with another domain, or whether that domain needs to be able to understand what is in the civilian environment that it needs to better integrate with, that's where I think things can get a bit wonky, as you said. Sure. Yeah, I think at the moment, business is booming in Europe, for obvious reasons.

00:01:42    JACK GAINES
Very true. What did you think of the conference? It started off with... some panels, and then we went into some work groups, and then another panel, and then we had some social hours in between. Yeah,

00:01:56    STANISLAVA MLADENOVA
I think I found that exactly as I expected to, which is trying to really be creative around the conversation of what the future means. Of course, I was with one of the groups where we looked at how the world could be in 2045 from a cognitive superiority standpoint. You know, ask a soldier to be a social scientist or ask a soldier to be an environmentalist or a techie. And that is by definition something very difficult to do. I mean, ask a civilian person to be a military person, right? And that's kind of the whole idea of putting yourself in the other's shoes. And it really gets at the heart of Sid Milne. So I think that within the constraints of how... creative and innovative, we can be within the three days. But also understanding that the military by default has this culture of, you know, creativity is not the place, right? You execute, you're kind of given orders and you just go about them. I think that I've gone to several of these conferences now with them. And I think that every time it just kicks the can a bit further down the road. And that's good. I don't think we can be too aggressive or innovative or get outside of our comfort zone, certainly whenever you're talking about the military and whenever you're talking about bureaucracies.

00:03:18    JACK GAINES
Right. The listeners should know, and that's that they did a 20 -year projection into the future. And most of the, I would say their military forecasters, projected pretty dour futures. Less freedoms, a lot more conflict, a lot more environmental challenges. Not a lot of peace, love and happiness in the future with those guys. I have to challenge it because I don't fully disagree, but I don't fully agree as well. I think there had some logic gaps because military forecasters, they look at risk and what future risk looks like.

00:03:54    JACK GAINES
look at risk and what future risk looks like. So if you're going to look at a military forecast, it's going to look like risk problems because that's what they're looking at. If you look at some of the other forecasters that are not risk -focused, you'll see there's some really positive things coming up as well. I just didn't think it was as balanced as it should have been.

00:04:15    STANISLAVA MLADENOVA
Well, this is where I think trying to get a bit more in their community is very important. So let me give you a bit of the perspective of a development person. Let's say you're a development person that's working on climate.

00:04:22    JACK GAINES
let me give

00:04:22    STANISLAVA MLADENOVA
a bit of the perspective of a development person. Let's say you're a development person that's working on climate. And we talk about all kinds of things get thrown around. on the climate, the seas are rising and everything's getting hot and you're going to have conflict and so on. And that's correct. And at the same time, when you're throwing the resilience conversation, it'll probably be a whole other podcast series. But essentially, you do have a lot of innovative strategies on how to leverage. the opportunity that presents itself. So are you looking at new types of horticulture? Are you looking at more exploratory ways to allow for livelihoods? Are you necessarily looking at, the assumption is always like, oh, people are going to move away from very hot areas where they can't grow food and go somewhere else and go on a huge influx. But we don't actually know that it's very hard for humans to just pick up and go elsewhere. likely they're going to try to adapt. And adaptation is part of being resilient. You don't have the shock absorbency to deal with something. So you need to come up with new ways to react to your current environment. And I think that there's also an assumption somehow that conflict will also cause people to leave. And that's also not necessarily a straightforward answer because people may be more willing to live in a place with terrible land. And more Cossack simply because they can provide for their livelihood and they don't want to leave their land and their families. So I think the more we can open up the aperture to think adaptation as opposed to shock, we're probably dealing with a more realistic scenario. And there are people outside of the military profession. Think about this. And their DNA is all about long term. How do you grow? In 30 years, how do you provide livelihoods? How do you lift people out of poverty by the end of the decade, by the end of the century?

00:06:25    JACK GAINES
Right. Matter of fact, I got to bring Gus Ferreira and Jamie Critelli back on because they are long -term economic agriculturalists. Another thing that struck me about the conference was the work groups. Did you attend any of the work groups or did you just present?

00:06:42    STANISLAVA MLADENOVA
I actually facilitated one of the work groups. Really fascinating. You go and you facilitate, but you're also learning. And our groups were really very well mixed. We had someone from the police that from you, Paul, and we had also a couple of colleagues from the NGO communities. But again, I found that I think our difficulty was trying to really look to the future. We thought about the future in the construct of what we know about the presence.

00:07:14    JACK GAINES
Which is how most people project the future is what we know now and just kind of extend it out and see how things have changed.

00:07:21    STANISLAVA MLADENOVA
Exactly. It's really hard to know, right? So we were kind of thinking like, well, what will NATO look like? And as some of us, is there a guarantee that there will be a NATO or there will be an EU? Which actually, if I can take us back to your question, I think it ties very neatly into really not underestimating how difficult multilateralism actually is.

00:07:44    JACK GAINES
Oh, yeah.

00:07:45    STANISLAVA MLADENOVA
It's very hard politically, extremely hard operationally. And we now have 32 nations. I was with NATO, young staffer, when it was only 28, I believe. No, it was actually 26 when I joined. And it was a really interesting, up -and -close experience to see what it means to get everyone to agree and then to operationalize what a guidance means. Try to get 32 different countries whose military do things different ways. Yes, to join NATO, you need to be part of the force structure. There's a common denominator under which everyone needs to be able to operate. But these are still sovereign nations and sovereign militaries and culturally, mechanically, organizationally, technically, budgetarily, whichever way you want to spin it. There's very much a difference. So you will appreciate this. There's always kind of a bit of, you know, CA and SF and, you know, CA and something else. Well, take a small country's military where the soldier has to be all things, where there is no separation between the lethal and the diplomatic in development. And then you're just dealing with a very different mindset and a ballgame in terms of what and who you can deploy.

00:09:05    JACK GAINES
True. That reminds me of Switzerland. Even though they're not a NATO member, they're soldiers. They have to do everything. They have to know how to do disaster response. They have to know how to do offensive operations. And they have to have technical skills. It's a lot, but be diverse and be successful at it. And that's another part of it is Europe having so many wealthy countries that have good education and training. Get really quality people. I mean, and to be soldiers, the Simic teams that I met. Those people were brilliant, really capable. So it was impressive to talk with them and to work with them on different subjects. One thing that caught me, though, it seemed like a lot of people were hung up on Article 4 and 5. And they didn't really want to talk anything pre -Article 4 or 5, any kind of lead -ups, any kind of what I call zero -based planning, because that's not where the business is. They were like... Once the rockets hit and we go to Article 4 or 5, that's when we do our job. And so I found a challenge there, and it's one that I pitched at NATO, and that is to start a working group to discuss CIMIC in competition. Domestic CIMIC, where you're doing crisis response in a nation, even if it's your nation or if you're going over to a nation to support them, as well as... expeditionary civic, where you're deployed overseas or in a hostile zone, what kind of efforts can you do before the fight begins?

00:10:44    STANISLAVA MLADENOVA
I think you've hit the nail on the head. Everyone says, oh, we need to be talking to each other before the crisis happens, so before Article 5. We say this, and yet it's very, very... deliberate, thoughtful, long -term, and kind of taxing to think about a worst -case scenario and essentially be able to think through every possible outcome. This is why I really enjoyed the work and the exercise that we had. As you know, I've been focusing a lot on this work and trying to mobilize the conversation as well in Washington for quite some time around research around the book. What actually very pleasantly surprised me from the conference is that signal is booming in Europe. The conversation is there, I think, for obvious reasons because of what's happening in the East. But again, it's booming because there's literally a crisis and there are boots on the ground. And I always wonder why we've not had the same type of energy and urgency. here in the US. And of course, we have it. We have it in the context of great power competition. Here it's China. In Europe, it's Russia. So you really have to bow to the moment and what people are talking about and thinking about. But it's exactly as you said, we need to be having these conversations in advance. And it's got so much other stuff to deal with. Bigger fish to fry. We'll feed people their signal vegetables when the moment comes. And I think this conversation around fragility This conversation about donor funding now increasingly going to fragile states. If we can focus on prevention, we can certainly focus the conversation more deliberately to start getting these signs to speak each other's love language. If we need to have the conversation around capacity and absorbency on the health or education side, we certainly can have the same conversation on the security side. The security relationship oftentimes is a political relationship. It's not necessarily focused around the fascism. But if you take up a multilateral organization such as the World Bank, they're now starting to operate in programming spaces that were completely off limits just 15, 20 years ago. So we have an impetus and we have plenty of terrain to see how some of this works by deliberately coming to the team.

00:13:21    JACK GAINES
When people are talking about crisis, they mostly are focusing on Ukraine. The one thing that I brought up was that Georgia is just as much a crisis as Ukraine because government is being toppled. It's just not with war. It's by political subversion. And that's where SIMIC can help a country if they were involved with Georgia in working with civil security, spotting risk, coordinating better responses so that they could work with the military on countering things like cyber incursions. or financial encouragements, while then showing the public that the military is there as part of the full -of -nation policy, it would have slowed down or even reversed the Russian attempts to subvert that government and bring in a bunch of politicians that are now rewriting all the laws in Georgia, a pro -Russian stance. And that's my challenge, is that if we lose in competition, there's not going to be a war. There won't be a need for a war. Everyone's equipment's going to be obsolete, because The governments will have changed, the financial systems have changed, and there's no one to fight because it's your own country that's been flipped by subversion.

00:14:32    STANISLAVA MLADENOVA
Having grown up in Eastern Europe as a young person and coming here, being in the West for the majority of my life, there's a certain vulnerability.

00:14:43    STANISLAVA MLADENOVA
Those countries that are the buffer between East and West have always been subjected and vulnerable to psychological evaporation, convincing people. And you and I talked about this in The Hague. You don't have to necessarily prove that what you're saying is true. All you have to do is just plant a bit of doubt and slow down decision -making. What is what's going to throw everything off? And now people have to have just a tiny bit of doubt whether what is being presented to them is what the information is or what the reality is.

00:15:18    JACK GAINES
But I think that younger generations are actually getting better at spotting The BS. In Eastern Bloc countries, they've always challenged what they heard. There was always the official word and then the unofficial word. And in countries like the Middle East, where you always had radical groups promoting stuff, as well as the government and civil groups telling you things, they've learned how to decipher chaff from the real stuff. In the U .S., I'm seeing the younger generations also picking that up because of the deluge of misinformation, disinformation and meaningless communication. And so I think that people are growing better at deciphering it.

00:16:03    STANISLAVA MLADENOVA
This is exactly right. And remember, the more exposure there is, I think, the more kind of variety there is of people having to select whether something is real or not, be it a piece of news or be it. Just an image or be it AI allows someone to look straight into the camera and not read off screen because, you know, so many people get on screen these days and have to give a presentation.

00:16:30    JACK GAINES
Yeah, even me.

00:16:30    STANISLAVA MLADENOVA
even me. Yeah, right. I mean, all of us, right? But the point is that almost on a weekly basis, something new comes out. Right. And the speed at which all of this is occurring. can sometimes outpace our ability to just kind of understand what the newest thing is, which is where I rely on my younger colleagues who are always much more up to par in things than I.

00:16:52    JACK GAINES
Sure. So do you have any takeaways from either the presentations in the end or some of the social events? Did you have any kernels that you'd like to share, something that struck you?

00:17:03    STANISLAVA MLADENOVA
What really struck me was there's just a disconnection for what the military does. And I would probably... push back and say, is this a PR issue? Is it a branding? Is it a marketing issue? I mean, in the US, of course, we have a very different relationship.

00:17:20    JACK GAINES
Support our troops, yeah.

00:17:22    STANISLAVA MLADENOVA
Yeah, support our troops, people coming, the high school. I don't know to what an extent that exists among allies. And I mean, we know that everyone is having a hard time with recruitment numbers. That is more of a commitment to probably identity.

00:17:37    STANISLAVA MLADENOVA
to probably identity. kind of believing in the cause and ideology of your government. And it reinforces the social contract in a way that being completely removed from it may not.

00:17:52    JACK GAINES
One thing that I noticed in Poland was that civil affairs teams were going out with Polish military and they were parking their vehicles in the market centers. And that way the public could walk up, look at the vehicles, talk to them, photos. They'd let the kids wear the hats or sit on the machines and get photos. And I thought that was a really good way to build comfort between the population and the military so that they felt comfortable with the U .S. being there with the Polish military. And that might be something that the other militaries might have to do. Getting more integrated with civil society might help the militaries to build back that good perspective. But also to do outreach, similar to what was going on in Poland. So I did hear that from... folks in conversation that they don't have a strong relationship with the public. There's a little bit of distrust in some countries. That's a PR thing. It needs to get handled. It needs to get jumped on quickly because the more there's propaganda targeting you, it is harder to build that relationship. The only time that you can build it at that point is if there's a crisis or a disaster and the military comes in and helps the population. That shifts it. which is also very important, is that the military be involved in crisis management so that they can show the humanity of the military in supporting its domestic population.

00:19:16    STANISLAVA MLADENOVA
That's right. And I think for us who are heavily plugged into the civilian side, we need to serve as the bridge between a civilian and a soldier, the life of a soldier, which ultimately that career comes to an end for most people. They go on to do something in a civilian capacity. And the things that the military can teach you between medical training, engineering, infrastructure, you pick a profession, there's some part of the military that deals with that profession.

00:19:49    JACK GAINES
All the way up to astronauts.

00:19:50    STANISLAVA MLADENOVA
Exactly. I don't think I've ever come across an astronaut. Not that I come across so many astronauts, but I do have a big social circle. Hey. We need to tackle space. We need everybody, right? Right. But, you know, almost every one of them comes with a military background. If you talk to Médecins Sans Frontières, the one organization that will absolutely stay away from any involvement in the military because they stay neutral to the bombing operations, they will tell you some of the most impressive trauma care or medical response by military medics. One person explained it to me, said it's just absolutely fascinating to watch these guys almost like an orchestra coming together and everything is down to the T, being able to suture someone so quickly. And yeah, I get goosebumps just thinking about it because I spend so much of my time trying to explain to each side that they need each other's skills, not always, but in some capacity. So very solid skills for very important. Function is in everyday life for communities. So I always tell people, learn leadership skills, learn the training, learn the discipline, and just go out and climb into the civilian world. And I think the military needs, I think this gunslinger mentality that has left sort of a bad taste for people from the wars. Many saying that, yeah, I don't want to go in and do what the military does. And then for us to say, well, actually, there's so much more that the military does in here all the way. And this is where Koning needs to step in and really connect with the communities.

00:21:33    JACK GAINES
So what are you looking to going forward?

00:21:35    STANISLAVA MLADENOVA
So I think that one of the things that would be really fascinating to see among allies is very difficult to do, but a little bit more around the wargaming and experimentation realm and trying to use existing methodologies. in the community, in the academic and practitioner community, to think about experimenting with some of these mechanisms and think about new wargaming tools and what does the future look like. So take everything that we discussed in the conference and now try to come up with the know -how and see if it changes our modus operandi. As you know, I always argue that CivMill is more of a way of being than it's an actual capability or a capacity or organization. It's really more about sort of those combination of the soft skills, the strategy and approach of the actors involved. Having more research and development around that would be great to help us think to the future.

00:22:39    JACK GAINES
You know, it would be great if they do a war game based on competition. anything leading up to conflict. And when it hits conflict, the war game is over. And so your job is all the way leading up to it to try to win without fighting, either through political means or economic means or through civil engagements or influence or messaging. That would be an interesting war game because then we're really driving to the reality that's going on now.

00:23:11    STANISLAVA MLADENOVA
That's right. A low -intensity conflict war game. It wouldn't be a war game. It might be a peace game.

00:23:18    JACK GAINES
Well, it's a war game. It's avoid all -out war by winning or the war happens. Right. Okay, we only have a few more minutes left. What's coming up for you? You're going to be pitching your book when Rambo meets the Red Cross. Do you have any testimonies? Do you have any conferences coming up? What's going on with you?

00:23:37    STANISLAVA MLADENOVA
Oh, gosh. Well, I will be at the Civil War Association conference. In mid -November, not only will I be there talking about the book, I will have copies of the book ready to sign. So I invite our listeners, if you have a copy of When Ramble with the Red Cross, bring it with you. I will very gladly sign it and with my gratitude for everyone supporting this very small English community. But we'll also have some copies for sale. Okay,

00:24:07    STANISLAVA MLADENOVA
well... That's it? I want to say it was really great to meet you in person and thanks so much for your support. I'm very grateful. It's great to have you.

00:24:17    JACK GAINES
to have you. It's a pleasure.

00:24:18    STANISLAVA MLADENOVA
It's a pleasure.

00:24:19    JACK GAINES
Okay, great. Well, we'll talk soon. Absolutely. All right. Awesome.

 

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