Few weeks or months ago they were in a horrible situation and
jumped on a plane not knowing where everything was going to
take them and they were kind of putting themselves and and our
hands and trusting us to make sure that they were taking care
of and their families were taken care of.
Welcome to the one. See a podcast your host today is
mr. Rob, the dro once the a 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 a partner Nations. 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 see a podcasting at gmail.com, or look us up on the
Civil Affairs, association website at www.flcfs.org.
I'll have those in the show notes.
We're the things that we were looking at, they said stability
and instability factors. We had some filters built into
this so that we could see week over week or day over day
whatever time Horizon we thought was appropriate, we could see
clothing issues are on the rise or food issues or going down or
medical care, it site. And then we could dive in to the
qualitative data behind that because quantitative data is
great, right? It tells you what direction to
look qualitative data, It really gives you that underlying story
and helps you understand the Nuance of the situation.
And, you know, for example, they have any give a hypothetical
example, this is not something that happened, Sergeant Shaffer,
I'll jump in and take a crack at it.
Sure, major Johnson, would you like to chime in there?
Yeah, one of the very first, big items of concern was very
reasonably apprehension in the guest population about, not
knowing where they were going after they left Fort McCoy.
The policy had been to provide that information to the guests.
Once it was confirmed final plane tickets are purchased, and
the guests are our departing. There was a lot of movement in
the ticketing is connecting up families, and individuals, with
support agencies across the country to get them.
Resettled that was just a really, really challenging
problem for, for our Department of State and in NGO colleague to
manage and and it would change a lot.
If a family is initially Needed to go to st.
Paul Minnesota, six weeks from now that could change three or
four times over the course of about six weeks.
And what we realized was that that was the biggest concern of
the guests was where we going after this.
And so we were able to use that information to suggest
leadership for oaw across the country to change the policy
that it's going to be a steam release valve for a lot of these
folks, giving them something. Giving them a piece of
information that could change is actually better than than
waiting and waiting and waiting to give them the the final word.
So the task force leadership took that recommendation in
approved the change and so we wound up doing a basically
camp-wide, you know thousands of people coming in and having a
meeting with resettlement Specialists to get at least
their tentative placement location.
So they can start looking at going on Google, Learning all
about Albuquerque, New Mexico or finding out all about Boise
Idaho or Tampa. Florida.
You know, wherever they were going.
It was remarkable the next week that line of people who are
concerned had anxiety about where they were going and what
was going to happen to them, totally fell off just nosedive.
It had been a significant portion of the population.
This is their primary concern down to, it wasn't zero, but it
was close to it, doing the Civil reconnaissance advising the
lead. Worship on a change to how we
were doing our work and then seeing the effects of that
change into the data. It was really exciting and I
think was an indicator to us that we were doing good work.
And so that's why I always heard about the importance of making
sure that you build these systems in a way that can
collect both types of data, qualitative and quantitative.
So that you can really make sure that you're tailoring, your
Solutions in an appropriate way. But then also have that
confidence that you're solving the problems.
Once you implement your intervention, I wanted to give
staff sergeant Shaffer, another note of credit for putting
together this tool for us. And one of the really special
pieces was to make it not just a trend analyzing tool, but also a
very rudimentary case management case identification tool.
We were not social workers rights civil Affairs,
professionals are not social workers, but we're talking to
these folks and we're talking to many of them on a recurring
basis. So Our teams were making their
way through the same group of living facilities.
Talking to the same families day in and day out over weeks at a
time and what ended up happening was that over the course of
those conversations? Yes, we're there to provide
context and picture of the civilian population, as a whole
for the Mandarin, for the federal coordinating official,
but we're also just running into people with people problems and
because of the relationships that are soldiers and Marines,
For able to develop what the guests into Camp.
Sometimes, we were identifying people problems that they were
uncomfortable bringing up through other established touch
points. So we had guest services
throughout the camp who were there to help connect guests
with the services that we had available, but we wound up being
is sort of a backstop. Maybe kind of a secondary touch
point for the the leadership to communicate with the guests and
identify specific problems. And so we were able to to build
into the the Civil Information. Management tool not just a
method to capture Trends over time.
But also just to say this family, in this Barracks is
having a problem. And so can we work with our
colleagues across the task force to connect them up 100%?
We are not social workers. We are not case workers but what
we found was incidental to our role doing Civil reconnaissance
for the task force. We're coming across these
personal individual one-off issues, and we felt that it was
necessary. Much just ethically as anything
else to make sure that that need was, was identified in
communicated to the proper agency, within the task force,
to leverage the purpose of our civil reconnaissance, the
purpose of our civil information management was to give the
leadership a picture of the civil.
Environment. But staff sergeant Schaefer's,
creativity in building out the tool meant that apart from just
that quantitative level of analysis.
We were also able to capture granular personal details and T
them up for Action in a way that wound up being a little bit of a
safety net sometimes for the rest of our teammates, across
the task force, and but it wound up doing a lot of good for our
relationships with the guests, but also just, you know,
contributing to the work that we were doing in the task force.
At the end of the day, if we see somebody who's got a problem and
we we can help them get connected with the person who
can fix it for them very easily. And because of Staff, Sergeant
Schaefer's work, we were able to do that.
Absolutely that's fascinating and sorry to interrupt you can I
add one thing to that? Okay so in a major Johnson was
talking about just now with serving as a backstop.
One thing that was really important to me was to minimize
friction and burden on the teams on the team leaders and I made
sure. To set this system up in a way
where the data is and what is a passively collected, right?
The reporters are submitting the reports.
And a lot of the analysis is very automated, but I was
pushing reports out to the team leads on a daily basis with all
of the issues that they had that still required follow-up.
And I think that the concept of push information versus pull
information by defaulting, to push information to keep them
updated. It was one less thing that the
team leaders have to juggle. At 10,000 of the things we're
doing at managing their teams and so it served as a backstop
but it also reduced the, the mental burden on the team leads
because they knew that every day, they would get this report
that would help them very quickly and succinctly Drive
action in their communities. That's terrific.
So, thinking about the amount of thought and Care your teams are
putting into to make sure that not only were folks getting a
good transition from the camps but that they would I'd have a
success in there, they were ultimately placed that ultimate
outcome was beneficial to them steps on Schaefer was lost.
You have on performance indicators, actually building on
what major Johnson just said, you saw the issues with
resettlement concerns and anxiety nosedive after shortly
after that event. But we also noticed that a lot
of the other instability factors that we would see show up in the
data. They were trailing downward as
well, not as sharply as that, and it was Because none of them
seemed related. And so, because we had this
ability to see data and near real time, I noticed that after
about two to three days, is able to arm our teams and have them.
Ask people is that we're saying, you know that used to have all
of these issues. What why is everything so much
better suddenly? And what it turned out was that
not only had we relieve these people of lot of anxiety and
concerns over when they were going to be resettled with that
anxiety, was causing them to see all of the problems that were
everywhere else. In their life.
So once that this had been lifted off their shoulders.
So to speak everything else about their wives.
Just seemed a little bit better and so it seemed very highly
effective if not just in relieving that one concern.
But we're leaving a multitude of concerns across the camp.
And then along with that in terms of measuring performance,
the way that the system was built, you can probably
envisioned this pretty easily because we're able to automate
so much other data. We're also able to automate
things. Like, how many reports were
being submitted by team or by marine or Soldier on an
individual level. We were able to see how long it
was taking teams to follow up on the issues that they were
identifying the case management system.
That major Johnson mentioned. There were a lot of ways that we
were able to very quickly, see what kind of performance are we
getting out of our teams and then to the measures of
Effectiveness, right? Looking at how effective our
interventions were In the community talks about the trend
line earlier and how we were able to see things moving over
time that was really helpful but then also the case management
system we were collecting qualitative data in those
reports on what the outcome was. And so that's not nearly as
automated. You need to read through and
kind of think critically about what the problem was.
But we were able to see a lot of information related to how the
guess. Received that intervention or
solution and they kind of Praise that they were giving our teams
went from. We were kind of an item of
curiosity at first, right? Being the only Marines at Fort
McCoy and after several weeks, I was seeing things show up in the
data about. We're so glad that the Marines
are here. And that's not to say that the
Army wasn't doing a great job. It's just, you know, different
uniform or easy for them to call out.
Seeing these things show up in the data helped kind of
reinforce the idea that Our team's work, just going through
the motions and doing what they were told to do, but they were
taking a lot of initiative and putting a lot of thought into
how they can help improve the lives of these people.
If we can pause there for a moment and think about the same
tools that you were employing, it sounds like you found a way
to distill massive amounts of data into usable information to
really Drive decision-making. What from those tools you think
is useful for other operations soon.
The tool that we were using to collect information is an
application through picks the protected, information exchange.
Some Of Affairs professionals may be familiar with it.
The specific app is called Mage, mobile awareness, geoint
environment, it is DoD approved, and you only have to have a dot
gov email to get access to it, which makes it great for working
across the interagency landscape.
I've worked with army civil Affairs professionals.
Before they've used it, I know Marine civil Affairs
professionals that have used it. And so, especially if you were
in an environment where you're maybe, you don't know who's
coming and going, A place you are who you're going to have to
hand this project off to next. Mages great for that because
again, you can customize your projects, you can add it or pull
people away from it as you see fit, you can make it open and
did closed under. There's lots of options that you
have and then on top of that picks has a dedicated help desk.
So, even though I might have been up at two in the morning
with a question, I could send an email off to the pics help desk
and they were usually very fast to respond.
Almost always within 24 hours of my question and the question
would typically be, you know, hey, I see this feature but I
can't figure out how to use it. They would get right back to
your hop on the phone with me and walked me through exactly
what I needed to do. So in terms of collecting the
information Mage was an excellent tool for us and then
taking the data out of my age, I mention Microsoft Excel earlier
being able to build a customized dashboard that was hugely
important. And like I mentioned earlier, I
didn't know how to do a lot of things.
Did I just kind of knew what Excel was capable of?
And then watch hate to say it watch some YouTube videos and
did some Googling to figure out how to actually build these
formulas. And and from there tweak it a
little bit and it worked great for us.
And so I would say that in terms of the specific tools that were
being used Mage through picks, and then also Microsoft Excel.
It was a pretty simple system, but it worked and so how can
professionals use that in future operations pics allows you to
create. Kind of a Wiki style page where
you can host a lot more than just some of the automated data
that I was talking about pulling through this and so you can
build products you can you know, post just about anything.
You want to a site that you can create great place to store and
share information. Maybe you're Building Products
need to be passed along to the next team and you're not sure if
it'll be army or Marine Corps or state department, right whoever
it might be a great place to store and share information.
Owen and then Microsoft Excel. You know, I've seen many
enlisted and officers alike struggle with managing just
information. I won't even call it data,
right? For example, I've seen psyops
greens that were trying to gauge not just how many messages they
were sending out, or the types of environments are trying to
influence, but also data on how they could gauge the
effectiveness of their messaging.
I took a look at their spreadsheet, they were using it
was very man. Warmest, taking them a lot of
time, just organize and understand the data.
And I showed them in about 15 minutes, how they could use
pivot tables and filters to take almost no time compared to what
they were doing. And it was hugely beneficial for
them and allowed them to really understand how the environment
was reacting to their message after that.
And so, I would recommend introductory, maybe intermediate
level, Excel classes can pay dividends in terms of your
ability to Understand and manipulate data for your
operations. That's terrific.
In the you're bringing up things set a lot of our folks that have
an otherwise had experience working with those tools.
I think civilian career is obviously assisted you in
preparing you to be able to use those major Johnson, anything to
add a weight. W was a weird deal in so many
respects. One of them was the nature of
the of the Civil information environment that we were working
in. Here, we've got huge amount of
resources, dedicated to staying engaged with and caring for what
is essentially a set group of people in a very small,
geographic location. You know, one one army base and
so we were able to I think compress a lot of the
procedures. And so, we were able to get into
a cycle of civil reconnaissance action assessment and then
reaction, I think it would be Challenging to do that, you
know. I'm thinking about the
experience of past guests of the of the one.
See a podcast major, Rob Boudreaux his experience on the
31st meu on, its Patrol out in the Western Pacific right there.
We're you're getting off the ship and you're going ashore and
working with civilian community that it may be years before
another Marine comes back and works in that Community.
Again, that's a much more challenging environment to apply
this kind of methodology. Just because of the time and
space challenges involved. What occurs to me is, just how
important having some common repository available to to civil
Affairs, practitioners, who are operating in the same theater
over time and over space. If it's you rob getting off the
boat in the Philippines and being able to go ashore and meet
with the local civilian government leadership, or Civil
Society leadership. Super helpful, if you can do a
similar project to what we did, You know, the talking to the
folks, you know, identifying concerns and then lining that up
with data, it may be years old. But having that similar
methodology, just stretched out over four months and years of
time that to me is kind of the application of our method to a
less unicorn, a less Black Swan environment.
It's easy for me to say, not working in the Civil Affairs,
brand shit us and opaque Ahmed quarters.
But that to me is the is the thing too.
Be on the lookout for, if I'm a tactical civil Affairs,
professional deploying on an operation like that.
If I want to replicate the kind of success that we had at Fort
McCoy, it's going to really be contingent on reaching out to
see the work that was done by civil Affairs professionals
before me, sometimes, months, or years before me, but then also
documentary and recording the state of play, in The Civil
information environment at the time that I'm there in order to
set the guy who comes after me. Up for Success months or years
down the road. It's tough.
Well, every good Marine Corps. Conversation must end with an
opportunity for safe around. So a staff sergeant Shaffer,
what are some of the personal memories that you're going to
take from this mobilization? For me, I deployed to
Afghanistan and some chick capacity is an infantryman in
2013 and the I think that just the ability to be able to help
you know this many Any Afghan evacuees having seen
Afghanistan? First handle was 10 years
earlier. It really was kind of a full
circle moment, for me to be able to see these people and know
that we're getting them to safety and that were putting
measures in place to help set them up for success as they
start their new lives in America.
One thing that I'll always be grateful for was actually when
we were at Quantico putting together a little bit of an
employment supports that are his everyone knew the Lord.
Every subtle but really worried about being able to find work
and so, you know, put together a some computers in an ncos faced
with the Wi-Fi connection and we'd sit down with people
one-on-one several hours a day and help them cranked out.
Resumes, teach them, how do you search for a job on indeed or
anywhere else on the internet? And by the time that we left
Quantico to go to Fort McCoy, I think we already had about a
dozen or so people had job offers accepted before they were
actually Be resettled to their new homes and just knowing that
we were only able to put these people ahead of the curve in
terms of how long it would have taken them to find employment.
Once they got resettled, that for me, is a really good feeling
that always, always remember. Sounds like you got to see a lot
of closure on a mission being there, firsthand in Fort McCoy.
That a lot of your brothers and sisters and arms never really
got to see personally. So that's terrific.
Thank you. And I drew Johnson bring those
home. First of all, just to say what a
privilege and an honor it was to To work with the leadership at
task, force McCoy, civilian DOD. And on top of that is to thank
the good work of the, the Marines and soldiers, that that
I was working with staff sergeant Shaffer among them, of
course. But think it ended up being more
than 30 soldiers, Marines, civilians working on our civil
Affairs. Detachment - reinforced, it
would have been ugly on the org chart, but we worked very well
together and really Rose to the challenge.
And the last thing I want to kind of leave in the Kind of,
the of the listeners is really that the story of our country's
relationship with Afghanistan. Didn't.
And when the 82nd Airborne Commander walked up, the ramp of
a C-17 and and flew out of Kabul and in August of of 2021.
There were something like eighty or eighty-five thousand Afghan
evacuees who wound up here in the United States and that was
the big challenge. How do we keep the faith with
these people? How do we help these folks out?
Who, who many of them? Years of their life.
Standing alongside our brothers and sisters in arms.
Putting themselves In Harm's Way to achieve the goals that we're
working towards there in 20 years in Afghanistan.
Again, above and beyond, just keeping faith with, with our
Afghan guests. I felt and I think that we as a
team felt that we had a duty to honor the work that thousands of
women and men had done in Afghanistan.
Thousands of Americans had done there during the war and in a
particular way they felt it was necessary to on.
Honor the sacrifice of the Marines and a sailor, and the
soldier who died at it, a be gate.
Most directly that sacrifice was made to help these people start
a new life in America. It was terrifically motivating
and humbling to have that Heritage in mind is we were
taking the Baton from our brothers in arms who had done
the work of the evacuation. We honor the work that was done
by those who went before us. Talk about standing on the
shoulders of giants. We felt that in a Way, and I am
really, really proud to say that.
I think that the work that we did was, was good Beyond any
measures of performance or measures of Effectiveness.
I think about, you know, a little English class full of
fourth, fifth, and sixth grade girls who were answering the
question to practice their English.
What do you want to be when you grow up and they were right
there with, you know, I want to be a doctor, I want to be an
airline pilot. One of them said, I want to be a
US Army soldier, which broke my Marine Corps hard a little bit
but my patriotic heart was was really, really Be proud to see
that in here that in gave me a lot of Hope for these people.
And it makes me excited to think of what where these these people
are going to go. And in the rest of their lives
is American. That's really what I want to
land on is just the sense of gratitude and the pride that I
have in the work that we did to help these people and to and to
write our our little footnote in the in the book.
So thank you very much for chance to talk with you rob.
We're really, really thankful for this opportunity.
Absolutely. Well you made your nation proud
and you did right by the Marine Corps and we really appreciate
you joining us Semper. Fidelis Thanks for listening.
If you get a chance, please like And subscribe, and rate the show
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Thank you all for what you're doing.
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