The story of our country's relationship with Afghanistan.
Didn't end when the 82nd Airborne Commander walked up,
the ramp of a C-17 and and flew out of Kabul.
And then August of 2021. There was 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 We help these folks out who, who many of them spent
years of their life? Standing alongside our brothers
and sisters in arms, putting themselves In Harm's Way to
achieve the goals that we were working towards there in 20
years in Afghanistan. Welcome to the ones.
He a podcast. Your host today is mr.
Rob Boudreau, 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.
The contact, the show, email us at see a podcasting at
gmail.com, or look us up on the Civil Affairs association
website at www.wrc.org. I'll have those in the show
notes, we're joined today by Major Jimmie, Johnson and steps
are and Greg Shaffer. Major Jimmie.
Johnson is a marine Manpower officer in civil Affairs.
Officer in 1021 and 2022, immobilized, in support of
operations, allies. Welcome with a civil Affairs,
Detachment from the main course, for civil Affairs group, in the
civilian career, who practices law with the Department of the
Navy's office of general counsel in Norfolk.
Virginia steps are great. Schaefer enlisted in the Marine
Corps in 2009. From Evansville Indiana, you
spent his first five years on active duty, in the inventory,
with diplomas to several countries including Afghanistan
and Yemen transitioning. To the reserve component in
2014. It laterally moved to civil.
Errors and completed his bachelor's and master's degrees
in Justice law and public policy.
Since then he has provided see a support the several
multinational exercises around the world and mobilized in 2021
for operation allies. Welcome, all the participants
today would like to note that all of their views are stated in
their personal capacities and do not necessarily represent those
of the United States government or any of its agencies or
components gentlemen. Welcome to the podcast.
Thank you very much for having us.
And I'm very glad to be here. I'm excited.
Excited to be here too. And it's nice to have the
Marines taken the podcast over for a change.
Good stuff. So, major Johnson, tell me how
did a bunch of Marines end up doing civil Affairs activities
for the Army on a base full of Afghan evacuees and Rural
Wisconsin. It was a huge project that we
got involved with and had the honor and the privilege to
support just to give you a little bit of context and help
the listeners understand a little bit of how the work that
we were doing as a part of operation allies.
Welcome. To evacuate US, Government
Personnel private citizens but then also tens of thousands of
Afghan civilians from Kabul and in August of 2021 to fly as many
people as or possible out of Hamid Karzai International
Airport. And of course we all do the very
setting photos and videos of that effort including the loss
of 11 Marines and Navy sailor and one Army soldier during that
evacuation of her the back end of that.
Ian was, what do we do with all these folks that have now gotten
out of Afghanistan, been given humanitarian parole, or some
other form of legal status, in the United States and ended up
being thing between 75 and 85 thousand Afghans who were
brought to the United States on, very short.
Notice, how do we take care of those folks?
How do we do right by them? And that's where we make the
transition from operation, allies Refuge the evacuation,
operation to operation. Allies, welcome.
Oh, aw. Which was the care and
resettlement. Operation, weight w was a uf's
northcom defense support to Civil Authorities Mission disco
to support the Department of Homeland, Security, to operate a
tree, settlement sites at military installations across
the United States. So these were places to house
care feed but also educate and and provide Social Services
support to these tens of thousands of people who were on
their way to making a new life and in the United States, the
Marines initially had two pieces of that were one at Fort barfoot
and another at Camp up. Sure Quantico in our civil
Affairs, Detachment was mobilized a little bit late in
the game to get out and support. Oh aw the first half Ganz reach
the United States at the end of August in 2021 in our
mobilization date was 1 December and we were initially deployed.
To Quantico. But by the time we got, there is
very very close to completing operations, most of the
population of the camp at Quantico had been resettled.
And so, what do we do with this group of civil Affairs, Marines,
who are on five-month orders to support the Marines piece of?
Oh, aw. The answer was actually to
reassign our civil Affairs Detachment out to the Army's
task force, working at Fort McCoy.
Boy, Wisconsin. So we packed up our bags and
flew from Quantico out to Wisconsin in the dead of winter
between the end of 2021 and into January of twenty two, we felt a
little bit like we would have been in some ways better
prepared to actually deploy to Afghanistan and do civil Affairs
in Afghanistan. We were to deploy to Wisconsin
but it turned out to be a really great opportunity to work with a
very good group of army, soldiers, DHS civilians, other
civilians. And across the interagency and
across the alphabet soup of ngos, who were doing that work
at Fort McCoy. When we arrived, there were
still about 10,000 Afghan evacuees.
The term we use is guests for Afghans who are in base with us.
We steer clear of the word Refugee that has pretty
particular legal connotation that goes along with it.
And at that point, we're helping these people to start
transitioning to the next phase of their life.
So we like using the word guest of the United States government.
We were very fortunate to work with a group of army leaders who
were very familiar with the Civil Affairs.
Discipline, the task force, Commanding General Brigadier,
General, Andre Carter and her Chief of Staff.
Colonel Scotty lynnae, both Army reservists who had a background
working either in or very closely with a civil Affairs
forces. The guidance that we got from
the see Gene from Chief of Staff was pretty much just Ooh, civil
Affairs. And that's perfect.
We were able to get in and take that maneuver space.
That they gave us to do a good estimate of what the situation
was in the Civil environment and then start racking and stacking.
Our priorities was like a really professional golfer who's been
looking for just the right pitching wedge.
You know that they've been missing from their bag when we
got there. We're very warmly welcomed and
we're put to work immediately. Okay.
So you deployed as the Detachment Commander is that
correct? I was Quantico was about 18
Marines total, and we split up 10 of us went to Joint Base
mcguire-dix-lakehurst in New Jersey.
And then I took a group of eight Marines to be a Detachment -
going to Fort McCoy, the chief of staff had set up a very
active, female engagement team and we integrated, those Soldier
to turn it into a sort of - reinforced Detachment and that
worked like gangbusters. So we had a very robust capacity
and then by linking up are cool trained and very experienced
civil Affairs, Marines with a lot of really motivated Savvy
thoughtful army soldiers, who had been doing the work for
several weeks. We were able to get really,
really good coverage to the task force, and being the best
vehicle for a lot of the ngos and interagency Partners.
At the camp, who needed to do Outreach with the guest
population. We wound up working very very
closely. And even integrating some of
those interagency and NGO Partners into our civil Affairs
teams. Basically be some additional
augmentation to where we're really ending up.
Sending Swiss army knife teams out where it's Marine civil
Affairs, Specialists Army, female engagement soldiers,
Department of Homeland Security, NGO, immigration and
resettlement, specialist it wound up being a really really
good combination on. Top of all that it was me and
staff sergeant Shaffer. We had a very very Very light,
Detachment headquarters as sort of the G9 civil Affairs cell
within the Task Force Headquarters.
I spent a lot of time going to meetings and less time out in
the field than I would have liked but that was sort of the
bargain that I made so that I could give my team leaders the
time and see room to work with the guest community.
So that's what our scratch-built civil Affairs.
Detachment looked like it's tough as you mention a couple
quarters in the gym. If you will see you had the HS
folks and Asthma Gio's. Any other particular
organization. The kind of stick it on your
mind is having a really important role that tied into
what you all were. We're looking to accomplish.
Yeah, absolutely. And I'll anchor down on VHS for
just a moment and talk a little bit about disco defense support
to Civil Authorities. That is not a common Marine Core
task. And so, it took a little bit of
adjustment for us to plug into it when we deploy, or even when
we do humanitarian, Ins we go abroad, right?
We're expeditionary and character, but here the need was
so great that we are deploying to support domestic Civil
Authorities. In what is essentially a
humanitarian relief mission in the Homeland.
Even within disk allies welcome was an oddball typically for a
hurricane Disaster Response, FEMA is the lead Federal agency.
They are leading the way and typically US Army.
North forces are providing support to FEMA as Interval
agency here, the Department of Homeland Security was the lead
and everybody was supporting them and so it was a little bit
of a new process for our DHS colleague to be serving in that
role. And it was a learning process
for us to be supporting them, but it ended up working out very
well. We at Fort McCoy, had a DHS
coordinating official, who was our boss?
Everybody in the task force from the dod side from the
interagency side rolled up to that.
DHS Federal Coordinating official.
There were other interagency partners on Deck, Department of
State, had the point when it came to coordinating
resettlement for the guests, to help them get on to the rest of
their lives and Department of State was using contracted a
support to do that work. It was something I was not
familiar with, but it made a lot of sense.
We actually had a bunch of non-governmental organizations
who had been contracted to support the oaw mission in
different respects. So for instance, And the
International Rescue committee and the International
Organization for migration since were contracted to support
Department of State and processing the resettlement and
that was just great. These were the old pros from
Dover. Some of them had come out of the
field, all over the world working in some very challenging
environments, to come and do this work.
And so brought just a ton of expertise a ton of experience to
that work and really made it a lot better.
In addition, we had contracted out the US Conference of Of
Catholic Bishops to provide Social Services for the guests,
but also just kind of morale welfare and Recreation.
There were even classes that USCCB was able to set up and we
were sort of running, kind of a mixture of daycare and Day
School for the children who were at the camp with us, so that it
wasn't just the green, Suitor soldiers and Marines having to
do that work, right? We're good at moving stuff
around. We're good at getting a lot of
people housed and fed and taken care of, but providing the human
touch. It was excellent to have the
support from the NGO contractors.
In the task force, that was a huge value added for the work
that we were doing. Are you mentioned a couple?
I'll call him unicorn aspects of your mission.
So you're performing a mission on us soil and humanitarian,
contact. Something that as you pointed
out, our kind of outliers in the way we think of civil Affairs
activities. So receiving a mission is Broad
or flexible. If you will is go do civil
Affairs. What did that mean?
For your Detachment in terms of mission planning civil prep of
the bat? Little space.
What were you looking at to get yourself prepared once you hit
the ground. Yeah.
I'll talk about Fort McCoy just because we wound up spending
most of our time there by the time we got into Quantico.
It was very few guests left over.
And we really kind of took that almost as our pre-deployment
training to kind of get our heads around, just the
experience of the guests leaving.
Kabul their first few months, you know, bouncing around
between bases and stations overseas on their way to the oaw
camps, all over the US with those few.
Excessive of work in Quantico behind us.
We had a pretty good idea of what these folks have gone
through. What, some of the problems were
that they were facing. And so we were able to, you
know, I won't say hit the ground running important koi, but at
least get a good free. Mph route, March Pace.
I think that was very helpful to have that behind us.
The other thing was we took a week to just be here.
Get our team's out into the neighborhoods working with the
guests and also introducing ourselves to both the uniformed
and the civilian leadership. Ship that we're working in
support for several months before we arrived and that week
was kind of a luxury that I thought we needed to have in
order to make an informed judgment about what was going to
be our primary focus of effort. And I'm happy to talk about what
we came up with. Before we do that let me ask
you. Did you have a particular
philosophy or approach just recognizing that this mission
was being carried out on our home turf with a lot of folks
paying attention, what was shaping your leadership for your
test? Yeah, The Guiding Light was
respect empathy and understanding.
I think often times when we as Americans think about people
coming here to our country for the first time, we think about
it, most like they won a lottery ticket, right?
We're proud to be Americans. We love our country were True
Believers and there was some of that with a lot of the guests
that we were working with. There was a recognition that
there were going to be opportunities open to them here
in the United States that they may not have had.
Had if they had kept on, living their lives in Afghanistan.
But along with that was the way the decision was made for them.
These very often were leaders in Afghanistan, civil leaders
Business Leaders, military leaders who were forced to flee
what for many people had been very successful professional
lives of service to their country and were forced you know
for fear of their life to come to the United States.
And so the Guiding Light I say for us was to just to be mindful
of that and to be sensitive to the kind of common trend for
many of the guests who we were working with.
And to the extent that we could, I will say 99.9% of the time,
our colleagues in the task force, had a similar attitude
and understood and appreciated, the that commonality in the
experience of the guests. But I think that it was often
times helpful to have us there as sort of The Lorax, right?
We speak for the Is everybody else's job is to support the
guests. Our job is to try to articulate
the needs of the guests population to understand the
impact and effect. That what the task force is
doing is going to have on the guests population and try to
make that work more effective. And so, it was very, very good
to have a G9 elements sitting in the Task Force Headquarters
whose sole purpose is to be the advisor on the state of the
civilian population. S population and to provide
advice and Counsel on what is going to be the effect of our
military operations, on the guest population.
And I'm using bar doctrinal civil Affairs, phraseology to
describe that in this kind of Oddball environment.
But that was the approach that we took, we were not conducting
kinetic military operations but we were Movin, big trucks
around. We were moving, lots of people
around. We were doing a flavor of
military operations, 10 or 15. Years ago, we might have called
it military operations other than War, right?
And so just because those operations were focused on
curing for a civilian population that didn't make it any less
important to have someone there providing insight into the Civil
environment. I think of anything it was more
important and we're very glad to be a provide some of that
Insight. Yeah it's definitely a paper if
I could bring you into the conversation.
Can you tell us what was your role in the detachment?
Certainly my role in the Detachment was to manage civil
information. I also wound up dual hatting
later on in the mission and supporting some of the messaging
out to the guests population and with this major Johnson and I
actually had a conversation right before we went to Fort
McCoy of having me as a dedicated civil information
manager. And he asked what I thought
about using the stability assessment framework is kind of
a framework to Build and conduct assessments and figure out how
we can best affect population. And I had just been to the Civil
military. Planners course not even a year
before that. And my initial reaction was no,
we're going to be trying to kill a mosquito with machine gun
without approach. It's too robust and it looking
back. I kind of laugh at myself.
I stopped my thought about it and realized that we could take
a modified approach with the stability assessment, framework
and Taylor, and craft it to suit our needs at Fort.
And so it m on tonight, I always give you credit for thinking of
that before. We got out there you never know
what you're going to be walking into.
But on the data side, at least having a general idea of the
story. We wanted our information to
tell and how we wanted it to drive action.
I was able to start looking into different systems that I could
use to digitize some of this and automate.
I don't know if you want me to get into specific tools and
techniques without now or if we want to.
Hold off on that a little. Yeah, we'll get into that in
just a moment, but one of the things major Johnson brought up
earlier talking Doctrine and complicating hard.
See a test, it sounds like soft skills were really kind of a
critical aspect of what you're doing.
So perhaps separate from the Sim, what were some of those
soft skills? You think we're most important?
Yeah, with soft skills, but a lot of times were doing our
drill weekends. We'll put together these
training scenarios and I've always advocated for Role
players in your training scenarios even if the focus of
the training is not civil engagement assessment because it
allows you to kind of get reps on treating people.
Like people treating everyone with dignity and respect and
understanding that, you know, a 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 and they were kind
of putting themselves in in our hands.
Trusting us to make sure that they were taken care of and
their families were taking care of.
And so, approaching engagements from a human first perspective,
trying to make sure that people's needs were being taken
care of. I would say, it was probably the
biggest soft skill, not only because it kind of bought us
some trust with the population, but also it would allow our
engagements to get a lot deeper. We would encourage the Marines
and soldiers regularly, when offer Sit down and have tea with
the families. Learn a little more about them.
And it's something that's preached in our school house and
it certainly proved true here. You know, we'd have a
conversation. We do our engagement and then
they invite us in 40 and we'd find out 10 times.
As much information, we sat down to have tea with them, learn
about their family, then we gather during the the proper
engagement that had happened. Three minutes before that,
right? In terms of soft skills, I would
say that's number one and then the and soft skill.
Is that the outside of the box thinking when you encounter
issues and are trying to come up with solutions to them, one
thing that came up while we were in there was covid that was
about the time that the Omicron Jerian had started spreading
across the country and there were quarantined Barracks that
you wouldn't want to go into without any kind of protection.
And so we had Marines or working with Medical Teams to get us
full PPE so that we could make sure that we were serving the
entire population and not those were outside of the quarantine
barracks. We had situations, where Marines
would recognize that kids didn't have activities and by working
with some of the ngos to get them coloring books, or games
that they can play that, that would keep them from exploring
Mischief in other areas, right? So, the two soft skills, I
mentioned, first that cumin first perspective, and then just
being creative and thinking outside the box, really helped
us but stuff, I think tying in those soft and hard skill
aspects of being a effective civil affairs.
Marines, you both have the benefit of serving in a reserve
capacity so you both have civilians careers and skills you
can rely on made you God said, if you could talk for a moment
about some of those things that you've seen from your civilian
career, that translated, well to operating effectively, as a
civil Affairs Marine mobilizing United States for my particular
background of being a department of Navy office of general
counsel attorney. We are the guardians of fiscal
law. So there's a thing called the
anti-deficiency ACT Which is designed to protect the power of
the purse, the Congress holds and there's a rule under the
anti-deficiency act that prohibits the Executive Branch
from accepting voluntary services or goods from an
outside entity without some kind of authorization from Congress.
And now there's a lot of there's authorizations out there, but we
did not have one laid down in particular for operation allies,
welcome, I'm sitting in a meeting and a new charitable
organization. Is trying to get in and provide
some services to the guest population.
Very helpful to have that perspective and say we one of
the real lawyers to come in here and take a look and make sure
that we're going to do this the right way.
And that's really what it comes down to.
And so I think having that background in perspective was
helpful to just be another set of eyeballs on the work that we
were doing to try to everything in line with the rules and
regulations that govern us whenever we're doing any kind of
military operation. And I like You kind of tie that
back into the authorities which are going to dictate the
military's ability to execute any Mission.
So it's really great perspective.
That's on Schaefer. What are your thoughts on that?
What I learned in graduate school with Statistics and
research methodology knowing that I was going to be taking a
very heavy data approach to this and that I wanted to try to
automate and streamline as much of the reporting and data
analysis as I could those fundamentals.
Tremely, helpful. And then beyond that, the work
that I've done is a program manager and a consultant.
I had a really kind of keen sense of what are the data
points. What are the kpis?
What's the information major Johnson is going to want to see
that can help him drive action in the camp.
And so from the very beginning of it using this ability
assessment framework, I was working backward.
Actually all the way to that, right?
Knowing that I would want to be capturing stability and
instability factors on a quantitative and qualitative
perspectives, I needed to understand how is the data going
to be coded in the system that we used?
What's that going to look like? And then walk my way backwards
from that to actually build those surveys and assessment
reports that our teams would use.
So that everything would pop out correctly and save me, tens of
hours every week trying to get the data straight.
And so just having a general understanding Standing of how
data Works, how to analyze it, helped a lot.
And then, for my time, as a program manager, I learned a lot
about Microsoft Excel, which I feel like most listeners right
now. Probably just turn the podcast
off because nobody likes to talk about Excel.
But what was really powerful was having a general idea of what
Excel could do? No, I'm not saying that I knew
how to do everything that I wound up doing.
But I had a general idea of what it could do.
And I spent, you know, maybe five ten hours with some Google
searches and watch YouTube videos with just a general
concept of what Excel was capable of, and I was able to
use that to build a dynamic dashboard that.
Also captured action items that we needed to accomplish which it
without this probably would have taken 20 to 30 hours a week,
just to collate the data and analyze it to figure out
insights. I was able to do this by
downloading the data poppy in the dashboard.
And it would pop out results and 15 seconds.
And so the power there is that we went from keeping myself busy
analyzing the data to being able to focus on what the issues are
with underlying problems are that are causing those issues
and then work with teams on creating solutions to help
address them. So I would say that for my
civilian career that was really what I brought to the table that
helped us go from doing the job well to doing it, great.
Where was the data coming from the teams?
Had through their phones, access to an application that we use to
submit these reports? And so they would go out into
the community conduct civil engagements assessments.
And these might be three-minute conversations, these might be
three our conversations, right? And they would typically take
handwritten notes. It's kind of rude to be on your
phone, in front of someone jamming information and and then
after they would finish the engagement students, Since they
would go into this application, fill out the survey report
which, you know, it was kind of backwards built so that the data
would come out the way that we needed it.
And then as they submitted, that it went into a secure
cloud-based system. So that from the interagency
operations center where my desk was at any time of the day I
could log in and download the most updated information.
What is really great about this tool is that it also worked in
low and know, no connectivity environments and so it's cell
service was on and off there. And so if they submitted a
report and there wasn't cell service, it worked in the
background, once there was connectivity, it would batch
submit every five minutes, which gave us the ability to see data
coming in and almost real time throughout the day.
And normally, we didn't need to see that, you know, on an
hour-by-hour basis. But maybe if there had been a
recent implementation or intervention that we had done,
And we were curious to see what those impacts look like.
You know, thinking measures of Effectiveness, we did have the
ability to on kind of a minute-by-minute hour-by-hour
basis, see what was going on in the community.
That's awesome and you're talking about something that a
lot of military professionals is unheard of the idea of being
able to collect us, objectively obtained information.
But in real time get that up to decision makers.
That's, that's terrific. So what were you doing with the
data as it's being Processed you talk about how was a time saving
measure? What would those key outputs
that you're looking to obtain from the data, the key outputs
that we were looking to obtain were resilience?
He's and grievances or instability factors and
stability factors and there was a lot of thought that went in on
the front end of this trying to predict what would be the big
topics that we would see, is it going to be food clothing
medicine? All services time that we had
spent at Quantico, gave us a finger in the air, at least what
we thought we might run into. But this was not a system that
was created and then just stayed static.
The entire time is as information would come in.
And we realize that there were some areas that we had missed.
I had the ability to go back into the system and add new
topics so that are collectors could easily tag the report as
it needed to be to allow for that easy.
Isis again, because of the way. The data was captured, we were
able to analyze Trends really easily.
So you would ask what were 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 are going down or medical care has spiked.
And then we could dive in to the Native data behind that because
quantitative data is great, right?
It tells you what direction to look qualitative data is what
really gives you that underlying story and helps you understand
the Nuance of the situation. And, you know, for example,
they, I'm gonna give a hypothetical example.
This is not some do something, I'll jump in and take a crack at
it. Ladies and gentlemen, we're
going to split the episode here. So come back next week for the
exciting conclusion. 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
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I'll have the email and see a association website in the show
notes. And now most importantly to
those, currently out in the field, working with a partner,
Ins people or leadership to forward us relations.
Thank you all for what you're doing.
Stay tuned for more. Great episodes one.
See a podcast. Ins people or leadership to
forward us relations. Thank you all for what you're
doing. Stay tuned for more.
Great episodes one. See a podcast.