Welcome to the ONE CA Podcast. I’m LTC Brian Hancock, and I will be your host for this session. Today, we have Major Megan O’Keefe-Schlesinger with us to discuss Civil Affairs, Information Operations, and the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS). MAJ Schlesinger, welcome to the show!
Megan O'Keefe-Schlesinger is an Information Advantage practitioner. She has served in the Nevada National Guard medical detachment, the Pacific, Europe and the Middle East in various capacities from the Army Medical Department to civil affairs planner and leader with special operations. In her downtime she volunteered with Team Rubicon assisting with disaster relief in the Mid West and COVID vaccine events. As a student at the command and general staff officer college she studied Defense Support to Civil Authorities and Homeland Security at the University of Kansas School of Law. She went on to study the impacts of automation on the Army and applying emerging concepts in multi-domain operations to large scale military exercises.
Disclaimer: A quick reminder for the audience that all remarks are solely those of the presenters.
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 [email protected]
or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org
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Special thanks to BluntedBeatz for the sample “Summer Breeze.” Retrieved from https://youtu.be/3P8Xz71BLes?si=r4-xvwcG21cLMWrO
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00:00:03 BRAIN HANCOCK
Welcome to One Civil Affairs Podcast. I'm Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hancock, and I will be your host for this session. Today, we have with us Jedi Knight, Major Megan O’Keefe-Schlesinger, an information advantage practitioner. She has served in the Nevada National Guard, the Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East in various capacities, from the Army Medical Department to civil affairs planner and leader with special operations. In her downtime, she volunteered with Team Rubicon, assisting with disaster relief in the Midwest. As a student, she studied defense support to civil authorities, or DISCA, and Homeland Security at the University of Kansas School of Law. She went on to study the impacts of automation on the Army and applying emerging concepts in multi -domain operations to large -scale military exercises. Quick disclaimer before we get into it, all the remarks made by the participants are solely ours. Now, I first met you when you were out here in Europe on a School of Advanced Military Studies Utilization Tour.
00:01:13 BRAIN HANCOCK
And you were here at United States Army Europe in Africa in the G35. I certainly do.
00:01:18 MEGAN O’KEEFE-SCHLESINGER
certainly do. And boy, does it feel like time has absolutely flung. But being a student and a practitioner from the Advanced Military Studies Program at Fort Leavenworth really allowed me to appreciate and understand the value that that education brings to the joint force and certainly in a complex environment like Europe, where NATO multinational operations truly are at the forefront of everything that we do.
00:01:49 BRAIN HANCOCK
I love what you said about the complexity of the environment with all these different partners. Many of us spend much of our time in the tactical arena where we really don't have to think about sovereign first world governments allowing us to do this type of training or not do this type of training or capabilities that we don't have in our army that they bring and suddenly you're working with. It's super exciting, very different than what we're normally used to. I think we'll probably talk a little bit more about that as we go through some of our questions and some of the experience that you've had out here. Let's start with your current tradecraft. You have many diverse interests and are well -versed in many different topics, but we only have about 40 minutes here, so we'll stick to just a few. Let's start with information operations. Tell the audience, why did you settle on I .O. or have you?
00:02:42 MEGAN O’KEEFE-SCHLESINGER
Oh, I don't think as a voracious learner and a curious leader, you ever really settle in the Army. I think our best leaders remain generalists. And so that is some of the appeal of the role of information operations, which we have transitioned to this phrase called maintaining an information advantage. From my early days in the National Guard onto my volunteer time, with various organizations, like you mentioned, Team Rubicon, you start to appreciate the role that crisis communication has, the role of informing and protecting an audience. But I really got interested in this field as a captain when I got to see the interplay between civil affairs, the interplay of psychological operations, electronic warfare, cyber and space. And it's amazing when you as a military planner have the ability to nest these things together, just how rewarding the art of planning becomes. And so to be interested in a field like any functional area in the Army particularly, you can't just go into it as a lieutenant. You have to come from another assessed branch. As a lieutenant, you might assess into infantry or signal or intel, certainly. And then you get the opportunity later on to say, you know, maybe I want to apply that to a new field and try to become a specialist in a unique way. And that's really the field of the FA30s. We all come from a different background. And that complexity or maybe the dynamic backgrounds of the individuals help to spark creativity, help to approach problem solving differently. And so I don't think any two IO officers are alike in that sense, because like I said before, you become more of a generalist and learning how to apply a vast array of combined arms into orders and plans. And so I came into this field almost about five years ago. I wanted to be able to mature into a field where I could take not just CA, but the combined information forces in a way where as a leader and as a manager, I got a little more toys to play with, if you will.
00:05:11 BRAIN HANCOCK
I could see from personal job satisfaction, you're a pretty bright light. I used to be a pretty bright light. I'm going to get a little older, but One of the things that I love about some of these aspects of information operations is how they rotate us every few years in the military to keep our education going. It's part of that broadening that we do. But within FA30, you have all of those things that you've mentioned. Are you interested in space? Great. You can do it. Are you interested in cyber? Great. You can do it. Are you interested in psyop? Great. You can do it. All of those things, they're all available to you. They're all open to you. All those schools, all those. training opportunities, all those career opportunities. With one functional area, you can play in any of those, which I think would keep my interest for a long time.
00:06:01 MEGAN O’KEEFE-SCHLESINGER
Well, and what's unique to functional areas, and I did not know this until later on in my career, it is unique to active duty. And there's a great value in what the reserves in the National Guard are able to apply in the realm of information operations because you may not be a branded FA -30. But that's not to say that in our theater information operations groups, we don't have quite a complex and diverse background of leaders who may come from the fields of intel or civil affairs or psychological operations. and have the chance to go through the information operations qualification course at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. So there may be a lack of awareness of these things that we call functional areas because they are slightly more unique to active duty officers who kind of track. In a way that I think the reserves have a little more flexibility to explore career fields and continue to grow and expand their knowledge base without necessarily being bound to one specific area of concentration.
00:07:05 BRAIN HANCOCK
That's true. Many of us have like three MOSs. That's not uncommon in the reserve as you move units. They'll let you go to whatever bill at MOS you are sitting in at the time. And they're happy to do that because many of these fields that you mentioned are non -accession fields. So they have to take folks from other base branches and move them over. They are used to doing that and are happy to do that. Now, I believe one of the National Guards on the East Coast has an IO qualification course that COMPO2 National Guard and COMPO III Army Reserve can go to. A friend of mine went to that. And I assume they award the FA -30 a functional area upon successful completion. But that sounds like that that is not a normal career pathing for many of our I .O. folks. So most of the folks that I know I've worked with in FA -30s are, as you said, from COMPO I, from the active duty component. And that's been wonderful. I think being a generalist also probably gives you some job security if you think about it. Now, when I was growing up, there was something called the S -curve, which would measure the acceptance of technology when a new critical tech comes out and is released in business. How long does it take for that to be adopted, to become ubiquitous, and to change the way business is done? And that used to be about a five -year period of time where some disruptive technology would come out, like the microcomputer, and it would just change the way business was done forever after. But that's now down to less than two years, where highly disruptive technologies, which at times eliminate entire job fields. So if you're a specialist and you've got a lot of education in a narrow niche, there's a lot of risk there that that field could go away when a disruptive technology is released. But as a generalist, we may not know as much about a specialist in their given field. But if one thing just isn't viable anymore, we just switch to something else. So I think there's some other auxiliary value to your generalist approach.
00:09:14 MEGAN O’KEEFE-SCHLESINGER
Sure, sure. disruptive technologies. The Army is always attempting to forecast future challenges across the world, future problems it might face. And part of the approach to preparing for those challenges is through modernization and experimentation. And the field of information operations has been around for decades. And we think about the application in the Gulf Wars was quite successful. And as we come around now to moving into the nearly the 2030s, we're still applying some of those fundamentals. The common phrase that folks are arguably relearning is called multi -domain operations. We're really layering that space and that cyber maritime air and land across dimensions, right? Whether that's human information or physical. And so how do we collectively as planners As operators, think about how we have to fight across warfighting functions, whether it's the offense, whether it's the defense, or whether it's in response to disaster. Applying information, as it were, to the spectrum of operations that we tend to get involved in, from the small conflict battles to the larger campaigns. We are not in the Civil War era where we can think without the internet. And as a result, the information operations realm really looks to maximize our ability to continue the fight, protecting the command and control,
00:10:52 MEGAN O’KEEFE-SCHLESINGER
command and control, protecting data, and really trying to maintain an advantage.
00:11:01 BRAIN HANCOCK
Would you say that's a decision advantage? Because when we look at the information advantage doctrine, I don't think it's clear what the terminal outcome is supposed to be that is battlefield significant. I think it's decision advantage. We can run our OODA loop faster than the enemy. We make better, faster decisions, which allow us to gain and maintain the initiative and put the enemy progressively into a situation which they can't cope, which hopefully leads to their... early culmination. Is that how you see information advantage?
00:11:33 MEGAN O’KEEFE-SCHLESINGER
Oh, I think this is a topic of great debate right now. Yeah. And, you know, I'll say that the November 2023 publication of the Army Doctrine Primer 313 tells us that information advantage is offensively oriented, which is somewhat the American way of war in some debate. It is combined arms, not a new topic. perhaps with layered capabilities that are emerging and modernizing today. It is commander -driven and remains soldier -enabled. So what does that mean? That is certainly not for one random FA -30 to think about. It is a complex series of decisions, thought processes, planning frameworks that have to be applied to improve our decision -making ability. So what is information advantage? I think it is many a things. And we continue to evolve and debate what it means because at the end of the day, acronyms and terms of reference, they do matter, but that doesn't mean that they can't change.
00:12:40 BRAIN HANCOCK
Well said. You mentioned earlier warfighting functions. I think we traditionally think that way. I'm not convinced that all combat power is defined by what we call warfighting function. So one example that's close to home for both of us, information is not a warfighting function in the Army. But of course, much of our topic today is about that and why it's important. It is a joint function. And for the Marine Corps, it is a warfighting function. Do you think the Army is going to follow in that path? Or how do you think we in our branch are going to ultimately treat information?
00:13:23 MEGAN O’KEEFE-SCHLESINGER
So a warfighting function, for those that may not be familiar with these terms, we talk about intelligence, we talk about fires, we talk about these rather general terms that help bucket the way that we break down our staffs and prioritize who focuses on what. Whether as sustainment, you know, we might think of a logistics officer. Fires, we might think of a field artilleryman. But debatably, the realm of information truly does span the full warfighting functions gamut. And so to separate it out into its own might be dismissive of the integrated nature that it has across every single warfighting function. So I'm not here to debate whether it should be an army warfighting function, because I t