Today, Brian Hancock hosts Col. Jeffrey Fiddler to discuss his work helping manage the DOD response to the Gaza relief mission.
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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 [email protected]
or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org
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Special thanks to Natalia Lafourcade for the sample of Tú Sí Sabes Quererme (En Manos de Los Macorinos). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABLT6hdgEek
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Transcript
00:00:01 Introduction
Welcome to the 1CA podcast. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website. at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes.
00:00:34 BRIAN HANCOCK
I'm Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hancock and I will be your host for this session. Colonel Jeffrey Fidler is a civil affairs officer with 34 years, thank you sir, of combined enlisted and commissioned service. He has a master's degree in strategic studies and a master's and bachelor's degrees in criminal justice. On the civilian side, he is a career law enforcement officer. currently employed as a special agent with the Department of Homeland Security. Colonel Fidler, welcome to the show. Great to be here, Brian. Thanks for having me. So let's talk about Gaza. It's a man -made disaster. Of course, natural disasters are on the rise as well. This one happens to be a man -made disaster, and the toll is high. At present, 96 % of the population of the Gaza Strip, which is an estimated 2 .15 million people, are food insecure. Now, you went to that region. You're back. You probably have a view of this from multiple angles. Can you tell us a little bit about the U .S. response to this crisis?
00:01:38 JEFFREY FIDDLER
This was a complex operation. Yeah, no doubt. It involved a joint force across two different combatant commands. So you have Cyprus, which belongs to UCOM, AOR, and then you have Gaza, Israel, which falls under CENTCOM. And you have... IGOs out there, United Nations, UKAID, USAID, Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance, which is the most important one for us when it comes to HA, bringing all those actors, so to speak, together to form a coherent response. Like anything we do in civil affairs, it can be challenging at first.
00:02:15 BRIAN HANCOCK
But it's extra challenging because we're military. Many of these actors you just described... have a little bit of baggage when it comes to military, or they have neutrality requirements like the Red Cross that limits their ability to work with the military. If they don't understand civil affairs and what our role is and the heart we have for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief and our sincere willingness to help, I mean, if we are mistaken for folks who want to take a, you know, shoot them up kind of approach, then that... would not make that an easy group to bring together as a coalition of the willing. There is definitely some baggage from the wars, right? Yeah. There is.
00:02:55 JEFFREY FIDDLER
There is. And we had the constraints. President made a decision. We're not going to have any boots on the ground. We follow orders of soldiers, right? So now you need partners on the back end. One thing the Army's always great at is logistic. So we can get a bunch of aid over there. And there'll be some friction getting it. Because you're dealing with civilian entities and organizations. There's always friction, but that's too easy. Really, the hardest part is once we get it on the beach, who's going to take it from there to deliver it to the people that are hungry? It's not going to be the U .S. military. And it's certainly not going to be really any military because you're dealing with organizations that can't necessarily work with a military organization. So it has to be civilian -led.
00:03:35 BRIAN HANCOCK
-led. And there can be mistakes if military forces of any branch are rolling in there. They may be seen as aggressors or a party to the conflict under the law of war. Very complicated. But getting supplies through there, tough. You're talking, you know, everyone with a gun is going to shake down an aid convoy coming through because that stuff is just worth its weight in gold right now. So you've got that complexity once it hits the beach. And obviously we want the humanitarian assistance to get to the needy who requires that sustenance to continue living. You've got a logistics hub, as I understood it, sitting there in Cyprus that was put together to do all of the loading and preparation. Then you're going out to CENTCOM, crossing a geographic combatant commander's boundary to set up this giant man -made dock amidst threats from some folks to attack this structure in what's kind of amounting to the Wild West. And then we have ARSEN, formerly Third Army in World War II. who's in charge of this mission. And then we have all these partners in the mix. You're being very humble, I think, but this sounds like a tough coalition to put together and get them all to work into a common purpose.
00:04:52 JEFFREY FIDDLER
It's not easy. Yeah. And I'll touch on that. I'm going to geek out for a second for all of our real civil affairs people. I'm going to talk about the Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance. Yeah, BHA.
00:04:58 BRIAN HANCOCK
I'm going to talk
00:05:00 SPEAKER_00
Yeah, BHA.
00:05:02 JEFFREY FIDDLER
So you need a MITAM to get the HA. You need a consignee. in Cyprus to receive the goods. And that's easy.
00:05:10 BRIAN HANCOCK
The MITAB is a mission tasking matrix, kind of like a request from the host nation that you're providing support to saying, we need this type of thing here, there, which gets validated and vetted by the military.
00:05:23 JEFFREY FIDDLER
Yeah. And it allows the DOD to respond, to actually use a piece of equipment to bring non -DOD articles or something to somewhere else. So the DOD doesn't get the bill. So you need a consignee from my team on both ends. The hard part was, who's that consignee going to be? It's a clear chain of custody. It's a requirement. Absolutely. So the World Food Program stepped up to the plate. But back to one of your earlier points of not working with the military, and look, that's their charter. Us and the military might hate it, but that's just the way it is. And WFP made it quite clear there's not going to be a military flavor to this when they receive the goods over there. And that's important to understand. So really bringing in everybody so that we could all get on the same shoot of music.
00:05:43 BRIAN HANCOCK
a clear chain of custody. It's a requirement.
00:06:06 JEFFREY FIDDLER
bringing in everybody so that we could all get on the same shoot of music. One of the things that I'm proudest of, what we did for civil affairs is helping set up a multinational coordination center with the Cypriots. So when we first started it, there might've been 10 people at the table, Brian. By the time we left her at the height of the operation, it was about 50 people in a room from all these various organizations. And we made sure that the Cypriots were in the lead. It's their nation. Yeah, yeah. Sovereign nation. Yeah. Sovereign nation, which is a whole other point. And we could do a whole other podcast on that about how civil affairs operates over in Yukon. But Cypriots are in the lead. We're there to support them and their efforts. And it was something as simple as, you know, Major Alan Diggertullo, my CPI chief, he was down there with me. One of the things we did with Alan was he would liaison with the Cypriots,
00:06:34 BRIAN HANCOCK
Sovereign nation.
00:06:56 JEFFREY FIDDLER
create a PowerPoint slide of... talking points that we were going to discuss during the MNCC. And that might not seem like a big deal to members of the audience out there that are Army. But other militaries, they don't necessarily do that. We weren't trying to insert ourselves. We were just trying to come to a middle ground where everybody could have a common understanding of where we were going. Trying to help facilitate. Yeah, exactly. So a lot of the friction points were wicked out during the MNCC. And then once a week, we would host a multinational decision board. where we would bring in senior leaders. So I'm talking one -star admirals all the way up to four -star generals in the army, plus the ambassadors. So you have ambassador level ranked from the Cypriots, other countries that are visiting, and the United States there, where if we hit a roadblock where we couldn't get something done during the MNCC, which is really like a working group, then you bring in the senior leaders for them to make a decision or something for them to action. So I think that's what kind of lessened some of the friction that we had.
00:07:56 BRIAN HANCOCK
that we had. Yeah. Sometimes that can increase, too, when you have different equities, different political equities, different concerns coming together. And, of course, for the military, it's usually pretty short -term involvement in HADR. So you hit a couple of good roadblocks, and that could really derail the mission. And it's awesome to hear that you guys had to figure out a process and that apparently it largely worked to keep that moving forward and get that aid to the people who desperately needed it.
00:08:22 JEFFREY FIDDLER
needed it. It wasn't easy, but there was mistakes made along the way,
00:08:26 BRIAN HANCOCK
the way, for sure. Right. Mistakes don't define us. What we learn from them and how we pick up and carry on maybe does, but mistakes don't necessarily define us. Within the context of that, for the audience, we've kind of talked a lot about the Gaza mission. What was your specific role that you were assigned to?
00:08:44 JEFFREY FIDDLER
Sure. And this goes back to, like we talked about a little while ago. You got to be aggressive, figure it out. Like I talked about, Hilda Fernandez, you know, came down to the Pentagon to do a job. She didn't necessarily end up doing that job, but she did what was required to do as a civil affairs officer. So my job was to go down there and to be the U .S. Army, Europe, and Africa, Army element, OIC, and just strictly focus on Army -related issues to support the mission. That completely morphed as soon as I got there, and we fell under a joint task force. And there was a need for a strong civil affairs presence in the MNCC and operations in general and civil knowledge integration. So we immediately shifted gears. I ended up becoming the de facto XO of the JTF. So I was dual -hatted as the senior civil affairs officer for the operation and the XO. And Major DeGratulo was the CKI chief and one of the operations officers for the JTF. So it just turned into that and it worked for us. Okay.
00:09:46 BRIAN HANCOCK
Well, you brought some handpicked team members there, so I'm not surprised that they were able to adapt. I think that's one thing that really defines us as civil affairs professionals is that we're very adaptable in different environments. We don't bring just like one tool to the fight.
00:09:59 JEFFREY FIDDLER
Absolutely. I sometimes see that culture out there where it's like, hey, we're going to find a way to know. And one of the things that I appreciate about civil affairs, most of us have a mindset of let's find a way to yes and figure out the problem. For one example, both Alan and I went out to sea with the French Navy. That's not something I ever saw myself doing in civil affairs, but they wanted a liaison officer on the French warship to deliver aid. So we actually went within four miles of the shore of Gaza. And that was just to make sure the French Navy was comfortable, that they were able to talk to the U .S. Navy. They had an American officer on board. And, you know, we'd pull in, deliver the aid, and then leave. Did you do that under a French flag or were you international?
00:10:39 BRIAN HANCOCK
under a French flag or were you international? French flag. Sometimes they re -flag depending on the mission. So that's interesting. But you know, others in our community who might be involved in defense support to civil authorities, DISCA or humanitarian assistance disaster reef, HADR, what were some of the obstacles that you encountered in your mission in Gaza and how did you overcome them? Sure.
00:11:02 JEFFREY FIDDLER
Like I said earlier, the friction points, that was difficult at times. And you said it earlier, Brian, there are folks that have been doing this for 20, 30 years in the civilian world. I think baggage is the wrong word. I'm going to say scar tissue. And you need to recognize that. If you see that, you know, you as the civil affairs officers, you're going to take part in this and kind of, if you're going to take a leading role to make this thing work, you need to recognize that and allay their fears that you're going to do everything you can to protect the process that they use. They're not showing up to be difficult. They have a process like BHA. They have a process for MITAM. You don't want to go to the left or right of that because that's the way that they do their business. And I think it's one of our jobs as civil affairs to make sure that our military understands that process so that eventually the two can come to a way to yes of how we're going to get something across the finish line.
00:11:56 BRIAN HANCOCK
Yeah, that's awesome. In civil affairs, we get access to some specialty training like the Jayhawk, the Joint Humanitarian Assistance Operations Course. the hard course. And I'm not sure that the larger force, especially in the combat arms, that they necessarily broaden with these kinds of things. But it's really important when we're working for BHA, that's always in a support role. And if we're doing DISCA, again, always in a support role, we ma