Welcome to One CA Podcast. Today we have Ryan McCannell of USAID discusses his paper "The Evolution of Civil Affairs and Interagency Partnerships in Sub-Saharan Africa," which won the top prize among the Civil Affairs Issue Papers presented at the 2018 Symposium at Ft. Bragg, NC.
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Transcript:
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across the board, the respondents noted that I talked to noted that civil affairs and the military more generally needs all the training it can get about how civilian agencies work, particularly in steady state environments. And also the philosophy and the mindset of NGOs because they're, you know, what motivates them is different than national security often. And so understanding kind of where, you know, how they see the world is really important. But that also begs the question of whether we civilians are showing up to serve as resources.
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civilians are showing up to serve as resources.
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Hi, and welcome to the 1CA podcast. My name is John McElligott, your host for today's episode. We're joined today by Ryan McCannell, who is the author of an issue paper submitted to the Civil Affairs Association. It's entitled, The Evolution of Civil Affairs and Interagency Partnerships in Sub -Saharan Africa. Ryan, thanks a lot for being on the 1CA podcast.
00:01:59 SPEAKER_03
Absolutely, John. Thanks.
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You're currently serving as the Seasonary Advisor for the U .S. Agency for International Development, USAID, or other people will just call it aid, in the Bureau for Africa in Washington, D .C. From 2016 to July 2018, you were the USAID Advisor to the U .S. Army War College Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, otherwise called PKSOI. That's in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. And how long have you been at USAID?
00:02:28 SPEAKER_03
Well, first, let me update you. Since November, I actually have jumped ship in the Africa Bureau, and I'm now serving as the acting office director for our global office of conflict management and mitigation.
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Wow, congratulations. Yeah, thank you. And, you know, I'm the third USAID person that I know you've had on the podcast, and I think that says something about how... closely aligned our two communities really are.
00:02:48 SPEAKER_03
person that I know you've had on the podcast, and I think that says something about how... closely aligned our two communities really are. I want to thank you on behalf of my colleagues and me for your great interest in the organization. I would just say, just quickly for people who don't know very much about USAID, although the work we do is pretty different, the organizational, the sort of logic is pretty similar in that we're a matrixed organization. We have, in the same way that The DOD has its combatant commands that are regionally aligned. We have regional bureaus, so does the State Department. And then we also have a number of functional bureaus. And so I've joined the same one that is where both Diana Parzek and Kevin Melton, who are some of your previous interviewees, are now part of, which is called the Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance Bureau. And so I'm now in one of the sister offices of those two individuals who spoke already with you.
00:03:47 SPEAKER_02
Oh, that's great. Now, why the shift from Bureau for Africa to what you're doing now?
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The main reason is because I've been an Africa specialist for most of my career, and this was an opportunity to learn something different. And then I think also after three years in Carlisle,
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I think
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three years in Carlisle, one as a student and two as a teacher, it opened my eyes to... the great amount of work that we could be doing across the civil -military divide, and that's really what motivated me to write the paper.
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Clearly, it looks like the last couple of years of working in Carlisle at PKSY, would you say that's the strongest connection most recently you've had to civil affairs?
00:04:26 SPEAKER_03
Yeah, it's always been an indirect connection, and unlike I think a lot of folks that have been on the podcast to date, I don't have any military experience. The closest that I have been involved is on the planning side when AFRICON, the Africa Command, was being stood up, and then over the course of the last few years. I've also been really – another aspect of organizational logic being similar, we have the equivalent of a military occupational specialty among – USAID employees. And so my, we call them backstops for some reason. I don't know why. Mine is called crisis stabilization and governance. And so when the, a few years ago, when there was a lot of talk and interest about setting up an institute for the military support to governance down in Fort Bragg. that caught a lot of our attention because as a democracy and governance officer basically at USAID, you know, we wanted to sort of understand what it is that civil affairs was planning to do at that time. More recently, a lot of my students and friends at the War College, you know, the civil affairs folks know how to find us. USAID folks. And so its result, what's kind of weird, is that many of the current sort of colonels in the civil affairs structure were either in my class or some of my students, which is weird.
00:05:53 SPEAKER_02
weird. Very nice. But pretty cool.
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cool.
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Yeah, it gets to be a pretty small network, especially you keep running into people over and over at a couple of these, the 3Ds, right? And that's great because you know people who have been there before. You can call even if they've been retired. People are more than willing to share from their experiences. It's great. Well, Ryan, I wanted to dive into some of the topics of your paper. It's again entitled The Evolution of Civil Affairs and Interagency Partnerships in Sub -Saharan Africa. And so let's sort of set the stage for the listeners if we can, because people from the military may be used to AFRICOM or Army Africa and its area of operations. Does the Aid Bureau for Africa cover the entire continent, or does it overlap with the DOD side?
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on an important point of the coherence or lack thereof across the civil and military perspective. So the short answer is no. The way that we divide the Africa region up or the African continent up is similar to that of the State Department. In fact, it's identical. Where we consider sub -Saharan Africa, which is to say all of the countries that are south of the sort of northernmost tier that runs from Morocco to Egypt, all of those are part of our Africa Bureau. And then along the top, the countries from Morocco to Egypt are part of the Middle East Bureau for, and in our case, we call it the Middle East and North Africa Bureau. And so that automatically creates some complexity when trying to get any conversation going with AFRICOM because we have to involve two of our bureaus and so generally just the State Department.
00:07:37 SPEAKER_02
So more phone calls, more meetings, more people to clear up any confusion about who's going to be where and who's going to fund it and what they're going to do. That's right. Okay. Well, I've also been hearing a lot about, from the military side of things, the Horn of Africa, the Lake Chad Basin, a lot of violent extremist organizations out there, a lot of DOD activity for combating terrorism. And I know AID has some work out there as well. What would you say are hotspots for aid in African nations?
00:08:04 SPEAKER_03
Yeah, well, I'm glad you asked. I think one thing to keep in mind is that when you're dealing with Africa, and anybody who's listening will understand this, there are generally two parallel conversations that are always going on. And sometimes they talk to each other, but more often they don't. There's a security conversation that really, of course, focuses on the military, but also law enforcement. And then there's a whole development and governance kind of conversation that is where USAID and To some extent, the State Department really focused, certainly a lot of the NGOs that are active in the region. And so often what's frustrating about working in the region is that sometimes those conversations are going on in parallel without reference to each other. And so the two areas that you mentioned, Horn of Africa and Lake Chad Basin, are two obvious places where... Both of those are aligning pretty closely in terms of the concerns and threats that we have. And, of course, on the USAID side, we also break it down a little bit more in terms of long -term development, which is where most of our offices abroad, our missions, as we call them, focus, and then all of the special things that we have, like the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance and the Office of Transition Initiatives. Increasingly, we've had a lot more engagement by those special elements of USAID's capabilities. that are focused more on addressing, you know, humanitarian challenge, like short -term humanitarian emergency relief kind of challenges and also political transitions, particularly in those two regions, but also increasingly now across the Sahel. So when you mentioned before I was a senior advisor when I came back from Carlisle, I was actually working on the area on the border between, okay, focused from Washington on the policy issues surrounding the areas. where Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso all come together because the violent extremist threat is really starting to migrate south. And so that's another area where we're trying to figure out how does development have a contribution in terms of addressing the grievances that people might feel that might lead them to make the decision to, I guess, become violent extremists or support violence.
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Yeah, that's incredibly complicated and nothing that one country is going to solve alone. And it's tough for outside countries, in my experience, to fund enough to give locals enough faith in their government and providing governance at certain levels.
00:10:35 SPEAKER_03
Well, just to turn it a little bit also toward, I think, where we're going to go, one of the places of convergence that actually where things kind of work relatively well. in our big, vast government, is at the country team level, which is where the ambassador of the U .S. embassy convenes the senior defense official and the defense attache alongside the USAID personnel,
00:10:53 SPEAKER_03
senior defense official and the defense attache alongside the USAID personnel, alongside the law enforcement folks, and tries to develop some coherence. And that's pretty easy. I can't say it's easy, but it's easier done at a country level than it is at any other level in our system.
00:11:14 SPEAKER_02
They're the people on the ground. They understand the flow of the culture and society, and it is a team. I mean, in my experience and what I've heard from fellow colleagues at aid, you know, colleagues of yours, they've said that that system has become stronger over the years from experience.
00:11:32 SPEAKER_03
Well, just as important, though, John, the authorities are clear, right? The president of the United States gives the ambassador the power to represent the president.
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power to represent the president. specific coordination role, whereas that's not necessarily clear kind of at a regional level. When you sort of draw back and are trying to do things across countries' borders, it gets more complicated. And then at a sort of macro level, it raises the question, the combatant commander, are they not sort of in more of a command and control kind of perspective than we might otherwise be? So, yeah.
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So your paper talks about the evolution of this partnership. And I want to start at what could be described as the beginning, 2007, when AFRICOM stood up. So it was established then. And your paper talks about the early days of CA, civil affairs forces working under AFRICOM. And I took it as being described as lacking strategic coherence, overlapping activities, lack of cultural awareness, a general blasé attitude to coordination. Is that accurate, and what would you say has been learned that may have led to the lackluster start to see a force as an AFRICOM?
00:12:43 SPEAKER_03
Sure. So I want to preface this by saying that there is a happy ending, right? Yeah. So I don't want to come across – and also,
00:12:49 SPEAKER_03
also, like, people are wondering, where on earth did this dude get all this information? So one thing that I did, I think what may be part of the reason that this paper got the attention that it did, was that I – I actually went out and interviewed about 40 people, a third of them actually members of the civil affairs community, and the others a like number from USAID, and then the