Welcome to One CA Podcast. Today we have John Stefula, Colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, discusses the Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute (PKSOI) and the implications of their mission for Civil Affairs. He also talks about the value of company and field-grade CA members sharing their lessons learned from training and deployments.
Call for Papers by the Civil Affairs Association.
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Transcript:
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think that's the other challenge. We have expertise, but I think our enemies understand it's like if we can draw this out and make it protracted, the expertise is that our system, how our army is formed and how we mobilize is not set up to do a long term campaign.
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Hello and welcome to the 1CA podcast. My name is John McElligot, your host for this episode. We're joined today by Colonel John Stifula, who is with the Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, PKSOI, at the Army War College. Sir, good afternoon. Welcome to the podcast.
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All right. Thank you, John.
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It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah, thank you. We ran into each other at one of the Civil Affairs Association's meetings and talked about this podcast. And then you followed up with some interest in wanting to sit down with us today. Rural Maryland to Mount Airy. Beautiful rolling hills with a lot of farmland. So we're sitting outside, and if people hear any birds, that's where we are. Sir, I wanted to talk to you about what you're doing at PKSOI. You're currently with the Defense Information Systems Agency, or DISA, and now working for the Army at PKSOI, so the Peacekeeping and Civilty Operations Institute. Could you describe for everyone what your role is at PKSOI, and how does it relate to civil affairs? Okay,
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so... I'm in a drilling individual mobilization on my team. So it's called DEMA. So if you hear me say the word DEMA, that's pretty much it. So the difference between DEMA and a true programming unit is true programming. You have a unit that's reserved and you go and you drill. I'm a DEMA guy, so I go drill with PQSLI. Now, they don't drill on weekends, so I have to go up during the middle of the week, either one or two days. As a matter of fact, I'll be going up later this week. I'll be doing an exercise planning conference, and I'll be there for two or three days supporting. PQSI in that effort.
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And you just take time off from your... Yeah, I got to take military leave or my annual leave and put some pretty long tooth in the federal government.
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Yeah, I got to take military leave or my annual leave and put some pretty long tooth in the federal government. A lot of hours. I have to manage that really good over the years to try to line those days up. But it's only for one more year, 12 more months. Then I'll have to find some other gig.
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some other gig. So is PQSI a mix of... Is it mainly CA type folks?
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It's a great question. If you kind of back up in history and kind of take a look at PKSI, it was original roots where originally it was the Peacekeeping Institute. So then eventually the Army added on, hey, you're also going to be expertise in stability operations. So then that was like around, let me see my notes right here.
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1993 it became the PKSI, and then 2013 it was designated to Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute. Okay. It's kind of broken into, I'd say, three divisions. There's a proponency division that looks at doctrine and getting after all the little eaches. So not everybody's a CA person up there. You have some DE civilians that are up there that understand how to do doctrine. You also have a plethora of other folks who are other branches, mostly all officers, who understand doctrine writing and how those things can go. They're a subset of the Army War College, so the Army War College has developed strategic leaders. So they teach a lot of stability operations stuff into the schoolhouse over there, and they also keep contact with the community of practice, whether it is peacekeeping or stability operations. So the next division would be the peacekeeping division, and they do a lot of interaction with... of the United Nations and how the United Nations can do those type of operations for peacekeeping and kind of develop out a curriculum. And then when it brings it back on in, they'll develop out the curriculum. So for primary order of instruction, if an Army unit had to go do a peacekeeping mission, they would say, okay, here's how you would do it. So there's actually institutional knowledge there. There's the Stability Operations Division, which gets into... each line of effort, and this is where you really start seeing different branches, like rule of law. You'll have people who have PhDs who are in there who understand rule of law. You'll have some JAG officers. You might have a PSYOPs officer. You might have, like, for economics, somebody who actually has an economics degree, an officer who's their background with that.
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Would you say that PKSY currently has the go -to experts? for the Army in peacekeeping and stability operations? Have they built up that subject matter? They have some subject matter experts.
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built up that subject matter? They have some subject matter experts. I wouldn't say they are, but if they don't know it, they're kind of the crossroads for a lot of things because they have interaction with a plethora of different folks inside and outside. So they can find the right people.
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they can find the right people.
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find the right people. They can find the right people, and that's really... As any institution that has a battle rhythm for the year, so there's like sets and pauses. Like they did recently, last month, the peacekeeping is to build the operations training education workshop. PISO2. PISO2. So if you hear me say PISO2, it's a really long word, but really... It's really like a small mini conference, which they have to put a conference back in. I'll put that up front, show everything else in the Department of Defense to get approval. They get a lot of different practitioners in the community, either in peacekeeping or civility operations, who come to this.
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PISO2.
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They have people from the Special Army Warfare Center who come on up at the Civil Affairs Commandant. Colonel Bennett came on up to the last one. And so in there, they have these workshops, which they kind of settle down and they talk about the most relevant things. that are affecting either peacekeeping or stability operations.
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Okay. And so we reconnected at the PISO2, the recent one that was last month, so April 2018. The theme was struggle for legitimate governance. Could you talk about the PISO2 being a conference that happens every year and the workshop that was held in April? So the focus on legitimate governance. What do you think that means, and where do you think PISO -2 is headed with that discussion?
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Well, they break out in a lot of subsets in there. We were talking about the small group I was working with was dealing with civil affairs right there. And legitimacy of governments is what they come back in, because you can look at the U .N. operations and how they try to reestablish and try to get the government together. They actually keep folks fighting each other. And then, yeah, protection of civilians. There was a workshop that was dealing with protection of civilians and what aspects. PKSOI recently established a handbook they published and they put on out there, and that was a big effort by a lot of folks in there to get after that. So you can't say it's like there's just one switch you can hit that's kind of like, hey, this will solve all legitimacy. It's a series of switches that have to happen either in unison or over time. And that's really where... PQSI really tries to get it because things are just so complex on multiple different operations.
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different operations. How do you understand that complexity? It's complex in the U .S.
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It's complex in the U .S. You take a city or a state like Maryland or a city of Baltimore someplace, it's picking up the trash on time, it's making sure the water is running, you have safety and security from police and fire and all the different social services that you have. Put that in the context of another country, it's complex. What would you say were the outcomes of that PISO II conference?
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Well, the biggest thing is you really, because you have all these different practitioners coming here, one of the things at PQSOI they have, they have a representative from the Department of State and they also have a representative from the United States Agency for International Development, USAID, is there. So they have two high -ranking officials that are part of the staff at PQSOI. They understand the biggest thing is how do you go back to your... own institutions, if you look at Department of Defense, USAID, and Department of State, is how do you get into their decision -making process. Now, one of the big products that just recently came on out is the stabilization assistance review. It really got into, okay, we understand that every institution, Department of State, USAID, or Department of Defense has a different way they go after doing stabilization operations. And sometimes what we're really starting to see right now is, in most cases, it might be USCID is in the lead and Department of Defense is in the supporting role. Right. So right now, it's like, well, how is that done? There's some examples right now within, like, Turkey and Syria and Iraq. We've seen some of those things serving as one model. But really, it's really how do we operationalize that right now? That's really what PECO has done. Like, okay,
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do we operationalize
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we have this great epiphany where, you know, At the secretariat level or even National Security Council level, it's like, okay, how do we operate finances? And like everything, it runs in a simple process. We get back everybody's battle rhythm for the year. Okay, is everybody marching on a certain path to where we can make this work? Right. And really make it institutionally. If it's written in doctrine,
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And really make
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we're learning lessons learned. That's the other big thing that PQSID does is writing doctrine. is they capture Lessons Learned, which is part of the Psalms process. It's almost like Center for Army's Lessons Learned, except PQS has their own version of that.
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Okay.
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Which you can go in there and pull some stuff. I know 412 recently asked for some stuff from Psalms. They were amazed at the amount of stuff that was in there.
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of stuff that was in there. I see the federal government like any huge organization evolves. Federal government very slowly. especially agencies like in the 3Ds, defense, diplomacy, and development.
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and development.
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So with the stabilization assistance review, the SAR document that came out, would you say that for stability ops, we've evolved, we're more in step with each other as agencies, departments? I think we're starting to get a little bit better at it.
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think we're starting to get a little bit better at it. One of the big things that came on out recently,
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there's a book I'll promote.
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Nadia Shablau. Yeah, Nadia Shablau. She actually read the Art of Governance and War. But if you kind of read her other works on that, what she really gets into is there's a realm of competitiveness right now. You're starting to see this come out of national security strategy. And it kind of filters down to the Department of Defense and kind of hits the Army.
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Competitiveness within the U .S. government. Well,
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the U .S. government. Well, they're not competitiveness. They're talking in the whole world. Oh, okay. So if you look at the Army's Center for Internated Capability,
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okay. So
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you look at the Army's Center for Internated Capability, there was this guy named McMasters. We kind of know where he went after that. So we've always, the Department of Defense has always held this model of going to war.
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to war. We talk about it quite a bit. It's like phase zero, phase one, phase two. Phase two, we're going to dominate, smoke it. Okay, we're going to go into phase four. Now we're going to use to build the operations five. And so what this, you know, kind of sitting there, you know, kind of looking at that and get some smart folks. It's like, okay, that's one model. In all honesty, if you kind of look at how the Russians are doing things, they're going as more hybrid, gray. I've heard different things. And Dimitri Gerson, he kind of looks at it. It's like, why are we applying military capability against we can use other instruments of national power, which you can use economically? So his idea is, like, before I get the military portion, I'm going to apply, like, three to four of these elements of national power. I'm going to raise it up. It's going to be just a little shorter for you guys getting into your little, I'm going to do your five -phase or six -phase campaign, and we're going t