Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Lawrence Wucher here at the US Institute of Peace. Let me welcome you on this gorgeous spring day. And thank you for coming, which should be a really interesting discussion of planning military responses to mass atrocities. And we get to learn about this new product, which you've seen out front from the CAR Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard and the US Army Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute. We're really excited to be hosting this event. As most of you know, the Institute of Peace was one of the sponsors of the Genocide Prevention Task Force. And the Marrow Project and the Task Force are really, in many ways, parallel and complementary efforts. So we're excited to see the efforts come to fruition in this handbook and have a terrific panel discussion. To get us started, we want to call on Colonel John Cardos for some opening remarks. Colonel Cardos, I believe, as of yesterday or the day before, is now former director of the Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute in Carlisle. And he served for two years in that capacity after a long 29 years of service in a variety of different positions, was really one of the spearheads of this project in its early stages. So Colonel Cardos. Good afternoon, everyone. Very much appreciate all of you coming out to join us today. Obviously, after two and a half years of work, this is a great day for us. And to actually see the handbook in print is a great thing. Appreciate the opportunity to open with some remarks concerning the military planning handbook. Going back two years, when I started working closely with Sarah on this project, I was struck by the promise of this effort to move forward to address some of the critical issues that we have around the world today with mass atrocities. For anybody who's been involved in these efforts, anyone who's studied mass atrocities or in some way had to deal with the fallout from them, the horrific nature of these events strikes you every time you look at them. It's not something that you get used to. So at the very human level, we feel a need to do something to stop these kinds of acts and help ensure that they don't happen again. Things are a little more tricky at the policy and strategy level because of the complexity of these issues. But they have very real national security implications, both for the United States and for other countries that are dealing with them. The instability that can be caused by such acts have wide-ranging long-term effects on the political landscape that we also need to consider. Now, ultimately, our civilian political leaders must make a decision whether to intervene or not based on a variety of complex factors. Each situation is going to be different. There are no simple answers. But what shouldn't be in question is whether we're prepared to respond with all instruments of national power if and when the decision is made to stop the killing. While it would be ideal to try to accomplish this using diplomatic, economic, and information means, we must be prepared to take military action when that's called for. And that's the purpose of the Morrow Project, to provide insights and tools to military commanders and planners to assist them in successfully executing master-trosity response operations. Now, prior to being assigned to PKSOI, I led Crisis Action Planning in US Pacific Command. My division planned efforts as diverse as major war plans, counterinsurgency operations, South Asia tsunami relief, pandemic influenza, and many other things. And so, despite the experience of my team's members, we couldn't expect to have extensive knowledge in every possible scenario that we could face. We relied on military and civilian experts to expand our understanding of what we were facing and what they could do to help us succeed. And so by practicing what we learned and developing draft plans, we helped ensure that in the face of a crisis, we were able to respond quickly and effectively. And that's what we did in this case was we brought together a group of experts in the core planning team. And you can see their names there in the forward of the handbook who had this kind of expertise, military and civilian, who had worked in these types of operations before, who understood what the nature of them were and could help us to put this handbook together. We then executed a series of workshops with military and civilian groups in order to help make sure that we had a wide range of individuals providing us with the experience and expertise we needed to get this handbook right. And so two things stand out that we provide to the commanders and planners in this handbook. One is to help them understand the environment in which they're gonna operate. Again, very complex situations with everyone being different than the past, but there are some common things to all of them that we can use in order to help individuals who need to be able to execute these types of operations. And then the second piece is putting together a planning framework to assist them. And we built this on the standard military process for planning so that planners didn't have to learn something new where one day they're using one process and another day they're using another. So they ought to be very comfortable with using the planning framework that's in the handbook. At the same time though, it provides them with considerations that will help them to think differently about these complex situations. For example, when you do analysis and combat operations you're typically looking at enemy forces and friendly forces. When you're looking at a morrow situation you have perpetrators, victims, interveners and other parties that participate in these types of situations. And through the course of these operations their position can change. Perpetrators can become victims and vice versa. So you need to really understand the nature of the environment, the nature of these operations. And so between the expertise that was provided by those groups through the planning, the core planning group and through the workshops and captured here in the handbook, I think we've helped to move this effort forward. And I can assure you there's a strategic planner and as busy as they typically are to have somebody put that together for you so that in a handbook this size that you have a lot of the insights provided to you on how to do this, it will absolutely help you move forward your efforts so that you can learn and practice and put together draft plans before you really need to execute. And I would tell you that ultimately I think this handbook can help us anticipate potential mass atrocities and to help prevent them through the timely use of all instruments of national power. It'll also help the military and whole of government planners to look differently at complex operations around the world because as I said it makes you think differently about these things and so we'll get better at our jobs. So I tell you that it has been my pleasure to be a part of the Morrow Project. I look forward to its use out across the force and I look forward to the discussion that we'll have here today. Before wrapping things up, I'd like to thank some of the main players who helped put all of this together by thanks to Sarah Sewell for her vision, leadership, her dedication to this. It has been great to partner with you Sarah. Thank you for everything that you've done. To Humanity United for their sponsorship of this effort without Sarah and Humanity United we likely would not be here today. I'd also like to thank senior leaders who supported the effort including General Sullivan who wasn't able to be here today, members of the core planning group, other car center members including Sally Chin and my folks at PKSOI, especially Dwight Raymond and Bill Flavin. Again, I'm very much looking forward to the impact that this handbook has. So my thanks again to all of you for attending today and for your interest in these efforts. Thanks to Karla Cardos for framing the discussion. So well, I think what's very clear from your opening remarks is that this project really was trying to tackle some of the very hardest questions. And there are a lot of things that we can say rhetorically relating to preventing and stopping mass atrocities but this was really trying to hone in on exactly how can we respond better and how can we prepare to respond? We have five terrific panelists. Let me just introduce them quickly not doing justice to their full experience each of you should have picked up their list of bios on the way in. First we have Jeanine Davidson who's Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Plans, a key position in the office of the Secretary of Defense. I just note that among other things she in a previous position oversaw implementation of DOD Directive 3000.05 which was really an influential tool for military support to stability, security and counterinsurgency operations. Then we'll turn to Sarah Sewell who's the Marrow Project Founder and Faculty Director at Harvard's Kennedy School at the Car Center for Human Rights Policy. Among other things Sarah was the first Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Peacekeeping and Humanitarian Assistance back in the 1990s. Then we'll hear from Sally Chin who's the Marrow Project Director also at the Car Center at Harvard. And Sally comes with a depth of experience in working in the field in conflict zones particularly in Africa for a number of NGOs. Then further to the left is Colonel Bill Flavin who's the Directing Professor for Doctrine Concepts Training and Education at PKSOI. And once again brings a real depth of experience in planning and doctrine and training and is now teaching these concepts was intimately involved in the Marrow Project Development. And finally a colleague from the State Department Liston Lee who's a senior advisor for warning at the Office of the Coordinator for Stabilization and Reconstruction or as we call it SCRS. Liston is on rotation from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and has over 25 years experience in the intelligence community in a variety of roles. So I think it's quite clear we have a great deal of experience on the panel. We have asked them to speak for just five minutes each so that'll really just be a beginning of the discussion. We'll then have some interaction among the panelists and then turn to your questions. So with that further ado, Dr. Davidson and if I may ask the speakers to speak from the podium just so the camera can get them people can see. Thanks. Thank you, thank you for the introduction and thank you for the opportunity to be here to talk to you today about this really, really important project. Again, USIP, one of my favorite institutions partnering with PKSOI, one of my other favorite institutions so I'm just thrilled to be here all around. Also I'm thrilled because I get to work with Sarah Sewell. Let me just say, let me indulge for a second and say a couple things about Sarah and why we should listen to her. As we already pointed out, she was the first Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Peacekeeping and Humanitarian Affairs, which pretty unpopular thing back in the 90s and this sort of reflects Sarah's MO, if you will. She's always on the leading edge of what's next and her ideas are often unpopular at first and then almost always proved to be the right thing. The same goes for her next couple adventures which were as the human rights working at the Center for Human Rights where she tried to bring military folks together with human rights activists on things like ROE and warfare and then on to work with the military very closely with General Petraeus on the counterinsurgency manual which wasn't very popular with the human rights community. So Sarah finds that niche and she sees what's coming next and she's almost always right, in fact as far as I know always right, so she's right about this one too and that's why I really wanted to be here today to talk to you about why I think she's right. Morrow is no different. People don't like it. Nobody wants to do it in the military, really. Nobody wants to get in the middle of something as messy and complex as a mass atrocity. We hear it all the time and it reminds me of the 1970s when the feminists didn't wanna learn how to type because then they thought they wouldn't be asked to type. I mean the military, the history of the military is filled with examples of them getting sent to do stuff that they don't think they should have to do and so I applaud the Peacekeeping Institute for even existing on the first place and for tackling this project. The USIP task force that looked at prevention focused on prevention and I kept thinking, I mean they talked a little bit about what happens if prevention fails but I kept thinking you would always hear we wanna figure out the indicators of mass atrocities or genocide before it happens so we can stop it before it happens because we don't wanna have to send in the military and in my work I kept thinking and then what? I mean what happens when you send in the military? Do they know what to do? And I'm not so sure that we do know what to do especially in the middle and I think when you look at the journey that this project has taken you see a lot of struggling with figuring out exactly what's different about Morrow and what makes it so complex and what that means for the intervening force especially if it's a military force. So we really need to be ready if prevention fails for a couple of reasons. Number one we need to be able to advise the president because the president is the person that's going to make the decision about whether or not military forces are gonna be sent in and let me just say historically it's not like we deploy troops early in these sorts of environments. We as a community ring our hands and because we aren't quite sure about the indicators and warnings we aren't quite sure when to go and my senses, my personal senses is that the most likely will also be the most dangerous times at which the military will finally be called to act since nobody wants to send the military into these environments they'll probably wait till the last minute. That's what I worry about in my job which is I worry about what we should be planning for in the military. We try to think about what would be the most likely and what would be the most dangerous and in this case situation they kinda line up as likely and dangerous and so it's really important to understand how to plan for that. When I think about the reasons we plan we plan so that we can figure out exactly what we're gonna do and who's gonna do what when when we actually go. We also really plan in order to have options for the president. Last week I was at a dinner where Bill Clinton got an award and he gave a speech and he talked about how hard it is to make these kinds of tough calls. He explicitly talked about Rwanda and how he knew that domestic public opinion was really against the idea of troops going in because of what happened in Somalia and that it was risky and they weren't quite sure what could be done and to this day he totally regrets not sending troops in because even though there's a lot of debate over what those troops would have done had they gotten at a certain time or whether they would have been able to stop the genocide or reverse the violence that isn't the political point from his perspective. The point is that he didn't heed the do something syndrome the do something drums because he heeded the domestic politics drums of let's stay out of that and he regrets it and I think that's the kind of pressure you're gonna have on presidents and we in the military owe it to those leaders to be able to offer something in the decision making process that is real that isn't just like you know I don't think we have a dog in that fight that isn't our job in the military we have to just be ready to do it. So where do those options come from? Well if you're a planner they come from doctrine but if there isn't any doctrine they come from people like Sarah and Sally and the Peacekeeping Institute and emerging theory and concepts and then if we're lucky it'll get written into doctrine. So that's why I think this is a really really important project and let me let me wrap up by saying a couple things about policy. I was where I worked on the QDR and there is language in the QDR that makes it clear that we should be prepared to respond to protect civilians in these sorts of environments and I read that and thought well you know we should be prepared in a planning environment too. We also write guidance for planners on what they should be planning for and there's a lot of discussion right now about what we should put in that guidance for this particular mission set and let me just be clear because there's guidance to be able to conduct a mission doesn't mean it's the policy to do that mission because very different thing. Doctrine is not policy. Doctrine says how to do something if the president so chooses. Policy says this is the kind of thing that we're gonna do or we are going to do this in this scenario. So I just wanted to be clear about that that's where we're headed from the policy perspective is being prepared for most likely and most dangerous. With that I will stop and again say congratulations on kicking off this effort and fighting the hard fights and I look forward to seeing the, to listening to the question and answers in the comments. Thank you. I wanna begin by thanking everyone for coming by thanking Lawrence and the Institute for Peace and Holocaust Museum and Mike Abramowitz for cosponsoring this event and for thanking all of the many people I'd like to recognize just a few folks Ambassador Mary Yates and the audience. Janine people who are in leadership positions in the US government but also to those of you who have literally soldiered on in your own ways large and small in dealing with reflections on and thoughts about these kinds of challenges. They're extraordinarily difficult and if this is the beginning of what we hope will become a common and shared understanding in the future it doesn't make it any easier in the short term. I wanted because I'm gonna have the folks who wrote so much of this document that I hope you've all grabbed a copy of talk more about parts one and two of the handbook itself. I wanted to just offer a couple of personal reflections about the early origins of this project. As Dr. Davidson said I served in government at the time of Rwanda and like so many who were either serving in the military or serving in the policy community during Rwanda like our former president as we just heard the story recounted Rwanda is really seared in our memories. And my memory was one in which the common understanding that intervention in the context of mass atrocity requires political will was not quite a deep enough understanding because my experience was one of the people in uniform in my office at the Pentagon sitting around a table trying to figure out what on earth you would do if you were asked to do something. You go inside out as Kigali the center of gravity how do you think about deployment of forces and these were puzzles for which we had no guidance and not to mention the fact that the planning wasn't welcomed but the planning was made up ad hoc responsive not where you want to be if you are in a position where your commander in chief tasks American men and women to go into the field to address a challenge. So I came away from that experience fully cognizant of the fact that responses to mass atrocity were not simply a matter of whether a matter of political will they were a question of how and it was a tricky question. And I also remember very well being on a retrospective panel at Harvard I think of the 10 year anniversary of Rwanda and I had read the work of the Carnegie commission for the prevention of deadly conflict had done a paper on what if in Rwanda and Scott File had been one of the main offers and authors of that paper and Scott is a member of the Maro core planning group but I remember at this particular event having recently read Scott's paper being struck by the what I took to be the fallacy that 5000 troops could have just solved the problem of genocide in Rwanda and thinking about how those troops would have actually confronted the situation that unfolded in Rwanda at any point in the spectrum virtually and the kinds of moral dilemmas that they would have faced in trying to determine who constituted the enemy and how to identify the enemy and whether or not to create pockets of safe havens that would incentivize travel across dangerous territory where people would be identified at checkpoints as being good or bad and being treated accordingly and the kinds of second and third order effects that would be down to the force that sought to make a difference in how it could very easily be painted as the bad guy and how would people in uniform feel if they were deployed to such a circumstance for which they were unprepared and where they became blamed as part of the problem instead of welcomed as part of the solution it struck me as so in need of serious thought. And then the final touchstone for me in this particular journey in leading the team that I've been privileged to be a part of was the Iraq, the second Iraq war and the sinking sense that I had as the United States was unable to recognize the fight that it was in Iraq after the conclusion of major combat operations and the inability of our troops to draw on concepts and doctrine and training to adapt to the situation that they faced in the form of a counterinsurgency and because I had served in the Pentagon as a deputy assistant secretary of peacekeeping and I had seen the resistance to any kind of operation that fell short of major combat operations and the institutional pushback for uses of military power that were anything other than the conventional model. I felt that our intellectual rigidity and our institutional defensiveness had put our men and women at unnecessary risk and I was disappointed that we faced that circumstance and I didn't want Americans in uniform to face that circumstance 10 years in the future if they were deployed in the face of a mass atrocity. So it really is with enormous gratitude and a great sense of responsibility that we as a team have sought to make a contribution to preparing for the kind of work that Dr. Davidson just spoke about to the extent that it is a responsibility of the US military to be prepared to develop options and to prepare US forces for any contingency to which they may be directed by the commander in chief. This is clearly one, it is historically a proven fact that Americans may be deployed to such a circumstance so it has been a grave honor I guess in an irony of phrase to be a part of trying to think this through in advance. We are part of a broader community and it's really gratifying to see in the audience so many people who are part of that community who have worked, whether it was on the genocide intervention, the prevention task force or whether it is with the Montreal Institute or whether it is with any number of the organizations that are represented here today who have worked on various forms of education, awareness and prevention. So there's a much broader community of which this is one part and we are very cognizant of the fact that although we're extremely proud that we actually have a product that we can share with you, it is a first draft in essence, it is a first step, it is a partial contribution, it is the beginning of what we hope will be an ongoing conversation with government entities, with international entities, with private organizations, with civilian world and with the military world to refine these concepts and improve upon them and adapt them and adjust them so that they work in a particular organizational, national, bureaucratic, cultural context. This is just a very first, small and humble step. I want to just end by saying that when we first started working on this project, it is in large part through the faith of an extraordinary foundation, Humanity United that said we believe in this work and we want to see it happen and in particular Tarik Ghani encouraged us when I said, no it's too hard, no it'll take too long, no it's just in the category of really only the government can do it, this can't be done from the outside. They believed and that was invaluable and I'm glad that they believed. I want to thank not just the Peacekeeping Institute but I also want to personally thank John Agolia who at the time he was John Cardos's predecessor who when I called him up and said hey I have this idea and I think it's something that is really important and I think it sort of dovetails with your institutional objectives at PKSOI, John didn't hesitate, John completely got it and put I think the organization on a path that led to some extraordinary growth and contributions from PKSOI and I want to particularly single out Dwight Raymond, we were fortunate to have a lot of contributions from PKSOI, Mike Price was one of the first hires that John Agolia made to help lead and organize the core planning group and we've had a number of folks from the PKSOI team, one of whom you'll hear from shortly involved in this project but it was really Dwight coming on board about a year ago who energized us and who worked so hard on the language of the second part of this handbook. And on the same lines I want to thank Sally Chin who also came in, we had Mike Zinco in the beginning from the Harvard team but we more recently about a year ago, Sally came on and her enthusiasm and her smarts and her passion and dedication to this has really made the difference in bringing this team effort to fruition. Our core planning group, John Karnakardos mentioned is really been the heart in many ways of the hard intellectual work over the course of the last two years. We have a couple of members, I don't know if they're all here but Colonel Kevin Benson, if you're here can you stand up, thank you. Mike Scott, are you here? Thank you Mike and Mark Walsh, thank you. Mark is here, these are our three of the terrific core planning group team. And I also want to just briefly shout out Graham Ball and Tamara did you make it? She may not have made it, Tamara was here in the early days but Graham Ball and Brita Kelly are a part of our Mara team and they have been just phenomenal. So I feel like this has been a product, a child with many parents and what we really hope to do today is to bring it out into the world and find more foster parents and more aunts and uncles and God parents and folks who can take this as an initial step and tutor it and bring it into a different life and a different use and give it relevance to the work that is so important and has yet to be done, so thank you. Hi everybody, I'm really excited to be here. I can't believe it's actually happening. I'd like to thank USIP, it's been a great host as well as the Holocaust Museum, PKSOI who've been an amazing partner and I'd like to thank Humanity United who've been an amazing funder and thanks for the kind words from Sarah. It's been really a pleasure working with you too. But I also thank all of you for coming and it's, as Sarah sort of hinted at it's such a diverse group of people and I feel like that's the strength such a diverse group of people who are interested in figuring out how to address this and that sort of brings me to how I came to the project. I joined last year as the project director and my background as Lawrence sort of mentioned is really as a humanitarian and I see some of my humanitarian colleagues in there too, Jonathan and Scott. And I spent several years, almost a decade on the ground, Chad, Darfur, Eastern Congo. And so often from my colleagues, I'm asked, my humanitarian colleagues, I'm asked, well how on earth did you end up working on this project? What are you doing? And actually it's really from that place that brought me here, really, really is that place because as a humanitarian worker on the ground, as a researcher, as a policy advisor, I witnessed situations of mass atrocity or potential mass atrocity and I found myself advocating for military intervention, some kind of military intervention to stop this and I realized that in the humanitarian community we didn't really know what that meant and we didn't feel like that was necessarily our job to know what that meant. We just knew that something had to be done and it had to be done with force. But the worrying part for me more was that a lot of the governments that we were appealing to and doing the advocacy to, they weren't quite sure what that would mean either. And so fast forward a year and it has been very exciting to be part of something which is trying to help make mass atrocity, military intervention better understood. As Sarah said, I'm going to, what I'm gonna do in my five minutes is briefly run you through part one of the handbook. Normally I'd have a PowerPoint, I'm very good at those these days, working with the military. But now we actually have a handbook so it's very exciting too so you can actually flip through and see it. So part one of this handbook is something that for me over the past year and the group over the past few years has been wrestling with and I think there was a sense that we could dive right into the military planning and sort of lay out this should be done, this should be done, this should be done. And we realized we had to take a step back and we needed to really identify and outline and talk about the characteristics of mass atrocity and a mass atrocity response operation tomorrow. And we really needed to lay out the distinctions, what made it different, what made a tomorrow different from other kinds of operations which we already know how to plan for and what made a mass atrocity situation different. And how did those differences in those distinctions, what were the implications then for planning? So the part one of the handbook is our attempt and it's been a very much a group effort but it's also been amazing reaching out to the academics and policymakers and lots of other people who have also put their input into this and I'd like to give a shout out to the Stimson Center as well because it's been great working with them too. So putting their thoughts into what is it that makes a mass atrocity situation different and what makes a mass atrocity response operation different? So one of the first things that we do in part one is really take a look at tomorrow and sort of set it up against other operations which we plan for and we know how to plan for. And so what are the differences and what are the similarities? Because it's true that tasks in a tomorrow are similar to other operations but they might contain elements of those operations but it's the combination of them that makes them different. So for example, we talk about how is a tomorrow different from a humanitarian relief operation because people come to us and say well it's kind of the same thing as in a humanitarian relief operation or a robust peacekeeping operation or a coin or a Neo or all these different operations and so what we wanna do is sort of say there are things that are the same but there are things that are really different and that's why we feel like we need to have this handbook. We then take a look at some of the distinctions of a moral context and we've come up with three that we think are particularly important. The first one Colonel Cardos alluded to which is the multi-party dynamic of a mass atrocity response operation situation and we've identified four actors and so sort of moving beyond friendly and enemy and even sort of that third green we've identified four which are the perpetrators of violence, the victims of violence, the interveners which would be the Merrill task force and that group the other and we talk through in part one and in part two sort of the interplay of those actors and sort of the characteristics which define them and as Colonel Cardos had said sometimes they're hard to identify who's the perpetrator, who is the victim and the way that they can change roles and how when an intervener comes in how it changes that dynamic as well as well as that fourth group of others who include bystanders who if we take a look at mass atrocity situations in the past have often been played such a critical role they could start off neutral but end up becoming victims or aiding the perpetrators. A second characteristic of a mass atrocity response operation is this illusion of impartiality that Amaro task force is there to save the day they're against actions they're not against a specific party they're acting in an even-handed way but that's not the case as we know and there could be once a force is on the ground it is necessarily hostile against one side and not another and what it means is there could be a backlash against this intervening force locally or regionally threatening the pre-existing power of balance power balance and something which started as Amaro could morph into a different kind of operation entirely. Finally we talk about an escalatory dynamic which we think is very distinctive about mass atrocity situations. As we've seen that mass killings of civilians can intensify and expand very quickly once they begin and perpetrators may consciously speed up their killing in anticipation that they may be discovered or stopped and at the same time that's moving very quickly we know that it takes quite some time on the policy military side to gear up for a response. There can also be a more of a constrained or a slow dynamic particularly if a perpetrator believes that they could stay under international radar if the killing is slow or difficult to recognize as part of a mass atrocity. After looking at those three distinctions we then talk about some of the operational and political implications of those and I probably don't have enough time to go through eight operational and political distinctions but they're in the handbook and I'll just list them for you and then I'll turn over to Bill who will talk a bit more about the planning process. But I think the importance was to sort of say these are the implications these are things that have to be thought of and then how do you apply and then applying that to the planning process. So one of the first implications is the importance of having different information from the outset. A second is the importance of advanced planning. The third is the sort of the potential as I was saying for rapid escalation privileges speed over mass when it comes to a response. There's something that we call the power of witness which I think has had a lot of resonance with people when we talk about this that in Amaro the mass killing is inherently criminal and shameful and what this means is that transparency or witness can be a particularly important alternative or adjunct to the use of force and so thinking creatively about how we could use those tools either high tech or even low tech when planning to respond to a mass atrocity situation. The fifth is something we call symptoms or root causes can there be a handoff and this is something that we talk about in a lot of different operations but it is very true for Amaro the extent to which an intervening force is responsible for the civilians it saves. Does it just stop the killing or then is it also then responsible for creating the stability so the symptoms versus the root causes? Another one is about the immediate non-military tasks that a military force like this would face. Humanitarian assistance, arresting perpetrators, resettlement, these are mostly civilian tasks but with violence being high these are the kind of things that a military would find themselves being tasked with. The seventh has to do with moral dilemmas and this is something that I think is particularly difficult because in a mass atrocity response operation the moral dilemmas will proliferate and this is where the political vulnerabilities come in. How do you identify the victims? Do you aid and abet the separation of groups? And how would you deal with a backlash that could accompany an intervention coming from the people you thought would be supporting you? And finally we talk about the importance of political guidance. This is a military planning handbook but some of the most difficult and vexing issues are going to have to be solved by political leaders. So that's the summary of part one and I will hand over to Bill from, sorry, Colonel Flavin from PQSOI to talk to you about part two, thanks. Thank you, I'm gonna cover very briefly the concept that was used in developing the actual planning guidance part of it, part two. Morrill was built around the US military joint operating planning process so that the ideas and the concepts could be translated into doctrine, concepts, tactics, techniques, procedures, contingency plans in order to provide that guidance easily just not to a military audience but to any civilian political planners non-governmental organizations. Anyone willing to look at this can get a insight on how to move ahead. This supports a lot of the conceptual design that's going on right now up at Carlisle, the Army War College. The US Army is conducting unified quest, an exercise that takes a look at the new Army capstone concept and some of the issues that they're dealing with out there is effective strategic engagement, relevant populations and actors, protection of civilians by conducting security operations over wide areas. All of that's supportive of what's happening here. It also complements a lot of the thoughts, initiatives on protection of civilians that the international community is interested in now, that the UN is launching on and many in this room are assisting such as the Stimson Institute and the US Institute for Peace and others are around. So it complements that as well. Like all good operations it starts with an assessment and an analysis and since you all have your himnos in front of you on page 38 we turn to the beginning of this whole thing of where it takes a look at the operational environment and talks about what Colonel Cardo and Sally and others have talked about. All the various panoply of actors, the dynamics out there and the understanding of the geographic, political, military and security implications of this. Just not if we're standing here in the United States and about to go into a country but also what if we're in a country in a disaster relief operation and we get indications and warnings that a mass atrocity may about to happen. What if we're in a country on a counterinsurgency or a peace operation or even if we're in some country attempting to withdraw from engagements? How do you then think about this and go forth and what options are available to you? It then goes forth and takes a look at end states and objectives. What resources might be available and does some critical factor analysis. So it can come up with a mission analysis in the generic sense on how to address these types of operations. And this is a generic approach, this document. It then has to be married with reality, with what is on the ground, with what you might face in the area of operations itself. Based on this analysis and the study of the academic research, it goes on to look at various options in order to deter, in order to defend the populations, in order to take actions to halt, to restore order and to transition to a sustainable peace. On page 60, it even takes a look at some flexible deterrent options which are also listed in annex G of the document. What can be done in order to prevent the runaway of this violent activity? One of the examples of it is exposing the perpetrators to international security, taking the cloak off, including transparency which we found out, of course, can deter various actions. So it goes through various options that might be used and might not be used so planners can consider these when faced with these types of operations. And considering the military intervention going into the operation, the document considers several approaches on page 63, it discusses them, but on page 78 there's a nice chart about them. We decided not to develop courses of action. There was a bait of whether we should have courses of action on what the military should do and should not do, what the other agents should do in support of the military, but as you know, these operations are varied. They change in time and space, location, geography and circumstances, so it's well beyond the ability to prescribe. So what we did instead is take a look at various approaches that have been done in the past and what are those approaches like? What are their characteristics? What are their considerations? What did we find? So that when you get to developing courses, you may take all some either, neither of these various options, combine them, put them together, but at least you have some background, some indication of what has been done and thought about in the past. Is it saturation where we send all of the forces there out among the entire countryside in order to secure everything? Do we use the oil spot theory, taking a look and concentrating in some areas and then slowly beginning to advance security umbrellas? Do we separate in order to prevent one side from attacking another? Do we establish safe areas which had been done in the past and safe corridors and move from there? Do we enable the partners themselves, the government that may be in trouble, did not have the capacity or the capability to handle this? Do we enable them and they take the lead in order to solve these problems? Do we just contain the problem itself or do we go in and deliberately target and defeat the adversaries in violent action? So all of those are various approaches that can be used, that can be taken and they're laid out for the planner so he can take a look at that or she can take a look at that and see what their insights are. Now all of this has got a nest within a design framework and on page 80 you can see the design framework that's been laid out based upon various lines of effort and lines of approach that include diplomatic, political, economic, international and security approaches. Well understood based upon all of the experience we've had in the past 10 to 15 years on a whole of government, comprehensive approach to these problems. This tries to identify the comprehensive approach that will be going on in the context of military intervention. And how should this come together? How should it balance one with the other? How should the planners consider all of these pieces? Because the military has its role to play yet everyone else also will have a role to play and how is it complementary? How do we eventually get to a sustainable piece which is the objective at the end of the day and how do we consider that? So that places this in the framework to take a look at. And then of course these things take place over time and space. So on page 86 we take a look at the planning phases. And these planning phases are laid out. You can look at page 88 for the actual chart. They're laid out in accordance with the joint military doctrine and the phases in that doctrine. Again to link this to the known, to link this to processes that have been proven and take a look at how those lines of effort flow through those phases as an example. Merely an example, remember, not a lockstep adventure. But to get someone's mind in it to frame it so the individuals can look at this and have a better understanding and a better feeling on how to take these various variables, take these considerations, take these trade-offs and risks and use them to best advantage. And so now comes to the future of this document. As Sarah has said, it's not the final word, far from it, it's only the beginning, the beginning of a process. And in the process of developing this and using it, we discovered other areas that need research, other areas that need investigation, other areas that can be helpful. We've conducted one tabletop exercise already with UCOM on this, taking a look at it, hopefully more, and we hope for more to begin to evolve, to take a look at this document, apply the various pieces of it, test it out, play with it, and gain insights from it. And as you can see from this, it's very much dependent on intelligence as well. And as we went through this, we began to ask the questions. What are the intelligence implications of this document? Do we have the right indications and warnings? Can we identify the issues as they begin to appear? Hopefully we can and I thank you for your time and I'll now hand it over to Liston who will talk a little bit more about intelligence. Thank you very much. Well, first of all, Bill, thank you for that segue into my presentation and since I am the last person before your many questions, I'm gonna stick to my five minutes that Lawrence very strictly told me about. As you mentioned, my bio, I work in the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization at the Department of State. I'm on detail from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. I'm nearing the end of my two-year rotation there. I have a unique perspective of being able to straddle two communities, what I would call the Reconstruction and Stabilization Community, and of course the Intel community where I come from. So my comments are gonna track to those two vectors into this important project. And the reason for that is, I think as all of you know here, but I'm gonna emphasize that this is a very complex issue. And it's, I would argue, and I have argued before in other forums, that this is probably the most complex national security issue requiring the cooperation and partnership among a vast community of organizations and entities. And what I mean by that is, first of all, we need a large segment of the federal bureaucracy and agencies. We need the military, we need civilians, we need non-governmental partners who might normally in other areas not be comfortable working with the military or with civilian agencies. We also need allies and coalitions. It's a very complex issue requiring all those partners in this effort. The US military has long known that effective planning is the key to success or failure, victory or defeat in the battlefield. And this handbook gives military planners the key, the tools they need to systematically take account of the unique complexity of the military operation to prevent or halt genocide or mass atrocities. One challenge now is to develop the civilian structures and tools to complement Mario. The office I represent, SCRS, can play an important role in this process given our unique mandate tools and resources. These include a whole of government structure that provides a civilian response corps, made up of eight partner agencies, the Department of State, many bureaus in there, USAID, Treasury, the US Department of Agriculture, the Department of Justice, Health and Human Services, the Department of Commerce, and the Department of Homeland Security. In addition, the Department of Defense has emphasized here and in other forms is a key partner in this organization. The CRC includes three components that I wanna emphasize. First, they're conflict experts and tools to deconstruct and mitigate the drivers of conflict in a situation, in a country or region. Number two, skilled planners and tools for joint planning with the military, which we have exercised with combatant commands over the past several years. And third, a rapidly growing corps of civilian trains equipped and rapidly deployable experts to support or who could support a genocide or mass atrocity intervention to mitigate or stop that atrocity. Now, turning to the other vector, the intel community, I wanna lay out some key things that have been mentioned in the handbook. And the handbook's a great start to help me and others to push further work in this field from my office. First of all, providing strategic intelligence and warning is critical. Situational awareness is important for the forces on the ground. Critical factors analysis provides troops and commanders faster decision making time in these situations. It broadens the expertise on issues. And what I mean by that is instead of looking insular within our own community or within the US government, we bring in academics, we bring in non-governmental officials who are working today on the ground in countries of interest and areas of concern. We enhance outreach for forums like this and others. We strengthen partnerships similar to what I mentioned in the beginning. And for me, it's important to emphasize foraging non-traditional relationships. Because again, these are issues from my community that are non-traditional for the vast number of work members of the workforce. We deepen the knowledge of IC analytical capabilities where we can bring analytical products and expertise to critical issues. And finally, we can build a USG process and structure for rapid response, which is a goal that's very important. In conclusion, I wanted to mention seven questions that I've changed them a little bit for this forum, but they're still the same theme that I've used in other meetings within my community. First of all, question one, what do planners need for effective planning for reconstruction stabilization and genocide prevention? Number two, what is the performance of the current system for providing warning of instability and potential cases of mass atrocities? Number three, how is this warning information conveyed to those with the ability and responsibility to react? I go back to your comment earlier. When decision makers are getting information, is it being provided in a timely and effective manner? That's a big, big issue for me. Number four, are there ways to make the information provided more useful to policy makers and planners? Number five, are the needs best satisfied with watch lists, briefings or detailed analysis? Number six, how current does the information need to be in order to be the greatest value? A lot of times policy makers perceive that there's an enemy at the gate's mentality because information is relayed in hours, days and weeks, when for some situations like this topic, it should be relayed in, I would argue, months and years, in some cases when you look at issues around the world. And finally, how do we gauge the relative impact of instability or impending civil violence both on the country involved or the region involved or international partners or for US national interests? Absolutely in conclusion. We look forward to working with our civilian and military partners, our NGO colleagues and others using this planning handbook, also hopefully using tabletop exercises in the future and other tools and support mechanisms that we hope that your various organizations will be engaged in in the future. This is a very important issue and I thank you for inviting me. Thanks to all the panelists for being brief and just piquing our interest. I wanna take a few minutes, if I may, pose a couple of questions and then go to your questions from the audience so you can start formulating those. If I can start from the kind of big picture political decision-making and policy end of things. Sarah, you emphasize that you're focused on the how question, not the whether question around mass atrocity response. But I wonder if you and perhaps Janine can talk a bit about how it would change or affect the political decision-making about whether to respond to have better tools for planning and concepts and doctrine around the how. Well, it's hard to get inside the heads of the most senior decision-makers but here's how I approach this in my current job. I think that the more options you have for senior leadership, including the president, the more likely you are to have a better outcome. I mean, to rely on crisis planning, pretty much ensures you're gonna have a substandard outcome because nobody knows how to think well in a crisis. And so I think it will enhance decision-making to be able to say things like, this is what we can do, manage expectations. This is what we can do with the tools that we have. This is what we can't do.  Having a really clear understanding of what that's gonna look like, how big it's gonna be, how expensive it's gonna be, how bloody it might be, I think will be really, really important for decision-makers in a crisis environment. So that's how I approach the issue. I would echo what Dr. Davidson just said. I think a couple of other points, I'm gonna forget them, but one of the biggest hopes, I think, that it's fair to say that John Cardis and I share very strongly in bringing our teams to this work, is that if you can help policy makers understand the implications of the cost and complexity and challenge of intervention further down the spectrum, that you can perhaps galvanize action sooner rather than later. These are not problems that look better with time. Generally speaking, the intervention options are more numerous and less difficult and challenging sooner. And there are a bunch of different historical counterfactuals that we could engage in. But I think it's fair to say that what motivated many of us is to help deal with the inverse dynamics of decision-making and violence escalation and try to help policy makers think more cogently earlier about how their options only get worse over time and perhaps then galvanize responses sooner in the spectrum. Related to that, I think one of the aspects of, that there are two elements of the exercise that we've gone through together through the last two and a half years that have been particularly illuminating for me, one is that some of the options are not mutually exclusive. So for example, the whole question of ISR, of witness and transparency, and its applicability across the operational spectrum, had a very interesting conversation with someone who worked in a military capacity for the prior administration who described being in a multinational forum where he was trying to catalyze a discussion amongst potential partners about policy options. And after walking him through essentially the contents of this assets to both shed light on the extent of current violence that would increase attention to the violence, that would better scope out the nature of the problem and therefore assist in analysis and mission framing and options development. And that would have continued utility where you to proceed through different versions of response in addition to the ISR piece. That might have been a completely different conversation if that had been on the table, but we didn't know to have that conversation. We hadn't thought about that. And to again, to Janine's point about, when you're under duress, it is not the time to be thinking about developing options. So I think that that's one aspect. The other is that this notion of second and third order effects that I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about in the context of other operations and intervention scenarios. There are so many potential permutations and directions in which second and third order effects of humanitarian intervention for all the right reasons can take you. And if political decision makers don't have a sense of the risks involved, they cannot make informed decisions. And regardless of one's view about whether or not option X is a good option or a bad option, it's very important to sketch it out as fully and comprehensively as possible. And I think that's one of the contributions that we have potentially helped facilitate in the framing's discussion. And I wanna just make one brief point, which is that as we did the tabletop exercises with UCOM, this is something that became glaringly evident.  What it did was brought home through a very realistic scenario in the context of a geographical responsibility for combatant command was focus them on how truly unprepared they were to think about a problem that seemed very real to them. And so I think we've had a chance to really through the tabletop exercise process, focus our minds on the reasons why you wanna fully understand all ramifications, all the imaginable ramifications that you can possibly predict or the more is better in terms of getting the head of senior decision makers around what the viable options are and that the more you look at those further down the line, the more you are really driven to appreciate the value of earlier and preventive action. And in that sense, I think Lawrence, it goes to the comment that you made at the very outset, which is that the genocide prevention task forces work and the work of all those who've worked on prevention is completely compatible with what we've tried to do in terms of the how question because they really are synergistic and ideally inform one another in ways that I think can help us make less bad decisions among very difficult options for very challenging problems. If I can turn to a little more of a conceptual question then, you underscore the second, third order effects and number of you refer to the complexity of these issues. And I certainly don't disagree, but I think one question is how much these complexities are unique to mass atrocity operations or mass atrocity response operations or more general to modern day conflict situations and intervention into conflict situations. So if I take the three distinctive factors that the handbook refers to multi-party dynamics, illusion of impartiality and escalatory dynamics, those certainly seem to me to apply to mass atrocity response operation contexts, but I'm not sure that they're not also true, applicable or characteristic of virtually any situation of conflict where you have some third party intervention. So I guess the question is, do we need, I mean, if these are the characteristics that are driving a new planning framework for mass atrocity response operations, is it also underscoring that we may need a more fundamental shift in our military planning frameworks to take account of these kinds of characteristics and complexes? And Sarah's pointing out, we may want to call on Dwight Raymond who's in the audience to comment as well. Unless there are any comments from the panel. Well, I think one comment is, Ness, this isn't a new framework. We're actually using existing frameworks and we don't see that an actual new framework, but the framework that is out there has to be fed properly through all of these various factors that will be put into it, so it then can produce the results that lead to it. And I think it's the conglomeration of all of these factors feeding into this that provides the issues that were fixed. And I'll defer to Dwight. Bill, thanks, I was going to say, so throughout the development of the handle, I think we were sorting into the debate about whether we should just talk about things that are unique and in particular to tomorrow or anything that applies tomorrow. And eventually we kind of settled that if it applies tomorrow, we should talk about it because if we talked about something that was just unique to a tomorrow situation, there really wouldn't be a whole lot to talk about. And also what we wanted to do was to create more planners who are looking at this, a package that is largely a one-stop shop so that as they try to tackle a complex problem, pretty much all of the considerations that they would have to address are there. Now, in laying out these frameworks and the list of possible assumptions and all that, what we wanted to do is to create, in most cases, about the 70% solution for what a planner would have to do if we had to consider a particularized case. So they could take the strawman that we had in the handbook, drop a couple of things, add a couple of things, tweak a couple of things that apply to this particular case and it would probably be pretty good to fit the problem that they have. Lawrence, I think your point about is there a applicability in this construct to wider problems, not just moral types of problems. Personally, I think there is, I think there is a lot of considerations and second word of thanks is quite important. Sure, let's go. So I'm not, definitely in agreement with my colleagues and I definitely hear your point, Lawrence, about what is it that, aren't there lots of parties, aren't most conflicts multi-party, but so maybe that rubric multi-party can apply to a lot of places, but then it's the particularities of what is a mass atrocity, which is, we define it, we define it very much the way the genocide prevention task force defined it, which is looking at large-scale systematic, widespread systematic killings of civilians. And I think it's that part where then you look at the multi-party dynamic and you say, if this is about an armed combatants killing civilians, targeting civilians, what are the parties that are involved there? And that's where it becomes interesting because that's where you see why do perpetrators commit this violence, why are victims targeted, how do interveners come in and intervene to stop that? And a very, I think in many ways, unique dynamic about that group of that others, the bystanders, bystanders to targeted, systematic, widespread killing of civilians. And that's different from other kinds of conflicts. And it's also different when then you think about the operations that we already planned for. We don't think about all of these different kinds of that mission, which is to stop killing of civilians in a mass atrocity situation. So I take your point. I don't, in many ways, yes, we're not inventing something completely brand new, but it's thinking about those different distinctions in the rubrics of them and then thinking about the particularities within them. For example, the escalatory dynamic. Something that we've talked about, if it happens really fast, you can have a late intervention into other kinds of situations. You can, if it's combat, you can come in late and regain territory and free prisoners. But if the civilians have been killed, you can't undo that action. So that's also something that is very specific to a mass atrocity situation. And I think that applies to that. If you look at it just very quickly and briefly said this is something we know how to do, it's when you sort of sit down, think about it. And this is what I think we found with the tabletop exercise at UConn, which was when you really sat down, think about it, really start talking through. That's when you see how unique and different it can be. Well, it's time for questions from the audience. We do have a microphone over here to your left if you can make your way there, if you have a question. And please introduce yourself and try and ask your question as briefly as possible. Thank you, George. Thanks. George Lopez, currently a fellow here at USIP. Does this help us get the Lord's Resistance Army three years ago or after the recent revelation of atrocities or three months from now? So that particular case, which I think some of us would think is a consistent mass violation against civilians. How does it help with that case? Second quick question. One of the scenarios of the future that I think scares many of us that worry about human rights is this phenomenon of post-election violence. And I'm wondering if you thought through some of the scenarios that we've seen recently as post-election violence that would be involved in situations like this and what that means, particularly for what the threshold is for atrocities, which are spontaneously massed in different regions of a country at different moments in time. Let's jump in on that. Those are great questions and I'm gonna give you a general response to how we think about the issue of threshold and how we think about the issue of mass atrocity as a political trigger because I think it will take us too far afield if we try to go into individual cases. And I don't mean that to be dismissive and I'll be delighted to catch up with you afterwards, George. But the way we have, to some degree, and this was something that we kicked around for a long time, and to create a specific threshold, is it? We all know the different typologies, numbers, sustainment, geography, percentage of whatever. We decided that a mass atrocity response operation occurs when political authorities determine that there is a mass atrocity and when the goal of the operation is to halt the violence against civilians. So one could argue on the one hand that it's a tautology, but since this is a planning framework for a mission that is determined by the outcome and the outcome is directed by political authorities, it almost doesn't matter whether it is post-violence mass atrocity, LRA mass atrocity in a third country, another Bosnia very early on. The specifics of it are not determined of whether or not this framework is relevant. This framework is relevant if people decide that that's the objective that they wanna pursue. And then what the framework is designed to do is push people to analyze whether or not they've clearly defined their assumptions, they've defined their terms, they understand the parties, they've thought through the way in which their own intervention will then shape the calculations of the various parties and potentially engender different kinds of actions. One of the things that is so, I mean, the analogy that always came to my mind in the course of two plus years of sitting through discussions about this is that this is the classic case of pushing the balloon because you push here and it comes out there and you may not be able to predict it even. We know that the questions we have here aren't all the right questions and that even the best informed, most recent intelligence isn't necessarily gonna give you the crystal ball scenario. But even having thought through what the interests of the parties are, how they identify themselves, what changing the balance of power between them may do in terms of reigniting and shifting the dynamic into from a mass atrocity to a civil war, from a mass atrocity to a relief operation and stabilization operation. One of the things that I think was a light bulb for one of the retired four stars with whom we spoke was when in the context of talking about the withdrawal from Iraq, counterinsurgency, stabilization, withdrawal, well then what happens if it becomes a mass atrocity? Well you can call it counterinsurgency, you can call it withdrawal, you can call it whatever you want, so the framework's relevant. So all of these permutations are why it took us so long to try to think through whether or not we had done a credible job of beginning the framing. And I think it's fair to say that we feel as though we've given it a solid shot, but it's part of the reason for the humility in this process and the sense of offering it up to this community to enlarge and adapt because it's when you sit down, George, and you say, how does this apply to the LRA? Oh my gosh, you know what, they forgot this. This needs to be a separate section to think about this kind of a circumstance that hopefully will then go into the next iteration, whoever it is that publishes it, hopefully it'll be in semi-official channels, official channels, right? So the answer is that's exactly what we want, the people in this audience and the people in institutions and the people in this broader community to be doing is thinking about how does this framework fail in addressing problem X? Where could it be improved? How do we need to adapt it? So I think that's my answer to your very good questions. Anybody else on that? Michael. Hi, Michael Lund, Management Systems International. Picking up on Lawrence's distinction between the question of the how and the question of the whether, and the answers to that, that the whether might be affected by the presence of a how. Where are we at this point with the QDR, the QDDR, all of the discussions of the 3D's whole of government approaches and so on that Liston alluded to? In terms of the triggering for action in relation to a situation such as this or a prior situation ideally, I mean this will provide the means but obviously there's a lot of discussion now even the word prevention is being used that more attention needs to be paid to these situations earlier but what I'm asking about is your sense of how far along those discussions are in terms of the architecture of decision making and so on. In the U.S. government at the present time. I think it's safe to say just based on public speeches and everything else that this particular Secretary of Defense is keen on prevention. I think there's an enthusiasm among the military community that wouldn't it be nice to not have to do war or morrow or anything boy if those State Department people could just get that diplomacy right we wouldn't have to do any of this stuff but we all know that it's more complex than that. We just get a little more specific. I worked a little bit on the QDR and there's language in it that is pretty explicit and I'll just read it to you. There's a section on preparing to defeat adversaries and succeed in a wide range of contingencies basically a big section that talks about what the military thinks they should be prepared to do and remember the QDR the quadrennial defense review comes out every four years in the Department of Defense and sort of a broad matching exercise of what is it our strategy is now? How is it synced with what the administration supposed to be synced with the administration's objectives that's why we write it every four years and what are we doing about that? Like what are we buying? What are we planning? And so it's all unclassed, it's all available online but this particular piece here says if deterrence fails and adversaries challenge their interests with the threat or use of force the United States must be prepared to respond in support of U.S. national interests. The range of plausible future challenges is significant. DoD requirements to deal with such challenges include the following and there's all kinds of different things but for this particular one preventing human suffering due to mass atrocities or large scale natural disasters abroad. So it gets to your point about context. Even in a natural disaster things can turn really ugly. Katrina, when you have lots of spoilers doing lots of bad things, I mean it wasn't a mass atrocity but one of the first things that happens is they call in the military to go fix it and to go do law and order. And so this is an acknowledgement that the nature of conflict in the 21st century is messy and human and we need to be better prepared for that. What does that mean and how does it ripple? It makes the community think. It makes people like me think about well what should we be telling people to plan for and do we have the right doctrine? And it ripples from there. So there's a lot of dialogue in the building in the Pentagon on this particular issue and I think it's significant that it's in the QDR. We'll watch for it and see if it's in the national security strategy probably and in other documents. So. Listen to any comment from your perched state or from the intel perspective on these reflections and changes in architecture perhaps? Well, I think the audience has picked up that there is a lot of movement toward that given what's been discussed here by the panelists and besides the QDR, I know there's the QDDR as well as the national intelligence strategy document will have some sort of language in them that will address this and that's important. My only comment would be to emphasize about the example I believe by the previous speaker on looking at pre-election violence. I mean that is something where certainly there's more emphasis on that today and I think you can keep it in this context that we're not saying we're gonna send in the troops to a country before an election but we're gonna do other things to hopefully mitigate potential post-election violence by having the UN or the African Union or other institutions monitor the election more effectively and also apply the smart power capabilities of the United States governments, diplomatic, economic and otherwise to try and push governments to more free and fair elections and also have more analytical focus on potential problems that despite doing all that may crop up so that we can mitigate bad outcomes. And I focus on the election aspect because that is one indicator and one area that we have seen time and again have caused problems and so that we should focus on those. And so I think that's an architectural aspect and a mindset that has changed to the better for this effort. Thanks, sir. Yeah, I'm Jay Bacher from the Army Capabilities Integration Center and I have a question primarily for Dr. Davidson. Just reading through this a little bit and listening to Sally's comments, there are things about moral operations that differentiate them from other military operations. Do you foresee the need for developing specialized forces, Army forces specifically for this or do you see additional resource requirements that might be placed on the Army Force Generation Model? Great question, Jay. I see this, and I'll leave part of this up to my uniform or my military folks, but I see this as more of a planning and a doctrine sort of exercise. I mean, you could send the same sort of light infantry unit into a peacekeeping operation that you're gonna send into this operation is not so much about, it's more about what they know to do and what they've planned to do. And so I think it comes to me, I focus it more at the planner level and the doctrine level. And so I'll let my military colleagues speak to the training parts of it, but this seems to me a more of a leadership thing as opposed to completely revamping the military. We have the tools, we just have to learn how to apply them. And indeed, as we say, this is indeed nested within the Army Doctrine Force Stability Operations FM 307, it's part and parcel of the entire approach, which this thing talks about when it talks about the lines of effort and the fact that this is more than just a military approach. So therefore, the debate of should we need specialized units for this operation, specialized units for that operation, specialized units for some other operation, pretty much we've decided in the full spectrum approach that we have to be able and capable of performing lots of different missions at any time to achieve that, based upon the problems we'll see out there in the world. And as resources begin to constrain, as we begin to move out of some of the operations that we're currently in, it is not feasible as we see get a specialized unit writ large. Now, are there specific capacities and capabilities in there, like for example, do you need a more robust forensic element to go ahead with your unit in order to investigate this sort of stuff? Quite possibly, as you know in Bosnia, we had to call on the Corps of Engineers for a forensic unit. Why had the Corps developed it? Because of reallocating Indian areas, American Indian areas, to develop the engineer products, they then had to send in forensic experts to determine whether or not there were ancient Indian remains in there. So strangely enough, out of that, they developed a forensic capability that we then used in Bosnia and other places. But for these specific niche items, there may be an opportunity to develop some of those, which we could look at. But generally speaking, I would say. Scott. Yeah, I'm Scott Studin with Oxfam America. I want to hear more about the idea of impartiality from you. As we respond to humanitarian emergencies in some of these places where there are mass atrocities, impartiality is very important to us and we can see how messy it gets. Most of the mass atrocities will happen in the context of insurgency with counterinsurgency or within a civil war that are supported by outside powers, supporting one side or another side, or post-conflict settings where the losers don't want to give away their arms and they want to pray in population so that they can keep money flowing to them and a mass atrocity operation would enter into the system and say, we're going to separate the civilians from the perpetrators, but it would essentially take sides at times. I mean, I was thinking of every mass atrocity recently. In Darfur, you'd be taking sides with Jem against the government, which is very difficult and they're supported by Libya and Chad and it becomes really, really messy. I know these are all political discussions, I guess, but is there things within this model and the plan you do to mitigate that, to make partiality less powerful? You've just articulated why we try to create this handbook. I mean, that's exactly the point and if you haven't thought through those issues, through an accurate diagnosis of the motivations and the capabilities of the actors, through thinking about precisely what your concept of operations is going to be and whether or not you are pursuing, as Bill said before, predominantly, what's the mix of offensive defenses and stability operations that you're undertaking and where and are you varying it by sector and is it really only these two parties or is it actually these four parties and these are perpetrators and these are victims and they're gonna switch sides as you begin to move in and change the power balance. You've just articulated why I think each one of us up here has said these are complicated. So what the handbook does is not give you answers for each of the 470,000 variations on the problem that may exist. What it does and this is what Colonel Cardos was explaining is that we came in hoping that we could provide a generic concept of operations and we recognized we have to take a step back and we have to provide basic understanding of conceptually what's different and particularly challenging about these operations which is part one. And part two, what is the framework that you can use to do the diagnostic yourself of the particularities in this circumstance and how do we tease people through thinking about the interactions of their nominal response with further course of action development on the part of all of the parties. You can't just do your own COA analysis. You have to look at how your specific action might engender a response on the part of the other parties and it becomes in a 3D chess almost automatically. That's what makes it intellectually fascinating and operationally daunting. And that's why there's someone in the back who wants to join in. Go. Remind people who you are. Mike. It's Mark Walsh, one of the core plaintiffs. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. There's a task that's part of that deal with the social aspect and social being. Is there anything else? Jeremy. Hi, Jeremy Pam. I'm a guest scholar here. Thanks very much for all of the work in this. It's fascinating. I'd like to ask you to talk a little more specifically about how you envision the end state and specifically the range of timing of the end state. I think you've defined tomorrow as an operation, the objective of which is to halt mass violence against civilians. But appropriately enough in the discussion of the ramifications of that kind of operation in the book, you talk about ways in which that objective, which described simply sounds fairly black or white, could shade into other challenges. You talk about having a branch plan for an inadvertent state collapse. There's some discussion of, I think key references to transitional military authority. Some references to transitional civilian authority before, after the transitional military, before you get to handing it over to the host nation. And so the question is, is this kind of operation, is the end state, both the definition of it and the timing of achieving it, contemplate, how do you distinguish the end state here from that of other operations? Is halting violence against civilians meant to be a lower threshold than an operation, the objective of which is strengthening a weak state, defeating an insurgency, building a nation? Thank you. Let me start with that, because this was something that we kicked around for six months, very heavily, let it lie, came back. This is one of these questions that is constantly gnawing at any attempt to do specific planning or course of action development. The bottom line is this, Jeremy, that you have failed with a mass atrocity response operation unless you have stopped the killing. So that is the scene of phenomenon, that is the requirement for mission success. You have choices as you plan your operation, depending on a panoply of factors to include, very importantly, and I wanna come back to this in a second, the notion of whether or not there's a credible follow on authority of any kind, and that could be anything from an interim authority that you set up, although we've seen some of the challenges with that, to a restoration of extant authority, which depends a large part upon whether there was government complicity and the mass atrocity to begin with, and that's gonna be circumstance dependent, to whether or not there is literally a handoff force that you can credibly hand off the state building stabilization functions to. Those are just three of many variations, but the point is, and this is a point that Sally made earlier, that if you don't force that issue early on, and force it into the very beginning of your planning process, you can't plan your concept of operations and all the rest of it that has to come up to that point. So in other words, in an ideal scenario, you can identify the circumstance toward which you are driving your force, and it may or may not include anything beyond stopping the killing. But that depends on the circumstance and you can do things to create greater likelihood of success or failure for the handoff. It's not as though there is or there isn't gonna be a handoff. So that becomes part of your planning process. This is why this is ultimately not simply a military planning handbook. It's a political planning handbook because it's gotta be your political decision makers who are negotiating for a stabilization force to come in with other entities, whether they're other states or an international organization, or who are talking to the extant government if it's not complicit, or the opposition if it is, or a third party in a civil war if they're getting ready to come in. I mean, just think about Rwanda and you think about the crisis that we face there, the ways in which the notion of governance had become completely unraveled and state building was an essential function. That's true in that case. That's just one of a gazillion cases. So the answer to the question about what do you assume is you have to assume the bottom line which is mission success requires stopping the killing and that you have to then factor into your planning and your mission design, all the other pieces, the solutions to which may be political decisions that lie outside of the military part of a planning framework. So that is why the engagement of political authorities and political entities from the outset is absolutely vital to enabling military authorities to do their job on the military side because unless you know what your end state is and what degree of responsibility entails, you can't plan. We always envisage that this was nested within other operations. In the UN capstone doctrine, there's a very nice little slide or diagram in there which shows right in the middle of this a blue colored arrow showing the actual military piece operation inside of a larger greener arrow that moves forward with a humanitarian response with another larger context of the World Bank leading to development so that at the end of that little diagram, it shows a viable capable state that can address the drivers of conflict and take a look at the grievances to lead to some sustained peace. But in nested in the middle of that is this military option in there. And it was very much in that mind that we addressed this and tried to look at what is that military option? What is the actual issue here that was trying to be addressed but being fully cognizant that this is part of a larger comprehensive response and as the lines of effort diagram in here lays out, I think. Thanks. And Louise is gonna have the final question. Let me just say one word of process. First, thanks to the generosity of the car center, we're able to have some refreshments and beverages to continue the conversation a bit more informally as soon as we wrap up. Just so we don't disrupt the rest of the institute to ask if you can, when you go out, if you're gonna hang around a bit and chat, come back in, we'll clear some of the chairs out and we can continue the conversation over some refreshments. But Ann Louise, please. Thanks, Norns. My name is Ann Louise Colgan. I work at Human Rights First, but before that I worked on the Genocide Prevention Task Force report, so congratulations on the release of your own handbook. What I'm especially interested in is in the analysis of the operating environment. You talk about a set of actors that are the others. And Sally, you referred to them a couple of times today as bystanders, but what I'm interested in are the cases where third parties are playing a more active role as enablers of atrocity. So where they're actively involved in the supply chain that brings critical goods and services and resources to the perpetrators. And to what extent have you looked at military options for choking off those supply chains in this project? Thanks. So yes, when we talk about others and we talk about bystanders, we talk about the potential of those bystanders or others to be, to have positive, to have negative impact. And I think that's a great point, that idea of enablers. And I think it speaks to the importance of intelligence. So bringing back the idea of what do we know and how do we know what the others are doing, how do we know what the bystanders are doing and how do they impact upon the situation and the mass atrocity. And I would identify what you're talking about right there because I think it's, we don't talk about it that specifically. And I would identify that as one of the things within that we discussed, and I'll let Dwight, because he probably has a lot more ideas on this than me, but that could use definitely more research when we identify that in the part three. So Dwight, do you want to talk about it? Yeah, actually when we break out the reactors, we have the four main categories, but the others we have really subdivided in the three suburbs. First one's the bystanders. The second one are positive influences and the third one is negative influences. That may not actually be perpetrators, but they can do so. And one of the considerations in tomorrow's operation is that other category. They're not just a bunch of non-descript, we don't really care about them, but they can be decisive factor in tomorrow's situation. So to the extent that you can get bystanders into positive influences, to the extent that you can prevent bystanders from becoming negative influences or becoming victims, to the extent that you can get these other actors onto the side of the interveners, not on the side of the perpetrators. Whatever measures you can do. And I think the bottom line is that this is exactly the reason why we're hoping that SCRS and non-military actors will get their hands into this and start developing their own flexible deterrent operations and lines of operation because at the end of the day, there is going to be a limit to what military forces can perform even in an environment in which say forensics is expected and the norm. So the issue of whether or not we can fully engage that favorite phrase, all instruments of national military power, and thinking comprehensively about the whole chain that supports mass atrocities. That's where this needs to go and this is just the first step. So I'm looking forward to you helping us. Well, we're doing a lot of work on this. So I'm looking forward to talking to you. Well, it's my pleasure to thank everybody. Again, thank you Conor McCartos. Thank you to all the panelists. Thank you for all your good questions. And again, I invite you to grab a refreshment and thank you. Thank you.


The study found that reducing the consumption of ultraprocessed foods can significantly reduce the percentage of people who consume too much saturated fatty acids. This can help reduce the risk of developing heart disease and other chronic illnesses. This article was authored by Euridice Martínez Steele, Carolina Batis, Gustavo Cedil and others.


Hello everyone, how are you? Welcome to Rimini, so Let's start First of all, I'd like to I'd like to welcome all the new Europythonists, I know that we have a lot of regulars coming back to Europython every single year Which is great as well of course, but of course we we always like to have new people come to the community and then Sorry It's not working so we always like to welcome new people to the community and I think it's it's very nice That we always get new people to the conference. I also like to welcome the sponsors Because without the sponsors you'd be paying at least 200 euros more per ticket So I think they deserve a good hand from you So who's behind all this? It's a small team of volunteers We are about 10 people who are really working hard to make this happen And of those 10 people we have two people here up on the stage Actually, we have more we are three This is Christian. He's the chair of the conference So let's talk a little bit about the Europython society. So it's the non-profit organization behind the Europython It's it's quite old from 2004 It runs Europython and it supports the Europython community Yes, as you can read we are all volunteers and we do this mostly just for fun Right. So here's a small slide with the with the basic details that you need to know about your person So one thing hello Hello No, it's not working Someone hit some button. Hello Okay, so I have to shout so These are the basic details. So you have the Wi-Fi Europython 2017 both as SSID and as password We have a conference app in the app stores. You can download it has the schedule We update regularly and we use it to push notifications to you to update you We have a standard hashtag that we use for social channels, which is half your Python We have a telegram group a public one That you can search on telegram and then you can participate there So we have lots and lots of people they're helping each other, which is very nice And for everything else that you want to know we have the conference desk Okay, and you also have a very nice bag. What do you have inside the bag? You have the booklet of the conference. You have some coupons from the sponsors a very nice shirt a super made in Italy bottle and Some gadgets from the sponsors and you can find a lot of things inside the booklet Okay, so this is This is a map of the venue. So we have two floors in this venue We have an upper floor with the keynote room, which is this one Next door. We have a second room, which is just as large as this one. We're using that for talks on the ground floor we have a few more rooms to the if you go around the The corridor if you go to the to the right, we have the pie charm room We have the Python anywhere room and we have the room arco, which is reserved for open space on the left side you have the training rooms tempio one and tempio two and In the middle right in the middle you have this large Room called piazza and this is where we have all the sponsor booths Catering so we have two coffee breaks and we have the lunch and yeah, it's Italian food Also, you can see the water dispensers all around the venue and please use your bottle and This year we don't have breakfast Right. So of course you want to know what talks on and when and if there are any changes So for that we have like I said the conference app. We also have the website There is going to be a conference info system. I don't know whether it's working yet Plus, of course, we have the booklet about the booklet I must say that we had quite a few changes in the program So the booklet was printed three weeks ago just like the display that you see downstairs So the book schedule unfortunately is not really up to date. So it's always good to have a look in the conference app and To check for any changes Okay, so we need help to run the conference. So we need session chairs So, please look for the organizer or for the volunteer to join for this Yeah, you can go up on the website on the website. There's on the registration volunteer There's a link to the volunteer app and you can sign up there So we definitely need a few more session chairs to make everything happen We are not enough people like I said in the beginning just ten people is just not enough to run a conference like this we have we have six keynotes and We have five keynotes in total so one each day and the first keynote is going to be Armin today Just right after this opening session And we also have a lot of trainings We have two rooms for the trainings. They are temp you one and temp you two and Yeah, we have a limited number of seats. So please go there as soon as you can Right, and then we have a whole set of other events waiting for you. So we have a lot of pie data sessions scheduled We have a recruitment session on Tuesday So in case you're looking for a new job a Python job then please go to the recruiting session And you have companies there Who are looking for people like you and they would love to talk to you We also have a poster session You can find that in the in the sponsor room in the large one. We have open space So if you want to run a talk that's not scheduled then you can just go to the open space whiteboard and put up a Post it and suggest a talk and then just take that slot and do whatever you like with that slot We also have a number of help desks help desk is something like word Basically says you can you get help from experts experts are usually people who run certain like open source Projects and then you can just go there and they will help you directly with your problems And of course we have the sprints after the conference But we're going to talk about that about that later So Back to the open spaces. So they all self-organized it Low of two feet you can fight this on Wikipedia We will have a shadow available near the conference desk There will be a big whiteboard for this and we have several rooms all around the van and of course we have the lightning talks Lightning talks if you don't know our very short talks five minute talks You sign up on the flip board a flip chart that we are going to put downstairs next to the conference display It's first come first serve So if we when we set up the board you have to go there quite quickly to reserve your spot And then you put up the title the name of what your name And then we're going to use that to call you up when the lightning talk Session starts and you can do pretty much anything in the lightning talk session. It's just five minutes. It's usually it's good if it's funny It's It should be helpful. It should be informative. You should not use it for presenting your company Okay, it's social event. We will have a social event this Thursday It will be around seven The place will be the coconuts. It's a club near the beach You can buy the ticket online and you can get the ticket at the registration desk We have something new this year. It's called a quiet room So if you want to just chill out a bit and maybe not use your computer for a short while Then you can go to the quiet room. It's upstairs on the first floor in the room Ponte. It's called and you can go there Just to relax. It's going to be there. There's some rules set up in that room You can have a look at those so basically it just means that you shouldn't you shouldn't really talk You shouldn't discuss anything just sit there and maybe work or relax restore energy conference up you can find program on the conference up you can find the application on the Apple market and on the also for the Android phones It's not connected with the website. So you cannot have the same account You will find the maps the programs as I said and also a lot of useful information so yesterday we already had the beginners workshop, which was very very popular and the mentors there they They want to basically share this idea of helping other people and make it possible for all the attendees to basically Say okay, I can help others who may may have a question So what they did is they created these stickers as you can see here You can get those stickers dancers at the conference desk And if you wear the sticker basically says that you're open to accept any questions from anyone And then if you want help from someone you can just approach these people and just ask them questions So I think it's a very nice idea volunteers yellow t-shirt So, yeah, we are here to help you can find volunteers inside the rooms close to the registration desk and Please we need help for a lot of stuff so join the volunteers and With this light I'd also like to thank all the volunteers that have helped yesterday set up the conference We had quite a few people and it was really really nice to see that people were open to help And I think they need a big big hand from you Right, then we we have a code of conduct. It's essentially it's be nice to each other and be professional And please don't spam This applies to everything that we do at the conference including all the social channels So all the communication that happens at the conference and related to the conference is on this code of conduct If you have any problems that you see or you you don't feel well in your in your setting or something happened That you want to talk about then you should contact our coc team, which is These two fine ladies including myself So just Just so you get some faces Okay speakers, so please contact the Session chair of your room and of your session. Please be there on time Please also try your notebook with with our system with the system of the venue I'm sorry if you have the new Mac book probably it will not work We will try to add in or resolve this problem. We also have some new adapters for this, but At least for now, we are not very lucky so Make sure to be there at least 10 minutes before the beginning of your session and after the talk remember to leave the adapters there and Also, please If you can upload your slides on the website All right. We're almost done There's one more thing that we have to say that it's not allowed to have food or drinks in the session rooms Accept your bottles you so you can take your bottles into the rooms and then have like drink water We'd appreciate if you follow this because it just keeps the rooms clean and we don't have that much issues with the venue then so There's nothing much left to say just accept maybe enjoy the conference and