ALLIES: Building Civil-Military Relations for the Future

Photograph: Allies Intellectual Roundtable November 2007

The IGL's ALLIES program experienced a very successful surge this year with the infusion of INSPIRE Fellow Gregg Nakano. ALLIES (Alliance Linking Leaders in Education and the Services), the Institute's civil-military initiative, grew out of the IGL's long-standing interactions with the US Military and Naval Academies (starting as far back as the first EPIIC symposium on International Terrorism, when a delegation of USMA cadets participated with their professor, Augustus Richard Norton).

Following the 2006 EPIIC Symposium "The Politics of Fear", three EPIIC students - Su Hamblin, Peter Maher, and Padden Murphy - worked together to form (and name) ALLIES to intensify the linkages and programming between Tufts and the academies. This included sending delegations of Tufts students to each of the service academies' international conferences, joint research trips, public programs on campus, and successfully encouraging the academies to establish their own ALLIES groups.

A panelist in the 2007 EPIIC symposium and Voices from the Field program, Gregg Nakano was intrigued and energized by the students and ALLIES and enlisted to help build the program at Tufts and at the academies and raise its profile with the Department of Defense and other military institutions, such as the Army War College.

Mr. Nakano's background and interests were a perfect fit. Prior to coming to the Institute, he served as a civil-military liaison officer for USAID's Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA), the United States' lead federal agency for overseas disaster response. Operations with USAID/OFDA included civil-military coordination in Banda Aceh during the Indian Ocean tsunami response; conducting safety and security assessments of the population centers in southern Iraq in the Spring of 2003; conducting structural damage assessments for the United Nations Disaster Assessment and Coordination team after the earthquake in Bam, Iran; and leading a CBRNE contingency response team for the Department of State Consequence Management Support Team during the Athens Olympics. A United States Naval Academy graduate, Gregg served as a Marine infantry officer during the first Gulf War and coordinated with civilian authorities as part of Special Purpose Joint Task Force - Los Angeles during the 1992 Rodney King riots. In addition to receiving his MALD from The Fletcher School, Gregg spent three years studying Mandarin at Fudan University in China and a year studying Farsi at the University of Tehran's International Center for Persian Studies in Iran.

Working with ALLIES Co-Chairs Nancy Henry and Jesse Sloman, the organization took great strides this year on all levels, beginning with the fall Intellectual Roundtable on "A Classroom for the Leadership of 2050."

Nancy and Jesse describe it below.

ALLIES Intellectual Roundtable: A Classroom for the Leadership of 2050

Last November, ALLIES held its first-ever Intellectual Roundtable, "A Classroom for the Leadership of 2050." Participants -- drawn from the military, US government, civil society, and academia -- wrestled for a day and a half with the needs for civil-military education to create the agile, interagency leaders required to integrate all aspects of US foreign policy--development, diplomacy, and defense--for the future . Ultimately, the roundtable set the stage for a much larger follow-on symposium to be held next year.

The themes for the Roundtable were built upon the principles that led Institute students to create ALLIES in the spring of 2006. The initiative is based on the idea that, since the Vietnam War, there has been a growing divide between people who serve in the military and civilians who formulate policy. The disconnect starts at the undergraduate level, where future military and civilian leaders are provided with different educational backgrounds with contrasting and sometimes competing assumptions and objectives. By introducing students, cadets and midshipmen to each other at the initial stages of their careers, ALLIES hopes to enable a dialogue and to empower relationships that will facilitate communication and cooperation as each rises in their respective organizations.

To that end, in addition to professionals, ALLIES hosted nine cadets and midshipmen from West Point, the Naval Academy, and the Air Force Academy. The cadets and midshipmen lived with the Tufts students, ate meals with them, and attended the same social events. This additional interaction beyond the formal programming, was just as important as participation in the Roundtable and went a long way towards building friendships that can be maintained as both sides move up the hierarchies of their respective organizations.

The proceedings took on a different format than previous ALLIES events. Rather than have the principal participants speak to a passive audience, the organizers made interpersonal interaction their priority. To facilitate this, professional participants were mixed with civilian and military undergraduates at small tables of four or five. Each discussion session started with a short presentation to introduce a topic, but the bulk of the allotted time was spent in intimate conversation within each table. Students and principals were able to rapidly bounce ideas back and forth, as well as digress to talk about other important subjects that came up over the course of the discussion. After an hour to an hour and a half, each table concluded the session by choosing a member to report to the entire group on the results of their individual discussion.

While the Roundtable mostly focused on the role education, especially undergraduate education, can play in alleviating civil-military friction, the open discussions format enabled discussion on a wide variety of related issues. Some of these included the appropriateness of the use of the military for humanitarian assistance and reconstruction missions, institutional impediments to interagency cooperation, ways of engaging academia in policy formulation, and the funding inequalities between major USG institutions.

The Intellectual Roundtable was an important step for ALLIES in moving its commitment to civil-military education beyond the borders of Tufts University and into a wider forum. The Roundtable's focus on interagency cooperation as a means of creating innovative and effective undergraduate civil-military educational programs represents the culmination of ALLIES' efforts and programming for members of the Tufts campus over the past year and a half. Most importantly, this Roundtable set the stage for the future of ALLIES by providing direction and impetus for expanding the program on the Tufts campus, at our partner military academies, and beyond.

-- Jesse Sloman and Nancy Henry, Co-Chairs, ALLIES

Participants in the Roundtable included Col. John Agoglia, Director of the Peacekeeping Stability Operations Institute at the Army War College, and Donald Muncy, Senior Intelligence Analyst at the Joint Center for Operational Analysis of the Joint Forces Command. For a full list of Roundtable participants, please click here.

Another significant annual event for ALLIES is the Joint Research Project (JRP). The first annual JRP was conducted in 2007. Four Tufts students, three West Point cadets, and one West Point faculty member comprised the team that traveled to Jordan for two weeks to research Jordan's security and counter-terrorism strategies. The research team held during the two-week period approximately 30 meetings with high ranking government, military, and U.S. Embassy officials, prominent individuals from the media and civil society, members of parliament, and leaders of local NGOs and think tanks, including Ambassador Hadan Abu-Nimah, Director, Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies; Ambassador Muhammad Allaf, Jordanian Ambassador to the United Nations; Ruhail Gharaibeh, First Secretary and Head of Political Branch, Islamic Action Front; Major General (Ret.) Mohammad Irdaisat, Director, Center for Strategic Studies (CSS), Royal Jordanian National Defence College (RJNDC); Naser Joudeh, Official Spokesman of the Government of Jordan; Lieutenant Colonel Tarek Mekhail, U.S. Army Defense Attaché; Mouin Rabbani, Senior Analyst, Middle East Program, International Crisis Group (EPIIC'86); Imran Riza, United Nations High Commission on Refugees Representative in Amman, Jordan; Daniel Rubenstein, Deputy Chief of Mission, U.S. Embassy; and Ayman Safadi, Editor-in-Chief, Al-Ghad Newspaper.

In June 2008, six Tufts undergraduate students, one graduate student from Tufts' Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, two cadets, and two midshipmen will spend approximately four weeks in Jordan, building on the work of the first JRP. This Second Annual JRP represents a crucial transition. First, it will leverage and expand an already established network of Jordanian contacts from 2007. Second, it will enhance last year's post-research dissemination so that the JRP delegation's findings are shared more widely and have greater resonance in the growing inter-institution ALLIES community, and it will set a logistical and institutional framework for the 2009 JRP trip, projected to take place in Asia (most likely in Japan).

This year, the ALLIES delegation will explore Jordanian politics and society from multiple perspectives, meeting with government officials, NGOs, academics, journalists, UN agencies, and think-tanks via formal and informal interviews, organizational site visits, and dialogue sessions. The delegation will expand on the 2007 JRL by making new contacts, in particular with Jordanian university students, and by exploring collaboration on a civil-military dialogue concept with the United Nations University's International Leadership Institute in Amman. Mr. Nakano and faculty member Lt. John Hoy from the US Naval Academy will accompany the group.

Alexandra Taylor, Tufts'10

Alex Taylor is an International Relations major and is from northern California. At Tufts, Alex has been involved with many programs of the Institute for Global Leadership including the 2006-2007 EPIIC Colloquium on Global Governance: Crises and Intervention and is a member of the IGL's Synaptic Scholar's program. Additionally, Alex has interned on a number of projects studying terrorism and the process of radicalization at the Fletcher School's Jebsen Center for Counterterrorism Studies and at the Harvard Health and Psychophysiology Lab. Alex is currently studying abroad in Madrid, Spain for the spring 2008 semester. She is one of the co-leaders of the 2008 JRP.

Andrew Byers, USMA'08

Andrew Byers is majoring in International and Strategic History and also pursuing a minor in Terrorism Studies. He is from Buffalo, NY and plans to branch into the Infantry after graduation. Prior to going to Jordan, his only foreign travel was to Germany. He was a member of Army Crew for three years and has held various leadership positions in the corps of cadets, including his current position as Headquarters Company Commander.

In addition to these major initiatives, ALLIES continued to send delegations of Tufts students to academy and other military conferences, including the inaugural Consortium for Complex Operations, funded by the Department of Defense and organized in cooperation with other organizations, such as USAID. ALLIES also sponsored and co-sponsored a variety of public programming on campus, including a panel on Darfur and a daylong symposium on US-China relations.

Mr. Nakano just completed a very successful trip, which included strengthening and establishing contacts at the US Institute of Peace, the Department of State's Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Development, USAID, the Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, the US Army War College, the US Naval Academy, and the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre in Ottawa, Canada. He was accompanied on the trip by IGL Director Sherman Teichman, Director of Peace and Justice Studies Paul Joseph, and Advancement's George Kosar.

One of the people who attended the Roundtable in the fall and who participated in the meetings in Washington, DC was was David F. Davis, the Director of the Peace Operations Policy Program, Senior Fellow and Research Professor in The School of Public Policy, George Mason University. He commented on ALLIES, "I am always astounded at what can happen when someone decides its time! I'm hoping this is a part of a continued cooperation. I will be at the NATO High Level Civil Military Cooperation Awareness Seminar next week in Cologne and hope to tell them about what you are doing." END