The story of our country's relationship with Afghanistan. Didn't end when the 82nd Airborne Commander walked up, the ramp of a C-17 and and flew out of Kabul. And then August of 2021. There was something like eighty or eighty-five thousand Afghan evacuees who wound up here in the United States and that was the big challenge. How do we keep the faith with these people? How do we We help these folks out who, who many of them spent
years of their life? Standing alongside our brothers and sisters in arms, putting themselves In Harm's Way to achieve the goals that we were working towards there in 20 years in Afghanistan. Welcome to the ones. He a podcast. Your host today is mr. Rob Boudreau, once the a is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military diplomats development officers and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with a partner.
Nations people and Leadership, our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of Foreign Relations. The contact, the show, email us at see a podcasting at gmail.com, or look us up on the Civil Affairs association website at www.wrc.org. I'll have those in the show notes, we're joined today by Major Jimmie, Johnson and steps are and Greg Shaffer. Major Jimmie. Johnson is a marine Manpower officer in civil Affairs.
Officer in 1021 and 2022, immobilized, in support of operations, allies. Welcome with a civil Affairs, Detachment from the main course, for civil Affairs group, in the civilian career, who practices law with the Department of the Navy's office of general counsel in Norfolk.
Virginia steps are great. Schaefer enlisted in the Marine Corps in 2009. From Evansville Indiana, you spent his first five years on active duty, in the inventory, with diplomas to several countries including Afghanistan and Yemen transitioning. To the reserve component in 2014. It laterally moved to civil. Errors and completed his bachelor's and master's degrees in Justice law and public policy.
Since then he has provided see a support the several multinational exercises around the world and mobilized in 2021 for operation allies. Welcome, all the participants today would like to note that all of their views are stated in their personal capacities and do not necessarily represent those of the United States government or any of its agencies or components gentlemen. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much for having us. And I'm very glad to be here. I'm excited.
Excited to be here too. And it's nice to have the Marines taken the podcast over for a change.
Good stuff. So, major Johnson, tell me how did a bunch of Marines end up doing civil Affairs activities for the Army on a base full of Afghan evacuees and Rural Wisconsin. It was a huge project that we got involved with and had the honor and the privilege to support just to give you a little bit of context and help the listeners understand a little bit of how the work that we were doing as a part of operation allies.
Welcome. To evacuate US, Government Personnel private citizens but then also tens of thousands of Afghan civilians from Kabul and in August of 2021 to fly as many people as or possible out of Hamid Karzai International Airport. And of course we all do the very setting photos and videos of that effort including the loss of 11 Marines and Navy sailor and one Army soldier during that evacuation of her the back end of that.
Ian was, what do we do with all these folks that have now gotten out of Afghanistan, been given humanitarian parole, or some other form of legal status, in the United States and ended up being thing between 75 and 85 thousand Afghans who were brought to the United States on, very short. Notice, how do we take care of those folks? How do we do right by them? And that's where we make the transition from operation, allies Refuge the evacuation, operation to operation. Allies, welcome.
Oh, aw. Which was the care and resettlement. Operation, weight w was a uf's northcom defense support to Civil Authorities Mission disco to support the Department of Homeland, Security, to operate a tree, settlement sites at military installations across the United States. So these were places to house care feed but also educate and and provide Social Services support to these tens of thousands of people who were on their way to making a new life and in the United States, the
Marines initially had two pieces of that were one at Fort barfoot and another at Camp up. Sure Quantico in our civil Affairs, Detachment was mobilized a little bit late in the game to get out and support. Oh aw the first half Ganz reach the United States at the end of August in 2021 in our mobilization date was 1 December and we were initially deployed.
To Quantico. But by the time we got, there is very very close to completing operations, most of the population of the camp at Quantico had been resettled. And so, what do we do with this group of civil Affairs, Marines, who are on five-month orders to support the Marines piece of? Oh, aw. The answer was actually to reassign our civil Affairs Detachment out to the Army's task force, working at Fort McCoy.
Boy, Wisconsin. So we packed up our bags and flew from Quantico out to Wisconsin in the dead of winter between the end of 2021 and into January of twenty two, we felt a little bit like we would have been in some ways better prepared to actually deploy to Afghanistan and do civil Affairs in Afghanistan. We were to deploy to Wisconsin but it turned out to be a really great opportunity to work with a very good group of army, soldiers, DHS civilians, other
civilians. And across the interagency and across the alphabet soup of ngos, who were doing that work at Fort McCoy. When we arrived, there were still about 10,000 Afghan evacuees. The term we use is guests for Afghans who are in base with us. We steer clear of the word Refugee that has pretty particular legal connotation that goes along with it. And at that point, we're helping these people to start transitioning to the next phase of their life.
So we like using the word guest of the United States government. We were very fortunate to work with a group of army leaders who were very familiar with the Civil Affairs. Discipline, the task force, Commanding General Brigadier, General, Andre Carter and her Chief of Staff. Colonel Scotty lynnae, both Army reservists who had a background working either in or very closely with a civil Affairs
forces. The guidance that we got from the see Gene from Chief of Staff was pretty much just Ooh, civil Affairs. And that's perfect. We were able to get in and take that maneuver space. That they gave us to do a good estimate of what the situation was in the Civil environment and then start racking and stacking. Our priorities was like a really professional golfer who's been looking for just the right pitching wedge. You know that they've been missing from their bag when we
got there. We're very warmly welcomed and we're put to work immediately. Okay. So you deployed as the Detachment Commander is that correct? I was Quantico was about 18 Marines total, and we split up 10 of us went to Joint Base mcguire-dix-lakehurst in New Jersey.
And then I took a group of eight Marines to be a Detachment - going to Fort McCoy, the chief of staff had set up a very active, female engagement team and we integrated, those Soldier to turn it into a sort of - reinforced Detachment and that worked like gangbusters. So we had a very robust capacity and then by linking up are cool trained and very experienced civil Affairs, Marines with a lot of really motivated Savvy thoughtful army soldiers, who had been doing the work for
several weeks. We were able to get really, really good coverage to the task force, and being the best vehicle for a lot of the ngos and interagency Partners. At the camp, who needed to do Outreach with the guest population. We wound up working very very closely. And even integrating some of those interagency and NGO Partners into our civil Affairs teams. Basically be some additional augmentation to where we're really ending up.
Sending Swiss army knife teams out where it's Marine civil Affairs, Specialists Army, female engagement soldiers, Department of Homeland Security, NGO, immigration and resettlement, specialist it wound up being a really really good combination on. Top of all that it was me and staff sergeant Shaffer. We had a very very Very light, Detachment headquarters as sort of the G9 civil Affairs cell within the Task Force Headquarters.
I spent a lot of time going to meetings and less time out in the field than I would have liked but that was sort of the bargain that I made so that I could give my team leaders the time and see room to work with the guest community. So that's what our scratch-built civil Affairs. Detachment looked like it's tough as you mention a couple quarters in the gym. If you will see you had the HS folks and Asthma Gio's. Any other particular
organization. The kind of stick it on your mind is having a really important role that tied into what you all were. We're looking to accomplish. Yeah, absolutely. And I'll anchor down on VHS for just a moment and talk a little bit about disco defense support to Civil Authorities. That is not a common Marine Core task. And so, it took a little bit of adjustment for us to plug into it when we deploy, or even when we do humanitarian, Ins we go abroad, right?
We're expeditionary and character, but here the need was so great that we are deploying to support domestic Civil Authorities. In what is essentially a humanitarian relief mission in the Homeland. Even within disk allies welcome was an oddball typically for a hurricane Disaster Response, FEMA is the lead Federal agency. They are leading the way and typically US Army.
North forces are providing support to FEMA as Interval agency here, the Department of Homeland Security was the lead and everybody was supporting them and so it was a little bit of a new process for our DHS colleague to be serving in that role. And it was a learning process for us to be supporting them, but it ended up working out very well. We at Fort McCoy, had a DHS coordinating official, who was our boss?
Everybody in the task force from the dod side from the interagency side rolled up to that. DHS Federal Coordinating official. There were other interagency partners on Deck, Department of State, had the point when it came to coordinating resettlement for the guests, to help them get on to the rest of their lives and Department of State was using contracted a support to do that work. It was something I was not familiar with, but it made a lot of sense.
We actually had a bunch of non-governmental organizations who had been contracted to support the oaw mission in different respects. So for instance, And the International Rescue committee and the International Organization for migration since were contracted to support Department of State and processing the resettlement and
that was just great. These were the old pros from Dover. Some of them had come out of the field, all over the world working in some very challenging environments, to come and do this work. And so brought just a ton of expertise a ton of experience to that work and really made it a lot better. In addition, we had contracted out the US Conference of Of Catholic Bishops to provide Social Services for the guests, but also just kind of morale welfare and Recreation.
There were even classes that USCCB was able to set up and we were sort of running, kind of a mixture of daycare and Day School for the children who were at the camp with us, so that it wasn't just the green, Suitor soldiers and Marines having to do that work, right? We're good at moving stuff around. We're good at getting a lot of people housed and fed and taken care of, but providing the human touch. It was excellent to have the support from the NGO contractors.
In the task force, that was a huge value added for the work that we were doing. Are you mentioned a couple? I'll call him unicorn aspects of your mission. So you're performing a mission on us soil and humanitarian, contact. Something that as you pointed out, our kind of outliers in the way we think of civil Affairs activities. So receiving a mission is Broad or flexible. If you will is go do civil Affairs. What did that mean? For your Detachment in terms of mission planning civil prep of
the bat? Little space. What were you looking at to get yourself prepared once you hit the ground. Yeah. I'll talk about Fort McCoy just because we wound up spending most of our time there by the time we got into Quantico. It was very few guests left over. And we really kind of took that almost as our pre-deployment training to kind of get our heads around, just the experience of the guests leaving.
Kabul their first few months, you know, bouncing around between bases and stations overseas on their way to the oaw camps, all over the US with those few. Excessive of work in Quantico behind us. We had a pretty good idea of what these folks have gone through. What, some of the problems were that they were facing. And so we were able to, you know, I won't say hit the ground running important koi, but at least get a good free. Mph route, March Pace.
I think that was very helpful to have that behind us. The other thing was we took a week to just be here. Get our team's out into the neighborhoods working with the guests and also introducing ourselves to both the uniformed and the civilian leadership. Ship that we're working in support for several months before we arrived and that week was kind of a luxury that I thought we needed to have in order to make an informed judgment about what was going to
be our primary focus of effort. And I'm happy to talk about what we came up with. Before we do that let me ask you. Did you have a particular philosophy or approach just recognizing that this mission was being carried out on our home turf with a lot of folks paying attention, what was shaping your leadership for your test? Yeah, The Guiding Light was respect empathy and understanding.
I think often times when we as Americans think about people coming here to our country for the first time, we think about it, most like they won a lottery ticket, right? We're proud to be Americans. We love our country were True Believers and there was some of that with a lot of the guests that we were working with. There was a recognition that there were going to be opportunities open to them here in the United States that they may not have had.
Had if they had kept on, living their lives in Afghanistan. But along with that was the way the decision was made for them. These very often were leaders in Afghanistan, civil leaders Business Leaders, military leaders who were forced to flee what for many people had been very successful professional lives of service to their country and were forced you know for fear of their life to come to the United States.
And so the Guiding Light I say for us was to just to be mindful of that and to be sensitive to the kind of common trend for many of the guests who we were working with. And to the extent that we could, I will say 99.9% of the time, our colleagues in the task force, had a similar attitude and understood and appreciated, the that commonality in the experience of the guests. But I think that it was often times helpful to have us there as sort of The Lorax, right?
We speak for the Is everybody else's job is to support the guests. Our job is to try to articulate the needs of the guests population to understand the impact and effect. That what the task force is doing is going to have on the guests population and try to make that work more effective. And so, it was very, very good to have a G9 elements sitting in the Task Force Headquarters whose sole purpose is to be the advisor on the state of the
civilian population. S population and to provide advice and Counsel on what is going to be the effect of our military operations, on the guest population. And I'm using bar doctrinal civil Affairs, phraseology to describe that in this kind of Oddball environment. But that was the approach that we took, we were not conducting kinetic military operations but we were Movin, big trucks around. We were moving, lots of people
around. We were doing a flavor of military operations, 10 or 15. Years ago, we might have called it military operations other than War, right? And so just because those operations were focused on curing for a civilian population that didn't make it any less important to have someone there providing insight into the Civil
environment. I think of anything it was more important and we're very glad to be a provide some of that Insight. Yeah it's definitely a paper if I could bring you into the conversation. Can you tell us what was your role in the detachment? Certainly my role in the Detachment was to manage civil
information. I also wound up dual hatting later on in the mission and supporting some of the messaging out to the guests population and with this major Johnson and I actually had a conversation right before we went to Fort McCoy of having me as a dedicated civil information manager. And he asked what I thought about using the stability assessment framework is kind of a framework to Build and conduct assessments and figure out how
we can best affect population. And I had just been to the Civil military. Planners course not even a year before that. And my initial reaction was no, we're going to be trying to kill a mosquito with machine gun without approach. It's too robust and it looking back. I kind of laugh at myself. I stopped my thought about it and realized that we could take a modified approach with the stability assessment, framework and Taylor, and craft it to suit our needs at Fort.
And so it m on tonight, I always give you credit for thinking of that before. We got out there you never know what you're going to be walking into. But on the data side, at least having a general idea of the story. We wanted our information to tell and how we wanted it to drive action. I was able to start looking into different systems that I could use to digitize some of this and automate. I don't know if you want me to get into specific tools and techniques without now or if we want to.
Hold off on that a little. Yeah, we'll get into that in just a moment, but one of the things major Johnson brought up earlier talking Doctrine and complicating hard. See a test, it sounds like soft skills were really kind of a critical aspect of what you're doing. So perhaps separate from the Sim, what were some of those soft skills? You think we're most important? Yeah, with soft skills, but a lot of times were doing our
drill weekends. We'll put together these training scenarios and I've always advocated for Role players in your training scenarios even if the focus of the training is not civil engagement assessment because it allows you to kind of get reps on treating people.
Like people treating everyone with dignity and respect and understanding that, you know, a few weeks or months ago, they were in a horrible situation and jumped on a plane not knowing where everything was going to take them and and they were kind of putting themselves in in our hands. Trusting us to make sure that they were taken care of and their families were taking care of.
And so, approaching engagements from a human first perspective, trying to make sure that people's needs were being taken care of. I would say, it was probably the biggest soft skill, not only because it kind of bought us some trust with the population, but also it would allow our engagements to get a lot deeper. We would encourage the Marines and soldiers regularly, when offer Sit down and have tea with the families. Learn a little more about them.
And it's something that's preached in our school house and it certainly proved true here. You know, we'd have a conversation. We do our engagement and then they invite us in 40 and we'd find out 10 times. As much information, we sat down to have tea with them, learn about their family, then we gather during the the proper engagement that had happened. Three minutes before that, right? In terms of soft skills, I would say that's number one and then the and soft skill.
Is that the outside of the box thinking when you encounter issues and are trying to come up with solutions to them, one thing that came up while we were in there was covid that was about the time that the Omicron Jerian had started spreading across the country and there were quarantined Barracks that you wouldn't want to go into without any kind of protection.
And so we had Marines or working with Medical Teams to get us full PPE so that we could make sure that we were serving the entire population and not those were outside of the quarantine barracks. We had situations, where Marines would recognize that kids didn't have activities and by working with some of the ngos to get them coloring books, or games that they can play that, that would keep them from exploring
Mischief in other areas, right? So, the two soft skills, I mentioned, first that cumin first perspective, and then just being creative and thinking outside the box, really helped us but stuff, I think tying in those soft and hard skill aspects of being a effective civil affairs.
Marines, you both have the benefit of serving in a reserve capacity so you both have civilians careers and skills you can rely on made you God said, if you could talk for a moment about some of those things that you've seen from your civilian career, that translated, well to operating effectively, as a civil Affairs Marine mobilizing United States for my particular background of being a department of Navy office of general counsel attorney. We are the guardians of fiscal
law. So there's a thing called the anti-deficiency ACT Which is designed to protect the power of the purse, the Congress holds and there's a rule under the anti-deficiency act that prohibits the Executive Branch from accepting voluntary services or goods from an outside entity without some kind of authorization from Congress.
And now there's a lot of there's authorizations out there, but we did not have one laid down in particular for operation allies, welcome, I'm sitting in a meeting and a new charitable organization. Is trying to get in and provide some services to the guest population. Very helpful to have that perspective and say we one of the real lawyers to come in here and take a look and make sure that we're going to do this the right way. And that's really what it comes down to.
And so I think having that background in perspective was helpful to just be another set of eyeballs on the work that we were doing to try to everything in line with the rules and regulations that govern us whenever we're doing any kind of military operation. And I like You kind of tie that back into the authorities which are going to dictate the military's ability to execute any Mission. So it's really great perspective. That's on Schaefer. What are your thoughts on that?
What I learned in graduate school with Statistics and research methodology knowing that I was going to be taking a very heavy data approach to this and that I wanted to try to automate and streamline as much of the reporting and data analysis as I could those fundamentals. Tremely, helpful. And then beyond that, the work that I've done is a program manager and a consultant. I had a really kind of keen sense of what are the data points. What are the kpis?
What's the information major Johnson is going to want to see that can help him drive action in the camp. And so from the very beginning of it using this ability assessment framework, I was working backward. Actually all the way to that, right? Knowing that I would want to be capturing stability and instability factors on a quantitative and qualitative perspectives, I needed to understand how is the data going to be coded in the system that we used?
What's that going to look like? And then walk my way backwards from that to actually build those surveys and assessment reports that our teams would use. So that everything would pop out correctly and save me, tens of hours every week trying to get the data straight. And so just having a general understanding Standing of how data Works, how to analyze it, helped a lot.
And then, for my time, as a program manager, I learned a lot about Microsoft Excel, which I feel like most listeners right now. Probably just turn the podcast off because nobody likes to talk about Excel. But what was really powerful was having a general idea of what Excel could do? No, I'm not saying that I knew how to do everything that I wound up doing. But I had a general idea of what it could do.
And I spent, you know, maybe five ten hours with some Google searches and watch YouTube videos with just a general concept of what Excel was capable of, and I was able to use that to build a dynamic dashboard that. Also captured action items that we needed to accomplish which it without this probably would have taken 20 to 30 hours a week, just to collate the data and analyze it to figure out insights. I was able to do this by downloading the data poppy in the dashboard.
And it would pop out results and 15 seconds. And so the power there is that we went from keeping myself busy analyzing the data to being able to focus on what the issues are with underlying problems are that are causing those issues and then work with teams on creating solutions to help address them. So I would say that for my civilian career that was really what I brought to the table that helped us go from doing the job well to doing it, great. Where was the data coming from the teams?
Had through their phones, access to an application that we use to submit these reports? And so they would go out into the community conduct civil engagements assessments. And these might be three-minute conversations, these might be three our conversations, right? And they would typically take
handwritten notes. It's kind of rude to be on your phone, in front of someone jamming information and and then after they would finish the engagement students, Since they would go into this application, fill out the survey report which, you know, it was kind of backwards built so that the data would come out the way that we needed it. And then as they submitted, that it went into a secure
cloud-based system. So that from the interagency operations center where my desk was at any time of the day I could log in and download the most updated information. What is really great about this tool is that it also worked in low and know, no connectivity environments and so it's cell
service was on and off there. And so if they submitted a report and there wasn't cell service, it worked in the background, once there was connectivity, it would batch submit every five minutes, which gave us the ability to see data coming in and almost real time throughout the day. And normally, we didn't need to see that, you know, on an
hour-by-hour basis. But maybe if there had been a recent implementation or intervention that we had done, And we were curious to see what those impacts look like. You know, thinking measures of Effectiveness, we did have the ability to on kind of a minute-by-minute hour-by-hour basis, see what was going on in the community.
That's awesome and you're talking about something that a lot of military professionals is unheard of the idea of being able to collect us, objectively obtained information. But in real time get that up to decision makers. That's, that's terrific. So what were you doing with the data as it's being Processed you talk about how was a time saving measure? What would those key outputs that you're looking to obtain from the data, the key outputs that we were looking to obtain were resilience?
He's and grievances or instability factors and stability factors and there was a lot of thought that went in on the front end of this trying to predict what would be the big topics that we would see, is it going to be food clothing medicine? All services time that we had spent at Quantico, gave us a finger in the air, at least what we thought we might run into. But this was not a system that was created and then just stayed static. The entire time is as information would come in.
And we realize that there were some areas that we had missed. I had the ability to go back into the system and add new topics so that are collectors could easily tag the report as it needed to be to allow for that easy. Isis again, because of the way. The data was captured, we were able to analyze Trends really easily. So you would ask what were the things that we were looking at? They said stability and instability factors.
We had some filters built into this so that we could see week over week or day over day, whatever time Horizon we thought was appropriate, we could see clothing issues are on the rise or food issues are going down or medical care has spiked. And then we could dive in to the Native data behind that because quantitative data is great, right? It tells you what direction to look qualitative data is what really gives you that underlying story and helps you understand
the Nuance of the situation. And, you know, for example, they, I'm gonna give a hypothetical example. This is not some do something, I'll jump in and take a crack at it. Ladies and gentlemen, we're going to split the episode here. So come back next week for the exciting conclusion. Thanks for listening. If you get a chance, please like And subscribe, and rate the show on your favorite podcast platform.
Also, if you're interested in coming on the show, or hosting an episode, email us at, see, a podcasting at gmail.com? I'll have the email and see a association website in the show notes. And now most importantly to those, currently out in the field, working with a partner, Ins people or leadership to forward us relations. Thank you all for what you're doing. Stay tuned for more. Great episodes one. See a podcast. Ins people or leadership to
forward us relations. Thank you all for what you're doing. Stay tuned for more. Great episodes one. See a podcast.