3. CONCLUSION
As the Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute (PKSOI) celebrates its 25 th year assisting
the Army in preparing for complex operations, the Army’s Foreign Humanitarian Assistance (FHA)
Program and Proponency at PKSOI is in its first year. Former Chief of Staff of the Army General
Gordon Sullivan identified a quarter century ago that although the Army might wish to focus training for
high-intensity combat, the reality is that it would instead be required to accomplish a host of other
missions in cooperation with United Nations (UN) and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs).
Experience has proven that the outdated mindset positing that if an organization could conduct
combined arms maneuver then it could do anything is quite incomplete.
Well-honed specialty skills and understanding of people, policies, and procedures are imperative
to accomplishing these critical – but episodic – disaster response and stability missions. Conducting
joint, combined, or even coalition warfare relies upon the existence of common concepts, terminology,
and procedures between military peers. Civil military operations should not assume any such
homogeneity across the array of actors during a humanitarian crisis. The DoD must acknowledge that it
will likely not be in the lead, but requires cadre who understand the policies, best practices, and
personalities of this peculiar yet powerful cast of actors to best support progress towards common goals.
Many norms of a traditional military culture are absent or even reversed in a foreign humanitarian
crisis. Military commanders accustomed to leading may instead find that they are best utilized in support
roles, and may find that their comparatively robust resources become greatly restrained. The funding,
authorities, and direction that military commanders are accustomed to exercising instead become
constraints and restraints. Senior leaders must exercise disciplined initiative in mission command as the
DOD assumes a supporting role to deliver unique capabilities and capacities with unparalleled efficiency
and agility during FHA.
FHA operations are far more complicated in a complex crisis, wherein conflict between armed
actors can greatly impede the required response from the international community. The UN recently
reported that in just the last decade their response has shifted from 80% natural disaster response to 80%
complex crisis involving active conflict. This means that the DOD will likely find itself at ground zero in
many of these responses and must be able to coordinate effectively. Our understanding of the array of
stakeholders and vulnerabilities of the at-risk populations will inform the international community’s
perception of our response for years to come.
Further, a fundamental dichotomy emerges for service members responding to these missions.
Service members, who are reluctant to kill and destroy by nature, steel themselves to do so in combat, yet
most of these same men and women would rise naturally to come to the aid of those who have survived
disasters. They instantly see a multitude of things that they could do if we just employed full resources of
the military toward the problem. However, our response systems demand that the military is often the
last resort for delivering aid and not the first to line for response. This becomes acutely evident when
the military directed to react to a humanitarian crisis in an environment where lack of security restricts
the humanitarian response. Senior leaders must exercise disciplined initiative as the DOD assumes a
supporting role to deliver unique capabilities and capacities with unparalleled velocity and agility without
derailing the recovery and development efforts.
Strategic leaders require a broad aperture to comprehend the diverse array of NGOs, IOs, and
multilateral stakeholders conducting disaster response and humanitarian assistance efforts, as well as the
nuanced meanings of the humanitarian principles like humanity, impartiality, and independence that
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