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Countering China and Russia: The Hidden Advantages of Women, Peace, and Security
00:50:39
How can Women, Peace, and Security be leveraged to counter China and Russia? Dr. Kathleen McInnis discusses a new brief with Dr. Kyleanne Hunter and Monica S. Herrera.
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- [00:04]
Dr. Kathleen McInnes
This is Smart Women, Smart Power, a podcast that features conversations with some of the world's most powerful women.
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Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
We feature thought leaders at all career.
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Dr. Kathleen McInnes
Levels where we explore, among other things, the many contributions that women make to the fields of international business, national security, foreign policy and international development. Does having women in positions of power influence the outcomes of decisions in these fields? Why or why not? Join me, Dr. Kathleen McInnes, Director of the Smart Women's Smart Power Initiative at the center for Strategic and International Studies, for these Incredible Conversations.
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Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
On November 15, during an event held at CSIS, Smart Women, Smart Power launched their latest brief, Countering China and the Hidden Advantages of Women, Peace and Security. I am so excited to launch and share with all of you a new report that we have just produced, countering Russia and China, the Hidden Advantages of Women, Peace and Security. Today I am in absolutely excellent company to help us dig through the findings and what the implications are for the joint force with my colleague first, Dr. Kylan Hunter, who is doing incredible, similar amazing work at the RAND Corporation. And to help moderate and highlight the importance of this work and what it means for the Department of Defense, we're joined by Monica Herrera, who is the Acting Director for International Humanitarian Policy and the Senior Gender Advisor in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, my alma mater. So, Monica, if I could turn it over to you, you're going to be facilitating this conversation, but I would love if we could start with your sense of what is Women, Peace and security? What has all this meant? Where has DoD been implementing it? Just for your overall thoughts as a scene setter. Sure.
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Monica Herrera
First of all, thank you so much, Dr. McGinnis, Dr. Hunter, it is such an honor to be at this roundtable with you all. And thank you to CSIS for hosting us today and also for the incredible report that you are launching through this event. So I just want to say thank you for that and yeah, happy to provide some kind of overarching context. I think probably people who listen to your podcast who might be tuned in are somewhat familiar with kind of the international Women Peace and Security framework rooted in UN Security Council Resolution 1325 that was passed back in October 2000, really looking at advancing women's meaningful participation across peace and security sectors to create more sustainable and lasting peace. So for the Department of Defense and really for the interagency, the US Government implementing Women Peace and security today, it is also rooted in our WPS act of 2017. So this is our national legislation passed under the previous Trump administration under broad bipartisan Support. We have a bipartisan WPS Congressional caucus that also supports this work. So our work really is rooted in the law and in our national strategy or our strategy and national action plan on Women Peace and Security.
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Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
And fun fact, Representative Mike Waltz was also the co chair at one point of the Women Peace and Security.
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Monica Herrera
That's right.
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Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
That's right.
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Monica Herrera
So dod, we have a lot of lessons learned since the passage of the act. And as we've started to implement and kind of right size. What are DOD's roles when it comes to implementing Women Peace and security? What does that look like? Within the Department of Defense, we kind of have three general focus areas for our implementation. The first, so their institutionalization, operationalization and cooperation are kind of taglines there. Institutionalization, some of it looking, I think broadly at what most people might think about when they think of WPS within the defense sector, which is advancing women's participation across the joint force, across the total force, and also building our own capacity to understand our roles within women Peace and security, to organize, train and equip ourselves to better implement and hopefully better utilize the tools, some of the tools and the toolkit that you've identified through some of this research. So that's the institutionalization, operationalization is really rooted in gender analysis. That's also part of the WPS act, leveraging gender data to help us better understand the operational environment. So we train personnel how to conduct gender analysis as part of broader human terrain analysis so that we can better understand the operational environment. So that we can better understand that men, women, boys and girls may have different security needs, they may be targeted differently by adversaries, they may experience conflict and crisis in different ways. And how do we really take that into account in our military planning processes?
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Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
Well, I guess militaries tend to operate where people are. Yeah, it's a good idea to understand the people and the complexities and the differences and the similarities amongst them.
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Monica Herrera
Absolutely. And then of course, last is cooperation. Really looking at how do we, as we're building our own capacity, work alongside our allies and partners around the world who are also doing this work. You know, over 100 nations have national action plans on women peace and security. Many defense sectors are very interested. We've received a lot of demand signal from across the globe with our defense partners on better understanding, how can we leverage wps, the tools that it provides to advance military capability?
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Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
Thank you.
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Monica Herrera
So, yeah, that's kind of a broad, in a nutshell, as concisely as I can, some, some overview of DoD's approach and so I kind of broadly touched on gender analysis as it relates to the operational environment, that level. But Dr. McGinnis, your work in this research really looks at gender analysis from a more strategic level and looking at tying it more clearly to some of our national security objectives.
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Dr. Kylan Hunter
Right.
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Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
I mean, so that gets to, you know, how it's. For many people, I think slamming women, peace and security against the problem of strategic competition is not a natural thing to do. Right. We think we tend to, as military and defense institutions, conceptualize the problems in terms of the kinds of widgets and capabilities and the posture and double PF that we can for or. Elizabeth, WPF is the sort of phrase for describing the different kinds of things that the department does. Thinking about women, peace and security is just not this natural thing to do. But then when you look at what our adversaries are doing, and this is where we sort of got the idea. Hang on a second. There's something to explore here. Russia and China are absolutely using gender. Gender doesn't mean women.
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Dr. Kylan Hunter
Right.
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Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
Gender mean it. Like gender is a core way to express who we are and think of who we are and how we relate to each other, both at individual and structural levels. Right. So when you think about gender, it's not just the women's stuff, it's actually who we are as societies. And that's why it's putting a gender analysis into the operate. Understanding the operating environment is critically important. They're running these gendered playbooks against us, and they're using these gendered playbooks in critical ways in their own societies to consolidate power. She is doubling down on conservative regressive gender norms.
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Monica Herrera
Right.
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Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
Women are. It's not okay to be a feminized boy. It is. Women are need to get back into the kitchen, back home, have babies, that sort of stuff to, to promulgate their notion of what a good society is. Same with Russia. Right. Putin's asking women to produce, I think like eight babies or something for, for the country now and has been very aggressive and upfront about, you know, men need to be hyper masculine and part of the military and, and women need to be back home. Despite the fact that, you know, for decades they had these policies of gender equity. What's actually happening in practice is something different. If they're running these gendered playbooks in their societies and they're using them as ways to consolidate power internationally, why aren't we taking a look at this much more seriously as a defense enterprise? Deterrence and integrated deterrence is all about a psychological calculator. How do we affect the psychologies of our adversaries? And they're using this stuff so deliberately and intentionally. It behooves us as national security professionals to get over our squeamishness about gender analysis and take it seriously. So that's where this started from. And then as we got into the women peace and security toolkit, holy crap. China and Russia have ceded over half of the popular human terrain to us, right? This is enormous strategic advantage that we can be utilizing if we just take a more intentional approach to it. And that can manifest in all sorts of ways, finding new networks with which to cooperate on the ground. Whereas China is doing elite capture strategies across Oceania, for example. There's a way to expand the competitive space so we can employ these tools more, more strategically and more intentionally and build joint force advantage. And American. And as we know, the joint force needs every advantage we can get. Right now we are in this place where we're overstretched. Our adversaries are learning from each other, they're collaborating. We need every tool in the toolkit. Let's not disregard this one.
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Dr. Kylan Hunter
I think to add on a little bit as to why this is so essential in the strategic environment. I think we've learned from the past 20, 25 years. We've really conceptualized in a defense capability, women, peace and security at the very tactical level, right? You see the women talking to women in Afghanistan, you see the humanitarian assistance, making sure we're taking care of mothers and children. And that is absolutely essential. That's not the game. We've learned those lessons really, really well. But if we think about the strategic operating space and we really think about what integrated deterrence means, there's a lot of talk around weapon systems that are there, right? Like, what's our nuclear arsenal like? Like, how are we going to carry your place?
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Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
And that's going to be deterred, but.
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Dr. Kylan Hunter
Or also like, how are we operating under contested logistics or long range fires. But if we see what the strategic environment actually is, it's a hybrid warfare information environment. This is a. We think about what our adversaries are doing. Our adversaries are not defeating us with bigger guns, right? Our adversaries are not defeating us with 5th or 12th or 29th, whatever generation. We are fighter right now, right? Or with unmanned aircraft. It's who controls the narrative about what defense and security actually means. And to continue off on Kathleen's point that like, our adversaries have become incredibly adept at creating a this masculine, feminine dichotomy that is rooted in divisiveness that is rooted in other rising, that is rooted in really division. If we look at the language that is coming out of both China and Russia around what it means to be a man or a woman, it creates this narrative that really bifurcates societies, right? It pits societies against each other. And we can see some of that influence operation occurring here where there are discussions around, like, what women should and shouldn't be doing, even when it comes to our own defense. So bringing this toolkit to bear, it's also essential for countering the disinformation campaigns that are being very, very acutely targeted at what it means to be a robust democratic society. And if we think about what integrated deterrence, and really the cooperative aspect of integrated deterrence means right now, it is bulwarking democratic societies against authoritarian misgendering that we're seeing happen. It's a bulwarking our societies against the ability to create this narrative that is really designed to bifurcate us rather than to bring us together around shared values and norms of the importance of each and every person. So just from a strategic messaging level, the WPS toolkit is so essential for countering that disinformation, that piece of, you know, that piece that can actually get at strengthening societies and making us more robust against the information coming out of China and Russia, because it's not just impacting their own societies. We're seeing it very clearly in how they're creating gender norms from within. But these are proliferating into and really trying to undermine the social fabric that makes democracy strong, which is predicated on the value of everyone's contribution and everyone's voice by saying that, you know, certain ways of acting are better than others.
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Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
Well, and also when we think about advantage and we think about the historical track record, who have, who. What are the groups that have actually taken down authority or created cracks in the edifice to take down authoritarian regimes? Women's groups, right? The, the. There's power that women have in expressing their voice and standing up as bulwarks.
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Dr. Kylan Hunter
Against authoritarianism and to the point of women's groups becoming important together. It's also where you see coalition building that destroys sort of authoritarian talks more than anywhere else, right? There's, there's, you know, the, the strategic environment right now thrives on tribalism, right? It really is thrive. We look at Xi and we look at Putin and we even look at Kim, right? Like all of these people are thriving off of tribalism in one way or another. If we look historically across the world as to how tribalism has been broken down, it is really because of the shared norms and values that women bring to bear to the strategic environment. They're able to cut across several of the real deep concerns that that exists, but also the fact that they raise the most important security issues that we have of our time. Right. Like while there's this talks about, you know, next generation fighters and nuclear weapons and everything else, the issues that are leading individuals in societies to be most insecure are things like access to safe food and water, access to reliable health care, access to education, economic empowerment for the next generation that we have here. And these are where women are operating. These are the spaces that women have always been operating in because it is the issues that they been or us are most responsible for in society. And I think the other piece, and what's so important about this and so important about countering Russia and China with it, is that women are able to elevate these issues to the key security concerns out there. Right. There is tons of empirical data that these are actually the issues that drive war, not who has more nuclear weapons that are there. Right. That like conflict is driven by these issues that are women's issues. And in the strategic environment, elevating these as the most important security issues of our time is how we're going to create actually a robust, integrated deterrence against authoritarian messaging.
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Monica Herrera
Yeah, that's certainly one of the ways that we've been approaching in dod, leveraging women, peace and security, and in many ways to reduce those root causes, those drivers of instability that create and set conditions for conflict. And some of that you mentioned, both of you women, civil society groups, other women's groups that not necessarily. Are we suggesting that women are inherently more peaceful? But as you mentioned, Dr. Hunter, in part because there are different gender norms, you know, gender roles within society. That means that men and women have different perspectives about security, about the needs of communities. And as you mentioned, part of WPS is ensuring that those perspectives are being brought to the table so we can have a more holistic understanding of the.
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Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
Security environment and also improve operational effectiveness. Absolutely right. I mean, because that's what. That's ultimately what. What we're talking about.
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Dr. Kylan Hunter
Right.
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Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
It's making the joint force more effective. And why would we take this off the table? I mean, when we need every advantage we can get Right now, going back to one of your points about, you know, formal and informal networks, I just wanted to footstep on that. Everywhere around the world, there's informal networks of women that, you know, cooperate on things from maternal health to school, schools, you know, schooling issues. I mean, all sorts of things are happening under the radar. And as a government, I would say not just the Department of Defense, but as governments, we find it very hard to get outside of the government bubble.
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Dr. Kylan Hunter
Right.
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Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
And we love to inter engage with formal power structures because that's who we are. And so, but, and we've seen different fits and starts trying to get at what's happening below the sort of transformational diplomacy over the, over the decades. But truly it behooves us to understand these networks much more carefully, especially because as Dr. Hunter just pointed out, our adversaries are running this hybrid warfare, political warfare playbook against us. The game is no longer in capitals in the same way that it was. The game is happening on the ground. The game is happening through co option in all of these places that are, we just reflexively don't know how to pay attention to yet. And it's, it's, we're running out of time. So.
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Dr. Kylan Hunter
Well, to the operational effectiveness point though, I want to just go back and foot stomp that for a minute as to why this becomes so important. Right. We know that the, the joint force around the world right now, like America's joint force around the world, operates in the crisis zone. And whether that means responding to humanitarian crisis, responding to natural disaster, or even engaging in joint exercises in super tense environments. Right. Like going out in the South China Sea and engaging in show of trust exercises, which I think they are more than show of force with our allies and partners in the region to show that they're there. This toolkit also provides essential things to ensure that we prevent the crisis to conflict pipeline. You know, if we're looking at something like security cooperation or really disaster relief or humanitarian response, that's there. We know that bringing these principles to bear and ensure that we are in engaging in our allies and partners in a way that prevents the holes that we know lead to actual conflict. Right. We know what these things are. We know that when societies and communities start to have inequity in health access, when there is inequity in access to safe food and water. We know that when there is a lack of trust in these systems to maintain the basic rights for individuals and basically subsistence needs, that's where conflict actually comes up. There is also this very operational need that if we take these frameworks and the way that we are operating in that crisis zone, we are also really shoring up that deterrence in depth. Really when we think about, we hear the Term integrated deterrence, quite a bit. We think about, oh, it's redundancy and weapon systems. Right, like that we have there. No, but it's. I think this allows us the ability to pivot the idea of integrated deterrence to create robust structural bulwarks against conflict coming up. It's a resilience and depth that can be developed.
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Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
And just this is such an important point because there's, there's some of us, there's those who have the view that, well, the military is about fighting and winning the nation's wars. Right. So it becomes a limited concert. But those of us who have been involved in or around the wars of the past 20 years, I mean, really, nobody wants to go to war, right. We have to be prepared to do so. I say all this because not only is the prevention and resilience toolkit critically important for how we act as a country in the world and achieve our strategic ends, but also, God forbid, the balloon goes up, we want to make sure that we have all kinds of pathways to counter our adversary. You think about the logistics, the geographic problems that the Pacific Ocean presents, the joint force. My God, if we're not building much more dense networks of interlocutors across Oceania, we're going to have some even bigger problems.
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Dr. Kylan Hunter
This is our key ability to build those robust partnership networks. Right. So if during crisis we're able to build trust with our allies and partners, whether it is across Oceania where we have the Pacific Ocean contested logistics problem, whether it is in Europe where we have a aggressive adversary who has made it very well known that he wants to take back the Soviet Union and take back sovereign states. Ability to be sovereign. Yep. We build those that. That resilience through mutual strategic trust. And mutual strategic trust comes through building community resilience, not through having a bunch of strongmen hanging out with. With guns. But although there is.
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Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
There is a time and place for that. There is.
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Dr. Kylan Hunter
But also. But when we think about even the idea of strong men with guns, when we think about how, and we can look at Ukraine as a very clear example of this right now. When we think about where armed defense, when it gets to that point, when it actually works to build more robust societies, is when you have societal buy in to the actual conflict. And if we continue to ignore half the population, we think about strategically building these allies and partnerships. We don't have democratic societal buy in. We don't actually have that. We continue to create these bifurcated classes, systems of like protector protected type idea, which leads to crumbling societies rather Than so there is that, that participation. We think about that institutionalization piece that the DoD is doing, having women squarely involved, you know, shoulder to shoulder with our, with our brothers in arms is an essential piece of democracy because we have full societal buy in to actually the defense. And we, we encourage full societal buy in because that's how we make a more robust society 100%.
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Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
And also again, when you think about what wartime scenarios. So this research took us to Indo Pacom, it took us to Newcomer. We looked at those two theaters specifically when we went to eucom. And I'm a NATO nerd by trade. Like I've been thinking about the European security problem in a lot of depth for a number of years and insufficient defense spending and what that's led to in terms of European force structure. We've got a big quantitative disadvantage in the European theater in so many ways. And so as we're doing these discussions, it was brought up, why couldn't we think of women, peace and security as a strategic, like Cold War style strategic offset of Russian quantitative advantage.
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Dr. Kylan Hunter
Right.
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Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
If we actually build whole of society, if we actually think about things like women's body ardor and, and think about what it means to have women as part of a whole of society, resistance strategy, resilience strategy, then you, if you, you minimize fog and friction on the day, God forbid that something happens. Doing that planning ahead of time gives you much more advantage in crisis.
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Dr. Kylan Hunter
It also really, when you put women sort of front and center in the operational capacity, right. When you have women who are on the front lines, whatever, whatever that means in these warfares, right. Which could be like, you know, holding a gun and fixing bayonets and charging. It can be sitting in the cyber information space, could be, you know, operating through whatever. But like as operators, however we're defining this in this changing world of warfare, it also opens up the types of seats at the table women get in post crisis environments. You know, we know from vast amounts of, you know, of research out there that having women as part of post conflict negotiations makes those negotiations so much more robust.
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Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
Yes.
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Dr. Kylan Hunter
For too long. I think what we've seen is that women, when they are included in these discussions get relegated into very sort of boxed roles. Right. Like you could come here as a mother's group. We need mothers groups at the table. They need to stay here at the table. Right. You can come here as a interfaith dialogue group. Right. We need them at the table that way too. But we also need women at the table as the prime security actors because for way too long when we look at these post conflict negotiations that we've seen the individual bodies that are representing the security interests continue to be elite men who have held power. And I think to break some of how they are thinking about what security means, to break some of how we get back into a lot of these cycles of increased militarism and increased sort of brink of strategic warfare. We need to bring hard security actors with different perspectives as the prime sitting at the table.
- [26:50]
Monica Herrera
Well, I think that's. You bring up such an interesting point regarding women in positions of decision making power. Dr. McGinnis, you sort of talked about women often hold informal roles of authority. But Dr. Hunter, you're sort of talking about we need also women in these formal positions of authority. And the defense and security sector is one of those areas where if you get more women into these institutions, they're likely to be educated and better understanding the institutions rising to positions of more formal power and then opening the door, adding a seat at the table to ensure that we have people within defense and security institutions, people representing civil society and just more kind of diverse perspectives providing a holistic kind of look at the entire security environment.
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Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
That leads to another project that Smart Women Smart Power has undertaken over the past couple years. We've done a. We use the podcast to actually understand the difference it's made made having women in these decision making spaces. What's the real. No kidding. Brass tack. Dollars to donuts. What's the value add not. Not hypothetical. Let's give us the real stories and the. I mean the advantages are manifold to having women in these spaces. Not only does it improve organizations abilities to understand the strategic environment in which they're operating. The just by virtue of these different perspectives that are brought to the table, they also tend to be conduits for new information that can be brought to bear. So for example, Elizabeth Shackelford, one of our first guests was talking to us about the situation in Darfur and one of the experiences she had was outside of a refugee camp where women had to go in and out of the camp every day to get food and water and there were rape huts on the way out. So the women were experiencing these horrible brutalities, didn't feel comfortable talking to any man in the US government, they reached out to her. So in terms of gathering intelligence about the environment, it makes a lot of sense to have women in all of these different decision making spaces. It's not just, it's not just because it's nice to have and we feel great having women There. No, no. There are strategic advantages that we give ourselves by doing so. Let's pay attention to that.
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Dr. Kylan Hunter
We can also, like fundamentally transform the way these organizations interact nationally and internationally by creating space for diverse rights. And it's not just having female bodies sitting at a table, Right? Because I think that's not right. Or, you know, having the women gets better or like the women does. We want things to look like United colors of Benetton AD. I mean, those like 10x is in.
- [29:49]
Monica Herrera
The room here too.
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Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
Right.
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Dr. Kylan Hunter
You know that, that I have it. Right. But it's actually allowing space for unique perspectives to come in and challenge the status quo and bring new ways of thinking, because that's how we become better. Right. And I think one of the tensions that has existed in the security space, the DoD and really the military, that's where my background comes from, the military world, is that there's this often tension between the need for uniformity to build trust. You need to be able to build trust that the person, and I know you come from this world too, right? Like the person sitting next to you, standing next to you is going to operate, act and react in a very predictable way when chaos ensues. Right. Like that's something that's absolutely essential. And so grappling with and why this becomes such a strategic advantage is that the way I've seen the DoD starting to implement women, peace and security is addressing this head on. When you think about the institutionalization, it's not shying away from the fact that there's a tension, right. There is a real palatable tension. Right. This tension between the need for uniformity to create predictability and chaos, which is essential when we're looking at war fighting with the need to ensure that individuals have the ability to show up as their true authentic selves. Because we all bring incredibly different perspectives on what is secure and what is insecure to the table. And that's how we fill in the gaps.
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Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
Right?
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Dr. Kylan Hunter
Right. That is how we fill in the gaps. And so this, this toolkit allows that challenge to be faced head on.
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Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
That's exactly right. I mean, because warfare, you know, today and in the future, it's not, you know, these conventional battles or we're going to have these, these, these static lines and it's a matter of brute force to, to, to plug in, you know, to, to cut through them. We are in a political warfare, hybrid warfare environment. So having people like, having these different perspectives, having everybody being able to bring their best selves to the table is essential. Right. It's it's, it's essential to be able to do the job of the joint force.
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Dr. Kylan Hunter
And I think back to even when the, the Marines were doing the whole studies on the removal of women in ground combat and what that was going to look like and how they, they created all these, they had like women only teams, they had men only teams. They broug mixed gender teams together. And one of the findings that got really buried from this, but I think is really essential in pulling out is that, you know, the mixed gender teams, they may not have been like the fastest to do anything, but they actually solved problems the best. Right. And they actually create like when you, when they sent them through like very specific tactical exercises. Yeah. Now, maybe they didn't like jump over walls the fastest that were there, but in these simulated combat environments, they had fewer civilian casualties. They were actually able to bring information back to command centers that led to better decision making that was done in the long term. And a big part of that is that if we think about the fog of war and we think about what hybrid warfare is trying to do, it breeds on chaos. And it really requires unilateral singular thinking to survive and thrive. When you bring more thinking into it, you're basically plugging more holes. Right. You are setting up more and more, you know, defense in depth, as we like to say, as a, as a military term, against this ability to happen. Right. And so it shows this, I think, very clearly why in an environment where our adversaries breed off of division, they breed off of unilateral and singular thinking. They breed off of trying to sort of tamp down dissenting opinions and make them seem wrong or unacceptable or that they don't have a place in security, ensuring that they stay elevated is our best defense.
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Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
Well, and also just to the point that you made, which I think is a really important one about civilian casualties and minimization. Right. Let's. Now the Afghan, we've got the Afghan War Commission who's like doing the analysis on what happened, why, how. But I remember sitting in Kabul with Secretary Gaza's part of the, the delegation doing an engagement with, with Karzai and he was furious about civilian casualties. Right. That was, he was unable to hold the government together because of some of the, the, the, the, the casualties that the US Military caused and we didn't really, we're like, oh, that's war legislation. No, it was actually a strategic vulnerability that over time, as I think back, what happened, like, it's, it's, it was a thread through how we failed. Right. It was, it was a friction point. And so the civilian harm mitigation, it's not like this again, it's not this nice to have thing that's, that's, that's counter to Clausewitzian notions of warfare. It's actually how we do our jobs of effectively in this strategic environment.
- [34:54]
Monica Herrera
And there's absolutely a huge push within Department of Defense to strengthen our civilian harm mitigation response. We have an action plan, we have, you know, a workforce coming on board for these efforts. Hugely important, but no better place to integrate gender analysis. Right. To better, Edward, looking at civilian environment, the effects of military operations on the civilian environment and a gender analysis, a gender lens certainly better informs the ways in which different elements of the population might be affected. And that is certainly something that we train on gender analysis. So I think so many overlapping potential opportunities to integrate some of this work. And I know I kind of want to go a little bit back to the sort of cooperation, the security cooperation. We sort of talked about building societal resilience. Some of the comments you mentioned earlier, Dr. Hunter, sort of reminded me about. I spent about over 8 years working in the Indo Pacific theater, including my time on active duty. And some of the work that our WPS workforce has been doing out there is really, we're getting that demand signal from allies and partners in the region that, hey, we recognize that we want to get after transnational threats, we want to get after the root causes of instability. And the Indo Pacific Command team had run a counter trafficking in persons workshop, but gender responsive. And you kind of mentioned, like, the importance of bringing all these different voices and perspectives to the table. And, you know, so that law enforcement was there, you know, maritime law enforcement was there, but we had women civil society groups there. And what we realized was all of these people were working on the same, focusing on the same topic, but some of them had never met each other or didn't know that they were even working. So we were able to, you know, they were able to drive for themselves what my cooperation look like, how may be able to strengthen this in a way that builds cohesion, that builds resilience to coercion. That kind of gets after all of these kind of broader connections to what we're trying to do. Integrated deterrence, countering coercion in the region and globally.
- [37:03]
Dr. Kylan Hunter
What you mentioned that's so important there is that when we think about security, wars aren't fought on battlefields anymore. Right, right. Wars are. And I think a lesson that we need to pull. You know, one of the coin Axioms that always came is like winning hearts and minds. Right. And we think of that as like village stability. But you're, what you just referenced is actually building resilient hearts and minds through security cooperation. Right. Through like if we look at trafficking in persons as one of the ways, right. Like how do you counter traffic in person persons, you understand the human train and you figure out what is motivating, you know, the nefarious actors. Right. In this case, and you bring together the appropriate coalition to actually change behavior. Right. And that's, I think that's a piece. When we think about warfare today, it's not going to be right. It's not going to be like, you know, we're not, we haven't been for a long time yet. We still plan so many of these things. Like there's going to be some very well defined battlefield and like soldiers will go duke it out and the civilians will hang out over here. Right. But, but no, this is, this shows that we are in a intentionally hybrid environment and our adversaries will try to exploit that by continuing to say, well, that's law enforcement's job, that's civil society's job, that's the defensive job. Right. They want that. Yeah. And so bringing everything together is such.
- [38:20]
Monica Herrera
An important aspect, I think building those networks of connection across. Right. So as you said, when the balloon goes up now you have a stronger society, a more connected society that's able.
- [38:30]
Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
And more touch points, more of our own touch points with these local communities that we, you know, you can't, you said in the global war, you can't surge trust. You can't just build like, hey, we're the U.S. we're here to help.
- [38:43]
Dr. Kylan Hunter
No.
- [38:44]
Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
In the crisis. We have to actually do this stuff intentionally now in order to build options for the future. We got some questions from the audience. One question is what recommendations do you have to ensure senior leaders understand the importance of women peace and security and maintain buy in to ensure women peace and security is incorporated into military operational planning.
- [39:13]
Monica Herrera
I'm happy to start. You know, interestingly, we also, so I, you know, dual hatted. I'm an Air Force reservist now. I spent time on active duty, but I am an information operations officer. So I am deeply passionate about, you know, messaging and communication. And that is something that we include in our training for personnel who are working on wps. First and foremost, you know, we shouldn't be doing any WPS that isn't directly connected to our primary mission set. Yes. To our primary strategic objectives. And now how that implementation looks across different organizations and institutions within the department, that may vary. Right? So the importance of, you know, framing wps, being able to clearly identify how is this work that you're doing connecting to your commander's priorities, what language are they using? What are the things that day to day you're seeing around your own organization are the priorities? And if RWPS work isn't contributing to that, maybe we need to re vector, because then it should speak for itself. We should be able to clearly connect it to the priorities of our commanders. That is, that is entirely what we're doing. We're providing tools for our leadership for our commanders. So I would say that's probably the number one thing is sort of connected to operational priorities, strategic priorities.
- [40:37]
Dr. Kylan Hunter
That though becomes, I think, essentially as to how we measure that connection. Because too often when WPS commanders will just say, oh, look, well, I have like 20 women over here, so I'm done with WPS, right? Like, and it gets often so equated with many of these DEI conversations that we have, right? Of like WPS is like, oh, well, there's, there's the women. So we did it right or right. Exactly.
- [41:01]
Monica Herrera
We have a woman in this position of leadership, we have a chance.
- [41:05]
Dr. Kylan Hunter
We did it right. But, but so it's so essential to take both, tie it to it, but also actually legitimately track and measure. Right? We know that everything happens in that happens in the big bureaucracy that is our Department of Defense happens because there's some metric tied to it that people have to act on. And so a big piece of this is getting, is, it feels weird to say getting creative, but it really is getting creative about how we're measuring success in ways that tie to operational effectiveness. And one of the things that, that we've done at RAND is build this framework that looks at improvised versus operational implementation of wps, right? And the big intent is to try to determine, well, how do we capture all these improvised things? Because what we find, and I know you know this from like your time on active duty and anyone who's found time on active duty is that like, service members are super creative when it comes to actually figuring out how to confront and solve problems, right? Like, they are super creative, but so often we don't capture how that actually solved the problem. And so one of the things that I think needs to be done more is to really reach down into these operational level security actors, right? Our, you know, our captains and majors are sort of staff sergeants and gunnery sergeants that we have there and really dig into how are they solving problems because there is, they are so often, you know, they are doing this. And I think we have a generation that is growing up in the, in the military right now that grew up with more of these principles than I think either of our generations ever did. Right. This is something that we, that we work or I was on the table here. Right. Like that we were confronted with sort of later on and we had to figure out how to adapt it to. You know, I think we have a generation that has grown up with this a little bit more who like, has some intuitive understanding that even our most senior leaders don't have, even the ones who really, really believe in it. So another piece of this is reaching down and really capturing what are they doing to be able to create meaningful metrics behind this rather than.
- [43:12]
Monica Herrera
I'm glad you're passionate about this, doctor, because we are currently running workshops to develop our monitoring, evaluation, learning framework for our forthcoming department implementation plan on wps. So you can be expecting a call for sure from our implementing partners to, to help us. Yeah, really kind of narrow that down.
- [43:32]
Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
Well, and in terms of making the case, one of the things that we did as part of the methodology for the study was a, A series of tabletop exercises run by our colleague Ben Jensen. And we essentially tested like with, with war planners. You know, we, we gave them, you know, different menus of options, you know, a gender informed like operations, activities, investments and the in. In Pacific theater and then globally. But that's, that's another methodological point. But also gender uninformed. You know, so there's traditional and overwhelmingly military planners. I mean, people with at least 15 years of experience working these issues within the Department of Defense at operational strategic levels overwhelmingly chose the gender based off because they saw the strategic advantage within the embedded within them. Right.
- [44:27]
Monica Herrera
Now that was also. There was like a double blind.
- [44:29]
Dr. Kylan Hunter
Right.
- [44:29]
Monica Herrera
Exactly. People didn't even know that those were necessarily the options that they were choosing from.
- [44:34]
Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
Right, exactly. Exactly. And so at some point, like it just kind of, you look at the tools and advantage like it just makes plain sense. And you know, the other piece of this is that women constitute what I think is the last 17.5% of the active duty force. Now, like, that's a lot of the joint force that we. Looking at the strategic environment we are operating in and the. What our adversaries are trying to bring to bear. We can't afford to lose almost 20% of our workforce. So we need to take these things seriously. And then the final. And this is sort of an ops. My own personal observation of how Russia has been fighting this. This war and the propaganda that it has been promulgating to recruit folks to frighten Ukraine. You know, for all of the aggressive masculinity that is a part of that and, like, what it means to be a man of fighting on the front lines.
- [45:50]
Dr. Kathleen McInnes
They suck.
- [45:52]
Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
They militarily.
- [45:53]
Dr. Kathleen McInnes
They have not.
- [45:53]
Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
I mean, they're getting better. I mean, there's a lot of discourse about the way that they've been getting better, but, like, they're 700,000 casualties, right? Is this the kind of way, a good way to. A good organizational culture to promulgate when it comes to the military and the force of the future? I would suggest that, but perhaps the current operational track record suggests otherwise.
- [46:19]
Dr. Kylan Hunter
And it goes to the. You know, there's unfortunately a continued narrative that there's something, like, innately better about a group of men fighting, right? Like, and we saw this. We saw this when we were doing the removal of women in ground combat exclusion here in the States. We see this in the rhetoric coming out of Putin. We're seeing this in xi. We see this with North Korea's military, right? That there's this some, like, mystical, magical thing that makes a bunch of dudes on the front lines fight better, but with the reality. And this goes back to how to show it, but the reality shows, like, that's just fundamentally not true. Like, there is actually zero evidence to show that there is some, like, magical power that they possess, right? But what is true? And I think if you look at Afghanistan, right, which is a big topic of debate right now, but you look and you look at Ukraine, you look at, you know, even going back in history to some of the, like, you know, Papua New guinea freedom fights. You go and you look at the ability of, like, Colombia to build resilience in a. In a government against, like, you know, authoritarian regimes and guerrilla wars, right? You look at all of this, where the evidence bears out that you actually have. When you have conflicts and you have a reduction of civilian casualties, you actually have conflicts last a shorter period of time. You have more robust agreements coming out of it is when women are there on the front lines, too. Yeah, right. When women are actually around on the. On the front lines. And. And so the empirical evidence, you know, and again, like, how you continue to, like, convince senior leaders is like, the data don't lie. You cannot like it. It can, like, go against a lot of the things that you really want to feel and believe deep in your core. But the Data don't lie. Yeah, they just don't. You have a. And I think we're seeing this borne out so well where you have right now in Russia and Ukraine playing out on one side, this hyper masculine, only men are going to fight. And you're seeing casualty rates that nobody predicted.
- [48:29]
Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
Right.
- [48:29]
Dr. Kylan Hunter
I think, you know, at the beginning of this conflict Banana, the prediction was that Russia was going to like, walk all over this.
- [48:35]
Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
Right.
- [48:36]
Dr. Kylan Hunter
And so I think to go back to one of your first points is that when we think about all these quantitative advantages, the calculus is wrong. The quantitative advantages is based on some, like, mystic belief that men are inherently better at fighting. And what we found is that, like, that's not real math.
- [48:55]
Moderator / Host (possibly from Smart Women Smart Power team)
Well, and we're just at times to close the conversation with a thought, which is, I was in Ukraine about a year and a half ago and I was told by a lot of the interlocutors that we met with that one of the key reasons that Ukraine has been. Was able to resist. Has been able to resist is because of the work that was done after 2014 to invest in civil society groups and women's groups. Specifically, it created a national edit, something to stand up against Russia, some backbone. And so taking it forward into this research and hopefully how the Department of Defense continues to perceive these issues, we need to think about women, peace and security as a strategic advantage, a strategic enabler for DoD activities, operations and investments. We literally cannot afford not to. Well, thank you so much for joining us. What a wonderful conversation. Kathleen, such a pleasure. And for those of you online@csis.org Take a peek at the website. There's all sorts of materials to take to look at on all the issues of the day, so have a poke around. Thank you so much for joining us and have a wonderful day.
- [50:20]
Dr. Kathleen McInnes
Subscribe to the Smart Women Smart Power podcast on Apple, Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to great content, be sure to follow us on Twitter martwomen or you can follow me on Twitter jmcinnis1. Thanks for listening and join us next time.