Feb 21, 2018 By Harry Funk staff Writer hfunk@thealmanac.Net 8 min read

First, the disclaimer:

“The speakers today do not make policy, and the opinions and views expressed today reflect their respective personal opinions,” Anna Harrison, director of public affairs for the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh, told the audience at Peters Township Public Library.

That being established, those in attendance for the recent “Global Challenges and U.S. National Security Strategy” panel discussion, hosted in partnership with the World Affairs Council, had the opportunity to gain candidate insight from half a dozen senior military officers.

All are studying at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, aone-year professional development program designed to prepare officers to serve at the strategic level, and are participants in the college’s Eisenhower Series Program 2018.

“It’s an outreach effort designed to promote dialogue on national security and other important public policy issues between our students and the American public,” Michael Neiberg, who chairs war studies at the college, explained in his introduction of the officers. Each gave a presentation with the theme drawing from his or her field of study:

• Col. Joseph Scott Anderson, U.S. Army, “Acquisition Reform: Solutions and Strategies”

As an acquisition officer, Anderson is responsible for making necessary purchases while staying within budget restraints, the type of task that, in his opinion, has room for improvement.

For example, the Army’s Acquisition Category I – the highest level of category, based on dollar thresholds – requires Pentagon approval.

“I think all that does is create bottleneck,” Anderson said. “It’s a process that takes time, because you have to clear your leadership at your organization, and then other supportive organizations have to look at the decision. Then you have to go to the building” – the Pentagon, itself – “and those support staffs have to look at the decision.

“So to go there and get a decision can take months just to get that scheduled and actually get a visit with that leader to get it done. Ot doesn’t facilitate any kind of rapid decision making.”

That also applies to government contracts.

“It takes now sometimes over 20 months to put a contract in place,” Anderson explained. “If you’re a company and you want to do business with the government, it should be easy, especially if you’re an American company. But unfortunately, because of all the regulation that we have to do business with the government, many companies opt out and decide not to do that.”

• Lt. Col. Lisa Lamb, U.S. Army, “Women Trailblazers in the Military: Forging a New Path”

About 214,000 women serve in the U.S. military.

“However,” Lamb pointed out, “that’s only 15 percent of our overall armed services.”

And the number of those women who are known beyond the military is practically negligible, as Lamb demonstrated by listing three names and asking if anyone in the audience had heard of any of them.

It turned out that a library staff member was aware of Deborah Samson, the Massachusetts woman who disguised herself as a man so that she could serve in the Revolutionary War.

But Air Force Gen. Lori Robinson drew a blank, even though she serves as commander of both the U.S. Northern Command, which controls homeland defense efforts, and the North American Aerospace Defense Command.

The same was the case for Lt. Gen. Nadja Y. West, the first African-American Army Surgeon General and also the highest-ranking female to have graduated from the U.S. Military Academy.

“None of you – well, we had one – can identify the military women who are trailblazers and have been at the forefront of our nation in serving this country and placing themselves in harm’s way for our freedoms. You don’t know who they are. And you need to,” Lamb said.

• Lt. Col. Matt Humphrey, U.S. Marine Corps, “Critical Thinking in Practice”

On the heels of the Feb. 14 shooting in Parkland, Fla., Humphrey fielded a question about high school students employing critical thinking and situational awareness in unanticipated circumstances.

“In terms of critical thinking, I would approach it more from a leadership perspective: How you define yourself is really at the core of self-knowledge,” Humphrey, who has two daughters in high school, said. “So I encourage my kids to define themselves, to make sure that they understand what is their highest priority. And I try to give them their No. 1 priority, which is: Be a good human being.

“When they do that,” he continued, “how you define yourself leads to making decisions very quickly in tough situations.

Although he admitted that he can’t fathom the situation the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students faced in an ostensibly safe place, he did offer some general advice:

“Be aware of who’s around you. Take things people say seriously. I do believe that there is evil in the world, and most bad people will tell you they’re bad. Believe them.

“And tell somebody. Don’t keep that a secret.”

• Commander Brett Holdiman, U.S. Navy, “South China Sea: Strategic Interests and Dynamics”

Relatively few Americans are familiar with the Spratly Islands, a largely uninhabited archipelago with less than 500 acres of land surface spread out over an area four times the size of Pennsylvania in the South China Sea.

“China has essentially claimed sovereignty over those land formations. The problem is, so does Vietnam,” Holdiman explained, as have the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan and even the tiny sultanate of Brunei.

“It’s easy for people to look at something that’s happening on the other side of the globe as a ‘them’ problem,” he said. “But the reality is, that regional dispute actually has global implications.”

One is of China putting the concept of global commons to the test.

“Every country has territorial waters that extend out to 12 nautical miles. Beyond the 12 nautical mile line, it’s the high sea, and everybody has the right to sail and operate in the high sea,” he explained. “That’s important to the U.S. Navy, and that’s why we constantly patrol in the Western Pacific and the South China Sea, to challenge those excessive maritime claims.”

• Col. E.J. Irvin II, U.S. Army, “Strategic Leadership in Times of Change”

Having been deployed twice to Afghanistan, Irvin spoke about the challenges the United States faces there.

“When we travel through Europe or Asia or wherever we go, we refer to ourselves as Americans,” he said. “We’re very nationalistic in our approach. We’re not Pennsylvanians or Ohioans.”

That is not the case among the people of Afghanistan, who lack a sense of unity.

“They don’t see themselves as Afghani. They see themselves as Pashtun,” Irvin said about the region’s largest ethnic group. “And the next valley over, they see themselves as a different tribe.”

While the United States has more than two centuries of history as a constitutional federal republic, Afghanistan has nothing of the sort.

“We forget about that when we try to slap a ‘2018’ solution on a country that is operating in a 1776 environment,” Irvin explained. “There are still very remote areas, not a lot of connectivity. They don’t care about cellphones. They care about a well for water.

“I guess that’s our biggest challenge, which becomes a threat,” he continued. “We’re trying to keep the threat as a minimum, but it’s a challenge to do the military piece of it when we need more work in the diplomatic piece, as well.”

• Col. Mark McPherson, U.S. Army, “Improving Safety through Investigation of Human Error”

Dr. McPherson – his medical degree is from the University of South Carolina – studies how military leaders can learn from accidents to help prevent their recurrence.

“About 85 percent of our accidents that currently occur are the result of human error, so I’m taking a hard look on how we can make that better,” he said. “When you look at human error, it’s very easy to, say, blame the pilot, to say that person who crashed the ship is at fault. What’s harder is when you really look at the chain of human error.”

He referenced the so-called “Swiss cheese model” of accident causation, proposed by British psychologist James Reason, which points out the aligning of flaws in layers of defense. In the military, such factors can include unsafe acts, lack of supervision, fatigue or other detriments to an individual’s condition, and organizational influences.

“That’s really looking at the whole systemic problems,” McPherson said. “And if you can block the error at any one of those places, you can stop it from happening in the first place.”

McMurray Veterans of Foreign Wars POST 764 provides support for Peters Township Public Library’s International Program Series, which is part of the Pennsylvania Library Association PA Forward initiative.