JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, Wash. – Service members from across the joint forces gathered at the Stone Education Center on JBLM to participate in the Humanitarian Assistance Response Training (HART) - Conflict course on Oct 16-19, 2023.
The 4-day course, taught by instructors from the Center for Excellence in Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance in Honolulu, Hawaii, was hosted by America’s First Corps.
According to the course syllabus, the purpose of the course is to prepare the U.S. joint services for supporting and conducting humanitarian assistance before, during and after combat operations, as well as to implement the consideration of the protection of civilian actors within a conflict zone when planning any military involvement in humanitarian assistance operations.
“We developed this course to help train the joint forces to think through [various issues concerning humanitarian access in a conflict zone] and doing some planning in the course to look at how civilians in those spaces might affect military operations,” said Greg St. Pierre, a retired Navy Captain and current instructor with the Center for Excellence.
Instructors of the course come from all walks of life, with backgrounds ranging from the U.S. military to the United Nations to various non-governmental organizations specializing in international humanitarian aid and relief.
“A lot of our team are former humanitarians. And so they bring a lot of cultural understanding that is new to military members…there's a lot of give and take that we kind of cross-inform each other on how this works” said Pierre.
U.S. Army Master Sgt. Mitchell Hoover, the Senior Enlisted Medical Advisor for the 95th Civil Affairs Brigade out of Fort Liberty, North Carolina, agrees that it is important for soldiers working in multi-domain operations and complex environments to understand the perspective and goals of NGOs and humanitarian actors because they will be working in the same capacity.
“This is the greatest opportunity to go ahead and find out when you have a formal course that teaches you to ask these questions. So I take the time to go ahead and to learn it here and then to push it out to [my soldiers]. And then ideally, I'm going to try to get more of my medics to come to this course.” said Hoover.
Throughout the course, students are exposed to several topics and case studies, such as cross-border and cross-line humanitarian access in Syria, deconfliction and Poland, and civil-military issues in Sudan.
“ In this environment, at this point in time, the military has a lot of different things to worry about. One of the problems is natural disasters, which could happen at any time; the Indo-Pacific is very prone to that. And manmade disaster, think about conflict. So it's training people how to think about the environment, the different stakeholders that compete in that environment, and the different interests” said, Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Blankenship, Assistant Chief of Staff for Civil Affairs at America’s First Corps.
The culminating event of the course has students present a situational out-brief, allowing them to apply the knowledge they’ve gathered over the course of HART-C.
“If you just have the opportunity to sit and listen, especially in Army courses and these opportunities. That's the best thing you can do… and that's the best thing that the Army gives you. And so every time you get an opportunity, absolutely take advantage of it," said Hoover.
The course, hosted by I Corps G9, was open to all servicemembers and provided a unique platform for learning a special interest topic from subject matter experts.
Lt. Col. Blankenship proudly stated, “Saving lives, alleviating human suffering, creating resiliency and programs where we can prevent loss of life and suffering is central to what we do… That makes me proud, being part of an organization that cares and invests in those kinds of things. So it's not only what we do, but it's how we do it. So this is a qualitative statement to First Corps being able to do both at the same time.”
For more information on the Center of Excellence: Disaster Management, visit: https://www.cfe-dmha.org/
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