By Mass Communication Specialist Seaman John R. Fischer
The Center for Civil-Military Relations (CCMR) at Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) hosted an interactive ‘Civil-Military Responses to Terrorism’ seminar for international students in Monterey, Calif., between Sept. 8 and 19, 2008.
This class welcomed 33 participants from 27 countries, bringing the total number of participants to approximately 4,000 students from more than 120 countries for the last six years.
“When you tap into lots of different expertise and lots of different perspectives,” explained retired Army Col. Timothy S. Heinemann, one of the CCMR faculty members, and “you’re really hungry for the next idea, then you really have a chance at having knowledge power. That’s a magic combination. That’s what it’s going to take to defeat some of these adversaries. We have to out-think them. No one can do it alone.”
The curriculum consisted of 17 instructional modules designed to promote group interactivity, three case studies covering terrorist activities and preventive efforts, six hour group exercise in three parts, and presentations by the participants to discuss their own home climates, issues and efforts.
“Everybody who comes to these courses has a different situation at home, a different set of opponents” said retired Navy Capt. Paul Shemella, now the CCMR Program Manager for the Combating Terrorism Fellowship Program (CTFP). “They’re not all plagued with terrorism the way Colombia is, or Afghanistan. The question is, what can they learn from each other.”
“You really start to see a lot of universality of concepts and principles,” said Heinemann. “Someone on one side of the room has to deal with the Russian Mafia, and across the room someone has street gangs from El Salvador, and then there are the people dealing with straight up Al Qaida. You’ll throw out a concept and see all of them nod their heads, because it resonates with each one of them.”
“It’s a clue that you’re hitting the right themes,” said James J. Petroni, one of the CCMR faculty members. “The participants build quite a brotherhood, especially for being together only 10 days.”
The approach combines academic theories with practical experience. There is not a professor talking to or at the group, but rather someone who is seen as a colleague talking with the group, inviting the participants to share ideas and experiences.
Heinemann said one of the goals of the program is to foster a supportive network between the individuals in the class when they return to their home countries. To have them communicate laterally through the internet as if they were still in the classroom is the next evolution he said.
“It [CCMR’s Response to Terrorism Project] mirrors, it’s adaptive, like a terrorist network,” Heinemann said. “It’s not an accident that we’re organized that way. It takes a network to beat a network - it takes a superior knowledge network.”
Shemella said every individual in the CCMR faculty network teaches with every other individual in the network at least several times a year. He said he wants them to resist specialization, but rather cross-pollinate their ideas and tactics.
“We partner with everyone we can,” said Shemella. “We’re trying to practice what we preach – to establish what I call a network of networks. We have a network, and I make that network available to others. We stay in touch, and we borrow from each other. If the Near-East South Asia Center, for instance, has the expertise we need for a particular program, we can contact them and ask for the help.
“Relationships are more important than events,” Shemella said. “If you can establish relationships, and nurture them to the point where people trust each other, then you can get real collaboration.”
Shemella told of a particular seminar he held in Malta in 2004. “We had Serbs and Croats in the same program. It wasn’t too far removed from 1994, when they were in conflict. I noticed that during free time they were spending a lot of time together. On the weekend I walked down into Valletta, the capital city, and I ran into these guys. They called me over to them, and the Croatian lieutenant colonel looked at me and said ‘We know what you’re really trying to do here – you’re trying to get us to get to know each other better!’ He looked around at his Serbian friend and said ‘You know, if we can do it, anybody can do it.’”
“Break it up into bite-size chunks,” explained Shemella. “Get regions to establish relationships based on trust and understanding, and develop cooperative mechanisms.”
Shemella summed up his vision of providing assistance to various countries around the world by saying that he believes no country is too large that it can do the whole job alone, but no country is so small that it can’t make a significant contribution.
