Mar 2, 2019 8 min read

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You might be mildly surprised to learn that the U.S. Army War College, which prepares officers for senior leadership positions, extends beyond the Army.

And participation extends even beyond the United States.

“I am proud to say that every year, we have 70 to 80 international officers from around the world,” Michael Neiberg, history professor and chairman of war studies in the Carlisle college’s Department of National Security and Strategy, said Feb. 14 at Peters Township Public Library.

Neiberg served as moderator of “Global Challenges and U.S. National Security Strategy,” a panel discussion featuring War College master’s-degree candidates who shared information in their fields of expertise. Representing the global component in particular was Col. Abdullah Haruna Ibrahim of the Nigerian Army.

“He is the very first international fellow to be a member of an Eisenhower speaker series,” Neiberg said, referring to the program the college offers each year.

Joining Ibrahim as panelists were three American lieutenant colonels: Steven Tofte, Air Force, and Eric McCoy and Shaw Pick, Army. Their views, as Neiberg pointed out, represent their personal opinions.

Nigeria and

Boko Haram

For Ibrahim, his topic had less to do with opinions and more with enlightening audience members about Nigeria in general – its population of nearly 200 million ranks seventh in the world – and specifically about the problems his country has experienced with Boko Haram.

You may recognize the name in connection with, for example, two rounds of mass kidnappings from the Government Secondary School in the Nigerian town of Chibok, 276 female students in 2014 and 110 four years later, and with the U.S. Congress designation of Boko Haram as a foreign terrorist organization.

The ostensibly Islam-supporting group has lived up to the billing for at least a decade and a half, with as many as 20,000 deaths and the displacement of 2 million people attributed to its activities.

“I want to categorically emphasize that they are neither a religious group nor a religious-affiliated organization. They are just purely a criminal organization operating under the name of Islam,” Ibrahim said. “They go to churches to bomb, as well as mosques. So all their desire is to just cause fear and commit crimes against humanity.”

Boko Haram’s primary base of operation in northern Nigeria, near neighboring Chad, Cameroon and Niger, has presented difficulties related to geography.

“When the Nigerian armed forces go after them, they cross over to the next border. And since they have relatives across the borderlines, they are harbored at each part of the cross-border location they decide to move into,” Ibrahim said.

He did provide some good news. Despite continued terroristic actions – a Boko Haram attack, for example, killed 11 and injured 15 just two days after Ibrahim’s visit to Peters Township – the worst has passed, in his view.

“The group still exists, but from 2015 to date, they’re relatively been suppressed. They have little or no effect like they used to,” he said.

NATO and the art

of negotiation

Three thousand miles north of Lagos, Nigeria’s capital, is the Belgian city of Mons, home to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Allied Command Operations.

An Air Force assignment took Tofte to Mons as a staff officer, and his experiences dealing with counterparts from various nations prompted his discussion topic, “The Need for Negotiation Skills for America’s NATO Officers.”

“While I was at NATO, I was asked to incorporate advanced technologies and utilize some quote-unquote out-of-the-box thinking into a new air operation concept that I was working for the alliance,” he recalled. “Now trust me when I tell you, my approach did not sit well. The NATO senior air commander deemed my ideas a bit too radical, while a handful of national representatives looked at me and thought I was not being radical enough.”

So, although he lacked formal training, he quickly learned how to employ the art of negotiation.

“I struggled to put personal frustrations aside so I could build the necessary trust and rapport with the very people who seemed to take great pleasure in derailing every effort I was trying to accomplish,” he said. “And although it took longer than I had hoped, I did eventually develop a new kind of intellectual dexterity and reasoning that, quite frankly, surprised my wife.”

As his revelation drew some knowing chuckles, Toftre spoke about applying his experience to the future:

“It’s my recommendation that this trial-by-fire approach is something that we should no longer take. And the good news is that this method is not being espoused by our senior service leaders. The importance of negotiation as a critical skill has resonated throughout the military, and negotiation education is becoming more and more available.”

Leadership and strategic thinking

Also looking ahead is McCoy, whose topic, “Developing Strategic Leaders for the Future,” addressed preparedness to deal with an assortment of global trends.

An example is outlined in “Report on Effects of a Changing Climate to the Department of Defense,” released in January:

“The effects of a changing climate are a national security issue with potential impacts to Department of Defense missions, operational plans and installations.” The report lists climate-related factors including recurrent flooding, drought, wildfires, thawing permafrost and desertification, by which land becomes increasingly arid.

“Climate change has the potential to threaten agricultural output and increase instability in rapidly growing poorer countries that may have interests that align with or conflict with what we look at from a U.S. national security perspective,” McCoy said. “As such, strategic leaders need to embed environmental awareness into their organizations, in order to create cultures that minimize impact on climate change while looking at the benefits of connectivity, urbanization and globalization to maintain competitive advantage.”

Regarding the trend toward urbanization, McCoy cited demographic projections.

“By 2035, scholars expect the global population to increase by another 1.8 billion people, with this growth primarily concerned in terms of occurring in the developing world and largely centered in urban areas,” he said. “By some estimates, the world’s ‘megaregions’ will account for 66 percent of the world’s economic activity and will be the breeding ground for 85 percent of all technological and scientific innovation.

Poorly managed urban areas, though, tend to have higher rates of negative aspects such as crime, pollution and disease.

“Therefore,” McCoy explained, “near-term decisions on infrastructure for these developing urban centers will determine their vulnerability to extreme events and create opportunities for both cooperation and competition among business, government and academia.”

Social media and

a new battlefield

Opportunities of a different kind served as the basis for Pick’s topic, “The Weaponization of Social Media: 21st-Century Info Warfare.”

“Battles playing out here are not about military victories, and the object of these battles is nothing short of our minds,” he said. “Individuals and groups are now capable of doing things that only national-level intelligence agencies were capable of doing just a few years ago.”

For example, he cited a “self-organized collective of online investigators” who have proved that a Russian missile launch shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014, killing all 298 people aboard.

“They even identified, through social media posts, the particular unit and the crew members of that launcher,” Pick said.

The power of the crowd, as he referred to such efforts, also is being used toward effecting governmental change.

“Using the virality of social media, these disparate groups are now coalescing online and mobilizing against oppressive regimes,” he explained. “But as in most struggles, the tide can turn. Oppressors have begun to worry.”

As such, they have started to employ such countermeasures as cutting off or degrading Internet connections, spewing internal propaganda and disinformation, and using spies to infiltrate networks.

“Having perfected this internal battle to control their populations, some have chosen to turn these tools outward,” Pick said. “And the battle for perception is expanding globally and in real time.”

He also addressed the spreading of opinions and distortions that are perceived as fact, particularly through so-called “online echo chambers” through which people seek and are fed information to support their existing views.

“Some say that information literacy is a public health issue, and I don’t necessarily disagree. But the nation has dealt with public health challenges before, and further, we have faced off with propaganda from other nations before,” he said, referring to the U.S. government’s Active Measures Working Group, which countered Soviet disinformation in the 1980s.

“Whatever the solution is, it needs to be driven by a vibrant debate in society, and it cannot sacrifice the one thing we hold the most dear, and that is our open society and the free exchange of ideas.”

Peters Township Public Library hosted Global Challenges and U.S. National Security Strategy in partnership with the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh, with support from Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 764.