News Posts - Defense Security Cooperation University

The Institute for Security Governance along with United States Army Pacific, CMO Bangladesh Armed Forces Division, and Oregon National Guard conducted the opening ceremony for the 2022 Bangladesh Disaster Response Exercise and Exchange (DREE). 

DREE is an earthquake disaster related exercise, which has been conducted in Bangladesh since 2010. ISG has been playing a leading role in the management and coordination of the event, and will be kicking off the table-top exercise portion shortly.

There are over 18 Partner nations attending the DREE Physically.

An ISG team recently visited the 162nd Wing in Tucson, Arizona. The 162nd Wing is the U.S. lead for training F-16 pilots for foreign partners and allies, including Poland, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania. The team met with Partner Nation student pilots, received a tour of base facilities, and were given the opportunity to try the F-16 flight simulators. The visit provided an excellent opportunity to learn more about how the Partners train, and how ISG might work with the 162 WG for successful employment of Partner F-16 programs in support of air policing and NATO air operations.  

Members of ISG recently met with Slovakian Ministry of Defence (MoD), General Staff, and HQ Air Force personnel to learn about air operations related to the arrival of new F-16 aircraft. Collaboration with Slovakian Partners was invaluable to developing an integrated, long-term institutional capacity building (ICB) program related to Slovakian F-16 air operations in support of national and regional defense efforts.

ISG Africa Regional Program Lead Dr. Whitney Grespin’s recently published an article titled, “Things Fall Apart: Soviet Assistance to the Somali Armed Forces, 1960–1977” in the latest issue of The Journal of African Military History. In this piece, Dr. Grespin and co-author Mr. Matthew Marchese noted, “As Cold War tensions rose, Soviet aid was offered to the nascent Somali government in pursuit of broader geopolitical machinations that were seen to supersede Somali interests, laying the groundwork for a decades-long mismatch between local intentions and Cold War superpower objectives in the Horn of Africa.” The result of this mismatch, they argue, “left Somalia with an unsustainable, corrupt, and repressive security structure as a direct result of high levels of foreign assistance that were not well coordinated with host nation sustainment capabilities.”

In this issue of The ISG Heron, the Institute reflects on the DSCA Director’s fruitful visit to ISG, applauds ISG's Resident Advisor to Lithuania for receiving the Medal for Exceptional Civilian Service, welcomes new colleagues, marks the successful conclusion of the two-year educating-the-educators mobile seminar series in Ghana, offers a standing ovation to Emergency Management & Resilience colleagues, highlights Resident Education in Logistics Capacity Building, spotlights ICB Advising achievements in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and many more newsworthy developments.

As the lead coordinating entity for 10th annual Exercise Gobi Wolf 2022, The Institute for Security Governance (ISG) brought together stakeholders from U.S. Army Pacific, the Alaska Air and Army National Guard, the U.S. Forest Service, and the international community to exchange expertise and best practices in disaster response. Taking place in early September in Bayankhongor, Mongolia, Exercise Gobi Wolf is part of the Pacific Resilience Disaster Response Exercise and Exchange (DREE) program, which focuses on interagency coordination and foreign humanitarian assistance. The six-day exercise featured three main events: an expert academic discussion, tabletop exercise, and field training exercise.

ISG’s Maritime Security Functional Lead, Tim Doorey and his team recently returned from leading a five-day Institutional Capacity Building workshop in Sri Lanka focused on comprehensive approaches to building Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA). The event was in coordination with the United States Embassy in Sri Lanka, where 29 officers from the Sri Lanka Navy, Sri Lanka Coast Guard, Attorney General’s Department, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Merchant Shipping Secretariat and Department of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources took part in the training.

Topics covered in the training included: human capital development, community resource management, operation research tools for maritime search and interception, building MDA capabilities to enhance operational effectiveness, decision making at all levels, and developing and maintaining partner fusion centers. The course culminated with all 30 participants working a comprehensive tabletop exercise.

ISG Resident Advisor to the Republic of Lithuania, Mr. David Antonik, received the Medal for Exceptional Civilian Service from Vice Minister of Defense Mr. Vilius Semesk earlier this month. Bravo Zulu!

Mr. Antonik deployed to Vilnius, Lithuania in August 2021 to support the Lithuanian Military of Defense on strategic logistics matters. To learn more about Mr. Antonik's background, check out his bio.

In the 2022 Autumn issue of The U.S. Army War College Quarterly, Parameters, ISG Africa Regional Program Lead Dr. Whitney Grespin reviews Benedict Wilkinson’s Scripts of Terror: The Stories Terrorists Tell Themselves (Oxford University Press, 2020). In the review, she notes that, "the work reads primarily as academic. Wilkinson’s (admirable) observation of the central problem lacks a 'step further' approach." Nevertheless, Dr. Grespin goes on to say that, "Even with areas in need of improvement, Scripts of Terror could serve as a useful primer for VEO case studies. It could prepare practitioners as pre-deployment reading for a better understanding of the foundations and evolutions of potential adversaries." 

Read the full review here.

ISG's International Defense Acquisition Resource Management team recently executed a 2-week Advanced Defense Logistics and Life Cycle Cost Management course in Miami, Florida for a group of Partner Nation participants affiliated with the U.S. Department of State's Central America Maritime Regional Initiative (CAMRI). ISG Course Director Brooke Adame joined students, the instructional team, and the SOUTHCOM J5 CAMRI Integrator on a tour of Coast Guard Sector Miami to reinforce practical application of maritime maintenance and logistics considerations.

Over the past year, an Institute for Security Governance’s (ISG) Resident Advisor has been deployed to Qatar and working with the Qatar Armed Forces (QAF) on an ongoing safety and security mission. Encompassed in this line of effort is the development of a security operations plan for the International Federation of Football Association’s (FIFA) 2022 World Cup, scheduled to begin in November.

ISG was honored to host DSCA Director Mr. James Hursch along with DSCU President Dr. Celeste Gventer at in Monterey this week. In addition to learning more from faculty and staff about the growth and impact of ISG’s work in areas such as Cyber and Resilience, Dr. Hursch shared an overview of DSCA’s strategic priorities, including the expanding role that Institutional Capacity Building will play in U.S. defense strategy. Director Hursch was generous with his time at the well-attended ISG Town Hall event, providing insightful responses to questions from ISG colleagues.

We look forward to continuing to contribute to the important work that happens throughout the Security Cooperation Enterprise.

ISG recently supported The Indonesian National Armed Forces (TNI), U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, and service members from dozens of partner nations in Exercise Garuda Canti Dharma 2022, Indonesia. This regionally rotating exercise is the largest annual international peacekeeping field training exercise in the world. ISG's Peacekeeping and Exercises Program trained and mentored multinational teams of instructors to execute a Staff Training Event and a Field Training Event for over 750 Indonesian and International Peacekeepers.

ISG's International Defense Acquisition Resource Management team executed a successful mobile education team event focused on fundamental concepts and challenges associated with national and global defense contracting for the South African National Defense Force. Participants from across the services were engaged and are working to identify and implement procurement applications within across the defense environment.

Mr. Nicholas (Nick) Tomb – a Functional Lead for Security Governance and Civil-Military Relations at the Institute for Security Governance (ISG) – recently returned from Washington D.C., where he presented on the successful completion of a two-year (2020-2022), in-country Educating-the-Educators Seminar Series for the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) to the Bureau for Political-Military Affairs and the Africa Bureau for Regional Security Affairs. As Mr. Tomb reported in his presentation, the goals of the seminar series were to enable the GAF to conduct Civil-Military Operations (CMO) education on its own and to develop a program of instruction tailored to the specific needs of its military. 

ISG's International Defense Acquisition Resource Management team recently completed a 3-day intensive "Principles of Defense Acquisition Management" virtual workshop. This workshop provided 16 international military students from Argentina, Ecuador, El Salvador, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Guatemala an examination of fundamental defense acquisition, logistics. and life cycle cost management considerations. Students were engaged in identifying challenges and opportunities to improve current acquisition management systems within Latin America & the Caribbean defense and security forces in the context of a real world scenario. Students highlighted the enriching experience of participating in a multilateral courses as it enabled a sharing of different perspectives, similar challenges, and practical opportunities for improving decision making.

The Institute for Security Governance recently conducted engagements with the Philippine Army, Air Force, and Special Operations Command with support from the Defense Institute of International Legal Studies (DIILS). The engagements focused on Civilian Harm Mitigation in accordance with the Philippines’ new defense posture towards territorial defense.

ISG recently completed a two-week “Fundamentals of Maritime Security” course with 26 international participants from 13 countries. 

In addition to presentations and exercises, highlights of the course included visits to USCG Station Monterey and tour of their 47-foot Motor Life Boats and their 87-foor Cutter HAWKSBILL as well as an all-day visit to San Francisco’s Japanese-American Historical Society’s Military Intelligence School, the Civil War-era Fort Point, and the USS Pampanito, a World War II submarine.

The Institute for Security Governance recently completed an Institutional Capacity Building (ICB) workshop in Somalia on Human Resource Management and Logistics to facilitate integration between the Danab Brigade, the Somalia National Army (SNA) personnel, and logistics headquarter staffs. These specific capacity building efforts support the Danab Brigade in performing its critical counter-terrorism role in Somalia – a key shared bilateral security goal as well as one of AFRICOM’s top priorities.

ISG supported U.S. Army Pacific (USARPAC) in the initial planning and design of the 2023 "Pacific Resilience" Disaster Exercise and Exchange (DREE) in Tumon, Guam. National delegates from Republic of Korea, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives attended the event, which was hosted at the Guam National Guard Headquarters. The Pacific Resilience multinational exercise series aims to increase unity of effort, interoperability, and disaster response capacity within the regional Indo-Pacific disaster management community of practice.

The Institute for Security Governance’s Peacekeeping and Exercises (PKX) Team recently returned from the Khaan Quest 2022 Command Post Exercise (CPX) in Mongolia. A long-term implementation partner with U.S. Army Pacific Peacekeeping Exercise in Mongolia, ISG has developed and executed the CPX for Khaan Quest for over 10 years. The ISG Team is solely responsible for the design, planning, and facilitation of the CPX using an ISG-developed peacekeeping scenario that is annually tailored to meet the guidelines agreed upon by the U.S. and Mongolian Armies each year.