Today, Brain Hancock hosts Col. Jeffrey Fiddler to discuss his career and his experience at the Pentagon helping manage the DOD response to the COVID 19 outbreak.
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One CA is a product of the civil affairs association
and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.
We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations.
To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com
or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org
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Special thanks to Natalia Lafourcade for the sample of Tú Sí Sabes Quererme (En Manos de Los Macorinos). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABLT6hdgEek
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Transcript
00:00:01 Introduction
Welcome to the 1CA podcast. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website. at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes.
00:00:34 BRIAN HANCOCK
I'm Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hancock, and I will be your host for this session. Colonel Jeffrey Fiddler is a civil affairs officer with 34 years, thank you, sir, of combined enlisted and commissioned service. He has a master's degree in strategic studies and a master's and bachelor's degrees in criminal justice. On the civilian side, he is a special agent with the Department of Homeland Security. Colonel Fidler, welcome to the show. Great to be here, Brian. Thanks for having me. I tell you, sir, with all of that experience you have in both infantry and military police, who actually rolls with more firepower than an infantry company, I'm making you think you just like to fire guns. Oh, yeah. Love shooting guns. Fair enough. So I'm going to ask you a little bit about your civil affairs journey in a moment, but let me give out the quick disclaimer here. A reminder to the audience, all of the remarks of the participants are solely ours. Now, sir, I met you here in Europe when you replaced the legendary Tony Vaja as chief of the civil affairs division at U .S. Army Europe and Africa. Boy, a lot has happened since then. It has.
00:01:41 JEFFREY FIDDLER
has. A lot has changed. First of all, Colonel Vaja is great. Tough guy to replace. As you know, Brian, he was the DCO of the 353KCOM when I was in brigade command. So I got to know Tony for two years. We would talk at least a couple of times a week. The institutional knowledge that he has is just amazing. It's unbelievable. It really is. So I still talk to Tony to this day.
00:02:03 BRIAN HANCOCK
Tony to this day. And there's so many rich reasons why you join civil affairs. But the quality of the people you meet on that journey, I think, is one of the things that keeps us in this field. Absolutely. Yeah. So when I first got here,
00:02:16 JEFFREY FIDDLER
we were G39. We had SEMA, Space, IO, Civil Affairs, PSYOP, Brigadier General Ellis, who's... Selected for major general, our old boss, our old boss's boss, he wanted to separate all those divisions out. So we're now fully functional G3 civil affairs division, which is interesting for USRAF because the 06 lead is going to be a comp of three person going forward, which is a little different from some of the other directorates and divisions that you see here in USRAF. Yeah.
00:02:48 BRIAN HANCOCK
Well, given the breakout, I wonder if they're just going to add a G9 shop at some point. I thought about that. The two -star level, certainly we have a G9 shop. Yeah. I'm currently filling a G9 billet for the 79 Theater Support Command. So that would not surprise me, especially given the importance that civil affairs plays in CIMIC and in competition and in all of the setting, the theater and shaping operations that we're doing right now. Absolutely. I went back and forth on that because I had talked to General Ellis about that.
00:03:12 JEFFREY FIDDLER
and forth on that because I had talked to General Ellis about that. The reason why I like being in the G3 is that we have all the integrating cells, the G33, G35. Right. And for long -term planning, we do have an officer, Major George Warren. He's embedded with the G5 downstairs. And the reason why I like being in the G3 is that any organization that you go to, the three shop is the center of gravity. Always. So when those emergent missions come up, like Cyprus or the Greek floods, anything even remotely related to civil affairs, even in an infantry mindset or whatever, they look over to us and then we get the tap on the shoulder, which is pretty cool for the soldiers in the division.
00:03:52 BRIAN HANCOCK
in the division. Well, you must be doing something right to have that kind of demand signal. So well done. It's just luck. I'd rather be lucky than good in the final analysis. So I appreciate that. Yeah. Now, one of the things that I personally love about civil affairs is that since we are a non -accessions branch and Of course, in the Marine Corps, it's a B -billet for the officers. So while they're non -commissioned officers can be a civil affairs officer for their career, they cannot on the officer side. So there's a lot of rotation and change in both the Army and the Marine Corps on the officer side, which basically means almost every civil affairs officer that you meet is different, has different skill sets, has a different career path, a lot of awesome diversity, I think, that we have in the branch. And so let me turn to your story. You commissioned as an infantry officer in the 90s. And now you're a civil affairs officer. How did you get here?
00:04:50 JEFFREY FIDDLER
So I think it was right after the surge in Iraq. And that was when they took a lot of the chemical folks because I was at the time. Made a mayor defense artillery. Yeah.
00:04:57 BRIAN HANCOCK
at the time.
00:05:00 JEFFREY FIDDLER
So I was voluntold like, hey, you're going to go down to Fort Liberty. You're going to go to CA school. And then all started before that, I was in the Massachusetts Army National Guard and very tough to get promoted. Yeah, a few slots. Yeah, a few slots. So after Operation Noble Eagle, when we did all the defense of the bases, I transferred over to the Army Reserve,
00:05:12 BRIAN HANCOCK
a few slots.
00:05:21 JEFFREY FIDDLER
had to pick up a basic branch that the Army Reserve had, which is an infantry. People out in the audience might know there is one infantry battalion in the Army Reserve. I didn't know that. I was thinking the Guard,
00:05:31 BRIAN HANCOCK
didn't know that. I was thinking the Guard, but I didn't realize we had it in the Compo 3.
00:05:33 JEFFREY FIDDLER
but I didn't realize we had it in the Compo 3. Yeah, no, there's one infantry battalion in the Army Reserve, and it's out in Hawaii. A good friend of mine, Alan Perkins, Lieutenant Colonel Alan Perkins, just commanded that, but that's a whole separate story. So you want to talk about IDT travel, he had to fly from Boston to Hawaii for drill weekend. He probably hated that. Yeah, he probably did. But it's the only infantry battalion in the Army Reserve. All right. So we needed those influx of CA officers. So I got orders to go down there and went to school and the rest is history.
00:05:35 BRIAN HANCOCK
Yeah,
00:05:51 BRIAN HANCOCK
Yeah, he probably
00:06:01 BRIAN HANCOCK
history. You've spent most of your career in infantry law enforcement and the chemical corps. How do those fields assist you in your civil affairs work?
00:06:14 JEFFREY FIDDLER
Well, two things come to mind. In the infantry, you have those type A personalities. And I'm not saying I am one, but you have to be aggressive in the infantry. For us as civil affairs to show our relevancy, you have to be aggressive. Agreed. If you sit back and wait for something to happen, you're going to be marginalized. Right. You're going to watch your budget go,
00:06:32 BRIAN HANCOCK
You're going to watch your budget go, dude.
00:06:34 JEFFREY FIDDLER
Yeah. Exactly. So you've got to show some type of relevancy to that maneuver commander. So you don't necessarily have to be infantry to start up, but I think you need to be an aggressive officer. Like we say in the civil affairs division, we're not taking the foot off the gas pedal.
00:06:47 BRIAN HANCOCK
Right. We're just going to keep on pushing forward. You know, that's one of the things I also I've noticed about civil affairs formation, even at the civil affairs. action team cat level foreman and army doctrine. These folks are always volunteering for missions. They're always making suggestions. They're not waiting to be tasked to solve a problem that they think they can help and add value. They're speaking up. They're going to the three. They're going to the fire's chief. They're going to whoever and saying, hey, you know, I think we can help you with that problem. And they're very aggressive. And that makes them one of the hardest working and highest op tempo groups as a slice enabler. to combat arms in combat operations. But that's about a return on investment and earning your pay. So I agree. I think now more than ever, with some civil affairs battalions going away, there's force reduction in the army in general. It's not just civil affairs. I think now more than ever, we have to beat those folks who ship up and add value at every level of war to make sure that we're not only achieving tactical battlefield success, but we're also... achieving operational and ultimately strategic success so we don't keep going back and repeating crisis after crisis. Yes.
00:06:47 JEFFREY FIDDLER
We're just going to
00:07:57 JEFFREY FIDDLER
And I think on the law enforcement side, one of the things that they're looking for for training is negotiation training. Yeah. How do you do that? And I think in law enforcement, if you're a decent law enforcement officer, you've got to know how to negotiate with people. And I think for civil affairs, that's a huge thing for us because we're really that connective tissue between the civilian populace and the military. We saw that just recently down in Cyprus, that you dealt with a pretty big problem set getting humanitarian assistance into Gaza, and you have a lot of international players everywhere. IGOs that are over there that want to do something, NGOs, different militaries from other countries. How do you pull all that together? You have to have some kind of negotiation training, or have done that in the past, and I think a lot of us have in civil affairs.
00:08:03 SPEAKER_00
Yeah. How
00:08:43 BRIAN HANCOCK
I think so too. Many of the most important problem sets, there are ways to solve them other than bullets. And bullets may be expedient, but again, that tends to generate a lot of long -term animosity, which leads to that crisis after crisis, right? So critical skill definitely need more of that. And if we're not going to plus up civil affairs, maybe we need to start training some other people to understand that, or at least how... to utilize the civil affairs assets they have properly. And I think we're going to talk a little bit more about that later. Now, not long ago, the psychological operations groups of the United States Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command, known as USACAPOC, they did that reorganization. They took their separate psychological operations groups, their POGs, and which, by the way, had a broken officer pyramid. They had about 100 captain positions, which would go to 33 major positions. and then go to 505 lieutenant colonel positions, four of which were battalion command.
00:08:57 SPEAKER_00
right?
00:09:45 BRIAN HANCOCK
So it really became hard to have a career in PSYOP. Those are now moved under the KCOM, theoretically integrated within the KCOM. So we have civil affairs and psychological operations not only working together, but actually coexisting the same unit together. KPOC started with some experiments in that, and there's more of that occurring now. You commanded a civil affairs and psychological operations combined battalion. What was that experience like for you? And do you have any opinions on whether combining those two elements is a good long -term strategy for the command? Sure. Well,
00:10:21 JEFFREY FIDDLER
I'm not going to say any psyop jokes because I put my foot in my mouth in the past on that. There's a lot of CA officers that are dual -headed. I am. I'm one of them. Exactly. See? So I didn't do it. It's not going to be there in perpetuity. All right. But I had a CA PSYOP training battalion, Brian. So really, we're training NCOES, wasn't an operational battalion. Still counts as battalion command time for anybody that's out there that's looking for a battalion command. And those CA PSYOP training battalions are, in my opinion, you're not only getting your command time done, but it's also a good broadening assignment because you're running a schoolhouse. Right on. How often do you get that opportunity other than going into one of the more traditional training commands? Yeah,
00:10:28 SPEAKER_00
Exactly. See? So I didn't do it. It's not going to be there in perpetuity.
00:11:00 BRIAN HANCOCK
you don't. You either work for TRADOC or you become a defense contractor for somebody's school, right? Yeah.
00:11:06 JEFFREY FIDDLER
It's a really different experience. I really enjoyed it. I learned a lot about running a schoolhouse. So that was, it was interesting. For example, so my S3 at the battalion was PSYOP. So, you know, you can't do anything without your S3. He didn't work too much with CA. I haven't worked too much with PSYOP, but at the end of the day, we're all wearing a uniform. We're going to figure out a way to make it happen. When I look at 353KCOM, I think they have 2POG underneath them. So now you have three brigade -size commands under there. So I think I understand why KPOC did it. I think we'd have to ask the folks down there, but they were direct reporting, right,