Welcome to One CA Podcast. Today we have Aleks Nesic and James Patrick Christian of Valka-Mir discuss advanced social science research and courses they've designed for Civil Affairs and the human domain.
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Transcript:
00:00:01 SPEAKER_04
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00:01:28 SPEAKER_03
the 1CA podcast. My name is John McElligot, your host for today's episode. We're joined today by Alex Nessage and Dr. Patrick Christian, both PhD doctors. Alex, you're a doctor as well. You're both at Valcomere, a company that is building advanced special operations forces, social science training and applications, targeting deploying soft detachments for their training. Alex and Patrick, thank you very much for your time and thanks for being on the 1CA podcast.
00:01:57 SPEAKER_00
Thank you for having us, John.
00:02:01 SPEAKER_03
Patrick, I wanted to start with you. Can you talk about the origin of Valkomir? Was this related to your background in Special Forces that led you to believe that the training was needed?
00:04:32 SPEAKER_03
think what you've learned goes across all cultures and what you've learned in the human domain does it matter what country you're in as what you learn can be applicable to any country where ca forces may be or could be heading
00:06:00 SPEAKER_03
How did you decide to partner together in working at Valkmere?
00:07:16 SPEAKER_03
come you're different from other companies which offer related training?
00:09:15 SPEAKER_03
active duty and reserve civil affairs units, either in the Army or Marine Corps, if they're going to receive training from Valkymer, they would be hearing from people who have lived it firsthand.
00:09:48 SPEAKER_03
to turn to you. Could you talk about the name Valkomir? What does it mean?
00:09:54 SPEAKER_00
Well, thanks for that question. Yeah, it took us about a year to come up with the name, trying to understand who we are, what we stand for, what we research, what we have experienced. And we came up with Valkomir because Valka,
00:10:08 SPEAKER_00
came up with Valkomir because Valka, the root, the origin of the word is Valkyrie. It's a Nordic term for war. And it sort of translates across many different languages. It has that powerful sort of destructive force in the word itself. And then the word mir, it has Slavic origin, Slavic roots, and it means peace. So our original thought was that we exist right there in that space of war and peace, trying to understand. what creates war, what conditions, but then to be able to work within the space of peace. And so now the name has sort of stayed with a lot of our members, and now a lot of people call us the planet of Valkamerians. So we've kind of created our own little tribe, but it took a really long time to understand where we are in that space. Okay.
00:11:11 SPEAKER_03
Alex, Patrick talked about his connection through special forces in the Army. What's your connection to Valkomir and what drove you to get your PhD and the experiences that you bring to the table?
00:11:23 SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so that, thank you for asking that. So Patrick mentioned that we met in our doctoral program, but prior to that, so I lived through the Balkan conflicts both in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 90s. came to the States in 99 to study psychology, to study, to try to understand what happened in the Balkans, to try to understand how and why my neighbors tried to slaughter each other. So I did my undergrad in psychology. I was not very happy with the way I was taught because it was a very Western -centric approach to understanding human trauma and conflict. So then I ended up going to do my master's in cross -cultural conflict and communication, attempting to further my study and understanding of these conditions that create this level of violence that no political science class has ever been able to explain to me. And unfortunately, always continue to minimize the actual reality that many of us lived through, survived, are dealing with. and want to help others understand it better. So then interventions, development projects, aid projects, humanitarian efforts can be better. Then I spent some time teaching peace education, developing courses and curriculum in that space for a university down in Florida. And then after a while, decided to seek further education because I was still not happy with not having the right answers and not being able to analyze these types of intractable conflicts in a way that it would make sense and that would be applicable across all of the domains around the world where conflicts were happening. Because I keep seeing the same patterns of genocide happening everywhere. but not really being able to explain how and why. And so when I found the PhD program, that's where Patrick and I met. And I wasn't aware of the level of special forces operations until that point when we met and started to talk and then sort of found this common understanding because I was working with a lot of... groups that were going and intervening and helping with refugees in any kind of conflict space, helping them and even Peace Corps volunteers and anyone who's really engaged in a kind of post -conflict development space. But I wasn't aware that civil affairs were involved on that same level, even more so. And, of course, there was that mutual understanding that we need to put something together. We need to put educational and training programs to help bring that knowledge to the SOF community. And that's what we started to do. And I did a lot of work down at the Joint Special Operations University. Patrick has two. And we just kept building and building and building more classes and more knowledge and more content. And so here we are.
00:14:33 SPEAKER_03
Yeah. So let's talk about those courses. The conflict science courses that you're offering through Valcomere, how many courses are there and what do they cover?
00:14:42 SPEAKER_00
There are four courses. We started with the Foundations of Human Domain, which was General Linder's request to have Patrick and I redesign and develop an entire new set of... um that foundational class used to be the cross -cultural communication and everyone sort of knew that that was a very surface level very ineffective very ineffective in a sense that um soft community deserves better in terms of understanding what they're about to get get into that space of conflict that space that that that is latent with trauma that not everyone has the ability to understand and so we developed and replaced the cross -cultural communication class with the foundations of human domain in which we introduce the basic framework for analysis of the target audience that SOF deploys to. It's a 21 -hour class that's part of the LREC pipeline, so language, regional, and cultural piece.
00:15:48 SPEAKER_03
Okay. And that's all for General Lunder being the then commander of Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg?
00:15:54 SPEAKER_00
Correct. Yes, so that was under his initiative. That class was developed and is in the hands of the ELREC program at the moment. We found an overwhelmingly positive feedback from students, SF, CA, PSYOP, going through that class, wanting more, wanting even more advanced applications specific for CA, PSYOP, and SF. And so as we were finalizing that class on the side, we started to develop a separate set of classes specific for CA, the indigenous social engineering and re -engineering for PSYOP, psychosocial, emotional target audience variables. And then for SF, the non -kinetic engagement. Okay. So we developed two separate 40 -hour classes that our students are asking for. to be taught to them now in the pre -deployment phase. And then not only taught from an analytical perspective, but then also tailored to and applied to specific problem sets where they're deploying to. So I did a number of pre -deployment classes for teams going into Bosnia. Paycom -wide class, we're constantly getting requests and demand signals from students that have gone through the foundational class because they saw what that analytical tool looks like and how to use it and how to apply it.
00:17:29 SPEAKER_03
Do the students need to go through the foundational class before they can move on to the more specific course that's either CA or PSYOP or SF related?
00:17:39 SPEAKER_00
That would be ideal, but it's not necessary because in... all of the subsequent classes, the CSI, OpenSF. As we were saying, you said conflict science. Science is a science is a science is a science sort of thing, right? So there are certain elements that transcend all of the classes. That is that you have to be able to learn how to... research, analyze, understand that there is going to be trauma in the community that you deploy to, and how to engage and message that. Now, that's going to vary, and it's going to be taught slightly differently for different purposes, given that CA does a slightly different job than SF and then SIOP, but the underlying science is there, and it's taught in all of the other classes. So ideally, and that was the vision that General Linder had, was that they will all get the same foundational education, and then we can advance into the other classes. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor.
00:18:46 SPEAKER_03
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00:20:23 SPEAKER_02
Welcome back to the 1CA podcast.
00:20:26 SPEAKER_03
Alex, I wanted to ask you about whether the courses are focused at the tactical level. And is that aligned with the professional military educational level of the students who are going through SWCC?
00:20:39 SPEAKER_00
Yes. So the content of the class teaches you how to understand your community, how to understand underlying conditions.
00:20:48 SPEAKER_00
how to understand your community, how to understand underlying conditions. and how to specifically engage with those on a operational tactical level this isn't that what patrick was referring to earlier that political science rational actor theory that everyone is just sitting in the capital building in the capital office somewhere thinking about the state -centric approach and solutions to their problems it is engaging how to engage and how to communicate through your key leaders, how to understand the community, how to ask better questions, how to understand the actual variables that people on the ground level deal with. So then when you step into that community, you know what kind of questions to ask. You know how to read that terrain better, how to engage with it. Otherwise, operationalizing your mission is going to be difficult if you're only taught. political economic sort of variables of a state, and I'm using air quotes for listeners, state sort of political economic entity that is supposed to be your community, right? And so it's highly operational, and the actual framework, analytical tool that we developed, that is where, that's the actual usability of it, because a lot of our students... You're familiar with PMICPTA scope and target audience analysis, right? This tool that we developed, it enhances or it deepens those other analytical tools because PMICPT gives you an overview,
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targ