Editor's note: We decided to give Mr. Bradford time to settle in to his new position before conducting this interview in the summer of 2001. The events of September 11 precluded our ability to include it in an earlier edition of the Liaison.

JU: You arrived at the Center in January 2001 from your last position, Director of Operations for the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA). How dramatic of a change was that, personally and professionally?

GB: You could say it was invigorating! Change is good. I love the work that I did at OFDA, and I love the people I got to work with, but at some point you realize it is just time to do something else. I feel very fortunate to be part of the Center. My last job involved a very different environment; I think it was easier in some ways to make the change and more complicated in others.

My wife and I didn't have any practice at moving and Washington, D.C. is a half a world away. Although I spent a lot of time outside of the United States, my wife and I lived in the same house for 26 years. Yes, it was a challenge, but worth it.

JU: What were your expectations about this position before coming to Hawaii?

GB: I thought that there were great opportunities to achieve long lasting results in certain areas. Not across the board, because so many things need to be done, but real opportunities to do something here that might help in the future, and that was very appealing.

Let me explain. When assisting a displaced population through a supplementary feeding program, you may achieve your objective and save kids from starvation this year. But next year, their overall circumstances will likely not change much and they will probably be exposed to new dangers and risks. You keep doing it over and over. It is reactive work. Sometimes you don't even know whom you are going to end up helping when you start. In a sense, the work for the Center may be less concrete because its results are less certain or measurable, yet it has the potential to be more satisfying because the results that you do achieve have the potential of making a difference for a long time.

JU: How have your views changed in the several months that you have been here?

GB: I have much better understanding of the challenges we are facing at the Center, and a much better appreciation of how capable and professional the staff is.

Our bosses over at Camp Smith* really want us to succeed on our terms. They want us to add value and be leaders in the international community-this is very important and positive.

*Camp Smith, near Honolulu, is the location of US Pacific Command Headquarters.

I have also developed more appreciation for the complexity and the diverse numbers of stake- holders that we have. I didn't understand that there are many, many expectations of the Center that are emerging. And they are all legitimate. Some of them we can accommodate and others are more difficult. I knew that it was going to be complex, but I didn't fully appreciate how complex it would be.

JU: What got you into the disaster management and humanitarian relief field?

GB: In the latter phases of the 1984/85 Ethiopian Famine, I was asked to go to Ethiopia by Julius Beckton, Director of the Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance at the time, and a retired US Army Lieutenant General.

He asked me to investigate port costs and cargo handling charges on relief cargo ships that were delivering food into the Ethiopian ports of Assab and Massawa. The costs were thought to be extremely expensive and complicated and they were. My expertise at the time was in ocean transportation.  So I went there for five or six weeks trying to figure this problem out. The unifying motive was money but the reasons for the costs, or the techniques used by the Mengistu regime for generating maximum income from emergency relief cargoes were many and complex. In order to complete the analysis, it was necessary to consult with the UN Resident Representative and officials of the World Food Programme. I also got involved with a few non-governmental organizations that were taking care of kids and displaced people. It was a community that was so small that I found myself doing other programmatic activities. I discovered it was very rewarding work.

JU: Where were you employed at the time?

GB: In the Office of Transportation, in the US Agency for International Development's Office of Procurement. My boss, quite frankly didn't want me to go because it was a six-week assignment. General Beckton, without ever directly asking me to do it, persuaded me to conclude that I needed to go, so I went. I was connected to humanitarian work as a person responsible for chartering commercial airplanes for OFDA. For example, I chartered commercial C-130s for emergency food airlifts in Africa and the aircraft that brought the U.S. government's search and rescue team home from the earthquake in Yerevan, Armenia.

In November of 1989, Andrew Natsios invited me for lunch. He asked about my interest in becoming the Operations Director at OFDA. At the time, the position was called the Assistant Director for Operations. We talked. I never actually applied. I was administratively reassigned and promoted, very lucky. That was late 1999.

JU: You mentioned Andrew Natsios. Who are your mentors in this field?

GB: There were, and still are, many mentors both inside and outside the government. One key relationship at OFDA for many years was with Bill Garvelink.* He and I had to work together on many different issues. I certainly learned from all of the OFDA directors I worked for. Andrew is a principle reason I had the good fortune to go into disaster relief management. I learned a few things from Roy Williams even before he became the OFDA Director, when he was the Operations Director for the International Rescue Committee. Nan Borton, who is now in the private sector, taught me quite a bit about managing resources to achieve results.

*Bill Garvelink was a Deputy Assistant Administrator at USAID for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance.

JU: That must be a valuable skill to have at the Center which has many stake-holders, all wanting to impose their own demands.

GB: Well, they have competing interests. The staff has to figure out how to prioritize those competing interests and make sure that we do the most possible.

One concept that unifies our work is the mandate to assure that our activities exploit opportunities to positively influence what happens to affected populations on the ground. To the extent that the Center has official influence as part of the Pacific Command community, we can make a contribution. We can also make contributions by bringing insights to civilian humanitarian practitioners. Better civil-military communication is obviously one key to reconciling priorities. 

JU: You have a great deal of experience leading disaster assistance response for OFDA through their Disaster Assistance Response Teams (DARTs) in many places around the world and under many challenging circumstances - Northern Iraq, Vietnam, Egypt, Bosnia, and Rwanda, just to name a few. What impact did these experiences have on you?

GB: The understanding that you can't do anything by yourself.

Generally speaking, the quality of the people that are attracted to humanitarian assistance work is extremely high. And they bring special skills and challenges to work with and through. The challenge is to leverage their skills and enthusiasm, and also realize that you and they are in a stressful environment.

In some cases, excellent people have had more enthusiasm and confidence than experience to apply in complex and hostile environments. It's really all about people - their quality, dedication, and motivation. At OFDA, we of course had the benefits of having other kinds of resources.

JU: What do DARTs actually do?

In my experience, DARTs just find out where the gaps are. They don't come in to assume command, they assess and find out what was left undone and develop a consensus among players on how to fill the gap. When DARTs that I was on developed strategies, they tended to be in the direction of assuring that there was adequate 'mortar between the bricks.' I agree with my former colleague Tami Sanchez, now Deputy Director at OFDA, that the ability to pull those areas of expertise together without much information and come up with a plan that would help most people is as much art as science. Each disaster is unique in its own way.

JU: What impact did these experiences have on you?

GB: They made me older. And they made me feel lucky.

JU: Is there a single event that stands out?

GB: No, it's a blur of about 300 of them!

JU: Have those experiences helped you in your new role, and how?

GB: You learn how to let people do what they do best. The experiences I had were not nearly as traumatic as many of the experiences of my colleagues. My own experience and proximity to the experience of others gave me an appreciation that some of the things that we think are terribly bad, or good, or important aren't really as extreme as we think. All the suffering you see sustained by others helps to keep things in perspective.

If you talk to a lot of people that I have had the privilege to work with, you see that they understand this. And that is why the humanitarian ethic is not so much 'look at me, look at what I am doing.' The ethic does not typically evolve from a promotion of their work, or what they do or what they have accomplished. Most of the folks that do humanitarian work have realized that they are so much better off than so many of their daily contacts. Humility is a natural reaction to such a difference.

JU: What keeps you in this field?

GB: I keep getting great jobs in it! And I'm lucky to be able to do something that feels good. This is great work, if you can get it. Most people doing this work realize that they will never make millions, but they do it anyway. There are some quirky personalities in this business, but there are not, in my experience, many malevolent motives among real humanitarians. Humanitarian workers are people motivated to do something constructive for others with their lives.

Being a government employee in that environment had its challenges. But not compared to what a lot of people in the non-governmental organization (NGO) community experience on a day-to-day basis.

JU: What are the challenges facing the Center of Excellence?

GB: We have to establish our place in the international community. We are, in a sense, necessary  for the continued improvement of humanitarian assistance performance in the civil-military equation.

We need to improve under-standing across institutional and international, military and civilian lines about what the motives and the intents of an organization are, why they are there, and why they are working. This could mean an NGO understanding foreign military procedure, as much as it could be our own military forces under- standing what would be, to them, strange behavior by the non-governmental organizations in those situations. It doesn't happen overnight, so the challenge is going to be building credibility and retaining confidence that we are making progress.

Our results are going to be difficult to measure and they won't be consistent. We may see a great revelation on one side in contrast to some investments that do not yield expected    returns on the other. Another challenge will be to read the environment correctly so that we don't miss the mark of leveraging the right programs and activities. This is why we need to be active members in our military and NGO communities, and try to be understood and trusted by them as an honest and transparent broker of opinion.

We need to be in touch with the changing scene of the military world and stay in touch with all the elements that are occurring in peacekeeping operations, what the changing and evolving role of the military is in that regard. We have to stay in touch with political developments within our region. We have to stay in touch with innovations in techniques of humanitarian assistance. What does humanitarian assistance mean in political terms? Are there potentially negative consequences? There may be. We need to find practitioners that are suited for the work that we do. Not only people that maintain interest but also ones who have the operational experience to share and generate ideas.

We are going to have to try to determine what kind of contributions we can make outside this command's theater to support the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict*. We have to look at their objectives and acquire special expertise for goals for which they perceive we can make a contribution and balance that with meeting objectives in the Asia-Pacific Region. This region covers 52% of the Earth's surface - that's a lot of people and a lot of disasters. Whether it is peacekeeping or humanitarian training, or a lecture [consisting] of one person, we need to think carefully about that commitment. Our decisions need to be based on understanding our environment, with all its complexities.

*The Center of Excellence is under the operational control of US Pacific Command  but takes its policy guidance from the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict, in particular, the office of peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance.

JU: This goes to my next question: where do you see the Center making an impact?

GB: Oh, I think the Center has already made an impact. We are seeing interest on the part of our own deployed forces to have Center staff talk about humanitarian assistance, the complexity of the civil-military issues, and the environment of complex emergencies. We always have internally displaced, water problems, natural disasters, [etc] and militaries have to be involved because in certain cases where security is a major problem nobody else can do it. They are used for the short term. There are repetitions of circumstances. The Center can use these repetitions to inform itself, and use the information to allow people to respond more effectively in the future.

So we'll have a reduction of human suffering in ten years. But not five years. Not many people would look that far ahead. We are already seeing changes in the ability of countries in the region to do things that they never expected to be doing or wanted to be doing. The contribution made by the Royal Thai Army in East Timor is one example.

Faster isn't always smarter. Unfortunately fast becomes more important because the populations that need assistance are becoming more and more politicized. The political challenge can be significant.

In Asia there are many perspectives. There are different dominant religions, traditions and cultures; impermanence is part of the process. 50,000 people may be killed at one time, in one disaster. The challenge is to incorporate assets and abilities through accommodation. We are never going to be able to line up with some of the vast cultures that we are dealing with, but what we can do is distill techniques on how to minimize the consequences.

JU: How does the Center of Excellence impact the operational readiness of today's military units?

GB: The Center informs, or attempts to inform, deploying units about the complexity of the environment they are operating in, e.g., the uncertain willingness of non-governmental organizations to stay in a particular place, the complexities of the United Nations' staff dynamics that influence decisions, the ambiguity of uncertain governmental support for a particular humanitarian strategy or plan. In spite of all these ambiguities [the military] needs to stay put.

It's really an awareness effort. The traditional military planning model was to develop a complete plan for all contingencies and to execute that plan. Unfortunately, in humanitarian emergencies, reliable, objective information is often difficult to get; you find yourself having to change the plan as you go on. Those kinds of incremental changes are counter to cold war military staff planning methods. There we can help, and I think that most senior military leaders understand that. The trick at this point is to be agile, to help the military in its response, and to be aware that things are not always what they seem.

Military folks are very sophisticated people in a lot of different ways. It is not as if they are not able to pick up on the different complexities, it's that the institutions have not had enough time to adjust. The bi-polar world's implosion was a hugely consequential event and it simply takes time for institutions to adapt to new conditions.

JU: Do you see any changes to the Center's mission?

GB: The Center is going to have to continually assess the environment that it is operating in. The operational environment is the best arbiter for change at COE.

The Center's mission will be focused on making a difference for victims on the ground in disasters and complex emergencies. We may be lucky enough to apply things we learn from our civilian and military colleagues that haven't even yet been discovered. Civil-military collaboration is at least a two way street. Our reason for being here is to try to work out institutional differences to improve the lives of people a lot less fortunate. We need to understand and communicate the body of intellectual work and operational experience that is already out there. If we are real lucky we may be able to develop some useful doctrine of our own.

JU: Where do you see the Center of Excellence in three to five years?

GB: If we do our job right, and I think that we will, then we will be recognized as an integral and essential contributor in preparing military forces for missions that touch or are touched by humanitarian situations. That includes peacekeeping and complex emergencies as well as natural disasters.

I hope we will be able to leverage resources to get more and more done, but I don't see the Center growing to be a huge organization. The Center is already getting some recognition for its contributions.

We are getting more support in our efforts to integrate different components. We have to reach out to the civilian side in the region and communicate the benefits of civil-military collaboration. It boils down to consensus on a division of labor. We look forward to being a strong part of an integrated or at least reconciled international humanitarian relief community, one that demonstrates leader-ship, is reliable and consistent in its products, one that is thoroughly plugged in. This is the challenge.

Jossie Uliasz joined the Center in October 2000 as the director's assistant, a position she held while conducting this interview. She now serves as the Center's junior travel coordinator.

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