Motive Subject Matter Expert Nathan Toronto shares how his recent experience advising the 3rd Security Force Assistance Brigade (3rd SFAB) and reflecting on “how the United States can reform military advising efforts to have a strategic effect, rather than achieving short-term tactical or operational gains that do not bear up under the weight of the overarching political conflict,” prompted him to consider the question “How does the Army know when an advisor is ready to deploy?”
Training & Education
Responding rapidly to DoD's need for remote training to maintain force readiness, our Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and tech innovators adapted Motive’s signature courses to a fully virtual format. Since April, we’ve executed multiple iterations of highly-interactive online courses to soldiers and Marines working from home, quarantined on deployment, or constrained to virtual battle assemblies and drills. Find out more and see if these courses are right for your mission!
Impact Initiatives, Thought Leadership, Training & Education
The current mass exodus of Venezuelans fleeing violence, economic collapse, and political instability in their home country is the largest migratory movement in Latin American history. Desperate to identify more effective and holistic policy and programmatic options to address the Venezuelan Migrant crisis, stakeholders in the region have expressed a need for a systems-level analysis to inform better strategies. This need inspired our team to conduct desk-based and in-country research relying on the rigorous and participatory Transforming Crisis Systems (TCS) approach.
Thought Leadership, Training & Education
Since the toppling of their regime in 2001, the Taliban have demanded recognition from Kabul as a legitimate political actor in a country where they enjoy substantial support among segments of the population, not least for for the economic and infrastructural systems they helped cultivate and on which nearly all rural Afghans depend. The Taliban have a near monopoly on a global commodity representing a $4 billion dollar a year industry that necessitates the sustainment of elaborate supply chains: opium. But a deeper conflict analysis foretells a future in which the Taliban could soon be incentivized not only to walk away from its lucrative drug empire but become an ardent counter-narcotics partner to the Kabul government and its international backers.
Thought Leadership
The term ‘governance’ recently re-emerged across the Civil Affairs Regiment, appearing on new Mission Essential Task Lists in the SOF component, in updated regiment-wide doctrine and publications and as a reinvigorated topic of concept and capability development.01 Governance is not new to CA. The regiment’s roots are in Military Government in post-World War I and World War II theatres, and more recently in state-building endeavors, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, images of CA forces executing technocratic, essential service projects in support of governments-in-transition is often the first image that comes to mind when one thinks of governance in the military context. This image is problematic.
