80. Civilians!

0:52 Lars Peter Nissen

The relationship between humanitarians and the military is complex at best. I heard about REACT, a British humanitarian organisation that describes their approach to humanitarian action as a lean fast needs-driven military approach, that repurposes the skills and experiences of military veterans and turn them into exceptional humanitarians. I thought that was really interesting. So I sat down with Nick Parker, the Chairman of REACT, and Paul Taylor, the International Operations Manager, to get a better understanding of what REACT is and how it fits into the humanitarian sector. It was a wonderful, fun and honest conversation where we spoke about two very different issues. First, we talk about REACT; their value proposition, relationship to the humanitarian architecture, plans for the future, and so on. And then in the second part of the conversation, Paul and Nick, so to speak, put their uniforms back on and we talk about Afghanistan where all three of us have worked, and reflect on what it was like to co-exist in the same theater. I know you’re going to enjoy this episode. And when you have listenes, we woukd love it if you would share your opinion on social media, or you can send us an email to info@trumanitarian.org. We really do appreciate your feedback, but as always, the most important is that you enjoy the conversation.

Nick Parker and Paul Taylor, welcome to Trumanitarian.

2:28 Nick Parker

Great to be here.

2:29 Lars Peter Nissen

Nick, you are the chairman of REACT Disaster response and Paul, you're the International Operations Manager for REACT. And it's a real pleasure to have this chance to talk through what is react and how do you fit into the humanitarian sector, the overall ecosystem of actors that we have today. You both have a long career, 20 plus years for. To you in the British armed forces, uh, if I were to describe that, I'm sure I'd get it wrong in 50 different ways. Nick, could you just explain to us? Who? Who were you as a soldier?

3:04 Nick Parker

I spent 40 years in the military. I served in my early career in Northern Ireland as a sort of leader of troops then. In the middle part of my career, I was a bit involved in Bosnia, but it was quite a sort of fallow period. And then I found to my surprise in the last third of my career, I had Sierra Leone, Iraq, back to Northern Ireland and then Afghanistan in positions of increasing sort of leadership responsibility. And then I finished as what? Typically British, my last job was the commander in chief of the UK Land Forces, so I was effectively the chief executive of the British Army.

3:48 Lars Peter Nissen

So a big deal.

3:50 Nick Parker

And my chairman was the chief of the General Staff. So yeah, reasonably big deal. And it was 13 years ago now. And it feels like a different life. But my goodness, I was fortunate to have a career like that.

4:04 Paul Taylor

I served not quite as long as Nick. I served for 26 years. I joined when I was 16, as a junior leader and I served in Northern Ireland in the first Gulf War in the Balkans, in Bosnia and eventually Croatia and Kosovo, and Sierra Leone and Afghanistan. And my last job was training, developing the next kind of tranche of leaders that were coming through and again like Nick hugely fortunate. And when I left in 2011, I think you have to draw a line sand. And in terms of this repurposing, there are some skills that you've got that you're never going to use again, but the vast majority of them you take with you. You kind of smooth off some of the rough edges and a lot of what I learned then I use now as my role as a humanitarian.

4:59 Nick Parker

And Paul and I were in different regiments of the British infantry and he would never have spoken to me when we were serving. But he does speak to me now.

5:01 Lars Peter Nissen

It's good to see your relationship evolved. Now when I first came across you, you were called Team Rubicon. And I believe you started in relation to the Nepali earthquake. Maybe could we have the origin story of REACT and Team Rubicon?

5:25 Nick Parker

Probably one for me rather than Paul.

5:27 Paul Taylor

Yeah, it’s a bit before Nepal that…

5:30 Nick Parker

Yeah, I mean, when I left, I left the army in 2013. And had an itch that the narrative in the UK was about sympathy, particularly for wounded soldiers, and not the respect for what I felt a soldier and a veteran could do. The potential for the veteran community. So I was searching around for some sort of an idea which would enable the demonstration of the great opportunities that existed and the potential of the veteran community. And I encountered Team Rubicon at a conference in 2014. And we started a conversation and they thought it would be sensible to set up an international division with the UK as one of its branches. And I was very struck by the fact that this was bringing US veterans together and then they were going and doing things for other people, largely in the US where the circumstances were very different to ours. They had many more natural disasters which would overload the emergency responders. Whereas in the UK that's much less likely. But it felt to me as if there was an opportunity to get a deployable organisation made-up of veterans that would do that. So in its inception, it was the team Rubicon idea that we were able to back on to.

7:04 Lars Peter Nissen

So really, it's the US, its domestic capability to deploy to primarily natural disasters, there you come in contact. At the core idea I guess we have all these veterans. They have an amazing skill set that must be useful in the international setting as well.

7:23 Nick Parker

Yeah. And I must be totally honest, at the beginning, I was more concerned about the input than the output, but in the back of my mind, I knew that from my experience in military operations, there was, forgive the language, but a sort of sweet spot when something happens, and everybody's in shock. There's a moment where if you can produce some order and structure to what's going on, you can make an enormous difference. So I felt that the ability to create an organization that could react to sudden onset emergencies could be relevant in the international and humanitarian communities. I have to be honest, the idea was there. We knew there was a gap in the market, but we didn't really know how much it was. Our emphasis was on bringing these veterans together and giving them a purpose.

8:26 Lars Peter Nissen

When you say you were more worried about the input than the output, could you unpack that? What's the input?

8:32 Nick Parker

Giving veterans a purpose. So that's where we started with an organization which, when you encountered it, was very much a sort of "come together, lads, we're great, let's go and do something." And we were searching for something to do.

8:46 Paul Taylor

Yeah, it was. So there's two parts of that. It was primarily focused on the veteran experience. The other thing that impacted us, I think because it was set up in the USA, we almost took their culture and the way they had been doing things and dropped it onto our organization. So it took us a while to find our way, I think.

9:11 Nick Parker

I mean, it's quite a challenge to set up a charity because you got to get the money, you got to get all the governance processes right. We were lucky because we were able to import all of Team Rubicon's documentation, handbook, all these things. But as Paul says, they were written for a different mass, culture, largely for domestic mucking and gutting. I think we would have found it extremely difficult to set the thing up without that leg up.

9:47 Lars Peter Nissen

Yeah, because I've never worked in the military and from the outside, you look very similar in many ways. But for example, experiencing the different armed forces engaging in Afghanistan, for me, there was a very clear difference between the way the Americans did that and the way the Brits did that.

10:04 Paul Taylor

I think that's a good point. As the Team Rubicon model grew, you had Team Rubicon Global and then you had people in Canada, the UK, Norway, Australia, all very different. Sometimes it's cultural, sometimes it's by virtue of geography. Nick's point about us – we had to be an international organization, aside from COVID, there wasn't that much to do in the UK. Australia, US, and Canada were very different. So there is that part. If you are someone like yourself looking from the outside, it’s as a homogeneous Team Rubicon Group, although the component parts were very different.

10:40 Lars Peter Nissen

And so why did you choose to rebrand? Why are you now REACT instead of Team Rubicon?

10:47 Nick Parker

I think two reasons for me. First, one of the big lessons we've learned on this journey is that you need to focus on the output – what it is you're trying to achieve. To do that, you can't shape your organization on the basis of its people. You've got to train your people to meet the needs. We've shifted in the way we do things, and about 60% of our people are ex-military, and the other 40% come from emergency services or are people who want to do something challenging. And when I go around and visit volunteers, responders and go to training events and that sort of thing, the commitment you get from people that are from people who are not veterans is an essential element of the energy inside the volunteering organization. We're building a capability designed to deal with that period, which we find necessary in a sudden-onset disaster. The shock period of two to four weeks, gosh you gotta train people carefully for that

12:06 Lars Peter Nissen

Yes, I fully agree with that. I guess the way you describe it is, that you start out with this group of people who leave the service and enter a very different life, a civilian life. And of course my immediate reaction as a hippie-humanitarian would be, it's good that we need occupational therapy for ex-military people, but why is that the problem of people suffering disasters internationally? It's a very different setting, and you can't just jump into that. What I hear you saying is that you had to refocus on what's the purpose here.

12:50 Nick Parker

So that’s the first things. The second point for rebranding was that for governance purposes, it was better to have an organization that recognized UK charitable law. It was essentially a UK-based organisation which wasn’t operating under a license controlled by another country. Team Rubicon is a fantastic organization, but to give us the flexibility and freedom to do what we needed to do, a rebrand was sensible. It was also in part driven by COVID, cause we all got stuck in the COVID groove and we did our rebrand through that period.

13:30 Paul Taylor

And that rebranding allowed us to control our own identity and culture and tweak it so it's more apt for people in the UK. And the other thing I think we acknowledged is how do we better integrate with the humanitarian sector and become a part of the ecosystem, which I'm sure we'll go on to discuss. And I think it was easier for us, and it has been easier for us to do that as REACT.

14:00 Nick Parker

REACT is a name about what we do. Team Rubicon is more about what we were, and I think that shift has been quite useful.

14:10 Lars Peter Nissen

When I look at your strategy, you talk about a lean, fast, needs-driven military approach to humanitarian action. What's that?

14:20 Nick Parker

It comes the back of my mind, from the things I did during my career. The military had a culture that focuses on the mission almost to the exclusion of everything else. You needed to design your organization and operate in a way where you achieve your mission as swiftly and effectively as possible. And to do that, the approach is about mitigating risk absolutely from the outset and not allowing yourself to be constrained by all the problems that are emerging. Focus on the outcome and contingency planning to get nearly to the outcome rather than stepping back and not doing anything at all. It's that attitude, it’s not about a sort of hierarchical, regulated behaviors. It’s more about the concept you take when you’re confronted by a challenge.

15:23 Paul Taylor

And Nicks point about not being regulated… There are three things for me that make it work: One is values – all organisation’s have values, but interestingly this one is where it’s becoming more humanitarian. Our first value is humanitarian first, regardless of our background we are all humanitarians. There is then the bid about leadership – we're repurposing military leadership experience so it can be used in the humanitarian sector and also for us critically as a volunteer organisation when leading volunteers. And the final bid, which for me really makes it work, is this idea, this philosophy of what we call mission command, so empowered execution. So opposed to be in this rigid hierarchy, we're empowering the person closest to the problem, giving them the freedom of action. So you get this really fast decision-action cycle.

16:14 Lars Peter Nissen

So the way I understand mission command – and again, I’m not deep into military things – it's basically you're told, this is what we want to achieve, this is the resources you have, and this is what you're not allowed to do. Now go figure it out.

16:27 Paul Taylor

Yeah. And here's the space for you to make it work.

16:33 Nick Parker

And feel free to come back and challenge us. If you haven't got… cause, the resources are inevitably the most restricting part of this, and what we have done over time is to refine what we're doing so that we can operate with minimal resources and achieve maximum effect. Which is what I will get into with partnership and…

16:52 Lars Peter Nissen

Yeah. But I think my first question is, I mean, when you work in the military, clearly the objective is not set by yourself. It's quite important for a military that somebody tells them what to do, or we end up in a bad space, right? So you have political masters who tell you, this is the objective. Who sets the objective for Team REACT?

17:11 Nick Parker

You're talking about an objective at a very high level. And there is a sort of, if you like, at the highest level, there is a common-sense reaction to a sudden onset disaster that everybody understands. You sort of don't need the order to be given, but in the military, what you then have to do is to set your mission on the basis of what is happening. So you look at the context. And then you decide what you're going to do, and usually, you consult with people to make sure that your mission fits into the sort of space that you're operating. For React, our philosophy, and Paul can talk better to this because he does it. Our philosophy is to react quickly, get there as early as we possibly can, survey the scene, set our objectives, having worked out what we can do given the circumstances that we're facing.

18:06 Paul Taylor

And I think we align our objectives with our capabilities, right? So what is it you can actually do? We're quite small. We frame that in what we call the emergency phase of disaster. We probably stay for about five or six weeks and hand over to set the conditions for large humanitarian actors. And so if you said, what are our objectives in line with our mission? Nick mentioned speed, rapid humanitarian action for the vulnerable and hardest to reach. So where do we fit into the sector? We're saying that we have got people using a military approach, not all military. And I think the biggest step change for me, in terms of capability with diversity... When we opened it up to everybody, it was the best thing that we ever did, I think. So we've now got blended teams, good balance. And if we said our first capability is to develop situational awareness, we're going to try and get on the ground early. We're going to get to these people who are vulnerable and hardest to reach by boat, helicopter, however you get there, and we're going to conduct needs assessments, develop situational awareness and feed that back into whatever the coordination mechanisms might be. And it might be at the cluster is in place.

19:15 Lars Peter Nissen

I think I was trying to shoot at something slightly different. How do you pick the contexts? So we have Ukraine, I would imagine that's the context where it's fairly uncontroversial for Team React to deploy. We have Gaza, that might be slightly different. There might be some political sensitivities. We have, let's say, Myanmar, we have Afghanistan, we have Syria. What's your calculus there in terms of where don't you go?

19:44 Paul Taylor

So I'll let Nick elaborate, but we are… straight up we're small and the needs are vast. So what can we actually do? And so within that, at my level, we have whether it's sudden onset or protracted crisis, we have a response activation matrix, and one of the critical questions is, can we make an impact?

20:07 Nick Parker

So I've got a very committed board who, I suppose, try to set our objectives. They want to do all of those. But there are inevitably both capability restrictions and there will be geopolitical circumstantial restrictions. And we now, as Paul says, have a better template that we can apply, which on any potential deployment we will apply very quickly, and it becomes extremely evident whether it's sensible to send somebody immediately to see what's going on. Ukraine, very different. Gaza, very different. The Morocco earthquake, it was very clear that there was a need to go and see. So before that, the template was being applied as we sent a team out to see what was going on, and then you can build your requirement and make the decision to deploy from there. Why not? I mean, geography also clearly plays a part. It takes an awfully long time to get to some of the far-flung parts of the world, and there's probably somebody else who may be doing it. And if there isn't, it's just beyond our capability.

21:28 Lars Peter Nissen

Of course, my real question is, are there some contexts that are extra sensitive because you're ex-military?

21:34 Paul Taylor

Haha..

21:35 Nick Parker

There are… I would say, as the Chair of this thing, there are some contexts where I lose sleep over my duty of care for the volunteer. Because these guys are sending our volunteers. They are, and we've got to be really careful, but the organization has got to be relevant. So it's got to be able to go anywhere but employing the correct levels of safeguarding. And I mean, we have been trying to do something worthwhile in Gaza since it started, but we're constrained by the duty of care. Ukraine is not a typical sort of engagement for us because originally, when we set ourselves up, conflict was a red line, we wouldn't get involved in a sort of conflict situation, but we've had to moderate that. The way we have done that is to introduce more training cereals for our volunteers. So we've now got a small group of highly trained volunteers who we are able to send into a place like Ukraine because they can protect themselves. The other thing is this business of partnerships. So in Ukraine, we can't have a persistent presence. It's too expensive. It would waste our volunteers' energy. So we have built partnerships with particularly one good Ukrainian NGO, and we go regularly to them and help them whenever we can. But the bottom line, the basic model is a sudden onset disaster. Apply the template. Does it fulfill the bill? Send a team out there as fast as we possibly can, and then deploy. That's the basic model. Nothing is ever simple, and we're adapting every time something happens.

23:26 Paul Taylor

And the complex emergency has evolved. Because if that is one of the primary drivers of humanitarian needs, that's where these vulnerable and hardest to reach people we say we're going to, we gotta be prepared to go there as well.

23:35 Lars Peter Nissen

Yeah. And of course, natural disasters or sudden onset disasters rather happen in complex emergencies also.

23:41 Nick Parker

Yes. Yes, I have one this one thing… the board also has to be conscious of the sort of the length of time that we're going to be involved for. It would be highly irresponsible to go into a disaster with a capability that suddenly wasted out, so you'd started to help and suddenly you found you'd run out of volunteers and you were unable to... now you can work on partnerships, which you do, but you should be very careful that you're not overstretching the organization, so it leaves people in the lurch.

24:12 Lars Peter Nissen

When you go into, let's say, an earthquake, a sudden onset, which suits your organization well I think, that's sort of the ideal use case… It hits very quickly, the confusion and chaos you talk about is there in the beginning, especially the first couple of weeks, are really chaotic, and of course, very rapidly deployable capabilities with the skill set to operate in that environment can really, really make a difference. Can you talk me through one of the missions you've had where you felt like, yeah, this is really where we belonged, we really, we hit it on the head this time. What's your best success story?

24:55 Paul Taylor

I think the response to Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas in 2019. Because I think there you had the hub in Nassau when we got there, there wasn't really a humanitarian presence on the affected islands, Abaco and Grand Bahama. So there was this bit about we'll go and have a look. So you had people who are self-sufficient, and that's another thing about our capability is that people got their own communications, food, water. They can look after themselves. We put a team onto each of the islands, started to engage with the local humanitarian actors, and empower them and some advocacy. And then from there, the response grew, and we stayed for about six weeks. That was particularly effective.

25:45 Lars Peter Nissen

And what do you do concretely? Do you hand out stuff? Do you fix the water plant?

25:50 Paul Taylor

So we do, in terms of our response capabilities, we do three things. So I think primarily, and based on speed and being there potentially when there aren't any other actors there who can do that, it's this situational awareness, just get to these remote communities, find out what people need. One of our capabilities is incident management, but I'm not saying that we just drop in and we manage the incident, I'm saying we support people. In places like the Caribbean, islands hit by Category 5 hurricanes, the incident managers may well be part of the affected population initially. So we can help with that. And if you know where the affected population are and what they need, there's a way of coordinating that. The final bit of those three things is logistics. So we then try and get humanitarian aid to those people that we've first identified.

26:43 Lars Peter Nissen

But you work more on the enabling side, on the logistics side rather than frontline organizing distribution.

26:49 Paul Taylor

We can. I think we're quite flexible. One of the good things about the pool of talent that we've got in our volunteer base is we have those three capabilities as I've described. But if you need a warehouse manager and you put a call out, invariably you'll find someone who has done that.

27:04 Lars Peter Nissen

Because I'm preparing for this interview, I was thinking about the Oslo guidelines for use of military assets in natural disasters. Right. And I guess the simple version is, don't let them out frontline, they do back office heavy lifting, putting in place capabilities that can really enable the operation. Is that how you see yourself?

27:24 Paul Taylor

No, I think it's a really important point that there's the veteran and there is humanitarian, and they're not mutually exclusive, right? I'm a humanitarian, and my former employment was in the army, just like someone else's former employment might be in IT.

27:40 Lars Peter Nissen

Absolutely. I get that. I was more hinting at the type of skills that you have.

27:45 Nick Parker

I think we're talking about almost exactly the opposite. I think you're right that in a purely humanitarian situation, the military can produce scale and mass and support. As your scale goes up into a chaotic environment, they can produce control mechanisms, but you send the wrong message if you have a lot of uniforms forward, and that causes all sorts of difficulties with partnerships. Don't look on us as uniforms. I think that's Paul's point. We're trying to get right to the pointy end of this with our amazing volunteers who we've trained as well as we possibly can to be able to suit the front end. And if you like, where you're talking about the military is a sort of a push, what we're trying to do is to pull, get threads into all these very well organized and supported humanitarian organizations that aren't able to cope in that period of chaos, put a tentacle in and start pulling the resources forward to where they're most needed.

28:55 Lars Peter Nissen

And I should say to our listeners that both Nick and Paul are extremely civilian looking today.

29:00 Nick Parker

Look, I think that's a compliment.

29:08 Lars Peter Nissen

Absolutely, Yeah. Thank you for clarifying that. And really what I'm doing, I'm just trying to probe around the boundaries of what you are and what you aren't, so that I see how you fit in. And you sound to me more like a disaster management capability than a humanitarian actor. Is that right?

29:27 Nick Parker

I find it very difficult to make that distinction, because if you're in a disaster, there's a humanitarian need, but I understand the point you're making.

29:35 Paul Taylor

Yeah, I mean I think that we're humanitarians. And I think by virtue of the space that we operate in, we find sometimes find ourselves in a disaster management.

29:45 Nick Parker

But we're digging latrines in Morocco with the locals. So we're doing WASH work. I mean, we sort of get involved in both.

29:59 Paul Taylor

I also think that we are – and this is one of the reasons I I'm proud to be a humanitarian –is that we are an advocate for marginalising disenfranchised communities. So we are there to hold the government in certain places to account to say ‘you need to treat these people as well’.

30:16 Lars Peter Nissen

Yeah, because I think that's probably the key difference for me in terms... if I say disaster management, I'm thinking of a government-led system where different capabilities plug in and support the overall operation. If I think humanitarian, I think humanitarian principles, which is a situation where government and civil society is either unwilling or unable to cater for part of their populations basic needs.

30:40 Paul Taylor

And also the point about humanitarian principles is that in the places where we operate in by virtue of the fact we're trying to get to the people who are vulnerable and hardest to reach – you're disconnected from that governing near that coordination hub. So really as a when people say to me, you know, you're going to our community in Nepal, ‘what do I need? Give me some advice’. I say two things. Your guide rails or your REACT values in one hand and the humanitarian principles in the other. That's what you're referring to, so it's very humanitarian.

31:10 Lars Peter Nissen

And of course, when we talk about humanitarian action, it's assistance. And its protection. What does protection mean for you guys?

31:20 Paul Taylor

Well, I think again that this protection for us is that we potentially haven't got the protection cluster to go to and seek for advice and report things, so it's an acknowledgment that at every level, protection is the responsibility of every responder. Morocco is a good case in point, right? So we're the first people there. The issue is in sanitation, we're digging emergency latrines. How do we have this difficult conversation with the head man to make sure that we find a location which is safe for the women of the village to go to the toilet, and that is existing when we leave. So how do you make sure that it is safe for a long period of time? So there. Yeah. So it's incumbent upon everybody, I think.

32:06 Nick Parker

In a funny sort of way, the conversation is taking us down a route where it's quite difficult to distinguish between those two sorts of capabilities—humanitarian and disaster—but the two, for us, in the end that we're operating, do merge, and you have to be able to deal with both. Which sort of plays back to this lesson that we've learned, which is that you do need to train your volunteers well. And with a volunteer organization, keeping your volunteers engaged and committed is in part achieved by giving them really good training, but you've also got to be able to give them opportunity. And of course, it's quite erratic when these things happen, and they've all got day jobs. So managing how the volunteer stays committed and is ready to go at no notice is a challenge for the organization.

33:06 Lars Peter Nissen

How big is the team now? How many volunteers do you have?

33:10 Paul Taylor

We've got about 2,000 volunteers, but that's across the piece that they can respond in the UK. And about 200 for international.

33:22 Lars Peter Nissen

And how scalable is this? Let's say in 10 years time, we have another interview to celebrate, what, 15 years of React? How big are you then?

33:31 Nick Parker

I mean, I think the point that we've been touching on, which is relevant to this, is that this organization only works if it can partner. We work most effectively when we have partner organizations that recognize what we do, support what we do, and don't see us as a threat. One of the things that I have felt, probably because I'm oversensitive, but I've felt during our growth that we are not necessarily recognized as a capability that's necessary. And that's in part because we're deploying at a time when the convention is that other people will be doing the business. So if we go to somewhere like Morocco and we find we're the only international NGO operating because of some political constraints, and we look back here in the UK, the fundraising is all through the Disaster Emergency Committee to the big charities who are putting out Morocco earthquake appeals, and we're totally out of that loop. So there is a disconnect between the relationships with some organizations and what we, but I don't care about the REACT brand if we're delivering what we should be delivering on the ground. We can follow that up later.

34:56 Lars Peter Nissen

And do you think that's because you're the new kids on the block or because there's competition?

35:02 Nick Parker

I think it's partly because of the veteran, the military aspect. Partly because I think the management of our brand has gone through a transformation. In the early days, I think we were seen as a sort of quasi-military organization.

35:20 Paul Taylor

I mean, I think in 10 years time, I would like REACT to be better known, used and respected. I mean, that could be a Venn diagram, and as a result of that, better integrated. And that means access to better funding, and that is maybe better integrated into response architecture – OCHA, UNDAC. And the other part of that, I think if we're better integrated, in terms of scale, I don't think we want to be too large. I think because it's quite specialist, we've got a niche. So we may be slightly larger, but I think we're fairly comfortable with what we do and that sets the conditions for other humanitarian actors.

35:55 Nick Parker

I mean, I've matured a bit. Frustrating what goes on maturing, but when we first set the thing up, we had grand plans of having 5,000 veterans on our books and 10,000 veterans in five years. We have completely shifted from there because it's not that sort of organization. It's doing fantastic things for our volunteers, and for some of those veterans. I hope they continue to be a strong seam of veterans in what we're doing, but this is all about how well we work with other people, how well we deliver a capability in some really very challenging circumstances.

36:34 Lars Peter Nissen

Can I ask about your funding? Is that a FCDO? Is it private sources? How do you get money?

36:40 Nick Parker

We work very hard to get money by going around and asking people to empty their pockets and by trying to develop relationships. We don't have any formal funding. At the very beginning, we were set up by an extremely generous grant of Libor funding, which you may have heard of, which set us up in the beginning. But since then, we fundraise in the way that many charities fundraise, and sometimes it feels desperately hand to mouth.

37:10 Lars Peter Nissen

Yeah, sounds familiar. So that's philanthropic mainly I guess?

37:17 Nick Parker

Community fundraising is important, particularly after COVID, and keeping our responders engaged at home, actually going out into their communities and helping with low-level things or low-level fundraising is important. It doesn't raise a huge amount of money, but it's really important for engagement. And then we are building relationships with some corporate partners, and we work very hard on trying to attract the attention of generous philanthropists. It's quite hard work.

37:49 Lars Peter Nissen

Yeah, there's no fun. So you mentioned that there was a certain reluctance or apprehension when you suddenly appear on the stage, and why do we need these guys and are they really military or what are they? I can see that happening with maybe some of the established NGOs who feel they don't need the competition. But how have you been received by the overall humanitarian architecture, OCHA, the clusters? Do you engage with them?

38:20 Paul Taylor

We do. I think we have got very good – you know speaking as a response actor – relations with the clusters, very good relations with OCHA, very good relations with the UNDAC team. And I think what's important is because they recognize clearly, I'm biased, the value that we might bring. So in response to the Türkiye earthquake, there's a very small UNDAC team in one place. We bring three teams of four people. You don't need to go to those locations because we can do that for you.

38:50 Lars Peter Nissen

No, I totally get that. I'm an UNDAC member myself. I've been for 20 years, and I'd love to see you guys show up in the field. I mean, that's clear. You fit straight in. What about the broader humanitarian architecture?

39:03 Paul Taylor

Well, it would be difficult to say because when we respond, we really do just engage with the cluster. We might be in the WASH cluster, for example, and we engage with OCHA in the center, so we don't really engage with the other parts of the cluster.

39:20 Lars Peter Nissen

OK, so you go wherever the coordination mechanism is at the country level, but we rarely see you in...

39:24 Paul Taylor

Yeah. And if it's to do with logistics, we'll go to WFP.

39:28 Nick Parker

I think and if the chief executive Toby Wicks, was here, I think he would say quite a lot of his time is spent sort of tapping the corridors in order to be able to have those sort of conversations.

39:39 Paul Taylor

Yeah, in Geneva.

39:40 Nick Parker

But you're… Paul made a point about being recognised and respected is something that we're working on as a journey. We're not there yet and so I would never level any criticism that any other organisation for not knowing about us or not trusting us because it's our job. To demonstrate that we're worth partnering with. But that is an absolutely central objective in what we're trying to achieve.

40:05 Paul Taylor

I think the other thing that you have to be... Again, as part of our values, is if you're a small actor then you have to be humble – there’s what you can do, there's what you can't do. So there's an element of humility and the message to every single responder when they go away on responses... Every single person you engage with at Community level be at the head of the communitarian response, be a local actor... They should go away thinking I like these people. These are the kind of people we can do business with. So we're kind of, you know, we're the advocate for our brand. Everywhere we go. And you as good as your last deployment.

40:40 Lars Peter Nissen

When you’ve spoken quite a bit about partnerships and needing to partner. So who are apart from that say the other international humanitarians you meet in the cluster meetings, who are your partners? What? What is that? Is that local civil society?

40:57 Paul Taylor

So I think, yeah. So I think we do, we do two things. We do, you know, make friends before you need them. So we can we can do that preemptively. And the other thing we can do, Ukraine is case in point with the charity that we're working with partner at pace. So we you know we went and met them into Ukraine, met them in Lviv and that's grown over a period of two years. And then again, I think with partnerships and again this is linked to the humility, I think sometimes in the humanitarian sector there is a… people will try and superimpose an existing model that they might have used elsewhere and drop it onto a response. I think what we're very good at is an acknowledgment that like, I've never been to Ukraine before, you understand the context and what can we do to maybe there's a shift in power balance. Maybe that's financial. What can we do to support you? And in terms of the... what we've been doing physically, you know, I got back from Ukraine on Monday. What we have been doing in Ukraine over the last two years has adjusted to the need – needs based humanitarian action. But the other thing we've been doing, we've been advocates for them. So we've introduced them to the UN ecosystem and as a result of that advocacy and writing a few letters, and taking them to meetings, they've now got access to millions from the Ukraine Humanitarian Fund.

42:20 Lars Peter Nissen

That sounds really good. And I think I understand how you try to sort of integrate into the humanitarian architecture and the way we work. Now you're still a fairly young organisation and not the most well-known brand among all of the actors. So what's the message you'd like to send to the rest of the humanitarian community around REACT –who you are, what you can do?

42:49 Paul Taylor

My message would be that REACT is a small, relatively nascent primarily response actor who are striving to be better, striving to integrate better into the humanitarian space and the humanitarian ecosystem. We can set the conditions for other humanitarian actors and we can partner with them. So if it's appropriate, we'd love to work with other humanitarian actors.

43:15 Nick Parker

Paul is absolutely right. Anything I would say, if there are any REACt volunteers listening to this, that this organisation simply wouldn't work without peoples willingness to volunteer and I am deeply humbled by what they do for us.

43:30 Lars Peter Nissen

I think from my side. I am a strong believer that we need a very diverse humanitarian community. And I think it's fantastic that you have established this capability that I can see complement the current sector in a number of different theatres and just like any other organisation, there will be places where you fit well and places where you fit less well. But it's great that you're here. Now, before we end, I'd like to maybe let's put on the uniforms – at least the two of you.

44:03 Nick Parker

They don't fit anymore… but Pauls’ does mindless.

44:06 Lars Peter Nissen

We all worked in Afghanistan at different stages. I was working with ICRC in 2002, just at the beginning of the whole operation, after the Taliban were chucked out of power. And I saw the military, both ISAF and so on, coming in and the impact that had on the country. And I know, Nick, you commanded actually the...

44:31 Nick Parker

Well, I was the UK national contingent commander and the deputy commander of ISAF. I did command for about two weeks when General McChrystal left and there was a gap before General Petraeus arrived.

44:43 Lars Peter Nissen

There's a film about how he made his boss very unhappy, yeah.

44:47 Nick Parker

Yes, yes. And I have no comment on that.

44:49 Lars Peter Nissen

No, of course not.

44:50 Nick Parker

But I was the world's best deputy cause I just sat there and kept the ship on course. But yeah, no, I was there as the deputy commander in 2010.

44:56 Paul Taylor

And I was there in 2009 in Muscala, and we were at the forward line, if you like. And I guess we were helping create the humanitarian space for humanitarians and other actors to operate in.

45:12 Lars Peter Nissen

And I'd like to start this conversation by just turning the tables on the two of you. Now we have spent almost an hour talking about how wonderful it is that ex-military people can be contributing to the humanitarian sort of endeavor. Now, what can the military use ex-humanitarians for? Let's say I show up to you then in 2009 and say, hey, I know Afghanistan. I worked with ICRC in 2002. Can you use me for anything, Nick?

45:40 Nick Parker

The answer is absolutely yes. The difficulty is going to be priorities, the establishment of priorities that allow you to have the voice that you need to have. Helmand, for example, or parts of the larger parts of the country…

45:57 Lars Peter Nissen

But not as a humanitarian. Can I help you out, militarily speaking, with my humanitarian skill set?

46:02 Nick Parker

Yes, you can. You can make a contribution to the commander's decision-making process that puts a perspective in his or her mind about what he's going to do. If he does that, there will be these consequences, which are very obvious to you because of your experience, but not obvious to him.

46:21Lars Peter Nissen

And do you actually do that?

46:23 Nick Parker

We do, we do it better. But as I was saying, the problem is the priority. And if you've got a nasty enemy who's making the area very insecure, all your energy goes into securing the area. Now, there is a long conversation about whether the actions that you take to make someone more secure actually have the opposite effect. But that's what you're trying to do, and so you don't listen to the other voices that are telling you to do other things because they are not of a high enough priority.

46:52 Lars Peter Nissen

Yeah. And it's very interesting, isn't it? Because I'm sure that all three of us felt a deep, deep frustration when we saw what happened when the pullout came after 20 years and that house of cards that had been built collapsed in a couple of weeks.

47:06 Nick Parker

Deeply upsetting, I found it. And also I find it upsetting that it almost seems to have been brushed under the carpet. People talk about the evacuation, but they don't talk about the consequences of the investment we made between 2001 and 2021. I did feel, and this is not with the benefit of hindsight, I did feel very strongly that we needed to invest just as much in social and economic programs as we were in the military. The billions of pounds that we were spending on the military were not matched by the amount that we were spending on assisting in other areas of civil society.

47:53 Lars Peter Nissen

But with all due respect, we all know from our side, from the humanitarian side, that when you're present in a theatre, you run the shop. You dominate it, and no matter what your military doctrine is, force protection comes first. The nasty enemy, those powers, we know that. And we know that we are either a sideshow or a force multiplier.

48:18 Paul Taylor

Well, a broader point, still holding Afghanistan as the one of perception. So if I go back then when I was a soldier, I knew very little about humanitarians. And I might say that there were humanitarians who maybe didn't really understand what I was doing and what I was about. And it's taken a long time for me now as a humanitarian and as a REACT responder… Maybe we've got a foot in both camps, which is helpful.

48:44 Lars Peter Nissen

But of course, what's so important for us, and I think the point that is so hard to drive home when we meet you in the field, if we had met there, Paul, and we had gone out for a beer, is trying to explain to you that you need to keep the distance. We have very, very different perceptions of security. That is such a hard point to drive home, especially on the frontline.

49:15 Nick Parker

And it may be irreconcilable because it...

49:18 Lars Peter Nissen

I think it is.

49:19 Nick Parker

You are trying to force a security situation to enable other things to happen if you're in the military, whereas you're trying to manage and step back and allow others to bring back the security. And of course, one of our problems is time and resource. You're placing a time and resource constraint on what you're doing. And you don't want too many people killed, so you've got to do it in as effective and efficient a way from your perspective, which won't necessarily look right from your perspective.

49:53 Lars Peter Nissen

No, when we drive at night, which we try not to, but if we do, we turn on the light in the car so everybody can see who's in there, right? We operate with putting our security in the hands of all the parties to the conflict, depending on a good understanding of who we are and why we are there.

50:10 Nick Parker

But we put ourselves behind armor, put on all sorts of protective kit and drive around in a little cocoon, completely different.

50:18 Lars Peter Nissen

Yeah, the ninja turtle outfit, as we used to call it. I remember meeting with a civilian-military task force set up by the Americans, and basically the message was, we've been to parts here. It's peaceful down there. I can walk on the street. I feel safe. You just tell us how to collaborate. Come down there. We can work hand in hand, or we provide security and you do the distributions. Those were the actual words. I remember one of the colleagues standing up and saying, "You know, I have worked for 20 years across the world. Always with the assumption that we had nine lives. Here, we only have eight." Then he sat down again. Right. And so I think that dilemma for us is we know you run the shop. We know force protection is key. Of course, it is. If I were military, that should be my focus, but you're undermining our security. And we look like you, at least I do, right? I mean, if I'm seen with you, if I'm hanging with you, if we drink a beer, Paul, or whatever, you undermine our security. Passing that message without pissing people off is very, very difficult.

51:30 Nick Parker

I used to try to reconcile that in a conversation by saying our job was to produce a really crude level of security. I think the military were trying to be too sophisticated in the level to which they were getting involved. Actually, if you can produce a really basic foundation of security and then understand that others, whenever possible, led by civil society, I mean the cultural lead is so important if you're going to get anything that's going to last. But if you could find that balance—and I don't profess to have an answer—but if you could find that dividing line and respect who sat on either side, maybe one could have a more constructive conversation. Your argument, though probably to me, forgive me, is pretty much where your mouth is, that there is no security partly because you're there. And if we were to go, you would be able to get on with your job.

52:28 Lars Peter Nissen

I mean, there are indications that that's what's happening. And I think that there is that element, right. But I think the key to understand is how do you operate? What are the traffic rules when you have both humanitarian and military actors present in the same theatre, right? And I think our message to you guys is you need to understand who we are and why we keep a distance. And again, there's a personal element as well. We meet each other as colleagues. It’s a hard line to draw and a difficult one to respect, especially because you guys change all the time. It's always a new face for me. And so it very quickly goes down to the lowest common denominator. I don't think the British military, I think you have a very sophisticated doctrine around how to deal with civilian populations. I don't think that's the case across the board. I won't name any names here, but I saw a clear difference between the way you operated and some of the other militaries. But the outcome is more or less the same for us.

53:43 Nick Parker

Yeah, I think it's the battlefield in military language. The battlefield is a hell of a lot more complex than it ever was. In the days of the Cold War, you had sort of two sides standing off and an assumption that you would clear the battlefield of any other complications and just get on and fight. That has long gone, and we're still going through a process of understanding the complexity of the places that we're going to. If you can produce a common objective—mutually understand what it is that you're trying to achieve—perhaps the mechanisms and intervention for the military would change. The problem will be the need for political expediency to get on with it, that something must be done element, tends to distort the long-term outcome. If you look at Afghanistan, if you look back at the amount of time that we took before it all ended up in tatters in 2021, that period of time could have been used much more constructively if you'd started by thinking we're going to be here for 10 years or 15 years. Maybe we should be thinking differently about time when we get involved in these things.

55:03 Lars Peter Nissen

We had two jokes in 2002. One was, you can't buy an Afghan, you can rent him for a while. And the other was, Hamid Karzai is the president of Kabul during the day.

55:16 Nick Parker

But when you were there in 2002, did you think that there was an opportunity for a better outcome then, looking forward?

55:26 Lars Peter Nissen

It was a time of hope. It really was, and it was wonderful to see how Kabul changed and to allow ourselves to believe that there could be a better future, right? It also felt, to be honest, like we were putting down some rail tracks that didn't go anywhere good. The way… the time pressure you talk about, the way in which seeking to push for a political consensus that probably wasn't there, the loya jirga, and all of that, it seemed sloppy. Maybe not from a narrow military perspective, but what we're learning is that a narrow military perspective doesn't work very well. It was concerning, and it's painful to speak to the colleagues back there today and hear the situation there.

56:29 Nick Parker

Certainly when I speak to military people who were serving in that 2001-2003 period, I mean 2001 was a bit different, but 2002-2003, there was real hope. Real hope, and it felt, although there were some cultural challenges, it felt as if there was a way forward, and then that changed.

56:50 Lars Peter Nissen

One of the things I admire about the military is the way you learn. I think you're very sophisticated in picking up lessons and understanding how you as an institution can change and modify. I really think that we as a professional community in the humanitarian sector can learn from that. What I don't understand, for example with Afghanistan, is the mountain of, if you excuse the language, bullshit institutional language around all sorts of weird success criteria just to show, oh, we're making progress, we're making progress. It fits very poorly with an institution that prides itself on honesty and candor in terms of things that don't work well.

57:40 Nick Parker

Right. And the pressure that one was under to show progress. I mean, I remember from the time in Kabul there was an announcement of a US surge in December 2009. And in that speech, the President said that he would start to pull back people in 2011. Now, in military terms, what that was doing was putting a paper down. Which of course our enemy was listening to and it meant that we had to behave in a particular way to show results, and that was not necessarily in the long term a helpful way to behave. But that's and again I have to accept as a senior military officer, you have to accept the political direction that you get and try and work around it.

58:30 Lars Peter Nissen

Absolutely.

58:31Nick Parker

I think as a humanitarian organisation, the controls are different in that respect.

58:35 Lars Peter Nissen

Yeah, they're different, but the same principles apply, right? I mean, you do the job. You have... Right. Of course, you may have degrees of freedom that you don't, but you still have to do your job, and they are masters at pushing the buttons in different ways, right? It was interesting. Yesterday, I had lunch with a humanitarian colleague, and I told him I'm going to speak to the two of you, and I tried to pick his brain. You know, what should I ask these guys? And his answer may surprise you. First of all, he wasn't negative. He didn't react negatively. He said, you know what these guys are good at? They're good at empowering the edge of the organization. We tend to remote control from headquarters and so on, but these guys have learned how to give freedom to their frontline units and really operate and adapt to the theatre, and we could learn from that.

59:30 Nick Parker

Military approach for REACT.

59:32 Lars Peter Nissen

There you go. So you're not the only one who can see that, right? Just to say that I think it's really important for me to distinguish between the two different conversations we've had today. On one side, I have deep reservations about humanitarian collaboration with military forces in an active theatre, right? That's one set of issues, and when you guys wear the uniform, we are going to have a different conversation than the one we've had today. But a different thing is people with that experience who take off the uniform and want to contribute and integrate into the humanitarian sector. I think we have a tremendous amount of colleagues who are like that, and sometimes we also get too hung up on the other conversations, so we overlook what we can actually learn from the military.

1:00:18 Nick Parker

I think there are extraordinary skills on both sides of this. And it may be utopian, but the more that we can speak and understand each other and recognize that there may not be a reconciliation... I mean, it may be that as a military commander in Afghanistan in 2010, I would have to turn around to humanitarian representatives and irritate the hell out of them by saying, this is what we're going to do, whether you like it or not. You may not be able to reconcile this, but my god, we've got to talk and understand each other, and I think bringing our skill set and not only... One doesn't want to overemphasize it, but being able to view the humanitarian sector from the perspective of our experience is extraordinary, what people achieve in impossible circumstances.

1:01:07 Lars Peter Nissen

Yeah, I think that what needs to happen for that to work is… you can't just take an armored vehicle and spray-paint it white, right? And then when you scratch the surface, it's still green underneath. There needs to be some kind of transformation. And what I heard you say at the beginning of this conversation was exactly that—the shift from being Team Rubicon to understanding Team REACT. What is it in a British context? How do we fit into the sector? And I think that's why it probably really has value.

1:01:40 Paul Taylor

I listened to your very first podcast with Marc DuBois, and he was talking about, well, what can the humanitarian sector… it is not very good at acknowledging what other people can bring. But potentially, this is an awareness, and the other thing I think that military people carte blanche really can bring to any sector, but particularly the humanitarian sector, is in the field of leadership. In that podcast, I heard Marc saying that the sector doesn't attract the greatest leaders, right? Yeah. And I'm not... that's not based on my experience. I'll put that there. But what the military does is it attracts the raw talent and then it develops those leaders. So I think that's something that could assist.

1:02:30 Nick Parker

But there's a caricature of military leadership which Paul is not talking about. It's, if you like, leadership with a small L.

1:02:39 Lars Peter Nissen

I mean, for me, command and control are two very different things, right? And the caricature is control. But you... I mean, you know, the other thing my colleague said... Now I remember, he said, you know, they're fantastic leaders actually because, you know, they have to convince people to go out and get themselves killed. Here, you can't even get people to give up a seat on a panel discussion.

1:03:03 Paul Taylor

Yeah. And Nick's point, it has evolved. It's whatever, it's servant leadership, right? It's putting people first.

1:03:14 Lars Peter Nissen

Nick and Paul, thank you so much for coming on Trumanitarian. It has been a true pleasure having you here. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation and I look forward to seeing what REACT comes up with in the years to come.

1:03:20 Paul Taylor

Thank you very much.

1:03:22 Nick Parker

Thank you very much, indeed.