Episode 11. Capacity & Capability: US Diplomatic & Military Operations In The Horn Of Africa

Episode Transcript:

Amb. McCarthy: [00:00:05] Welcome to another conversation in the Academy of Diplomacy series, The General and the Ambassador. This focus is on how our top military commanders work with our top diplomats to advance American interests and protect our country. My name is Ambassador Deborah McCarthy and I am the moderator. Today, our focus will be on the Horn of Africa. Our guests are Ambassador Thomas Kelly and General Kurt Sonntag. Ambassador Kelly, you were the Ambassador to Djibouti from 2014 to 2017 after serving as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Political Military Affairs at the Department of State in Washington, working with the Department of Defense on many global challenges. General Sonntag, you were the commander of Combined Joint Task Force Horn of Africa from 2016 to 2017. You previously served as a Deputy Commander of the Army's Special Operations Command and are currently the commander of the Army's John F Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School. The Horn of Africa is the easternmost projection of Africa. It includes the countries of Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia. In Djibouti, the US has both a civilian base, the US Embassy and a military base Camp Lemonnier. Camp Lemonnier is the only US military base in sub-Saharan Africa and is part of the US Africa Command. I want to turn first in our discussion to your relationship and the missions that you each had. You led teams in Djibouti addressing terrorism, poverty, refugees, weak local governments. How did you develop your relationship and how did you work together in facing these challenges in this part of Africa?

Amb. Kelly: [00:01:45] We had two different channels of communication. The first was kind of formal channel in which the general and I every other week would chair a meeting with our respective leadership teams where we just.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:01:56] So you brought both teams together?  

Amb. Kelly: [00:01:57] Yeah. And if one of us couldn't attend, our deputies would represent us. But we thought it was really important to have our whole leadership team together exchanging information on what's going on, knowing what was important, what our military colleagues were working on, what we were focused on, what the Djiboutian government was worried about. That was a great way to make sure that our entire leadership teams were engaged in collaborative process, that we needed to make sure the US government was achieving all of its objectives. And then informally, we just were always kind of synced up, whether we just like walk into each other's offices, which were only about a mile and a half away or, well, that's good. Or he'd come over and have lunch at my place, or I would just eat at the mess with him. So where see each other better? 

Gen. Sonntag: [00:02:40] I had more. I know that his was way better, though. What the Ambassador is saying is absolutely correct because as the country team, he's got the lead within the country. Djibouti, we had a very large military presence there at the camp. So we wanted to ensure that we were good guests on behalf of our nation, but more as a reflection of the Ambassador's country team and its relationship with the Djiboutian government. So we made every effort to ensure that we were constantly maintaining and proving in relationships, whether it was primarily with our military counterparts. But we would also extend that into the political offices as well, based upon recommendations from the Ambassador. The interesting thing is, is that that was a very much a primary mission for us is the relationship with the Djiboutis. The actual mission of my command extended throughout the Horn of Africa, and this is one of the big differences I think our citizens should understand is that when we talk about the Horn of Africa, you know, the State Department sees it one way and then the military sees it another. Right.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:03:39] And I'd like to get it.

Gen. Sonntag: [00:03:40] So every three months or so, we would also brief all the newly minted general officers that would come through and kind of give them a rundown of what the environment was like. And I would always lead in and say, you know, the Horn of Africa is pretty big. And for perspective, the landmass that we were responsible for as the CJTF, if you picture the United States, it would go along the entire Eastern seaboard from the tip of Maine all the way down to the tip of Florida and extend all the way west to the Mississippi River. And we had that type of range and influence from within the camp, a total of ten countries. It also include the Seychelles, which which was offshore, and we would bring in all that information. So we had forces throughout there and we would support that. A lot of that energy moved from the camp out into the outlying areas and that would also have impact in terms of the Ambassador's engagements, because sometimes we would ask for certain flight permissions because it wasn't our airspace. So we needed to be able to travel different directions or we'd be bringing in other types of equipment that were last minute coordinations. And they had a small staff. But all of that has to be coordinated through the country team to be effective.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:04:44] That's the point we've made in some of the podcasts, which is we have these bases, I call them the civilian bases, the military bases, but we are guests in a certain country, even if the area of responsibility can extend beyond. Kurt, can you tell me a little bit more about the basic mission of CJTF and how it evolved while you were there? 

Gen. Sonntag: [00:05:03] The evolution of the command actually goes back to almost right after 9/11 when we realized that we needed a footprint further out near the Gulf of Aden just because of all the trafficking. We had a lot of piracy issues in the area. And we also knew that there are certain indicators within civil populations that we knew bred violent extremism. So we wanted to kind of get a look at that. That's when we first made the agreement to establish a JTF out there. The JTF has actually older than AFRICOM, my parent headquarters that was stationed. Over the course that I was there, the missions changed a variety of ways for different reasons. But generally speaking, the CJTF's role primarily is force protection of the US personnel, military civilians, interagency and interest in Djibouti, and then an extension of those protection responsibilities throughout the militaries reach within the area. We would provide security, force assistance, support to all the ambassadors within the region and sometimes outside of our region. If we had the capacity to do that in order to grow those partner nations capabilities and capacity to handle some of the internal security issues that they dealt with, and then as various forms of problems or crises evolved, particularly when it came to poverty related issues, drought, famine, things like that, we would look at it, available resources that we could push over to the State Department for their use to resolve those problems as fast as possible.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:06:21] And Tom, can you go over a bit what our national security interests were in the region? 

Amb. Kelly: [00:06:26] In any foreign country, the US has a range of interests from promotion of US business, protection of American citizens, promotion of human rights. But in Djibouti, by far our most important national interest was making sure that our very important military base, as you said, the only major one that we had in the entire continent of Africa and in a very strategic area was able to operate so that the men and women of the armed forces at Camp Lemonnier could carry out their mission. And I made sure that every new member of my team, when they visited me in my office, understood that that was our most important mission. And that's how I wanted the whole team to focus their time. And that's why we spent so much time at Camp Lemonnier with our colleagues that are making sure that we were synced up.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:07:11] I wanted to turn a little bit to the issue of terrorism in the regions, as Djibouti is located next to Yemen and Somalia, where terrorist groups operate. Either of you can respond to this or both. Who are these groups and what threats do they pose to the US. 

Gen. Sonntag: [00:07:25] Ambassador, if I may. So we actually have a mix of a lot of different violent extremist organizations within that region. Al-Shabab was probably the principal effort for our forces. Al-Shabab was a separatist movement trying to overthrow the government of Somalia and create a greater Somalia caliphate in the region, going back several hundred years. In terms of what the Somalis used to hold heavily financed and supported through other violent extremists such as Al Qaeda and ISIS, which were more involved in Yemen, which is literally just across the water. And so because of the pretty ancient smuggling lines that moved back and forth, they were able to resupply with weapons, ammunition, monies, trainers and support fairly easily going back and forth. And then as you extend outside of the Somalia area, then you have a lot of ethnic violence, old clan tribal rivalries that actually played out while I was there. And then that starts to bleed out towards some of the issues with Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as further west with the Boko Haram.

Amb. Kelly: [00:08:26] I think what's important for the American people to know about these terrorist groups is that to a significant extent, they represented a threat to the United States. I mean, there are two of Al Qaeda's most important remaining franchises, and AQAP is the group that was behind the guy known as the underwear bomber who tried to blow up a plane going from Amsterdam to Detroit. They were also behind the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, where happened a couple of years back around Christmas-time. Some terrorists went into this newspaper in Paris, had been critical of them and just killed everybody there. So they were really kind of nasty folks who meant us harm. And we were able, because of our presence in Djibouti and because the Djiboutian government's willingness to let us operate there, we are really able to keep these groups on their heels, which meant that they had less time to plan attacks on us and our allies.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:09:20] I wanted to talk a little bit about the role that both our military and our diplomats do in protecting and rescuing Americans. In February 2015, our entire embassy in Yemen had to flee parts of the embassy to flee to different locations. But as the rebels were closing in, there were Americans that did come to Djibouti. I mean, they were evacuated out of Yemen and came straight across that short span. Can you tell us a little bit more, Tom, about how you and your team work to greet these stranded Americans and what kind of condition you found them in? They literally ran with nothing.

Amb. Kelly: [00:09:52] The Yemen kind of conflict blew up in March of 2015. So from one day to the next, our little embassy found that there were. Thousands of American citizens and their families who were coming across the Red Sea on any kind of boat that they could get on and just showing up in the port of Djibouti. I had no idea before I went out to Djibouti that there were more than 70,000 American citizens who were in Yemen. 

Amb. McCarthy: [00:10:19] These were private citizens, people working with companies, people working at the embassy. Sort of a combination.

Amb. Kelly: [00:10:23] Yeah, There's a big Yemeni American community in the United States, and a lot of people go back and forth just like a lot of immigrant communities do. And a lot of those people are just trapped by the conflict. We had to help them, first of all, kind of establish their American citizens, help make sure their paperwork was in order so that they could move on, get back to safety in the United States. And again, we had a very small embassy when it broke out. We only had three Americans in our consular section. We didn't have any Arabic speakers because that's not one of the official languages of Djibouti. So we were really inundated and we had to kind of immediately make sure that all hands on deck at the embassy were involved in this. And I think the work that my colleagues did was really heroic. Sometimes we would be called in the middle of the night and told to go down to the port of Djibouti because there were 150 American citizens.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:11:14] Just arrived on some boat.

Amb. Kelly: [00:11:15] Yeah. And a lot of them were like elderly people in wheelchairs, babies. We really had to be creative about how we were able to take care of all these people. Of course, one of the saving graces we had was we had this incredibly capable colleagues at Camp Lemonnier who could basically deal with any kind of crisis and had all these skills that you normally wouldn't have with a small embassy. And so, for example, we had this great group of Seabees who were there and they from one day to the next, they kind of stood up these barracks on a piece of land that we had really, so that Yemeni American families that were coming in to Djibouti and couldn't find hotel or any other lodging, they had a place to stay. So we were proud that American citizens didn't have to go into a refugee camp. It was just another great example of the incredible teamwork between the embassy and Camp Lemonnier. And I think that because Djibouti was willing to let all these Americans come here and because we were able to accommodate them, we saved hundreds of American lives, if not more, because they had nowhere else to go.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:12:17] And you had to connect them with their families in the States so they could eventually move on.

Gen. Sonntag: [00:12:21] Right. And then it's all the transportation back from Djibouti, getting them back to the United States and processed back in the states safely. It's a lot of work.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:12:28] And then again, in July 2016, US forces were sent to evacuate our diplomats from our embassy in South Sudan when fighting and gun battles broke out between forces loyal to the president and forces loyal to his political rival. And I understand several hundred people were killed. General, can you tell us a little bit about that rescue mission and how it took place? And as I read, we left some troops to guard the embassy as all our people left.

Gen. Sonntag: [00:12:53] There's a little bit of history there. I think it's important. After the events in Benghazi, the military took on a responsibility to provide increased protection towards our US embassies worldwide. And so one of the assets that I maintain was a crisis response force at Camp Lemonnier, a company size infantry element with air transportation. As the incidences were increasing in Juba, South Sudan, my phone calls with Ambassador Phee at the time increased. So we were talking constantly because we wanted to make sure that they were in a good place. Not a lot of infrastructure in Juba, a single runway nearby, but could be easily contested. So we were really concerned about our ability to protect our citizens there. And then one night it just completely flipped upside down. She asked for that assistance. And so we sent in a crisis response force, plus my East African response force to go in there and secure the remaining diplomats, as well as the residential areas that they would normally live in with the intention of conducting an evacuation until things settled, decisions were made to maintain a diplomatic presence, which changed the environment completely because Juba was 900 miles away.

Gen. Sonntag: [00:14:01] And so now it became a logistics issue in a support ability issue as we increased US footprint because of the number of soldiers that were on the ground, because it was so far away. If something was directed at our US members, how do we protect that? So literally overnight we were requesting additional resources to come in. So within about 72 hours, not only did he have the largest kind of army base there in East Africa, but we also had the largest air force in East Africa just because of the legs. So that mission continued for about six months, but it provided the ambassador the maneuver room to get after the diplomatic negotiations that needed to take place between the warring factions and the government, and then gradually expand the US diplomatic services within there. And as that came about matured, we extracted our forces, but it was over six months that we were holding holding that ground. It was it was quite a long time. But it's important. Got the job.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:14:55] Done well in this area where there is so much instability, poverty and a huge refugee population. I wanted to turn a little bit. To the challenges of that pose for both our diplomatic assets out there and our military assets. And poverty can feed instability and make the young vulnerable to recruitment by terrorist groups. So I wanted to start with you, Tom, to talk a little bit about the refugees in the region and the refugee camps in Djibouti, which held at that time millions of people, if I have my figures correct. And what was the embassy's role in addressing this human tragedy of refugees?

Amb. Kelly: [00:15:30] When I got to Djibouti in 2014, the first thing I wanted to do in understanding the refugee problem is just visit the camps and see what kind of situation they were in. The first thing I learned was it's very impressive that Djibouti, which is one of the poorest countries in the world, was so open to refugees on a per capita basis. I think they're in the top five in the world and number of refugees who they host. So they're hosting refugees from Somalia, from Ethiopia and Eritrea. And a lot of these refugees have been in that country for years. So many of the children there have only lived in these refugee camps. And so what we focused on was education, because these children were in this situation where they had schools on the camps and the UN High Commission of Refugees and their staff kind of did a great job keeping these camps up and running. But I thought it was really important that these children had some kind of a future. So it was important that they have the right to get some kind of graduation certificate from these schools, which they didn't have when I got there. So that was kind of our main focus there. To their credit, they did that over the last two years. And so now it's very tough to be a refugee anywhere, particularly in Djibouti.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:16:40] Well, they say that the average time in a refugee camp in general, I think this came from the UNHCR is something like 18 years on average across the world. So it's their entire lifetime. 

Amb. Kelly: [00:16:49] And these places are really desolate places that you can't really grow anything there. So it's really tough, but you don't have a future if you don't have an education or you don't have any proof that you have gotten education. So at least with that, that gives them some chance to succeed in life. And so that was our focus.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:17:06] Thank you for the positive. So, Kurt, I wanted to ask you, in terms of our US military and their role as they look at this region, and it's not the only region where there is poverty, refugees, vulnerabilities, what is the US military's role in this sphere? 

Gen. Sonntag: [00:17:23] Oftentimes it's by ask whether by the partner nation or by within the State Department, particularly if they don't have the resources to be able to get into some areas that they need to oftentimes is because we can get into the areas because we got different permissions, we can go in and put some eyes on and kind of get a different analysis in terms of what's going on. And depending upon what needs to happen, we might already have the resources to get things moving. That was a great benefit of having the camp. We had a civil affairs battalion that was assigned to the camp and that provided a great capacity to reinforce some of the efforts that USAID or OTI was doing. So we had some different monies that we could go in and get things started till we get some of the US government going on. The other piece that we made a very concerted effort in is making sure that everybody understood the security environment, because the last thing we want to do is allow our citizens to go into an area that they weren't sure of, and then we just create a different problem. So I had a really good network of liaison officers from different countries that were operating throughout East Africa. And then we would share all of the information in terms of what they were seeing as well so that we can push that back out. So we wanted as complete a picture of what was happening as possible. And then when you look at the resources that are available, there's not enough. Then you got to make some very hard decisions and prioritize. Where are you going to put your effort in?

Amb. McCarthy: [00:18:40] Well, I wanted to turn now a little bit to an issue that's popped up more recently, which is the rapprochement that's taking place between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Djibouti's Port has played a key role for the country of Ethiopia, handling over 90% of its trade. Ethiopia became landlocked when a province, Eritrea, broke off and became independent. And now, after a long freeze, these two countries, Ethiopia and Eritrea, are moving to establish ties, which sort of cuts out Djibouti. In a way.

Amb. Kelly: [00:19:09] I think there may be some people in the region who think that Djibouti is going to be the odd man out here, but I don't really share that view. I mean, first of all, one of the main sources of instability in the Horn of Africa over the past 20 plus years has been tension between Ethiopia and Eritrea and kind of a looming threat of war. And that's bad for everyone in the region, scares away private investment from coming into the region. It diverts resources from spending on infrastructure and other things that the very poor populations in the region need to kind of military spending. And Djibouti's got a huge kind of lead, has established a lot of good port infrastructure. And so Djibouti is going to continue to benefit from that. And if this leads to kind of an acceleration of Ethiopian economic growth, Ethiopia is really the engine for the whole Horn of Africa. So if Ethiopia does well, that's only going to benefit Djibouti. So I think it's a win win for everybody, and I hope that this will also lead to Djibouti and Eritrea being able to work out their own border dispute. There's been border skirmishes between those two countries as well. And that would be a good thing for Djibouti, certainly, and might make it easier for them to attract investment to northern Djibouti, which is a poor part of the country.

Gen. Sonntag: [00:20:23] I think one of the points the Ambassador brings up is extremely important in terms of the power that Ethiopia has within the region. This is an emerging country whose economic viability, not just to the region but to Africa, is increasing daily. Even if they were to gain that friendship and access to the ports through Eritrea, they're still going to need not just the ports coming out of Djibouti, but they've also been looking to go east in order to open ports in Somalia because there's just not enough the terrain is very difficult to get to Ethiopia, where the capital city is. You've got to go up through all the mountains. And so putting in rail lines is difficult. The roads are very dangerous. Everything's a long way from the port. So the more opportunities you have, the greater ease that the country of Ethiopia is going to be able to do to import and export goods, which is going to increase their economic viability within the region.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:21:15] In other words, also a political rapprochement does not mean instant development or instant access.

Amb. Kelly: [00:21:20] For sure, it's going to take decades, but I think it's good for the whole region. If there's a good modern ports in Djibouti, Somalia and Eritrea. 

Gen. Sonntag: [00:21:28] So from an economic investment, there's been a lot of investment into Ethiopia. There's been hardly any investment into Eritrea over the past couple of decades. And so now now you've got to think about what's it going to take to actually get their infrastructure to where they can support today's economic markets. It'll be hard.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:21:45] Well, in Djibouti, also, our allies have bases there. I gather the Japanese have a base, The French have a base, others have bases. Did you gentlemen work with our allies in the region on your respective missions?

Gen. Sonntag: [00:21:58] We had a very solid relationship with our partners there. So first and foremost, the French, they've been there the longest. They have security agreements with Djibouti. We have shared real estate on the airfield. They're just natural allies to begin with. So we had a great working relationship. Our soldiers would train with theirs. Their soldiers are trained with ours. Our pilots would fly with each other. All that interoperability that we like to have with our allies occurred in Djibouti. The other partners that we had, the Japanese in particular very heavily invested in support to the counter pirate operations that are going on in Gulf of Aden. So they had a large base and Japan was increasingly becoming involved in UN tasks into the interior of Africa. So they are also supporting those. Italy has signed up because of their prior history with Somalia. They had built a small base in order to train Somali police forces. They bring them out of Somalia, they train them in Djibouti, and then they ship them back into Somalia. So that was all very positive. And then we had other relations with the Germans were there, the Dutch were there, Spanish were there. It was pretty robust. Again, they would be part of my LNO, so now if we went well, that's good.

Amb. Kelly: [00:23:04] Yeah. The Italians brought a lot of things to the table, not just their excellent expeditionary pizza parlor, which they had on base. But I went to one event for Somali police who are training there at the Italian base, and Italian commander gave a speech and the Somali commander got up and was like, oh, I wonder what language he's going to speak, Somali or French or English or what? And he just gave his whole speech in fluent Italian, which kind of reminded me, as the Italians reminded me later, that, you know, they've been there a long time. They feel like that is a region that's important to them and that's why they're there.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:23:37] There's a new entrant also into the region, which is China. The Chinese have opened a military base in Djibouti, located about four miles from our base at Camp Lemonnier. So I wanted to ask you both, what challenge does this represent to US interests in the region and what, in your view, are Chinese interests in the region?

Amb. Kelly: [00:23:55] It's an important challenge to our interests. It's unprecedented situation. There's never been country before Djibouti to host both the US and Chinese military base at the same time. They're not that far from our base seven miles away. I think it represents kind of a new Chinese kind of roadmap as they move from kind of being a near-peer military to a peer military of the United States where they use kind of loan financing to generate leverage with partner countries that enable them to then establish military presences in areas that are important to them. And the Horn of Africa is important to them. They have a lot of interests in Africa in a situation where they're not allies and potentially adversaries. There's obviously a lot of risks involved. And so it's going to be incumbent on the Chinese to show that they can act responsibly when they're engaging with other militaries, including our own. And I think General Sonntag was really a leader in trying to engage them constructively.

Gen. Sonntag: [00:24:51] The Chinese a difficult problem set. Obviously, tensions are always kind of tight between our nations. So this is going to be a very large base as it was developing. It's currently complete.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:25:01] Oh, it is complete.

Gen. Sonntag: [00:25:02] It is complete now, probably about 10,000 soldiers, so two and a half times more than what we have there. So if you look at it from the lens of what they're viewing as they extend their reaches outside of the mainland, they've got significant economic investment into Africa as they're looking for natural resources. They put significant investment into Djibouti. They built a rail line that extended from the port all the way up into Ethiopia, pretty university. They got the camp. They were doing a lot. They also had a UN mission in Juba. When everything went. They lost a lot of soldiers there during that fight and increasingly because of their growing economy, you need to realize that probably greater than 60% of trade coming out of the Pacific travels to the Bab al-Mandab Straits. A lot of that is Chinese shipping piracy was starting to come back a little bit. They were involved as an international partner, not part of the task force, and so they had some interest there. Now the trick is how do we live in the same neighborhood together? So early on we established some meetings both at the ambassador level and then with my military counterpart that was working out of the Chinese embassy at the time in order to try to work out a method of communication, because as their forces started to occupy with our forces, they're going to bump into each other on the streets of Djibouti. And we both had a responsibility to adhere to the host rules. And, you know, don't let the political pieces get down between the troops. This is a good opportunity to see how we can work well together in these types of environments.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:26:28] Well, I do know in many of my assignments, we've engaged with the Chinese diplomatically and otherwise in countries development projects and others. So it's part of natural diplomatic discourse to engage.

Amb. Kelly: [00:26:38] Yeah, I think their willingness to engage with us kind of waxes and wanes. I've been in places where they wanted to talk to us a lot and kind of share perspectives. And I've been in other situations where we tried to engage them constructively and they just didn't want to play. 

Amb. McCarthy: [00:26:53] You worked together and worked very well together. What would you say to your younger counterparts, your younger officers under you, especially you generally you're in in leading a school about the need for diplomats and our military to engage and work together because sometimes each remains in their silo.

Gen. Sonntag: [00:27:14] That's true. So everyone kind of gets fixated on what they perceive is to be their their role. I think the advice I would give to any of our military servicemen and women that are traveling overseas into the countries is the first stop is the country team. They need to go in and introduce themselves. They need to talk to the country team. They can't get to the ambassador. Those who knows what the ambassador is trying to do because that's important. That is the extension of the president into these countries, the extension of our foreign policy. It's not for us to say what's right or wrong. It is our responsibility to ensure that they're reaching their objectives. Now, we come in with different authorities and permissions, but those are supposed to be worked out at various levels and sometimes at the younger levels. Regardless of agency. People get fixated on, you know, this is my piece of the pie and everyone kind of forgets, hey, we're all part of Team America. We've all got a piece of this. The difference is, is foreign service very limited in terms of capacity, great capability? We bring a lot of capacity in, sometimes not the capabilities that are needed. And so that we get into sometimes some tension out there. But I think at the cooler heads, they figure it out. I've always had great relationships with the ambassadors that I've worked with for of our geographic areas. It's always been very positive, but it's understanding first and foremost what's the ambassador's goals, and it's pretty much maintaining those relationships or improving those relationships with their partners. And that's what we're here to do is help.

Amb. Kelly: [00:28:34] And what I would say to young Foreign Service Officers is, first of all, working with our military colleagues, we can accomplish so much more for our country than just working in our own silos. You know, the US military is the greatest military in the world. They have incredible operational capabilities and because they are focused in so many different areas, they can help us in almost every single way. And so if we're synced up closely in a country, there's just no limit to what we can accomplish. And like General Sonntag said, communication is key because we come from different backgrounds. We have different perspectives on things because we're good at different things, like the general said. And that's why it's really important to talk to each other all the time and swap info and make sure that we're pulling in the same direction. And it was a real privilege for me to be able to work with General Sonntag and thousands of his colleagues over a period of two and a half years to support US interests.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:29:30] And I would like to thank you for your leadership and leading your teams to work together on the challenges that you faced in in the Horn of Africa. So, gentlemen, thank you very much for participating in our podcast series. I think this is going to show our listenership a lot about the practicalities of working on the ground together and the need to have that tight civil cooperation for us to achieve our objectives overseas.

Amb. Kelly: [00:29:55] Right. Thank you, Deborah. 

Gen. Sonntag: [00:29:56] Thank you. Thanks for having us. Thanks.