How to Introduce CBD to Military and Other Traditional Defense Oriented
Audiences

This is the edited transcript of a talk by David Yaskulka at the conference
"Civilian-based Defense and People Power" in Windsor, Ontario, Canada in
September 1991.  He co-founded LEAD USA in 1987 and spearheaded its Military
LEAD Program. (LEAD is an acronym for "Leadership, Education And
Development.) LEAD has conducted over five hundred seminars, many on college
campuses.  He is currently co-founder and CEO of Take the Lead and Step Into
a Better World, Inc.

I want to begin by acknowledging the man who has influenced my work the most,
Gene Sharp. He is in the audience today, and I want to offer him my thanks.

I usually begin by asking the audience some questions about their knowledge
of and commitment to civilian-based defense.  In particular I want to ask you
in which group you would place yourself, if you had to be categorised: on the
left, a liberal, of the peace through disarmament school or on the right, the
peace through strength school?  How many on the left, who believe in peace
through disarmament? [Most raise their hands.]  The right, the conservatives
who believe in peace through strength? [Laughter. Very few raise their
hands.]

At LEAD USA, we work mainly with college students throughout the United
States. We have four main programs designed to reach college students with
the goal of improving the ability of the next generation of leaders to solve
global problems more creatively and more effectively.  So we lead seminars
and offer participatory educational models to help students and universities
with that goal.  Of the four programs, one is for students of African
descent, one is called Women LEAD, another is called LEAD for Our
Environment.  The fourth program, for which I have been mostly responsible
and the main subject of my talk today, is the Military Leadership Education
And Development Program.  I go to ROTC students, the Reserve Officer Training
Corps, the young adults in the United States who will become military
officers after they graduate from college, and I talk to them about
alternatives for national defense and about global security issues.

As young adults at LEAD USA we do not have many credentials, other than being
young and willing to work really hard, so we decided to focus on young
adults.  We then considered which groups we should focus on.  We asked who
was being excluded from debates about domestic and foreign policy.  That
included quite a lot of people, and we decided to focus on women and students
of African descent.  We also realised that in general conservatives and
military students do not talk very much with students in the peace movement. 
That was the beginning of what is now the military LEAD Program.  I devised a
program for military students, "National Security in the 90's."  So with a
nifty brochure and after some phone calls, I began to be invited to speak
with some of these military students.  One of the first seminars I led was at
New Mexico Highlands University.  After leading the seminar, I went out to a
local bar with some officers who said: "OK, I have to admit that I invited
you in here because we wanted the cadets to have a chance to blow away some
flower-toting pacifists." [Laughter.] "But you know, the cadets thought what
you said was interesting and believed most of it, and what they didn't
believe was at least presented in a way that they could consider."  That was
the main goal of the seminar, and I considered it a success.

Why should we focus on military people or conservatives or the very few
people here who raised their hands earlier?  Why focus on them?  Dr. Sharp
spoke eloquently of some of the reasons.  For me the first reason is that if
military students were interested and enthusiastic about civilian-based
defense, we would have credibility before a wide range of audiences.  They
are levers of change.  It is not that we expect that governments and military
leaders will themselves change the world.  But credibility and
acknowledgement from these people help us to reach out to those citizens who
may be dubious about civilian-based defense.  Those levers of influence help
in every audience.  A second reason, in my opinion, is also important; we
will learn from them.  There is a lot of important research about
civilian-based defense, but I think that even the most enthusiastic
proponents will acknowledge that many questions remain to be answered.  In my
own experience the people in the peace movement have not been the best at
asking the toughest questions. "What do you do when the troops come to your
town, take your little girl, put a gun to her head and say, 'We'll kill her
unless you do what we say?'"  Military students ask these questions, and so
do conservatives.  It has strengthened my own knowledge; that is the second
reason that I would like to suggest you consider that audience.

[Question from the audience] "How do you answer the question: 'What do you do
when the troops come into town, put a gun to your girl's head and threaten to
shoot?'"  The first thing to say is, "Good question."  In civilian-based
defense, just like in any other form of defense, people will be killed. The
thing to emphasise is the relative chances of success with violent and
nonviolent strategies.  If you lunge at the soldiers who are holding the gun,
if you attack them violently, if you do the natural and noble thing and fight
them, what will the result be?  Will you in fact incur more violence upon
yourself, upon the girl, upon everyone, will you ultimately undermine the
struggle of the defenders?  What is the best strategy?  Are there
alternatives?  Can you talk the soldier out of it, or bluff him?  Can you, in
some situations, accept that loss?

[Question from the audience] "Where is civilian-based defense most relevant
to the security interests of the United States?"  Do you know how much the
United States spends on NATO?  It is over a hundred fifty billion dollars a
year, roughly one half of the United States' military budget.  Even many
military students and conservatives, when they hear that figure, think that
we are spending too much in the defense of Europe for the security interests
of the U.S.  Civilian-based defense is perhaps most relevant here, especially
since the current rationale for nuclear weapons in Europe is to repel a
conventional invasion.

[Question from the audience] "Do the career goals of military officers make
them reluctant to consider civilian-based defense?"  We should also consider
the many civilians workers involved in defense who would be profoundly
affected by a shift to civilian-based defense.  In my experience, military
officers and students are the most willing to think directly about the
national security and defense issues and not to argue on the basis of career.
It is time that the tour in Europe is one of the nicest and there wouldn't be
so many of them if we didn't spend a hundred and fifty billion in Europe; but
I have found military students to be patriotic, to believe in doing what is
best for the country rather than merely for their own self interest.  The
first thing is to go to them.  I heard that there was excellent outreach for
this conference, but very few conservatives are here.  We must learn how to
speak on their turf.

The second point is to find common ground.  Before founding LEAD USA, I
bicycled a ten thousand mile loop around the U.S., leading seminars for
students on nonviolence.  It was a year of meeting people I would not
otherwise have met.  After the year I decided that I love this country; I
love the people of this country.  Already this establishes a lot of common
ground with conservatives and military students.  I love this country, I
believe in national defense, and I consider myself a patriot.

The third point is to be objective, pragmatic, to be agnostic in a lot of
ways.  To say that we have seen potential, we have seen some things work, but
that there is a lot we don't know yet, that remains to be investigated. 
Civilian-based defense is a lot easier to defend before a hostile audience if
you maintain a certain agnostic attitude.  You ought to make assertions like
"This deserves more attention" or "This is worthy of study" rather than "I
believe in this philosophy."  Invite tough questions and be grateful for
them.  I once sat in on a class in California taught by an authority on
civilian-based defense whom I've admired since I was an undergraduate.  After
the class a student asked a tough question and the professor began his answer
by saying "Gandhi said..." and explained how Gandhi had shown that the
criticism was incorrect.  It was the end of the dialogue. This "Gandhi said"
sort of answer is not helpful.  You shouldn't appeal to authority or even
think you have the definitive answers.  You should recognize questions as
legitimate concerns that need to be thought through together.

The fourth point I would like to make about speaking to conservative
audiences is that you should try to make the talk interesting and try to
involve the audience.  One thing I do is lead a war game, a simulation of
civilian-based defense.  One side is the civilian defense, and the other side
are the invaders.  Put them into the position where they need to think
creatively about how to implement a civilian-based defense so that they all
won't automatically criticize it.  Half the class will criticize it and try
to overcome it effectively.  But the other half will try to make it work
somehow.  And they loved it.  I set up the scenario of a Soviet invasion of
Germany in the year 2000.  The invaders were allowed to use every military
means at the disposal of the Soviets in order to accomplish certain strategic
objectives.  The other side had to use strictly nonviolent means.  At the
start the invaders usually believed that the defense had no chance, but after
an hour of fighting, they didn't know who won.  They knew only that the
battle was going to continue.  This was a surprise to them, and it was a far
more effective lesson than any description or theory about nonviolence.

I have led some of these games around the country.  At Holy Cross College, I
invited both the peace studies program and the Navy ROTC to play the game
together, and put half the peace studies students and half the ROTC cadets on
each side so they had to learn from each other.  I called three students to
be judges to resolve disputes ('They moved" vs. 'We didn't move', etc.). 
Only once in my experience, at Princeton University with the Army ROTC right
after Desert Storm, did the invading force totally topple the civilian-based
defense.  They killed a few people, and the defense gave up.  I attribute
this to my failure in not describing civilian-based defense well enough; the
defenders felt helpless.  But at Holy Cross it was a dead draw, and everyone
believed that the battle would last for a long time.

More recently we had a really raucous battle at Cornell with sixty
participants (forty air force and twenty army), and at the end the military
judges gave a split decision in favour of the CBD side.  So here we have air
force and army ROTC cadets demonstrating for themselves the effectiveness of
a strictly nonviolent defense against the full force of a Soviet invasion.

My goal is to enable future military officers to think a little more
flexibly, to have a wider range of policy options.  If they will have heard
of civilian-based defense and even better have considered it or simulated it
in a workshop, they may be more flexible.  I have been most successful among
conservatives by respecting their views and not putting them on the
defensive.  Finding common ground helps us both, in challenging our
assumptions and views about defense.
David Yaskulka