Bonessi:  Just a quick note on this episode, there are some sound of gun shots and explosion, which may be upsetting for some listeners.

[Sounds of war and explosions]

Bonessi:  War…Since the beginning of time, it’s been used as a tool to resolve disagreements. While countless numbers of civilians die in war, the cost of war only gets more expensive each year. Just how much does war cost?

Steve: “It came in at $19.1 trillion in 2023.”

Bonessi: That’s Steve Killelea, he’s the founder and executive chairman of the Institute for Economics and Peace. Almost yearly the institute puts out a study that looks at the cost of violence on the global economy.  Over the past decade the cost of war has substantially increased by 23 percent.

Steve breaks down that trillion-dollar price tag a bit more.

Steve: “That’s 13.5 % of global GDP, or put it another way, it’s $2,380 for every person on the planet.”

 Bonessi:  Unsurprisingly, defense spending makes up the largest portion of the cost coming in at 8-trillion dollars. It makes sense: military personnel, weapons systems, aircrafts, frigates, vessels, and the list goes on.

Steve says in the current age, the biggest problem is our inability to resolve conflicts.

Steve: “We need to put a lot more money into trying to effectively stop conflicts, get resolutions to them, and then put the factors in or the resilient factors, which you could say is this positive peace so that the countries do not fall into violence.”

 Bonessi:  On our show today, we look at one of the only programs on the globe that brings together adversaries and allies to talk through ways to reduce the costs of war—in treasure and in lives–and maybe build toward positive peace.

I’m Dominique Maria Bonessi and this is Intercross. A podcast that offers a window into the work of the International Committee of the Red Cross and shares the stories of those effected by armed conflict and violence.

[INTERCROSS INTERLUDE MUSIC]

 Bonessi:  Every year, for almost the past two decades, close to a hundred of the highest-ranking military professionals in the world—from countries like the U.S., China, Russia, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, Guatemala—sit down face-to-face to talk about how to conduct military operations in ways that reduces civilian harm.

Geiser:  “SWIRMO is a, a bit of a cumbersome acronym.”

 Bonessi:  That’s my colleague Thom Geiser.

Geiser: “So it’s Senior Workshop on International Rules Governing Military Operations.”

 Bonessi:  Thom is an Armed Services advisor for the ICRC. He previously served in the United States Air Force for 25 years, first flying C-130s, later transitioned to Special Operations Command flying Talon IIs then became a combat aviation advisor and a Foreign Area Officer travelling around the world.

Tom and I sat down with Paul Sotomayor, the deputy division chief with U.S. Special Operations Command. Paul is also a veteran who served 23 years in the US Marine Corp first as enlisted and then, promoted to a foreign area officer.

Thom and Paul met at the 17th SWIRMO event in October 2024 in Baku, Azerbaijan, and they sat down with me to talk more about it a few months later.

 Bonessi:  I wonder if you guys could go into both of you talking about your, maybe some preconceived notions about what you’re gonna get yourself into. What you thought it was gonna be like.  And maybe we can get to the, what you actually witnessed when you were there. But first preconceived notions. I invite either of you to address that first.

Sotomayor: No clue whatsoever. I tried to do my homework ahead, um, speaking to. Thom, uh, a colleague of his, um, Chris and a few others about what exactly to expect. And they, They just kept really emphasizing what a, what a great experience I’m gonna have, uh, in this course. And, and from there I started, you know, trying to figure out what do you mean a course?

Like, is this something I can do online? Is it, is it something that, you know, perhaps I can do in DC I.  And the, the folks kept saying, you know, it’s definitely worth your while to, to go to the location. And, and when I looked at the, the travel, you know, 20 plus mile hours to travel, I was like, well, do I really want to make this trip? Then I ended up jumping on the plane and, and, and what began the 30 hour trip across the world to get the SWIRMO.

Geiser: I’d say for me, you know, being new to the ICRC and having not been to SWIRMO before, like, Paul mentioned, you can read about it. Uh, you know, you think about it in, in, in terms of the academic side of what’s going to present it, be presented, how it’s going to be discussed, and you’re not sure.

How formal things are gonna be, how scripted things are gonna be, how interesting it’s gonna be for everyone. Um, so I look at simple things like, you know, in 2016 there were 49 armed conflicts, and today there’s 120 armed conflicts around the world involving over 60 states and 120 non-state armed groups.

So when you have  senior military leaders coming from around the world. You, you have folks that are actively involved in some of these conflicts. You have military leaders with 20, 30 years of experience in multiple uh, conflicts. It’s getting, getting a bunch of military folks together with a lot of experience and you start getting war stories.

I’ve been around a lot of coalition conferences and multinational conferences, but the diversity of the military leaders that you see coming to SWIRMO from all ends, sometimes potentially. Adversaries are people who have faced each other as, nation states, uh, in armed conflict and, wondering how that’s gonna work out.

And, and you just see again, kind of the brotherhood of the profession of arms that, that, that people, that they open up, they, they in, in most cases, uh, we’re, we’re very freely talking about the challenges that they’re facing and opening a dialogue.

Sotomayor:  There’s some historical adversary, kind of like, it becomes a banter, you know, who’s got the best Pisco go Peru or Chile and or, or some of the conversations that you’re.  Um, you might be familiar with just from history in itself, um, but, you know, getting to SWIRMO, uh, Baku, Azerbaijan, of course gonna do your, our research.

What was unfamiliar in me, which I’ve, I’ve worked in probably three regions, but then finding every region the US has worked in all in one location, uh, the magnitude of different uniforms and, and, and ranks as you mentioned. And then like Tom was saying, the comradery of just military similarities.

 Bonessi: Do you guys have any stories about maybe some of the people that you met or, or the, the things that you learned?

Sotomayor: As a foreign area officer in our years of working in the international space, you kind of have an expectation of how to interact and what are the expectations of, you know, some of these interactions.

And also, you know, breaking the ice and getting past the customary greetings and interest, you know you start building similarities in almost like what you share that are common, you know, some of the challenges, whether it’s in the defense or, or you start hearing some outside of defense challenges, whether it’s with economics in the country or just personal thoughts.

So some of these, these experiences start coming out, you know, like. You start building more than an acquaintance, almost like a mutual friendship and you start exchanging commonalities of challenges in the country, you know, particular, times in administration or, just, you know, new laws or executive decisions that come up. So you, you start hearing this from, from other sites, and then you come across the opportunity to, to meet with and hear perspectives from, let’s say Ukrainian soldiers, on Russians that are also in the room, or Belarus  or the NATO countries that are, that are there and, and, and what are their perspective on what’s going on, not just in the Ukraine, Russia conflict, but just globally.

So you, you kind of get exposed to a lot going on at once. And then how much of it do you let it cross over into your personal kind of like, thought on things, even though that’s the direction it sometimes goes a lot of  bonds are made and, and suddenly folks are just sharing  their personal insight or perspective with you, you know, out on sidebars or, or even during the course of the dialogue or the exchange in a scenario or, or how something plays out.

 Bonessi: For you, Thom?

 Geiser: I found it incredible the evolution within the week. You know,just to see how, how quickly those groups came together. Um, and then as, as  people engage with each other more and more, just how much they opened up and, you know, the number of WhatsApp groups that you would see and you know, the photos of people that you would never expect to be going out together at night having dinner. It was fun to see the different groups that came together and those WhatsApp groups continue. They, even after SWIRMO you see people that continue communicating, engaging with each other.

There’s some that for just the politics when you’re in uniform, that it would not be appropriate for them to continue. But others, you know it’s again, when you hear on the news that you know somebody you were with, and there’s a very tough situation in an armed conflict someplace.

It’s just, it’s just that. That community of a note to, not a political note, but just to understand that you’re going through some tough times right now and we’re thinking of you and we hope that you’re doing well and that your family’s doing well. You know, so it’s the, the human side, the apolitical side of just a bunch of military professionals that understand the difficult work that everyone has, especially in armed conflict and being able to, to share with each other and also to wish each other well, not, not just as individuals, but also for each other’s families.

 Bonessi:  So in some ways, you know, you have these military men who are putting a little bit of humanity of humanness back into what can be terrible situations of conflict and violence.

Geiser:  Most definitely, that’s probably for a lot of the public who’ve never worn the uniform, that may not be obvious that side exists in the military professional. May that’s it’s only in those environments where you’re only amongst other military that, that that guard comes down and you’re a little more frank with each other.  But I found that to be really remarkable in ways that I didn’t expect.

Sotomayor:  Yeah, I know to Tom, you hit, you hit the nail on the head with the WhatsApp groups. I think I was fortunate enough to be in one of the bigger groups which at first I was a little skeptical. I was like, why didn’t they keep me in the Latin American group? I speak the lingo and everything and I could follow through.

But, you know, a after, after a while, I started thinking I knew exactly what that group. It would entail and the conversations would be of, so I, I found myself in a group, which was fascinating, one of the bigger groups,  but there was a person, if not two or three, from every continent in the, in the world.  So I found myself in a group that at the end of all this, as Tom pointed out, um,  you, you have a relationship, you grow bonds.

If there’s something going on in the world, you might hear a perspective on that, on the group chat. And it doesn’t necessarily come back from a defense mindset or an interpretation from, you know, military strategist.

 Bonessi: A lot of, uh, networking opportunities, it seems like. Yeah. Can you guys go into some of the seminars? Because you said you had these breakout seminars, these breakout groups. What were they called? What was the lesson style?  What exactly were like the classes like? Tom?

Geiser:  Yeah, so basically you would have different modules based on law of armed conflict that would tease out in what was facilitated, did decontextualize scenario, kind of think maybe like a, like a tabletop exercise where you have a scenario that in this case doesn’t have any actual countries that exist, but…

 Bonessi: And just define tabletop exercise for those who might not know what it is.

Geiser: So it would be doing an exercise using a fictional scenario. Might be around civilians in armed conflict and how they’re affected and how we have to think about them through what we would discuss is a, a green lens perspective on armed conflict and then go into small groups.

And those groups would be divided by language. So we had French, Spanish, Arabic, English, Russian groups. And those facilitators then would take the scenario.

Some dilemma that a commander would actually have to deal with on that.

 Bonessi: Can you gimme an example?

Geiser: So let’s say that there was a military objective that was in a civilian community where the military objective was in, amongst or close to civilians, or you had lines of communication.

You had highways or roads that had large populations of displaced people that are trying to run away from the heaviest fighting in the armed conflict. You would have these scenarios that would be teased out by the facilitators, and then those challenges would have to be discussed.  By the participants, how are you still gonna achieve your military objectives because you have that military mission that you can’t fail.

While at the same time, how are you gonna take this, this commander’s dilemma that I’ve given you, and, and figure out different courses of action, different ways that you might be able to achieve your military objective.

Paul, I’m not sure how much you saw in your small group breakouts, but I was surprised at how frank people were willing to be, even when things went wrong or didn’t work out.

They understood that this was a place for us to share not just the good ideas or the successes, but also to say where maybe we’ve fallen short. During past conflicts and, and sharing that as a discussion point to, to generate thoughts from other folks. And I found that to be the most powerful part, that really the decontextualized scenario you would just be the opening with the facilitator in the beginning and it would very quickly transform to real world relevant discussions, either historic or contemporary with, with armed conflicts around the world.

Sotomayor: In one of my discussions, of course the US was, the storyline was based on the US and it was interesting to hear  the perspectives from the different colleagues in the group  and just take that, I’ve never, it’s never been presented in that manner on  what was the unknown and then even more so, to take the perspective that they were presenting and kind of like  dissect it into like, where does that come from? And we even, we even broke out into a conversation where, I asked a question. I was like, you know, that’s a very interesting perspective. How did you come to that? Was that a personal, was it, you know, is that how your,  is that how your military is formed to go in that direction, to come out with that end, that end state?  And what really came to the table was just that, that because those were the procedures tactics used in their military, it fed into the end state of what their perspective was from a storyline that I’m familiar with.

And I knew that’s not how it was generated. It wasn’t a top down decision. It was  because the US has small unit leadership opportunities that, you know, the guidance is out there in order to act on, an event or a potential event.  And  one of the colleagues’ perspective was like, it’s shameful that your leaders are directing this to happen.  And so once we talk that through, it becomes almost like an aha moment. Like, oh, we didn’t know, we were not aware that, you know, these decisions are,  you know, independent of like the highest leadership for that country. So I think that became a topic of discussion like, maybe we should change how we do things. Or maybe that’s something that we should, revisit. Because, you know, if our senior leadership is directing us to do something that, that might be in the,  in society or in the, the global eye as, as very wrong, why don’t we have the authority to push back or not follow through?

 Bonessi:  Interesting. So talking about operating procedure in relation to the global international  rules that govern how conflicts and violence should be occurring. I wonder, you know there’s a clear argument for saying that, the rules of war today don’t really apply, that countries are, that people are free to do whatever they want and that there’s no consequences for it. And I think unfortunately there’s a lot of that happening in today’s conflicts, a hundred and more than 120 conflicts that we see as we started with today.

As Tom mentioned, maybe Tom can, can you go to a little bit more about why the rules of war that we have that, that were the focus of  SWIRMO, why they should still exist and why they’re still relevant?

Geiser: I think for me these are moments as we think through these challenges in the arguments and the logic of why these things are important,  I wish those who are no longer with us were able to speak to us, and be with us today. And in a way they can, and that’s why history and studying history is so important and we can actually hear them through their written words. –It’s very powerful to look at why do we have the laws of armed conflict? And it’s because of military professionals. You know, those are the origins. It’s those in uniform. Those in uniform who, who suffered and saw the worst tours of war through human history. They’re the ones going back centuries in millennia that have decided there’s a different way that this needs to be done. And there’s some principles that apply to it.

So these principles, born of a military leader, you see this reflection of humanity is an important part of, you can hear underlying that this, this concept of honor, which anybody who is served in the profession of arms understands that to be an important aspect. In the United States, you have Lincoln and the Leiber Code again, with general order 100, thinking about a post-war world.

During the mid-19th century, they’re thinking about after the war, or ICRC. President recently said, the way you lead wars defines how you end wars.

And that’s very, very true.  So it’s not just about how you conduct yourself during the armed conflict. But it’s trying to imagine as a military leader what the peace looks like. When might peace come?  How will the way I conduct myself as a leader and the way my forces conduct themselves in warfare, will that affect the peace?

Will that affect whether peace can come and whether it will be enduring or whether you have a multi-generational conflict. So all of this is, is absolutely critical. I see in, you know, in history it comes back again and again. And I think really that period of World War I to World War II veterans is the Geneva Conventions that we’re seeing from 1949.

And then as they were ratified by the United States those veterans. Speaking of those more recent large scale conflicts, they said. Our nation has everything to gain and nothing to lose by being a party to the conventions now before the Senate and by encouraging their most widespread adoption, the requirements of the four conventions to a very great degree reflect the actual policies of the United States in World War II.

 Bonessi: Unfortunately, it’s sad to say, but the rules of war are written in blood. You know, you have people who have been through these conflicts in the past, world War I, World War II, who have, been the target of an enemy and then been maybe taken prisoner by the enemy and having to, had been treated in a way that comported with an international standard, an international obligation by a country to do that. Yeah, I think it speaks volumes of how we hope to continue that humanity through and through.

 I don’t know if you have any final thoughts, Paul, on that?

Sotomayor:  Yeah. I think as we listen to what Tom has said, I mean the evolution of ICRC over time,  several conflicts,  campaigns that have occurred globally  and today’s new threats  advance through technology. They might not necessarily be kinetic.  They endure catastrophic results whether it be cyber or, from an economical lens. I think it’s definitely something that, you know, it  still is, center. As a top priority particularly, in the, the current state of global conflicts.

And what’s happening, I think the law of war, law of conflict it’s only going to evolve with technologies that does come  center just to really understand what are the impacts. We’re seeing it with what is taking place in Ukraine and Russia,  and of course, what being predicted in the future in large-scale conflict, when you’re we’re crossing different paradigms or domains? And how the effects take place,  whether it might not necessarily be on the battlefield that is from the past there,  the era of the Gulf War in the desert, or even cross a plane to adversaries, you know, opening with each other with muskets and cannons and so forth. I, think that’s in the history books, we’re not gonna see that anymore. I  think the new  age of conflict is definitely gonna be across ones and zeroes.

It’s not necessarily gonna just impact  warriors on the battleground. It’s gonna impact  everybody, you know,  said economic lens to where and how does it  day-to-day  pleasantries. And, and comforts and, and discomforts that come from it.  So, yeah, I think it’s definitely an important aspect,  gets adapting and evolving  on a daily, if not  monthly basis.

We can’t wait for new technology to surpasses and, and how, we fight  and then wait for policy.  Or law to be written.  And again it’s not between two adversaries anymore really on a global scale.

 Bonessi:  Right, right.  Well thank you Paul and Thom for your time. I really appreciate it and, um, hope we can have another conversation again soon.

That was Paul Sotomayor with U.S. Special Operations Command and Thom Geiser, a armed services advisor with the ICRC.

Thanks for this episode go to Paul Peugnet, head of our Foreign Armed Services Team.

If you’d like to learn more about SWIRMO please visit our website, that’s intercrossblog.icrc.org, or follow us on X.com @ICRC_DC.

That’s our show for today, please if you like the content you get here on Intercross, please do me a favor and rate, review, and subscribe. Tell us what you think about the podcast, are there particular contexts or issues you think we should talk about.

See you next time on Intercross.