Secretary Clinton delivered remarks and answered questions about the new Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations and the Civilian Response Corps during a recent town hall meeting on the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review.
Watch clips from the Secretary's speech on the Civilian Response Corps YouTube Channel or read the excerpted transcript below.
SECRETARY CLINTON: Because we recognize that it’s more important than ever to address the problems of fragile states, we are strengthening our capacity to prevent and respond to crisis. We rolled out our new Conflict and Stabilization Operations Bureau. And in the past year, CSO has deployed more than 175 Civilian Response Corps members to hotspots in more than 30 countries around the world. They come from nine different agencies and bureaus, including USAID, which has expanded its own work in this area. They’re working everywhere from Afghanistan to South Sudan to Timor-Leste, often in some of the most remote and least governed places on earth. They can be found camped alongside special forces, sleeping under mosquito nets in campsites hacked out of the jungle by machete, eating MREs, hitching rides in the back of pickups to meet with local leaders – not the common image of a diplomat. But they are among the hundreds of State and USAID employees practicing a tradecraft that now lives at the intersection of diplomacy, development, and security.
QUESTION: Good morning, Madam Secretary. My name’s Michelle Lakomy. I’m a member of the Civilian Response Corps. I wanted to know what your vision for the Civilian Response Corps and the interagency is and their role in the implementation of the QDDR in the next few years.
SECRETARY CLINTON: Great question. Is Rick Barton here? There he is. Rick’s right in front of me. We were so fortunate to recruit Rick to be the first leader of the CSO. And I think his vision and what all of you are thinking through will answer that question.
I want us to be able to deploy expertise in the form of Americans, both from the government, from the outside if appropriate but part of our network, to be on the ground, as I said in my remarks, doing what is necessary to protect us, promote our values, and further our interests. And that’s why this is so exciting, because I can’t, standing here today, tell you exactly all of the different roles and functions that CSO will perform. It will – it already does have a very tight partnership with counterparts in AID. We need to increase the flow of information and cooperation but then, going beyond that, into the rest of the government.
But I do know this: This was absolutely one of the most important decisions that came out of the QDDR. We entered into it with a question like, “Well, do we need this?” I mean, is this – because we’d had some efforts that were really quite important but never were given the support, the resources, the attention and time that they deserved. So it was a natural question to say, “Do we need this?” And the answer was resoundingly yes, but it has to be done the right way.
So I’m hoping that as we go through the startup and the consolidation of the CSO, you’ll be coming to me to say, “Well, here’s what we need to do, what we think we should be doing,” and I will be as responsive as I can.
