Episode 374: The Illusion of Separation: Civil-Military Coordination in Modern Conflict with David Higgins
This episode hosts David Higgins to explore the complex and often misunderstood boundary between military operations, humanitarian action, and political stabilisation in modern conflict environments. Drawing on two decades of experience across the British Army, the United Nations, and geopolitical advisory work, we look at how different institutions operating in the same space can interpret the same conflict in fundamentally different ways, and how those differences shape outcomes on the ground.
The discussion focuses on David’s central argument that civil-military coordination frameworks still assume a level of clarity between “military space” and “civilian space” that increasingly no longer exists. While these distinctions were difficult but workable in conflicts such as Afghanistan and Somalia, today’s environments are far more fragmented, with blurred front lines, overlapping actors, and the increasing weaponisation of civilian domains including information, finance, and infrastructure. As a result, coordination mechanisms risk becoming procedurally active but operationally ineffective.
A key theme throughout the episode is the role of perception and language. Humanitarian actors rely on principles of neutrality, impartiality, and independence to maintain access and trust, while military organisations operate through hierarchical command structures and mission-driven logic. Although both often use similar terminology, such as “protection of civilians,” the meaning can differ significantly depending on institutional context, leading to misalignment even when actors believe they are speaking the same language.
The conversation also explores how civil-military interaction is shaped by differing organisational cultures and incentives. Through examples ranging from improvised field-level decisions to strategic coordination meetings, David highlights how misunderstandings can arise not from intent, but from structural differences in how institutions plan, decide, and interpret their operating environment. He argues that effective practitioners in this space are those who can operate fluently across both systems and detect these gaps early before they become operational problems.
David Higgins is Head of Humanitarian Access and Civil-Military Coordination in Somalia for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). He has spent twenty years working across the civil-military boundary as a British Army infantry officer, humanitarian and stabilisation adviser, and geopolitical analyst, including deployments to Helmand Province and roles across Afghanistan, Iraq, and East Africa. He previously served as Head of Geopolitical Analysis at M&C Saatchi World Services and as a reservist Lieutenant Colonel with the British Army’s 77th Brigade, and holds a research master’s focused on hybrid threats and UK national security.
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Transcript
00:00
David Higgins
Civil-military coordination keeps happening. Civilian agencies, the military, they keep interacting, reports are written, the architectures in place.
But operations responses still fail because the mechanisms that underpin them have not been developed for the right problem.
00:16
Elisa Garbil
Welcome back to the International Risk Podcast, where we discuss the latest world news and significant events that impact businesses and organisations worldwide.
00:26
Dominic Bowen
And before we start today, I have a quick favour to ask you. If you listen to The International Risk Podcast and you find it useful, please follow and subscribe wherever you are watching and listening today. In return, my commitment to you is simple that every week we will keep raising the bar with better guests, sharper questions and more practical takeaways for you that you can use to make better decisions. And if there is someone you want on the show, tell me. We read all of your comments, and we act on them. Let’s get onto the show.
00:58
Dominic Bowen
In every major conflict, there’s space where neat theories simply don’t work. We know that in conflict zones, soldiers are trying to control or capture territory. We know that humanitarian actors are trying to reach civilians and provide assistance. We know governments are trying to project their authority and, in many cases, collect taxes in order to do that. We know that armed actors are trying to survive. Sometimes they’re trying to disrupt and sometimes they’re trying to dominate.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, there are the people who simply need food, they need medicine, they need protection, they need safe passage to a new area. I’m Dominic and I’m host of the International Risk Podcast where we discuss the topics that really matter.
Now, when coordination fails between all these actors, the consequences are not just administrative. Aid and life-saving humanitarian assistance can be blocked. Neutrality can be questioned and communities can really die when this humanitarian assistance is cut off.
Today we’re joined by David Higgins, and he spent about 20 years working at these front lines, from British Army deployments to Helmand to humanitarian, political and UN roles across Afghanistan, Iraq, East Africa, and now Somalia with the United Nations.
I think this is going to be a really interesting conversation about access, power, neutrality, and what really happens when humanitarian needs collide with military actors.
David, welcome to The International Risk Podcast.
02:18
David Higgins
Thank very much Dominic, it’s good to be here.
02:20
Dominic Bowen
I’m really looking forward to the conversation today. I think this will be a lot of fun and really insightful too. You’ve got a great background.
If we jump straight into your background, in places like Helmand and Somalia, everyone says they want stability. Everyone says they want protection. Everyone says they want access and legitimacy.
But these often mean very different things to different actors. Can you talk to us about how this plays out on the ground? A military force defines stability as reducing the threat. A government defines stability as extending its authority. A humanitarian organization defines stability as reaching civilians without being seen as part of the conflict.
These definitions collide before we even get to what the actors are doing. What actually happens on the ground, and how have you seen this occur?
03:04
David Higgins
Thanks, Dominic. That’s a really good way into the topic.
Looking back at my own experience, starting with Helmand, I was a CIMIC officer deployed with the British Army. Because of the position I was in, I was working across military headquarters and a civilian stabilization headquarters. That was when I first started to see some of the differences and some of the gaps between the two.
Sitting at my desk on the military side, going through military planning, I saw that they viewed the conflict in Afghanistan essentially as a counter-insurgency, with civilian agencies and civilian actors providing those lines of effort like aid and development to support the counter-insurgency.
But when I sat at my desk in the civilian headquarters, they saw a civilian-led post-conflict stabilisation campaign that was aiming to create the time and space for longer-term political and peace processes to take hold, with the military providing security for that effort.
Essentially, what I saw straddling both headquarters was two organisations physically located next to each other on the same base, prosecuting the same campaign and part of the same conflict, but looking at exactly the same problem in two very different ways and using the same language while thinking the other side was using that language in the same way.
04:20
Dominic Bowen
It’s really interesting. I’ve had the blessing of working both with humanitarian organisations like Médecins Sans Frontières, Doctors Without Borders, the Red Cross, the Danish Refugee Council, and with UN agencies like UNICEF, UNHCR and OCHA, but also within Special Operations Command.
The coordination between these actors is really challenging, and the objectives can be very different. You can be operating in the same piece of territory. I remember in Afghanistan, and you might remember this from your time there, the allied forces were giving away free gifts. It was our way of basically buying intelligence. We’d go into villages that were cut off from the capital and much of the world and give them water pumps so they could pump water out of the ground and feed their crops.
USAID, which was sadly until recently the world’s largest humanitarian donor, did a study and worked out that these pumps were actually leading to desertification. So we were worsening the humanitarian situation in Afghanistan and actually contributing to greater conflict.
I remember listening to a brief where some colleagues from an American unit were talking about this. I took it back to my unit and briefed my commanding officer. He rolled his eyes at me and called me a left-wing something. I said, “No problem. I just think this could actually impact how effective we are in our missions as well.”
He sort of palmed me off.
It was one of those beautiful moments. I’m not often right, but on this occasion I was. It was really tough terrain that we were getting to. We had to use donkeys. It was a classic SF mission. We heloed in, bought donkeys, and used them to carry these water pumps while trying to collect intelligence in the area.
After getting them all the way in there, we sat down for a shura with the village leaders and, as a gift, tried giving them the water pumps.
You could see the commanding officer sitting there thinking, “Yes, I am the king. I just gave you these gifts. Aren’t I great?”
Then the village elders started discussing among themselves.
The translator looked at him and said, “They don’t want them.”
He said, “What? They’re free. Why don’t they want them?”
The translator explained that they knew the pumps were bad for the environment, but more importantly they knew the pumps would get them killed. If they pumped the water and diverted it into their village or stream, they’d cut water off from someone else. That person would come and either steal the pump or kill the family. It would lead to greater conflict.
So they didn’t want the pumps. They’d actually prefer it if we all left right now.
It was a classic situation where the military was looking at things purely through a military lens. If they had taken a wider view, they would have realised there was a better way to approach the problem.
I think many people listening to this episode will think humanitarian access sounds simple. People are in need. Aid organisations try to reach them. Surely armed actors aren’t going to stand in their way.
But as you and I both know, every conflict, every meeting, every movement, every escort, every checkpoint you go through can change how people see you.
Can you talk to us about how these risks are managed and why perception really matters when people see the military, the UN, the police, the government and humanitarian actors?
07:06
David Higgins
Yes. I think the problem is often that humanitarian organisations and the military are pursuing different agendas, have different ways of working and different operating principles.
Humanitarian organisations adhere to what they call humanitarian principles of independence, neutrality and impartiality. The whole idea behind this is that if you are independent, neutral and impartial, you can demonstrate that you aren’t taking sides in the conflict and that you’re simply there delivering humanitarian assistance and helping people on the basis of need alone.
Sometimes that can clash with the culture of the military, where everything is very much about clear objectives. We have a mission and we’ll pursue it at all costs.
Neither way is right nor wrong. They’re simply different ways of operating and approaching overlapping problem sets.
Where I see this coming to life is, for example, in Somalia. I sit in interagency working groups that bring together military, post-conflict stabilisation, government and humanitarian actors.
In those meetings I’ve heard military counterparts talking about tasking humanitarian support, for example. Implicitly, that means deciding what humanitarian organisations should do and when and where they should do it.
This isn’t said with any intent on the part of the military to dominate or control the humanitarian effort. It’s simply how the military thinks about coordinated effort. You identify the actors, agree the plan and assign the tasks.
The problem is that humanitarian actors, if they want to be seen as neutral, impartial and independent, cannot be seen to be closely aligned in this way.
The moment they become perceived as extensions of the military effort, humanitarian access starts to break down. The ability of aid workers to reach people in need, and vice versa, starts to close. It can also have impacts on security and safety. Aid workers and recipients of aid can become targets.
09:01
Dominic Bowen
Yeah, I think that’s really interesting. I like the way you describe that because I think the military has very clear chains of command. Their missions are very defined. Any young officer going through Sandhurst, Duntroon or West Point is critiqued for a good couple of years on how they define their mission.
And of course, military leaders are really good at making fast decisions with incomplete information. Again, it’s something they train for years to do.
But humanitarian actors generally operate a little bit differently. They’re more based on relationships and negotiation. Consent is really important. And there’s this constant concern within humanitarian organisations about how they’ll be interpreted by different communities and different armed groups.
As you said before, it’s not right or wrong. It’s just a different way of operating.
So David, can you take us into a moment where you’ve seen these two worlds collide, where the military logic made sense from a military perspective? They’re trying to shape the battlefield and achieve a reasonable outcome, but where humanitarian logic came from another direction and created a gap, a gap where ultimately we needed civil-military coordination to fill that ground.
10:02
David Higgins
When I was a military CIMIC officer in Helmand, I remember receiving a phone call from a unit on the ground one day asking for colouring books.
I said, “Why do you need colouring books?”
As a CIMIC officer, I sometimes received these odd requests. The idea was that a unit was going somewhere and would hand out colouring books to win the hearts and minds of the population.
That was an opportunity for me to explain how they could win the consent of the local community by thinking more deeply about what the community needed. What they didn’t need at that point was colouring books for young kids.
On another occasion, in the same headquarters and the same role, I used to sit next to someone called a battlespace manager. Their role was to coordinate movements through the geographical area where the military was operating. There were lots of maps marked up with boundaries, symbols and things like that.
I went to them one day saying that the International Committee of the Red Cross had an aid convoy moving through the battlespace at a certain time along a certain route.
This caused all sorts of consternation.
“How are humanitarians moving across our battlespace? Do they not know this is our area? Can they not see we’ve marked the boundaries on our map?”
Again, it was an opportunity for me to explain to my military colleagues that these are our maps inside our headquarters. The humanitarians on the ground have never seen them. These boundaries exist conceptually in our planning, but they don’t exist on the ground outside our reality.
11:30
Dominic Bowen
Even within the military, I can think of a few examples where different units will say, “Well, can’t you see?” But you’re not the only actor on the ground. There’s quite a few things at play here.
You’ve worked in these environments and those examples are great ones, so thanks for sharing them, David.
Trust is so fragile.
I guess the young soldier or officer who asked you for the colouring books was trying to build trust and rapport with the community. Their intent was good, albeit, as you said, perhaps not the highest thing on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that the community required.
In places like Afghanistan where you served, you’ve seen it, and we’ve all heard the message, that bad decisions can really reshape how communities, authorities, military actors and armed groups perceive actors, including the United Nations, which according to the UN Charter is meant to strengthen peace, stabilization and humanitarian organisations that clearly have that mission.
I can think of so many occasions when I’ve been working in places like Yemen, Liberia during the Ebola outbreak in 2014, and Syria during the civil war, where success or failure on the mission really depended not just on what the humanitarian actors were doing, but on how others perceived what we were doing.
That perception was so easily manipulated and so easily changed.
I wonder if you can talk to us about that and tell us how perception matters, sometimes even more than reality.
12:51
David Higgins
Yeah, of course.
I think you’re right to pick up on issues of perception.
We apply the humanitarian principles to all of our work and they’re held up as these universal principles, but ultimately they’re there to serve a practical purpose.
If we seem to be too closely aligned with one side in the conflict, that could undermine the perception of our neutrality in a conflict zone.
If we’re seen to be showing favour to one side or one particular group, that would undermine our impartiality.
If one particular actor, armed group or party to the conflict is able to unduly influence our decision-making, then of course that would undermine our independence.
This starts to break down our ability to operate and access different communities.
So far as it relates to civil-military coordination, when we talk about civil-military relations, it implies there’s a binary distinction between all civilians and all military.
Actually, the relationships involved are more nuanced than that.
There are two particular angles that I’ve seen play out.
Firstly, the relationship between the military and civilian agencies engaged in post-conflict stabilisation.
Secondly, the relationship between the military and organisations delivering humanitarian assistance.
I’ve seen this in Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq.
You get civilian organisations building schools, digging wells and handing out assistance as part of a stabilisation campaign. Post-conflict recovery is intended to create the space for political processes to take place, eventually leading to peace and stability.
That means those activities are inherently political. Those organisations are working towards political objectives and a political agenda.
Humanitarians may also be handing out assistance, food and medical support, but on the basis of humanitarian principles to communities that need it.
In practice, however, both sets of activities can look very similar.
Armed groups and communities watching the operation will see two sets of civilians: one directly supporting military efforts and one trying to maintain a degree of separation from the military.
But it’s very easy for those two groups to get mixed up.
14:56
Dominic Bowen
Yeah, that makes sense.
David, I’ll just take a moment to remind our listeners that for those of you who prefer to watch your podcasts, the International Risk podcast is always available on YouTube.
Please do go to YouTube and search for the International Risk Podcast. If you like our content, subscribe and hit the like button. If you know someone who might also enjoy this episode, please share it with a friend or colleague. This really is important for our long-term success.
Now David, when we talk about civil-military coordination, which we’ve been doing for the last 15 or 20 minutes, the term makes sense to you and me, but it definitely doesn’t make sense to all military actors and it definitely doesn’t make sense to all humanitarian actors.
Can you help us understand the role of civil-military coordination, or CIMIC roles? Where does it begin and where does it end?
15:40
David Higgins
Possibly the best place to start is by highlighting that both military and humanitarian actors use the same language but often think about it in very different ways.
As a military CIMIC officer, with civil-military coordination in my title, the underlying concepts, ideas and working practices all assume that the military is the principal actor and that interaction with civilians and civilian efforts are there to support military objectives.
On the humanitarian side, where we refer to CIMCoord, Humanitarian Civil-Military Coordination, it’s about managing a degree of distance and separation between civilian agencies on one hand and the military on the other.
So both sides are trying to manage these relationships, but in quite different ways.
The military is looking for ways to pursue its objectives more efficiently with regard to civilian agencies, whereas humanitarians are trying to manage that separation and protect their operating space.
16:44
Dominic Bowen
You mentioned before that we were talking about definitions. You’ve talked about stabilisation operations, military action and humanitarian action.
Do those definitions matter?
Does it change what military actors are doing and why they’re there, and how humanitarian actors should be engaging with them?
16:57
David Higgins
I think one of the issues I’ve seen in the past is understanding what type of conflict we’re facing, what type of operation, campaign or war we’re involved in.
As I mentioned at the start, you had civilian stabilisation actors pursuing a stabilisation campaign, while military planners viewed it as a counterinsurgency.
Definitions on both sides do matter because both sides use very similar terms and language, but use them to mean different things.
For example, when I, as a humanitarian, talk about protection of civilians, that’s quite a broad term. It can mean freedom from exploitation, access to humanitarian assistance and the protection of minority groups. It’s a broad, all-encompassing concept.
Whereas when I think back to my time as a junior military officer, if someone mentioned protection of civilians to me, I would have interpreted it in terms of military or police protection from violence.
So we would have been using the same language but actually meaning something quite different.
17:50
Dominic Bowen
Yeah, that’s a really good point.
You’ve had the benefit of working across the military, humanitarian, political and commercial environments.
I’d love to hear, in your experience and interactions, what distinguishes those people who are really effective at bridging these different worlds. What makes them stand out?
Those people who can work across military, humanitarian, commercial and political environments—why do some people do it so smoothly while others struggle?
18:15
David Higgins
The first is that they understand each type of institution on its own terms. And also I think it’s important that they are able to speak both languages so that when they’re in the room they can pick up gaps and differences before they have the chance to take hold and cause any lasting problems.
So I think firstly in terms of understanding, the military, as you’ll know Dominic, even across different countries tends to operate in a very hierarchical manner, and so common training, common culture, standard operating procedures across the whole organisation.
And at any given level, you have a single decision maker who can commit resources and make decisions and make things happen. And as you pointed out yourself earlier, humanitarian operations are managed and run in a very different way. So decision making is by consensus and accountability is spread across a community of independent or semi-independent organizations.
So it’s less like a single institution and more like an ecosystem. And I learned this myself when I first entered the UN after working in the military, and my first instinct was to look for the commanding officer of the humanitarian efforts. And I found I couldn’t find one. Of course there’s some people in charge, there is some degree of hierarchy and there’s seniority and things. But for me, in terms of what I viewed as a commander for something that was so complex and large scale, I just couldn’t find it.
So I guess I made this mirror image mistake myself, but that also demonstrates why the ability to have experiences on both sides of that relationship is so important.
And then I think the second ability that I say is important is, as we talked about, understanding when the same word, same language is being used to mean two different things.
And I think that someone who’s only sat in one institution, particularly if they’re reaching the middle of their careers, they’ve been in an organisation 15–20 years, that then embeds certain assumptions, certain ways of looking at the world, and makes it that much more difficult to pick up these differences in language and meaning.
19:54
Dominic Bowen
Yeah, that language, we keep going back to it, is so important. And civil-military coordination really gained a lot of traction in the early 2010s. And this was built back then when we could really distinguish between civilian and military actors, humanitarian and political objectives, state and non-state groups, front lines and rear areas. These concepts were quite clear.
But today’s conflicts are so much messier.
A couple of months ago I was in Syria. Not only did we have the Russians, the Saudis, the Europeans and the Americans all having delegates in Damascus at the same time trying to cut the country up, we had Israel conducting strikes in parts of the country. You had different armed groups. You had some remnants from the Assad regime who were rebelling along the coastal areas.
Last week I was in Ukraine. Whilst the front line is in the south and the east of the country, we saw over 1,100 drones and missiles go across the entire country, from Lviv right on the border with Poland all the way to the north, south and east. So there really is, it’s not as clear anymore where the front lines really are.
We see armed groups fragment throughout the Middle East in a variety of conflicts. We’ve seen drones and unmanned aerial vehicles changing the battlefield. We’re seeing information operations. Instagram is clearly a significant priority for all state actors that are engaged in conflict.
And then we’re seeing states funding criminal economies. We know the Chinese, the Iranians, the Russians are sponsoring criminal groups that are further complicating humanitarian activities. And then, of course, humanitarian access is being manipulated by almost everyone.
So with that said, do you think the existing frameworks, the way that we do civil-military coordination today, does it still work or are we reaching the limits? Is it time to rethink how we do civil-military coordination? And even the title, civil-military coordination, isn’t the right title anymore?
21:30
David Higgins
I think what we’re seeing in terms of conflict is that particularly states are more willing to weaponise and instrumentalise factors that previously wouldn’t have been considered in the same brackets as the military. Foreign interference in domestic information environments, finances, sport, culture, media—all these different parts of civilian society and the civilian domain being instrumentalised and pulled into the conflict sphere.
My thoughts looking at what this might mean in the future are that we don’t have frameworks that adequately address private sector platforms, businesses and commercial infrastructure. And I don’t think that we have the ways of thinking yet about how we bridge the relationship between the military and these different parts of the civilian realm.
And particularly in the 2010s, some of the things that characterised conflicts at that time was state fragility, the absence of strong governance and functioning institutions.
I think I saw this in a much more live conflict in 2023. I worked briefly with Ukrainian CIMIC officers. You had functioning institutions, you weren’t facing a lack of governance where external humanitarian actors were looking to expand into that space.
And I think also another thing that I really reflected on working with the Ukrainians at that time was that in the Ukrainian military, their CIMIC branch is a large, elite, aspirational part of their special operations forces. Now I compared this to my own experience as a British CIMIC officer, where it’s a small part-time reservist occupation, sometimes seen as a bit undervalued.
And I think the Ukrainian military was established to fight wars of national defence amongst its own communities, to defend its own territory. And so therefore the CIMIC function was valorised and given much more priority than elsewhere, opposed to say the British military, where the army was built to fundamentally fight wars in other people’s countries as an expeditionary army.
23:23
Dominic Bowen
It’s a really interesting point, isn’t it? How we frame it and how we talk about it and how we staff it can really impact the effectiveness of it. What a surprise.
That’s a really interesting comparison between the British example overseas and the Ukrainians, which is also an amazingly well-respected military, and how they’ve framed it very differently.
So thanks for that example, David.
And a question that we ask all guests that come on the International Risk Podcast.
You’ve worked in East Africa, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. You led a geopolitical analysis team at a corporate firm for five years. You work for the United Nations.
When you look around the world today, what are the international risks that concern you the most?
24:04
David Higgins
So I think the major risk that I think about as a civil-military coordination professional is that our existing frameworks assume legible distinctions between military space and civilian space, between humanitarian operations and military ones.
This is what I’ve seen in Somalia and in Afghanistan and other countries where I’ve worked. This distinction was difficult to maintain, but at least it was meaningful.
The risks that concern me now are that where states are weaponising aspects of civilian society, the frameworks will need to evolve, and I’m not sure that this work has seriously begun.
So I think the specific risk here is not that these frameworks collapse visibly and dramatically. It’s more that civil-military coordination keeps happening, civilian agencies and the military keep interacting, they keep attending meetings with each other, reports are written, the architecture is in place.
But operations and humanitarian responses still fail or don’t operate as efficiently as they could, because the mechanisms that underpin them are not being developed for the right kind of problem.
It’s something that often gets talked about in military circles, that the military is trained to fight the last war, and I think that could be said for other parts of the civil-military relationship as well.
Are we delivering our ways of working reflecting what we have in front of us right now and what we will have in front of us in five years, or are we looking back at the lessons of the past and trying to extrapolate forward?
25:34
Dominic Bowen
It does make me think about when I was on my promotion course for captain, and I was a young, arrogant lieutenant getting ready to deploy to Afghanistan. I remember arguing with one of the lecturers, who was a major and clearly my superior.
We had been running tactical exercises without troops. It’s basically theory: what would you do if the enemy did this, and you game plan it and go through it all.
At the time, conventional armies were the focus, sweeping across large amounts of terrain and other conventional armies standing up against them. But we had been fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and for Australia also in Timor-Leste. And the missions we were doing throughout the Indo-Pacific region were all working with local forces and training them on guerrilla warfare.
There was nothing about large-scale conventional military operations.
I remember thinking, why are we still doing this? Why are we still learning all this? Why doesn’t it reflect today’s battles?
And the majors said, “Look, you just need to accept, young man, that sometimes we know better and sometimes there is value in this.”
I thought, what a load of nonsense. But of course, I was wrong.
Now we look at the battles we’re worried about today, China in the South China Sea or Russia in Europe. That’s exactly what militaries are working with.
So it’s a very interesting space.
But thank you very much for explaining all that to us, David.
And thank you very much for coming on the International Risk Podcast.
26:48
David Higgins
Great, thanks very much Dominic.
26:50
Dominic Bowen
Well, that was a great conversation with David Higgins, and I really appreciated hearing his thoughts on humanitarian access, on power, neutrality, and what really happens when humanitarian needs collides with military action.
Today’s podcast was produced and coordinated by Ella Burden. I’m Dominic Bowen, your host. Thanks very much for listening. We will speak again in the next couple of days.
