Maximilian Hauffe, a Fall '24 MIW student, wrote a blog piece for the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition!
The USGLC works in our nation’s capital and across the country to strengthen America’s civilian-led tools — development and diplomacy — alongside defense. By advocating for a strong International Affairs Budget, the USGLC is working to make America’s international affairs programs a keystone of U.S. foreign policy.
The blog titled "Uniting Forces for Global Impact: How USAID’s Office of Civilian-Military Coordination Drives Development on the World Stage" talks about how the partnership between The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) is vital to the support and development of USAID's mission.
"A recent example would be USAID-DOD collaboration in Paraguay, where wildfires are a common occurrence and contribute to 50% of Paraguay’s total deforestation. Despite this, the country relies fully on volunteer firefighters who have no formal training and lack proper equipment. USAID partnered with Paraguay to provide training to these firefighters on wildfire management and incident command systems. However, training alone wasn’t enough to address the problem, as the firefighters still lacked the necessary equipment to carry out their mission. To receive the proper equipment, the DOD’s partnership and cooperation was necessary."
