Page 106 - The Wish Stream Year of 2022 CREST

Exercise DYNAMIC INFLUENCE
Lt Col (Ret’d) Ronnie McCourt
This article is being written a few days after the BBC World Service announced the ces- sation of their Arabic service.
SOFT POWER
What do the following countries have in com- mon: Albania, Bangladesh, Kazakhstan, Nepal, Algeria, Botswana, Zambia, Kuwait, Oman, Lat- via, Spain? They are all part of the 74 countries where deployed RMA Sandhurst Academics have delivered one-week face to face courses to Officers as part of the RMAS’s academic out- reach programme – Ex DYNAMIC INFLUENCE (Ex DI) – which has been running for 14 years.
START UP
The project is the initiative of Ronnie McCourt, a retired Officer who spent 20 years as an Aca- demic in the Department of Communication and Applied Behavioural Science (CABS), one of three departments in the Faculty of Leader- ship, Warfare and Security (LSW). Ex DI came about as a result of a casual conversation in a car park in 2008 at UKLF HQ in Wilton with an ex RMAS Chief Instructor (Johnny Fenn, who is cur- rently walking across Nepal, West to East, rais- ing money for charity as an Ambassador of the Gurkha Welfare Trust). At the time, Johnny was responsible for deploying Short Term Training Teams worldwide, and when asked if he could make use of academic volunteers replied: “What can you offer?”
FIRST STEPS
Once this question was put to Dr Ian Stewart, then Head of CABS, the game was on. We looked first
at what we could teach Officers abroad. Within our own department, we could offer two top- ics centred on what we already delivered to our own OCdts – the Psychology of Leadership and Media Operations. Then we realised we needed money before we could present Ex DYNAMIC INFLUENCE as a viable proposal to Academy Headquarters for their consideration.
A couple of trips to the MOD Main Building in London secured the funds to enable us to sub- mit this initiative as a viable proposition. Part of our approach included running an awayday for the staff of what was then called the Department of International Policy and Plans. We made sure that the awayday was fun and set up a number of ‘social traps’ for the participants to fall into (and being human – they did!). We won them over and funds started to be released, albeit modestly at first.
EARLY DAYS
We ran the first four courses in Sierra Leone, Qatar, Kenya, and Kosovo during our leave periods, but then realised that there were other periods that we could use at the Academy. As with most other training establishments, there is an amount of irreducible spare training capacity. This usually occurs at the end of each term when OCdts are preparing for, rehearsing, and taking part in the Sovereign’s Parade.
At the forefront of our minds was identifying our target audience; in effect, who would ben- efit most from our courses. We realised that the Defence Academy at Shrivenham was already targeting Senior Officers on their courses, so we opted for Junior Officers, primarily 2nd Lieuten- ants to Captains, in addition to OCdts at over- seas military academies. Class sizes were limited to 20 so that we could ensure that every partici- pant would be kept busy. We wanted everyone to learn by doing, not just by looking at slides and listening in what, for many, would be their second language.
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