How Technology Saves Lives After War Ends

How Technology Saves Lives After War Ends

HOW TECHNOLOGY SAVES LIVES AFTER WAR ENDS

INTRO:
When a conflict ends, former battlegrounds often contain a modern remnant of warfare: landmines, making that land effectively uninhabitable. For 35 years, The HALO Trust, a UK-based charity, has been helping communities around the world recover by removing these explosives. Major General James Cowan, a distinguished veteran in the British Army, is chief executive of The HALO Trust.

Under his leadership, The HALO Trust has increased its global workforce by a third, with 95 percent of those employees coming from the communities The HALO Trust serves. Now located in 29 countries, its revenue has almost quadrupled. Cowan has achieved all of this against a backdrop of unparalleled geopolitical turbulence.

That achievement wouldn't be possible without location technology, which helps the trust more efficiently accomplish its lifesaving work. Recently, Cowan presented The HALO Trust's latest work while visiting Esri headquarters.

SHELLEY:
Please help me welcome James Cowan.

JAMES COWAN:
Thanks, Shelley. Thank you very much, Shelley. That's my whole lecture. I'll get my coat.

No, it's really lovely to be here, and thank you so much for this incredibly warm welcome. I feel quite intimidated talking to you tonight. I read Modern History at Oxford. Modern History at Oxford starts with the sack of Rome by Alaric the Visigoth in 410 AD, so it's not really that modern.

I felt quite out of my depth in the very technical discussion that we were having earlier. But what I hope to do tonight is lift us away a little bit from the technical and talk more generally about the humanitarian work of The HALO Trust.

As Shelley said, I used to be a soldier, and my theme tonight is, to some extent, conflict and war, and how, whereas in the first few years of my career I dealt with conflict, what I do now is in a sense the opposite of that. A poacher-turned-gamekeeper life is what I've led.

I began my career in the army in Northern Ireland. I was an intelligence officer there, and the thing I took away from that conflict is that wars rarely end through violence. They end through negotiation and through peaceful settlement.

I played quite a major part as a young officer in the planning for the Kosovo conflict and, quite depressingly one might say, the last occasion on which the West managed to achieve military effect in a positive way.

I served in Iraq, as so many of your fellow Americans did during the 2000s. I led my regiment there, the Black Watch, during the Battle of Fallujah, and it was a huge privilege to serve alongside the Marine Corps during that particular conflict. It was a pretty brutal battle, but what I'd like to tell you tonight is that, having gone there to fight in 2004, I went back there for lunch in 2018.

I had lunch with the mayor of Fallujah, where HALO is now clearing landmines around that city, and it is a really nice feeling to be able to go back and do something peaceful to make that country prosper for the future.

I was the British commander in Afghanistan in Helmand Province, and I'm going to talk a little bit about Afghanistan today. I go back there too. It was quite a weird experience as a former combatant, a former British commander, to go meet the very people that previously I was sent to fight.

I finished my time in the army as the commander of the British Army's deployable force. We were really centered on a time when people said there could be no prospect of war in Europe. There now is a war in Europe.

Let me talk, though, about what I do now, because I left the army in 2015, and it's been my huge privilege to lead The HALO Trust for the last 10 years.

This is a photograph that shows, in essence, what The HALO Trust's work is all about. It shows a deminer moving up towards the side of a landmine. Why is it important to move to the side of a landmine? Well, a landmine is essentially a victim-operated device with a pressure plate on top, and if you stand on it or push it, it will detonate and it will kill you or maim you. But if you come at it from the side, as this deminer is doing, you should be safe.

Look at the tools that are being used here. They're basically fairly primitive, old-fashioned tools, somewhere between gardening and archaeology, you might say. But there are some aspects of this picture that I think are quite modern.

The first thing to say is obviously it's taken by a drone, and drone technology is an increasing part of the work of The HALO Trust. The second thing I'd say is that the deminer is a woman. This photograph is taken in Sri Lanka, and it's been my huge privilege to take HALO from being a very largely male-dominated world to where we are today, where I'm trying to head towards a 50 percent female workforce.

It's about empowering communities and empowering individuals to take the future into their own hands, to give our deminers a chance to live in their country, in their communities, in safety.

That's the mission. Our mission is really very straightforward. It's a two-part mission: to save lives and restore livelihoods for people affected by conflict.

Let's talk a bit about the history of the landmine. What is it about a landmine that makes it particularly evil? Landmines are devices put in the ground to make war as economical as possible. They don't require any supervision. They don't require feeding. They don't require sleep. They are the eternal sentry.

The landmine really doesn't have much of a history before the Second World War, but it is during the Second World War that the Germans began to produce landmines on a truly gigantic scale. A very simple device, a wooden box, laid across the whole of Europe, in Italy, in North Africa, in France, in the Low Countries, and of course on the Eastern Front as well. These mines killed and maimed literally tens of thousands of Allied soldiers.

After the Second World War, with the invention of Bakelite and plastic, you could begin to create mines that were hermetically sealed. A mine is essentially a device that will degrade if it's exposed to the elements, to water. But if the mine is encased in plastic, it can remain hermetically sealed and perfect for not only years, but decades after the event.

This is what marks landmines out particularly from other weapons that kill you in the moment. These are intended to kill or maim a soldier, but actually they will kill or maim innocent civilians, often children, decades after the event.

When we got started in 1988, our work was really pretty primitive. It's extraordinary to think that soldiers in the Second World War had to use bayonets to prod into sand or earth to find landmines. The intention was to come in at a 45-degree angle and hope that you did not hit the top of the mine.

As late as when this photograph was taken in the early 1990s, we were still using prodding as a technique for finding landmines. Goodness, we've come on a lot since then. The whole work of everything that happens here at Esri is about the digitization of information to present ways of speeding up work.

Perhaps the most famous event surrounding The HALO Trust was the visit of Diana, Princess of Wales, to a minefield in Angola in 1997. I've actually visited that very same minefield, and I'll come back to that point in a minute. Her presence in that minefield, one of those iconic photographs, galvanized the whole movement to ban landmines.

Of course, she visited in January of that year, and she was dead only a few months later. But it is at the end of 1997, in December, a few months after her death, that the landmine ban treaty came into force. Such was her power to convene and make a difference in the world.

This is what has happened with the Ottawa Landmine Ban Treaty. Actually, the United States is not a signatory. But the United States has a very honorable part that it's played in the landmine clearance process. Even though it is not a signatory, it has funded landmine clearance very significantly around the world, and you should be very proud of the part your country's played in achieving that.

Very sadly, whilst we were beginning to make serious inroads in the 2000s in post-conflict countries like Angola, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, and the like, we are now seeing new conflicts, notably in Ukraine, begin to fill that void in a very serious way.

All across the world, from the Western Hemisphere, to a great many programs in Africa, in Europe, into Asia, and down as far as the South Pacific into the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea, HALO is a genuinely global concern.

Increasingly, our donors are looking for us to work inside conflict-affected states where the conflict is still live, and that creates an entirely new challenge for HALO.

What are we really about? We're about the safe and efficient removal of ordnance and the restoration of land by local people for local people. We aren't an organization employing thousands of Americans or British people. We are an organization employing local people.

Yes, of course, we have international staff as well, but our work can only be affordable because of that employment of local staff. By employing them, we are actually empowering local communities to take the future into their own hands, and that gives them a sense of their own destiny, which is massively important for us and for them.

We can do this by deploying at scale a very disciplined workforce. Discipline is really vital to our work because the clearance of a landmine is something that, if you do it right, you will survive, you will be fine. But it only takes one mistake for you to suffer an injury. So we are very dedicated to the highest possible standards of clearance.

What our work does, in essence, is make it possible for people to live their lives without death or injury. It's possible for us to create jobs for local communities and then, having had the job as a deminer, to have a sustainable livelihood farming that land in the aftermath.

But we do employ international staff as well, and I've had two young ladies come up to me already asking about working for HALO. It is exactly this kind of talent that we are looking for in HALO.

We bring people to Scotland. We run them around the hills. It's usually raining in Scotland, I can promise you that. You then get put through some literacy and numeracy tests. We test your character, see whether you're the right sort of person, and if we think you've got the right leadership skills, we will then take you out to Cambodia, where our training takes place.

After four months of training, people who've been students will come out the other end as trained leaders. They will get sent out to one of our countries. It might be Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, Colombia, or Cambodia, and they will begin their work of leadership, leading perhaps upwards of 100 deminers somewhere in one of our mine-affected countries.

That huge local talent inherent in whatever country they are from, whether it be Colombia or Cambodia and all stations in between, these are the people who form the backbone of The HALO Trust, this hugely talented local workforce.

Some examples of that, and something that Esri has been fantastically supportive of, is bringing on women within demining. I mentioned at the beginning that my ambition is to get to a 50 percent female workforce. That's hard in certain Muslim countries, like Afghanistan. But in many countries around the world, it's been such a pleasure to recruit incredibly talented women and give them a future in some specialist roles.

Let's talk a little bit more about technology. There must be a way in which we can do landmine clearance without having to use human beings. I think there probably is at some point in the future, and let me just talk through some of the technologies that people tend to think of.

Drones have huge value in the world of landmine clearance as a way of surveying land. They are not yet a means of destroying ordnance. They cannot carry the payload to make that possible, and they would have to get too close to the ground and would then be damaged by it. But who knows what will come in the future?

Right now, the drone cannot destroy every mine. If you had, let's say, 100 landmines in your backyard and your grandchildren or children were coming to play, you don't want 98 of them destroyed. You really want every single one gone, so that's not the answer up there.

And then, of course, the military, and I am an ex-soldier myself, spends millions on some really extraordinary pieces of military equipment. But these are multimillion-pound platforms that don't really have a place in humanitarian demining. The military is about plowing a lane through an obstacle in order to allow armor and tanks to break through to the other side. That's not the answer.

Quite often, the answer for us is in something much more humble. We don't want to rip out all the forestry. We want to work amongst the trees. We can get in there, and this helps improve our speed of excavation. It also helps the safety of our work because, with small anti-personnel mines, you can make sure that the operator is not harmed using such devices.

Looking towards the future, how can we marry the detection systems that we have at our disposal with artificial intelligence to start thinking about machine learning? We're already having some very interesting trial data showing what can be done with AI. It's picking up the landmines. It is also creating quite a lot of false positives, so we've got to weed those out.

But we think that if we have access, as we do, to vast amounts of open-source satellite and drone imagery, and we can then marry it to machine learning, we can scan images and come to very rapid assessments of where precisely the landmines are in any given area.

The next stage on from that, of course, is to get to autonomous vehicles. Then you cut out the human completely. That's not yet an actual physical reality, but it is something that no doubt will come in the next few years.

A little bit about the reality, though, is that these are some aspects of our work that I think many of our donors find extremely compelling. Our work is measurable, and we can measure our work extremely precisely.

Our work is scalable. There is one U.S. billionaire who's helping us clear the whole of Kosovo. He's doing it without any desire for publicity. But a schoolchild could help clear a single landmine with a week's pocket money. So the work is scalable. You can find different levels, and we have donors who just want to clear a single minefield somewhere.

The work is final. When it's done, it's done. Mozambique is now completely mine-free. There are no mines left in Mozambique. That's a terrific thing to be able to say.

And the work is highly affordable because we are very much a frontline-first organization. We have the smallest possible bureaucracy, and we are very much about spending our money where it is needed.

But the world is changing, and The HALO Trust is changing with it. From the largely rural, field-based problem of landmines of the 1980s and '90s, conflict is happening increasingly in city landscapes. Three-dimensional, urbanized, high metal contamination makes it hard for metal detectors to pick out where the problem is.

We're not just talking about landmines here. We're talking about artillery shells and air-delivered munitions, bombs. That is the reality of HALO during the course of the last 10 years.

So the role of imagery in all of this is absolutely fundamental, because what we see in our work is that, on the whole, people have a suspect contamination idea in their head. They think an area has a certain amount of contamination.

Right now, the Ukrainians believe about 150,000 square kilometers of their country is contaminated. But once you get to work with imagery, you can begin to process that down from a suspect area to a real area. Generally speaking, as a rough rule of thumb, only about 10 percent of the suspect area will actually be contaminated.

Through tight survey, we can thereby save billions of dollars by making sure that we're not wasting money trying to clear landmines from areas that don't actually have any.

The replacement for the landmine in most of the conflicts that I fought in, in Iraq and Afghanistan, was the IED, which is basically an improvised explosive device, a homemade landmine. Quite a few people die from those. Even more people die violent deaths from conflict.

But now look at how this expanding torrent of misery grows. It's the people who have been forcibly displaced by conflicts, the millions of girls not allowed into education, the hundreds of millions who are in extreme poverty, and the nearly billion people who are undernourished as a result of conflict.

Conflict is arguably the great challenge of our age and the challenge that we are not controlling sufficiently. The work of The HALO Trust is about being part of the solution to the causes and consequences of conflict because statistics show the countries most likely to go back into conflict are the ones that have been in conflict previously.

So this is what The HALO Trust is really about. We put conflict at the heart of what we do, but it is the impact of our work, the impact on people's livelihoods, on women's life chances, on conservation, upon climate change, upon public health, upon education. This is really the essence of what my charity is here for.

In 2021, HALO suffered the worst single attack it experienced in its history, when ISIS attacked and murdered 10 of my staff, and a further two died of their wounds thereafter. It was a pretty shocking moment for me. After 30 years in the army, it was quite ironic really that the most significant mass casualty incident of my professional life took place not in a military context, but within a charity.

But only a few weeks after this incident, the withdrawal from Kabul took place, and HALO had a decision to make. Were we going to join that evacuation with our 2,500 staff? The answer is no. We decided to go to ground, stick it out, and two weeks later we went back to work.

I'm incredibly proud of the way in which we did that, and we are still operating to this day in Afghanistan. That is testament to the courage of HALO's Afghan staff.

I now go back to Afghanistan, and it's a weird experience for me as a former British soldier there. Having fought the Taliban, I'm now meeting the people that previously, let's be frank about it, I was trying to kill.

By sticking it out, by staying engaged with Afghanistan, we've been able to expand our work throughout all affected provinces. The only reason why we're not in those provinces, the white ones, is because there aren't any landmines left to clear. But we're now able to get everywhere we need to get.

Let me turn now to the Israel-Palestine situation. The Middle East is somewhere that HALO is focused on very much. I mentioned earlier the cityscapes that we've been operating in, and HALO has been working in Iraq and in Syria, clearing ordnance from urban settings where war has seriously destroyed that environment.

But nothing we have seen so far in Syria or Iraq can compare with the scale of the destruction in Gaza. What we are doing in Gaza is striking a very careful balance. We are hugely respectful of the appalling and quite unwarranted assault on Israel on the 7th of October, and our work is of a humanitarian nature in helping Palestinian communities to function in safety, but it is also of assistance to Israel. We are the only NGO registered by Israel and allowed to operate inside Gaza.

It is one of HALO's abiding characteristics that it is able to strike that balance and get it right, and we are very respectful of the needs of both sides in this appalling conflict.

We are also now, because we have been in Syria for a long time, able to operate throughout the country. It is massively mine-affected. It's not getting enough attention, and Syria should be the breadbasket of the Middle East. It can't be until this landmine contamination is gone. So we have big plans to expand in Syria.

As Shelley said at the beginning, there are so many things in this world that are reasons to be depressed. But to say that we have cleared two million landmines, that is two million people who've lived, who never knew that they might have died, who have lived their life in happiness, in health, and in safety because those two million landmines did not blow their leg off or kill them instantly.

Here's a shot of a school in Zimbabwe. It's a typical little school classroom, and the teacher is asking those children a question. Maybe it's a geography question: "What's the capital of Zimbabwe?" Maybe it's a maths question: "What's two plus two?" Actually, what this teacher is asking those children is this: "How many of you walked to school today through a minefield?"

Our role in The HALO Trust is to make sure no child in the future has to put their hand up in answer to that question. Thank you very much indeed.

OUTRO:
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