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CANNON AIR FORCE BASE, N.M. - The 27th Special Operations Wing is comprised of thousands of Air Commandos; men and women of diverse backgrounds, experiences and opinions unified in service to their nation. In addition to the motivation that binds them, these Airmen have another commonality – each of them has a voice and a platform to affect change.
Maj. David Blair, 3rd Special Operations Squadron assistant operations officer, is leveraging that platform to its greatest advantage, garnering top-tier attention and applying new lenses to age-old issues.
Blair built an interagency plan to counter human trafficking, which was awarded an innovation prize and acclaimed by the U.S. Agency for International Development. For this and other notable contributions, the major was named the 2015 National Public Service Award nominee for Air Force Special Operations Command.
“What I ended up doing was taking military targeting models of the way we fight terrorist groups and applying them to human trafficking groups,” Blair said. “In certain ways I thought they were similar; they are both networked, adaptive adversaries. I was trying to do two things: first, I was looking for unclassified data so I could try out the math and see if the theory held together; second, I was trying to apply what I had learned professionally to fight something that I’ve always felt passionately about.”
Blair first became interested in the fight against modern human trafficking in graduate school. It was during this immersion that he realized most of the minds he encountered were looking at the issue under a singular lens.
“I worked with a lot of fascinating people who came from different law schools, but they were coming at the problem from a very Department of Justice build-a-case perspective, and I thought the military view of strategy really had something to say to the conversation,” he said.
It was during work on a doctoral dissertation that Blair delved into historical cases that mirrored human trafficking in a way that offered new insight.
“What I ended up doing for my dissertation was making a general model of illicit market suppression,” Blair said. “I looked at the Coast Guard during Prohibition and the British campaign against the Atlantic Slave Trade in the 1800s.”
As history attests, Prohibition-era Coastguardsmen were able to gain considerable ground in the effort to enforce anti-liquor legislation, and British Sailors of the 1850s ultimately claimed victory over proponents of the Atlantic Slave Trade.
“I knew these were stories that needed telling, both for historical significance and also because these men fought monstrous, adaptive organisms that looked a lot like Al Qaeda, looked a lot like ISIS, looked a lot like modern human trafficking -- and they won,” Blair said. “There are very few times that people have fought something as big as that and they’ve actually reached a conclusive victory.”
After recalibrating his research design, Blair expanded the lens through which he was examining modern human trafficking and incorporated takeaways from the two historic case studies.
“My core argument was it takes a market to defeat a market,” he said. “You have to have a place where good ideas go viral and they allow people to propagate whatever models are working. I argued that one of the things we lacked was a sort of market infrastructure space where information can flow easily, where people had incentives to work together rather than against each other.”
In order to eradicate modern day slavery, Blair believes that we must approach the fight against trafficking with a whole-of-nation approach, rooted in American ideals of liberty, where citizens, business and the government all in partnership against the trade in persons.
“Advocacy has to be something that everyone does,” Blair said. “We, as American consumers, have to think about what we’re buying, the places we’re patronizing, what we’re watching. Human trafficking is something that flies in the face of American values of liberty and human dignity.”
Ultimately, Blair is one Airman with a single voice standing upon an ideal. His message to his fellow Airmen is simple – follow your principles, and lead with ideas.
“There are so many smart people with so many good ideas in this wing,” he said. “There are some very interesting stories that Airmen of the 27th Special Operations Wing have to tell and there are ways to lead with ideas. We must be quiet professionals about our tactical deeds, but we must also capture the strategic lessons we are learning about the evolving nature of war. I would very much encourage Air Commandos to get those lessons out there, so we can all fight smarter and win faster.”
| Date Taken: | 07.28.2015 |
| Date Posted: | 07.28.2015 11:11 |
| Story ID: | 171323 |
| Location: | CANNON AIR FORCE BASE, NM, US |
| Web Views: | 30 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, 3rd SOS officer makes moves in fight against human trafficking, by SSgt Whitney Amstutz, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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