Over the past few days, members of the Belize Defense Force, the Police, and other authorities have been involved in a civil-military training exercise. The course is being conducted with facilitation from the resurgent British military. Lead instructor in the course Alan Edwards told us what it's all about.
Alan Edwards,
"We're here conducting a course in civil military operations. That is to say how the military can work with civilian organizations and we are practicing techniques of how we can do joint planning and joint operations and we are going through things like negotiating, how to plan and run effective meetings, how to liaise project management and techniques like managing displaced populations and things like that. The importance of this is two-fold. There is a semi-military reasons such that wherever the military goes these days there are civilians and we need to work with those civilian organizations and in particular in the case of Belize it could improve the hurricane preparedness and response to a crisis provoked by a natural disaster like a hurricane. What we found all around the world where we go is that many of the problems are caused by bad communications and it's through relationships between individuals that often the problems between organizations can be overcome."
The course concludes tomorrow.
