UN-CMCoord Platforms

CMCoord platforms facilitate the dialogue between the humanitarian community and military forces. They can be exclusively composed of humanitarian actors, with the CMCoord Officer acting as interlocutor, or of both humanitarian and military actors. They are scalable and based on agreed deliverables and the prevailing dynamics in the operational area. CMCoord platforms must remain humanitarian in nature and must be chaired by a humanitarian actor (usually OCHA). In disasters in peacetime, the Humanitarian-Military Operational Coordination Concept (HuMOCC) is often the most appropriate platform, CMCoord platforms will take different forms as dictated by the context and the need for distinction. The name can change, depending on local level decisions: CMCoord Cell, CMCoord Forum, CMCoord Working Group, etc.: 

• Humanitarian Military Operations Coordination Concept (HuMOCC)

• Multi-National Coordination Centres (MNCC)

• UN-CMCoord Cell

• Civil-Military Working Group

• Civil-Military Advisory Group

• Civil Military Forum

Request for Assistance (RFA) Process Flow 

When the use of military assets, foreign or domestic, is considered to be timely and appropriate in large-scale disaster response operations, one of the CMCoord Officer’s key tasks is to facilitate the planning and implementation of a Request for Assistance (RFA) process. The RFA process helps humanitarian actors prioritize requests for military assets and allows military forces to plan accordingly. The role of the CMCoord Officer is to facilitate the timely and appropriate use of FMA, facilitating knowledge and understanding of humanitarian priorities and ensuring that FMA meet actual humanitarian gaps. While FMA can fill a critical gap at the onset of a natural or technological disaster, they might draw down long before the humanitarian response ends. The humanitarian community should therefore avoid over-reliance on FMA. While the usual end state of the military mission is a situation in which civilian capabilities and capacities can take over, the aim of humanitarian assistance is to restore normalcy within affected communities. Humanitarian actors must plan for the projected timeframe of the relief operation, independent of military support which is temporary in nature.

Requests for military assets by humanitarian organizations are first reviewed by clusters and inter-cluster coordination mechanisms so that they can be validated and prioritized against humanitarian priorities agreed with the government/NDMA. Once RFA are validated, they become part of the civil-military dialogue and interface the NDMA has established, to determine that there are no comparable civilian alternatives and that only military assets can meet a specific critical humanitarian need. Experience from recent large-scale disaster response operations indicates that most RFA that can be timely and effectively met by military assets are primarily for indirect assistance and infrastructure support, such as engineering, transport and airlift capacity.