Perry Center Director Lieutenant General (ret.) Frederick Rudesheim participated in the Conference of Defense Ministers of the Americas (CDMA) hosted by the Government of Mexico in Cancún from 7 – 10 October. The forum was founded by former Defense Secretary William J. Perry back in 1995. The Director made a presentation the evolving role of the armed forces on a high-level expert panel designed to provide insights for the participating ministers. His intervention focused on the need for governments to develop intermediate capabilities to address the scourge of organized crime and also to better identify the roles that the defense sector should play in the cyber domain. CDMA XIII resulted in the signing of the forthcoming Cancún Declaration, setting out a series of working groups that will feed into CDMA XIV, to be hosted by Chile in 2020.