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Dr. Steve Metz was published on this topic by the Military Review in July-August 2001. A great deal of original thinking came out of the U.S. Army Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) in the aftermath of the 1998 Army Strategy Conference, and sadly, none of it has gained any traction with any Secretary of Defense (or State) since then. Should Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) actually be selected to be the new Director of National Intelligence (DNI), this is a concept he is going to have to integrate into his thinking.
Although Dr. Metz fully understands the asymmetry of will and touches on the asymmetry of morale, he does not address the core intelligence question of our century: the asymmetry of morality. Will & Ariel Durant understood this and highlighted the strategic value of being “in the right” in their capstone work, The Lessons of History. Others, including Buckminster Fuller in Critical Path and Dr. Robert Ackoff (see first link below), understood that context matters, and within context, morality and doing the right thing.
Morale is not the same as moral, and the “collateral advantage” that allows one to harness the distributed intelligence of the Whole Earth–to receive unsolicited warnings large and small, to receive unsolicited good ideas large and small–comes ONLY when one holds the moral high ground. It merits stressing that CONSENSUS is most easily achieved when those striving to achieve consensus share a common faith in integrity–in morality.
America is in the wrong today, because the US Government is imposing on both the domestic public and on humanity at large the wrong policies, the wrong programs, and the wrong acquisitions–as well as the wrong distribution of US taxpayer funds in the service of dictators, cartel leaders, and predatory immoral banks and businesses not at all interested in earning legal ethical profit fully compliant with true cost economics also known as the triple bottom line.
If the next DNI is to be successful, they must:
1. Be firmly rooted in their Oath to the Constitution, to defend America against all enemies domestic and foreign. Right now most of America's enemies can be found within the confines of the District of Columbia and its outskirts in Northern Virginia and the adjoining counties of Maryland. What is being done “in our name” within both Congress and the Executive is–in this time of national emergency–treason.
2. Free Obama from the grip of the two-party tyranny and reconnect him to We the People. There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be fixed with the right mix of clarity, diversity, integrity, and a long-term commitment to the sustainability of the Republic. Those in charge of US policy today are traitors–they strive to optimize profit for the few at the expense of We the People. It is this basic truth that the DNI is going to have to communicate to the President, or they will both go down in flames. CONSENSUS can best be achieved through multinational and multi-party information-sharing and sense-making; public intelligence is the way to reconnect to reality and to the 43% plus American voters who now classify themselves as Independents.
3. Free Obama from the grip of the military-intelligence-industrial-congressional-banking complex. There is PLENTY of money with which to get this country back on track, it is simply being badly managed. The Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) shows no evidence of understanding how to do strategic analytics or integrated Whole of Government planning, programming, and budgeting. The right DNI, and the right budget-savvy DDNI, could actually show the President how to cut DoD by two-thirds, cut DHS by three fiths, increase State, Interior, and Education by a factor of five, and generally create a Smart Nation, a Safe Nation, by leveraging intelligence. Reform can be job and revenue neutral on a district by district basis. It will take five to ten years. It starts with having a DNI able to combine brains and ethics, and a President willing to try intelligence-driven policy and intelligence-driven acquisition.
We're not holding our breath–but if President Obama is prepared to ignore the people that have destroyed his Presidency to date, much as Dick Cheney destroyed the well-intentioned Presidency of George Bush Junior–and take intelligence (decision-support) seriously while embracing the Fuller-Ackoff=Steele ideas of holistic strategic analytics that allow the Republic to address all ten high-level threats to humanity by orchestrating all twelve national core policies, all to the end of using intelligence to harmonize the spending of all parties toward creating a prosperous world at peace, then the rest will follow. Obama WILL get a second term–all he has to do is implement electoral, intelligence, governance, and national security reform in the time he has remaining on his first term.
Seize the day….or not.
