Douglas G. Pinkham is president of the Public Affairs Council, the leading international association for public affairs professionals. The Council is a non-partisan, non-political organization that provides training and development, “best practice” information and benchmarking services to the profession.
His experience is focused primarily on helping very large corporations (some would call them dinosaurs) get agrip on citizen advocacy and the power of the network. As he has shown so many clients, engaging clients, engaging citizens, makes you stronger. They are NOT a threat, they are a foundation for transformation. Below is his contribution to OSS '02. We strongly recommend all of the publications offered by the Public Affairs Council. Both slides lead to the same briefing.
Mr. Vickers, the National Intelligence Officer for Warning (NIO) addressed the American version of policy-maker push-back on warning: “inconvenient warning.” The British call it “warning fatigue.”
The US Intelligence Community–and all other communities with the possible exceptions of the Nordics, The Netherlands, and Singapore, have failed to triage among the urgent important, the long-term important, and the unimportant.
Kristan Wheaton, the Army field grade officer who predicted the Balkan meltdown years in advance but could not get command attention (he subsequently wrote a book,The Warning Solution : Intelligent Analysis in the Age of Information Overload that needs to be updated and reprinted. The bottom line: policymakers are dealing with $50 billion problems “right now” and the intellgence profession has not matured to the point that it can compell attention to $1 billion “peaceful preventive measures” as General Al Gray, USMC, called them in his article, “Global Intelligence Challenges in the 1990's,” American Intelligence Journal (winter 1989-1990).
The OTHER big problem that the U.S. Government has, apart from the corruption of Congress and the two-party political systems that services special intersts at the expense of the public interest, is the casual acceptance by the U.S. Government of authoritarian regimes. Indeed, of 44 dictatorships on the planet, all but two (North Korea and Cuba) are “best pals” with the U.S. Government because they all support rendition and torture and being “tough on terrorism” in return for liberal unaccountable funds from the U.S. taxpayer.
Achieving a prosperous world at peace demands and end to the concentration of wealth by illicit means. That in turn demands an end to dictatorial governments and a restoration of the rights of indigenous peoples. It is in that context that this paper matters.
The GlobalFuturesPartnership(GFP) is a strategic “think and do tank” that undertakes unclassified global outreach for CIA and other Intelligence Community elements on the most important issues facing the intelligence community today and in coming years. It conceptualizes and implements interdisciplinary and multi-organizational projects on key intelligence issues with leading thinkers from academia, business, strategy, and intelligence consultants.
Below is the citation for the award given to the visionary, founder, and core catalyst within the GFP, followed by two CIA seals: the one on the left leads to the pro forma page on GFP, sadly not offering access to its unclassified and often brilliant productions over the past several years, and the one on the left offers a link to a presentation on “Meeting 21st Century Transnational Challenges: Building a Global Intelligence Paradigm” by Roger George, possibly the most tangible evidence of GFP's influence on CIA's leadership.
OSS '02: 21st Century Emerging Leadership Award. Global Futures Partnership, Central Intelligence Agency. Under the leadership of Carol Dumaine with her extraordinary vision, the Global Futures Partnership has created strategic learning forums bringing the rich perspectives of the outside world into the classified environment in a manner never before attempted. This official but revolutionary endeavor nurtures an outside-in channel for integrating a diversity of perspectives. It is a vanguard toward a future in which the lines between national and global intelligence, and between governmental and nongovernmental intelligence, are blurred into extinction.
Global Futures PartnershipMeeting 21st Century Transnational Challenges: Building a Global Intelligence Paradigm
The GFP is not to be confused with the Open Source Center (OSC). The first is a visionary outreach elements that seeks to share information and achieve multi-national sense-making, in one instance working with up to 35 countries. The OSC is a bureaucratic unit that classifies everything it creates and refuses to engage with any countries other than the standard English-speaking allies and a couple of others totalling eleven including the USA, Canada, the UK, Australia, you get the idea….
The CIA leadership never properly supported the GFP. Its vision
PLATINUM LCdr Andrew Chester, RN, Canada
LCdr Andrew Chester, RN, Canada, has distinguished himself, first, as a pioneer for the exploiotation of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) within and throughout the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Partners for Peace (PfP), and subsequently as a trainer and practitioner with an especially constructive influence upon the international military environment.
If BGen Jim Cox (CA) was the visionary within NATO who saw the need and orchestrated the direction, LCdr Andrew Chester (CA) was the “doer” who executed the single most intelligent and original Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) conceptual process it has ever been our pleasure to support. He is one of a dozen Platinum Lifetime Award receipients from the first 20 years of group endeavor. Below is his presentation to OSS '01.
Col Michael J. Dziedzic is one of those very rare officers of such intelligence and integrity that he was able to run against the grain for years, focusing on the vital importance of civil-military operations other than war (OOTW) that were “buried” by a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who said (we are not making this up), “Real men don't do OOTW.” Of course the Defense Science Board Report on Transitions to and From Hostilities (December 2004) and the current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, say otherwise. Principle co-author with Ambassador Bob Oakley of Policing the New World Disorder, still the seminal work in the field, this is an officer, along with Colonel Ferd Irizzary, whom we hope to see earn multiple promotions as we all realize that a multinational multifunctional Earth Rescue Network is a non-negotiable first step to “getting a grip.” We hold this officer in the very highest esteem.
Douglas G. Pinkham is president of the Public Affairs Council, the leading international association for public affairs professionals. The Council is a non-partisan, non-political organization that provides training and development, “best practice” information and benchmarking services to the profession.
