This year's survey places strong emphasis on the global nature of economic and financial vulernability, and on Afghanistan. Below is a quote in two sections from the official press statement releasing the survey to the public.
Strategic Survey 2010 does not seek to lay out a new comprehensive strategy for Afghanistan. It does however argue that for Western states to be pinned down militarily and psychologically in Afghanistan will not be in the service of their wider political and security interests. The challenge of Afghanistan must be viewed and addressed in proportion to the other threats to international security and the other requirements for foreign-policy investment. With economic, financial and diplomatic activity moving at such a pace and with such varied outcomes internationally, military operations in general have to be all the more carefully considered. Precision and adaptability will be essential watchwords. For heavy, large, military deployment, the longue durée will be seen as an attitude for other times, other centuries.
The Afghan campaign has involved not just mission creep but mission multiplication; narrowing the political-military engagement to core goals as described will allow for proper attention to be paid to other areas posing international terrorist risks, and indeed to other matters affecting international security.
Security and stability in the 21st century have little to do with traditional power politics, military conflict between states, and issues of grand strategy. Instead they revolve around the disruptive consequences of globalization, declining governance, inequality, urbanization, and nonstate violent actors. The author explores the implications of these issues for the United States. He proposes a rejection of “stateocentric” assumptions and an embrace of the notion of the New Middle Ages characterized, among other things, by competing structures, fragmented authority, and the rise of “no-go” zones. He also suggests that the world could tip into a New Dark Age. He identifies three major options for the United States in responding to such a development. The author argues that for interventions to have any chance of success the United States will have to move to a trans-agency approach. But even this might not be sufficient to stanch the chaos and prevent the continuing decline of the Westphalian state.
DOI: 2009 from the Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection (I3P)
We are developing a commentary on the cyber-scam and cyber-ignorance of most of the US Government. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is the only element that is doing its job, everyone else, most especially the U.S. Intelligence Community, is completely lost. There are exactly 66 reputable people working at the code level who are seriously competent, not couinting both a handful or our hacker friends and a handful of talented gnomes inside two specific units. Everyone else is drinking the kool-aid, running on fumes, and pretending the vapor-ware they are being shown is real so as not to demonstrate their own ignorance.
UPDATE: A colleague from within asked us to highlight this quote with the observation that neither the US IC nor DoD have any clue how to execute. We agree. Both lack leadership with vision and multinational panache; they simply do not know what they do not know because they have both wasted the last 21 years refusing to listen or learn.
P.23. They must embrace open-source, population-centric information as the lifeblood of their analytical work. They must open their doors to anyone who is willing to exchange information, including Afghans and NGOs as well as the U.S. military and its allies. As General Martin E. Dempsey, commander of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, recently stated, “…[T]he best information, the most important intelligence, and the context that provides the best understanding come from the bottom up, not from the top down.”
The Cold War notion that open-source information is “second class” is a dangerous, outmoded cliché. Lieutenant General Samuel V. Wilson, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, captured it perfectly: “Ninety percent of intelligence comes from open sources. The other 10 percent, the clandestine work, is just the more dramatic.
Good News: Some good people in the field have finally re-invented half the wheel–the company-level bottom-up half. Unfortunately they have absolutely no idea what can be gotten from the rest of the world (non US citizens without clearances); they are jammed into a legacy system that demands at least a SECRET clearance; there is no Multinational Engagement Network that is totally open albeit commercially encrypted, and therefore this is going nowhere. We could fix this on leftover loose-change, but ONLY if DoD intel leadership will accept the iconoclastic multinational solutions that have been in gestation for 21 years.
Bad News: CIA and DIA are still broken and not likely to get fixed anytime soon. The Human Terrain Teams (HTT) are an utter disgrace. DoD commanders still have not figured out Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and OSINT does not appear in this report, nor does Reach-Back, 24/7 tribally-nuanced on demand web-cam translator services, and on and on and on. Army G-2 is non-existent–Army is simply not trained, equipped, nor organized to do tactical intelligence in small wars. Neither is the Marine Corps, but they adapt better. What is so very tragic is that this is a problem that can be fixed FAST with Multinational Engagement and a proper use of distributed linguistic and cultural assets. All it needs is an internationalist mind-set, which no one now serving in DIA or CIA actually can muster. All of the pathologies we have been writing about since 1988 are to be found in Afghanistan, and none of the solutions that many, many authors have written about for the last 21 years are even on the table.
