If you're the type of person that does not have the time to read Laurie Garrett's BETRAYAL OF TRUST: The Collapse of Global Public Health (Hyperion, 2000), at 754 pages a real challenge, then this book, and the other books in the series, are a very worthwhile means of exploring real truths in an engrossing manner. The fact of the matter is that we are creating an increasingly dangerous environment for ourselves, with cross-contamination, increasingly resistant strains of difficult to diagnose diseases, and so on. The naive will lambast the book for scare-mongering, and they will be wrong–if this book gets you through an airline flight, or an afternoon, and causes you to think just a tiny bit about the reality that we can no longer trust our government to protect the food supply and preparation process, and to think just a tiny bit about how you might protect your children from inadequate “due diligence” by the food service industry, then you will be richly rewarded. The author himself recommends the non-fiction book by Nicols Fox, SPOILED: What is Happening to Our Food Supply and Why We Are Increasingly at Risk (Basic Books, 1997 or Penguin, 1998). The bottom line is that this novel is for serious people, and chillingly worthwhile for those who like to learn while being entertained.
Starting Point for 21st Century Security Strategy Dialog,
October 2, 2000
David L. Boren
I know of no finer collection of relevant views on our current and prospective foreign policy challenges. In the foreword to the book, William Crowe, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and then Ambassador to the Court of Saint James, observes that “A reappreciation of government is also in order.” He clearly articulates both the range of challenges facing us (most of them non-military in nature), and the disconnect between how we organize our government and how we need to successfully engage.His bottom line is clear: we are not spending enough on the varied elements of national security, with special emphasis on a severely under-funded and under-manned diplomatic service.
From Gaddis Smith and Walter Mondale to Sam Nunn and Robert Oakley, from David Gergen to David Abshire to David Boren, from Kissinger to Brzezinski to Kirkpatrick, in combination with a whole host of lesser known but equally talented practitioners, capped off by comments from five Directors of Central Intelligence, this books sets a standard for organized high quality reflection on the future of U.S. foreign policy.
Most interestingly, there is general consensus with David Abshire's view that we are in a strategic interregnum, and still lacking for a policy paradigm within which to orchestrate our varied efforts to define and further our vital interests.
David Gergen clearly articulates the shortfalls in our national educational, media, and political patterns that leave the vast majority of Americans ignorant of our foreign interests and unsupportive of the need for proactive engagement abroad. Reading this book, I could not help but feel that our national educational system is in crisis, and we need both a wake-up call and a consequent national investment program such as occurred after the first Sputnik launch.
David Boren is clearly a decade or more ahead of most current commentators in his call for a new paradigm, for a new analytical framework, for the internationalization of American education across the board. I am reminded of the quotation from early America: “A Nation's best defense is an educated citizenry.” Interestingly, he cites Daniel Boorstein's caution that we must not confuse information with knowledge, and in the next sentence notes: “I watched during my term as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee while the CIA greatly increased its information, its raw data, but became overwhelmed and unable to separate the important from the unimportant.”
I would itemize just a few of the many, many useful insights that this book offers:
1) Diplomacy is the sum total of familiarity with the role, knowledge of the component parts of the overall national security policy, and the ability to design and implement comprehensive policies that achieve the national objectives;
2) Politicians and policy-makers are losing the ability to think objectively and act with conviction…they are too dependent on short-term domestic polling and opinion;
3) (Quoting Donald Kegan): Power without the willingness to use it does not contribute to world peace;
4) We must strengthen the domestic roots of national power if we are to have a sound strategy;
5) Future of U.S. education and strength of U.S. family unit will quite simply determine whether U.S. can meet the economic challenges of the 21st Century;
6) Our domestic insecurity and domestic violence-and resulting foreign perceptions and disrespect for our competence at home-reduce our effectiveness overseas;
7) U.S. is its own worst enemy, with declining attention to foreign policy matters;
8) Weapons of mass destruction are our only substantive vital interest today;
9) Hunger, pestilence, and refugees within Africa will affect all nations;
10) Corruption has replaced guerrilla movements as the principal threat to democratic governance;
11) Commerce rather than conflict will be the primary concern of 21st century foreign policy;
12) The environment joins trade and commerce as an essential objective for foreign policy;
13) Long-term non-military challenges, and especially global financial markets, require refocusing of our security perspectives;
14) Asia will edge out Europe as our primary trading partner;
15) China in Asia and Turkey in the West are linch-pin nations;
16) NATO will survive but we must take care not to threaten Russia;
17) The UN is not very effective at peacekeeping operations-it is best confined to idea exchanges;
18) Our military is over-extended and under-funded but still the best in the world;
19) For the cost of one battalion or one expensive piece of military equipment, one thousand new Foreign Service officers could be added toward preventive diplomacy;
20) Lessons from the Roman empire: its decline results in part from a loss of contact with its own heartlands, a progressive distancing of the elite from the populace, the elevation of the military machine to the summit of the power hierarchy, and blindness in perceiving the emergence of societies motivated by nationalism or new religious ideologies; and
21) We may need a new National Security Act.
If I had one small critical comment on the book is would be one of concern-concern that these great statesmen and scholars appear-even while noting that defense is under-capitalized-to take U.S. military competence at face value. I perceive a really surprising assumption across a number of otherwise brilliant contributions to the effect that we do indeed have all that we need in the way of information dominance, precision firepower, and global mobility (strategic lift plus forward presence)-we just need to use it with greater discretion. I do not believe this to be the case. I believe-and the Aspin-Brown Commission so stated-that we lack effective access to the vast range of global multi-lingual open sources; that our commitment to precision munitions is both unaffordable and ineffective (we ran out in 8 days in the Gulf, in 3 days in Kosovo); and that we fail terribly with respect to mobility-naval forces are generally 4-6 days from anywhere, rather than the necessary 24-48 hours. This book is a very fine starting point for the national dialogue that must take place in 2001 regarding our new national security strategy.
Brilliant–Puts Water in Context of War, Peace, and Life,
October 2, 2000
Marq De Villiers
I rank this book as being among the top ten I have read in the decade, for the combined reason that its topic concerns our survival, and its author has done a superior job of integrating both scholarly research (with full credit to those upon whose work he builds) and what must be a unique background of actually having traveled to the specific desolate areas that comprise the heart of this book-from the Aral Sea (“the exposed seabed, now over 28,000 square kilometers, became a stew of salt, pesticide residues, and toxic chemicals; the strong winds in the region pick up more than 40 million tons of these poisonous sediments each year, and the contaminated dust storms that follow have caused the incidence of respiratory illnesses and cancers to explode.”) to the heart of China (“According to China's own figures, between 1983 and 1990 the number of cities short of water tripled to three hundred, almost half the cities in the country; those who problem was described as ‘serious' rose from forty to one hundred.” The author provides a thoughtful and well-structured look at every corner of the world, with special emphasis on the Middle East, the Tigris-Euphrates System, the Nile, the Americas, and China; and at the main human factors destroying our global water system: pollution, dams (that silt up and prevent nutrients from going downstream or flooding from rejuvenating the lower lands), irrigation (leading to salination such that hundreds of thousands of acres are now infertile and being taken out of production), over-engineering, and excessive water mining from aquifers, which are in serious danger of drying up in key areas in the US as well as overseas within the next twenty years. The author provides a balanced and well-documented view overall. His final chapter on solutions explores conservation, technical, and political options. Two statements leapt off the page: first, that it is the average person, unaware of the fragility of our water system, that is doing the most damage, not the corporations or mega-farms; and second, that for the price of one military ship or equipped unit ($100 million), one can desalinate 100 million cubic meters of water. The bottom line is clear: we are close to a tipping point toward catastrophe but solution are still within our grasp, and they require, not world government, but a virtual world system that permits the integrated management of all aspects of water demand as well supply. This book should be required reading for every college student and every executive and every government employee at local, state, and federal levels; and every citizen.
J Kirkwood jrkirkwood at earthlink.net
Wed Sep 20 17:32:50 EDT 2000
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I am forwarding this with Mr. Robert Steele's permission, and it should answer Mr. Aftergood's recent post, as well as the original post regarding the ‘competition' that was held with regard to open-source intelligence.
Jason Kirkwood
Robert David Steele, OSS CEO wrote:
Mr. Kirkwood,
Thank you for your thoughfulness is sending along the Stratfor discussion. Please feel free to post this to the forum if you wish, as you surmized, I no longer participate in any list discussions for lack of time.
The Aspin-Brown Commission had four witnesses on open source: Tony Lake, RAND, David Sarnoff Lab in Princeton, and OSS. Lake was behind closed doors but probably said he > relied heavily on informal academic and business contacts.Ā RAND said everything was on the Internet and they knew how o get it. Sarnoff said that high definition television (their pet rock at the time, funded in part by NRO) could solve all open > source issues (but somebody else would have to feed them the sources). I did my normal spiel. At the end of the day, at 1700 almost precisely, General Lew Allen, USAF (Ret) and member > of the Commission, asked me if I would be willing to undertake a benchmarking exercise. I agreed, he turned to Britt Snider, the Staff Director, and instructed him to tell the IC to deliver anything they had on Burundi by 1000 Monday (this was a Thursday at COB). I had my assistant send faxes and followed up with calls from Las Vegas (DEFCON) on Friday, and by 1000 Monday the
Commission received:
+ top ten journalists in world on this matter, from LEXIS-NEXIS
+ top ten academics via citation analysis, from Institute of Scientific > Information
+ one paragraph precis of all stories on this in past, and one page orders of battle on the clan/tribes, from Jane's
+ 22 two page top level political military briefs from Oxford Analytica on UN, US foreign policy implications of this matter
+ list of all immediately available Soviet military combat charts for the whole country (US had no tactical maps at the time)
+ belatedly, as I did not know them that week-end but found them a week later, list of images for the entire country, cloud free and less than three years old, suitable for creating 1:50,000 combat charts
The staff was shocked by the comparison and decided this was “too hard” an issue, and planned not to include it or its implications in the final report. Since all commissions are manned by rotations, I knew of this within 24 hours. I wrote a letter to Harold Brown, and he was wise enough to see that this needed to be pursued. He assigned a three person member panel to focus on this, without further reference to me, and they came to two conclusions, the second of which was new to me but which I have since adopted :
1) The IC is severely deficient in its access to open sources, and this should be a top priority for funding and a top priority for DCI attention.
George Tenet subsequently decided he was not in the open source business and allowed FBIS to continue on its downward spiral and COSPO to languish in the death of a thousand slights. The DI, however, and especially the ADCI for Analysis and Production, John Gannon (one of the top people I really really admire), did not let this lesson go past them, and have done what they could, within the severe limits of their discretionary income (very low), to examine alternatives.
2) From page 17: The Commission believe that intelligence agencies should not satisfy requests for analysis when such analysis could be readily accomplished using publicly available information….The Commission believes that in general intelligence agencies should not accept requests for analysis when it is clear in advance that the information available from intelligence sources would have a marginal impact on a particular analysis.
This is the part that George read, perhaps because it was in bold print and far forward in the book.
Unfortunately, as Ellen Siedman, Special Assistant to Reagan, said at one > of my lunches, “Treasury, Commerce, the Fed *don't know how to do intelligence*.” This is why my book outlines the need for a Director General of National Intelligence within the revitalized and restructured White House Staff, with the National Intelligence Council expanded and elevated to be directly responsive to the DGNI, and the DCI (now the Director of Classified Intelligence to have full program authority over *all* of the collection and classified analysis capabilities, while we create a “peer” Global Knowledge Foundation with $1.5B a year to harness open sources worldwide, and to orchestrate a web-based means of sharing baseline OSINT collection and analysis and discussion and distance learning on topics of mutual interest.
It will take another ten years, but this is where we need to go. I am now much beyond OSINT, and focusing on the global burden sharing aspects of the problem.
Pages 17 and 88 in the commission report contain the most relevant passages.
Best wishes,
Robert
>
> >Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 08:09:52 -0400
> >To: Steven Aftergood
> >From: “Robert David Steele, OSS CEO”
> >Subject: Steve, You are Half Wrong
> >Cc: “Mr. Vernon Loeb”
> >
> >
> >Steve,
> >
> > I chose not to glorify the Stratcom thing with a response, but you are also wrong to go on the record saying it was untrue. Vernon is the one who best researched this. While I was not privy to exactly what they provided, I am privy to come comparisons, and it did center around the World Fact Book. We blew them away with over $100,000 in nominal stuff delivered via overnight mail.
> >
> > Having said that, I would go on to say, on the record, that CIA, the DI, learned from this while COSPO did not. The DI subsequently sponsored a Global Coverage program with numerous pilot projects, and OSS is pleased and privileged to have been one of the winners of this competitive exercise. The DI is capably exploring direct one stop shop support, web technology, side by side academics, structured outreach programs, subcontracting of election polling for specific foreign elections, and so on.
> >
> > In my own mind, OSINT and the Burundi exercise are in the past. The private sector is no smarter today than when the Burundi exercise took place. The Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals is in the fourth grade, and there is no serious capability in the private sector equivalent to the Directorate of Intelligence at CIA.
> >
> > Best wishes,
> > Robert
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