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GLOBAL TRENDS 2025: A Critique of the “Analysis,” the Sources, & the Methods
Robert David STEELE Vivas
It was with some interest that I ordered a copy of the (US) National Intelligence Council’s latest unclassified future-oriented report, GLOBAL TRENDS 2025: A Transformed World (November 2008). A careful reading of the administrative remarks at the beginning suggests that the analysis, sources, and methods were starkly limited, were not multinational, multiagency, multidisciplinary, or multidomain in nature, and did not include clever utilization of advanced information processing and visualization nor any form of analytic model intended to assure an integrative delivery that might actually help decision-makers responsible for developing strategy, policy, force structure & acquisition, or operations.
As we prepare to welcome Admiral Dennis Blair, USN (Ret), into the position of Director of National Intelligence, I consider it my duty as well as my privilege, to provide a critique of this report, a report that in my view epitomizes everything that is wrong with the existing US Intelligence Community (USIC)[1].
Welcome aboard Admiral. Rocks and shoals to leeward, engine casualty has forced all stop, hurricane ramping up, and oh yes, ship is sinking fast from several breaches in the hull that appear to have originated inside the ship—perhaps sabotage, more likely incompetence.
As a 56-year old practitioner of both secret and open source intelligence, whose views have been documented in six books, all available free online as well as at Amazon, I will not belabor the obvious, but two fundamentals must be articulated up front:
1. Every person in the USIC is a good person, albeit trapped in a bad system.
2. The culture and the mind-sets have made the very large budget ($60-75 billion) ineffective.
This results in an archipelago of competing agencies and divisions attended by an even larger archipelago of contractors—70% of the manpower and funding—for something that is an inherently governmental function and should not be out-sourced, in my view. Worst of all, this archipelago is isolated from 80% or more of the information resources it needs in order to be effective. Consider the following from General Tony Zinni, USMC (Ret), one of a handful of flag officers with a strategic brain:[2]
80% of what I needed to know as CINCENT I got from open sources rather than classified reporting. And within the remaining 20%, if I knew what to look for, I found another 16%. At the end of it all, classified intelligence provided me, at best, with 4% of my command knowledge.
There are many implications that can be drawn from this, but the two most important are these:
1. General Zinni was on his own for the 96% not provided by the secret world.
2. The U.S. taxpayer, policymaker, acquisition manager, and inter-agency commanders and domain chiefs are not getting a good return on investment for what we spend on secrets.
In that light, we can understand that the report in question was created on the margin, and it shows.
No References
The report is devoid of references or notes. The acknowledgements make it clear that the National Intelligence Council relied on a handful of US-based individuals and firms for outreach, and while there was certainly an effort to include non-governmental and multinational views, this report can be said to have accessed, at best, being generous, no more than 5% of the views that a properly managed effort could have achieved. “Hundreds” of contributors does not impress when I can access tens of thousands to tens of millions via varied Collective Intelligence networks such as the World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility (WISER) or Reuniting America. The report is sophomoric at multiple levels.
No Analytic Model
I hesitate to presume that the Chairman of the National Intelligence Council might be aware of or even have read the 2004 report of the High-Level Panel on Threats and Challenges that published A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility.[3] It became one of my fundamental references the day it was published. In 2004, drawing on LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcroft, USAF (Ret) and other equally distinguished multinational participants, and with access to all that the United Nations System (UN) knows, this group identified and prioritized the ten high level threats to humanity demanding of executive and legislative attention. In the three columns below, I list them, note the degree to which open rather than secret sources apply, and then grade GLOBAL TRENDS 2025 with respect to its attention to each of the threats.[4]
High-Level ThreatPriority Order / Open Source Sufficiency
Percentage / Global Trends 2025
Grade on 4.0 Scale
Poverty / 99.0 / F / 0.0
Infectious Disease / 95.0 / C / 2.0
Environmental Degradation / 90.0 / C / 2.0
Inter-State Conflict / 75% / D / 1.0
Civil War / 80% / D / 1.0
Genocide / 95% / F / 0.0
Other Atrocities[5] / 95% / F / 0.0
Proliferation / 75% / D / 1.0
Terrorism / 80% / C / 2.0
Transnational Crime / 80% / F / 0.0
Average: / 86.4% / D / 0.9
Figure 1: High-Level Threats to Humanity and GLOBAL TRENDS 2025 Report
Given the complete lack of resources devoted by the secret world to open sources (less than one percent) and the USIC’s relative ignorance of both globally distributed indigenous knowledge and of advanced information processing possibilities, a grade of D is actually very—very—good. The National Intelligence Council is to be praised for seeking to rise above the limitations imposed by the secret mind-set. However, apart from failing to address all ten high-level threats to humanity in a coherent prioritized manner, the report also lacks any analytic model for relating threats to policy. Policymakers are called that because they make decisions about policy in relation to threats, not threats per se. Any threat statement that is insensitive to the parameters that both constrain and guide the policymaker is less than satisfactory.
In 2006 the Earth Intelligence Network, since approved by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as a tax-exempt 501c3 Public Charity, addressed the need for a policy line-up within global analytic products, and identified the following twelve core policies, each of which can help eradicate one or more of the high-level threats to humanity, and all of which must be orchestrated by any executive and legislative bodies in harmony with one another.[6] Since policies are inherently 100% transparent and public, and the report failed across the board with respect to policy options and policy interactions, below I simply provide the twelve core policies in alphabetical order (left to right).[7]
Agriculture / Diplomacy / Economy / EducationEnergy / Family / Health / Immigration
Justice / Security / Society / Water
Figure 2: Twelve Core Policy Domains
The same enterprise also identified the eight demographic challengers for the future, countries that because of their demographic weight now and into the future will inevitably eclipse both the United States of America (USA) and the European Union (EU).[8]
Brazil / China / India / IndonesiaIran / Russia / Venezuela / Wild Cards
Figure 3: Eight Demographic Challengers
Wild Card nations include as a minimum the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR), Malaysia, South Africa, and Turkey, three of the four being ignored by GLOBAL TRENDS 2025.
We can safely presume that the National Intelligence Council is either oblivious of this non-profit endeavor to create a public intelligence analytic model, or disdainful of it to their own impoverishment.
In my view, no Global Trends report can be fully satisfactory unless it meets four conditions:
1. It addresses all ten threats in relation to all twelve policies
2. It addresses emerging behavioral, technological, and collaborative solutions in each domain
3. It provides measurable metrics in terms of cost, time, and scope within each domain
4. It evaluates projected alternative paths for each of the eight demographic challengers, and provides helpful illumination on how we can help each of those actors avoid our mistakes.
GLOBAL TRENDS 2025 does none of the above.
Below are two illustrations. The first shows the ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers in relation to one another, a holistic analytic model that the USIC must adopt if it is to be relevant to the security and prosperity of the USA going forward. The colors add emphasis to the “central” policies whose management will make or break a Nation-State, and also highlight the two small areas where the USA obsesses today, to little positive effect. The major players other than the USA and EU make the need for broad multilateralism in addressing threats with harmonized policies quite clear. In the second illustration, a single policy is used to highlight an analytic model for ensuring that the policy is crafted in relation to every threat and every other policy. Together with a balanced budget approach, this leads to the development of a national strategy that can in turn be used to harmonize varied strategies among varied actors. This kind of thinking is not present in GLOBAL TRENDS 2025.
Industrial-era actors have become skilled at internalizing profits and externalizing costs. They have also lobbied heavily for legislation that addresses their needs without regard to the implications for other policy domains. It is all connected in one large system of systems, but governments are not connected, are not coherent, and consequently are not serving the public well.
Errors & Omissions
In evaluating this product, the primary question that I ask is: why, what, how? Why was this product created? What is it supposed to accomplish? How does it enlighten or empower a broad range of intelligence consumers?
By the product’s own account, the process followed was as important as the product, and I find both wanting. The process, however “extended” it might be from the long-retarded outreach practices of the secret world, does not approach, by any stretch of the imagination, my own outreach as a single individual.
The product is interesting and certainly valuable as a starting point for anyone seeking to reflect on the future of the Earth and its varied civilizations, but here again, the lack of a coherent analytic model leaves the product telling a wandering tale of the young and the old adrift in a world where water and food and climate offer challenges that most governments including those of the USA are simply not up to—the product is itself a statement on the incapacity of the USA to do strategic thinking that fully integrates options, solutions, costs, and outcomes.
That in turn leaves us with the how. Assuming the product offered specific options and solutions with specific costs, which it does not, would this product help any policymaker improve their performance in relation to any stakeholder, any challenge, any budget, and any timeframe? The short answer is no. HIGH NOON: Twenty Global Problems, Twenty Years to Solve Them, by J. F. Rischard, Vice President for Europe of the World Bank, remains vastly better organized and more useful than this report. Published in 2002, it cost nothing to produce (comparatively speaking) and is still available to anyone for $10.33.
Similarly, Edward O. Wilson’s The Future of Life, published in 2003, and Lester Browns third edition of Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, published in January 2008, each offer hard specifics including detailed citation of sources, that are absent from GLOBAL TRENDS 2025.
This product is completely lacking in metrics helpful to decision-making, to include the concept of “true cost,”[9] any discussion of trade-offs, or any appreciative inquiry about both imminent technical solutions and the power of innovative education (e.g. one cell call at a time) to move entire societies faster.[10]
I read about technology adoption lag with a jaded eye, realizing that the authors forget that iconoclasts have been at this since the 1970’s—it does indeed take a quarter-century for any society to catch up with its avant guarde—and that Collective Intelligence scales faster, better, cheaper than any bureaucracy, of which this product is assuredly a manifestation. Given leadership, we are ready now.
There are some good things I had not expected, for example, the insert on women as agents of change (I will always credit Michael O’Hanlon with that insight, from his book, A Half Penny on the Federal Dollar: The Future of Development Aid, published in 1997), and the understanding of the Davies J-Curve within China (revolutions do not occur when people are repressed, but rather when their expectations are raised and then dashed).[11]
The group behind the product overstates the importance of Central Asia, overstates the desire of others for leadership from the USA, misses Russia’s looming loss of the East to China, misses the Union of South American Nations (UNISUR), and is generally oblivious to the real trends that are shaping the future, i.e. Open Everything including Open Money, and Epoch B bottom-up collective intelligence along with massive multinational information-sharing and sense-making, all open and transparent.
What Is To Be Done?
I will repeat below the suggestions I made to Admiral Mike McConnell on 22 July 2007, and then expand somewhat. The US Government and the US economy are collapsing—only intelligence can save the day.
This was the heart of the one-pager to then Director of National Intelligence (DNI) McConnell, with Admiral Bill Studeman, USN (Ret) kindly running interference and recommending attention: