Author’s draft 1.3 dtd 21 Apr 05, as posted to www.oss.net. Open Access ? 2004.
Peacekeeping Intelligence &
Information Peacekeeping
Robert David Steele-Vivas
The world is at a tipping point, in danger of slipping into complex global emergencies on several fronts. At the same time, the United Nations is re-thinking its organization and mission, information technology is making many new forms of information sharing possible, and collective intelligence—the “wisdom of the crowds,” is emerging as a force for world peace.
I thought it might be a good thing, as we consider how to act and collaborate with one another in the years ahead, if I began these reflections with a review of how the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded since its inception in 1901. I hold the Norwegian Nobel Institute[1] in the highest regard, and believe that the Nobel Peace Prize represents the single best “metric” for focusing our collective efforts. We must all strive to earn this prize each day of our lives.
Since 1901, there have been 112 awards in the 84 years in which an award has been made. I note with sadness that in 19 of the 103 years (18% of the time) since the award was begun, the world has either been in a state of total war, or lacked any suitable candidate for recognition.
Since World War II, there has been a tendency for the Nobel Peace Prize to be awarded to organizations rather than individuals. This is consistent with the growing global importance of non-state actors and networks, where the sum of the parts is greater than any one individual, however inspiring. Among the organizational winners have been elements of the United Nations (5 awards, with peacekeeping forces recognized in 1988); the International Committee of the Red Cross (4 awards), Doctors without Borders (1999), the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL, 1997), the Pugwash Conference s on Science and World Affairs (1995), International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (1985), Amnesty International (1977), the International Labo u r Organization (ILO, 1969), the Quakers (2 awards, 1947), and the Nansen International Office for Refugees (1938).
The awards have tended to be given for peace organization (28), conflict resolution (19), human rights (15) and relief enterprises (14), arbitration (9) and disarmament efforts (6), refugee handling (4), nuclear reductions (4), pacifism (2), and land mine reductions (2). There have been no awards for creating a global information network dedicated to peacekeeping.
Within the existing awards, I studied the information aspect in each case. By far the most common element was direct face to face contact, with 23 awards for direct engagements on the ground, and 22 for direct negotiations. Documentation of circumstances was the primary characteristic of 18 awards, followed by 12 being for personal examples, 7 for educational endeavors, 5 for authorship, 5 for global publicity campaigns, and 4 for media operations. There have been no awards for establishing intelligent information architectures that empower collective groups of individuals, or enable the use of information to prevent, resolve, and recover from conflicts.
What then, should be our objectives in developing a focused discipline or practice of peacekeeping intelligence (PKI) and information peacekeeping? Although several references are listed in the Bibliography, we continue to lack both definitions and distinctions. I seek to provide both below.
· Peacekeeping Intelligence develops and applies the proven process of intelligence[2] to the decision-support needs of the Secretary General (mandate and force structure), the field commanders (civilian, military, and police), and the tactical commanders and humanitarian assistance supervisors.
· Information Peacekeeping develops and applies the proven process of intelligence to define challenges, identify options, specify costs, and make the political, social, cultural, and economic cases for preventive and/or reconciliation actions by nations, organizations, and publics.
Whereas peacekeeping intelligence is largely reactive, seeking to field the right force with the right mandate to resolve an existing conflict, information peacekeeping is pro-active, seeking to define courses of action that prevent conflicts from occurring, and/or that address the many severe challenges that undermine stable governance and the social and economic prosperity that stems from stable governance and democratic participation.
In the absence of both of these, United Nations (UN) forces will fail and global instability will become the norm, consuming us all.
Here is a look at the on-going UN peacekeeping missions today.
Figure 1: UN Peacekeeping Missions[3]
These sixteen missions, as of 1 November 2004, are comprised of 62,271 armed military and police personnel, an additional 3,949 international civilians, aided by 7,340 local civilians, for a total force in the field of 73,560. The annual approved budget for all these missions is $3.87 billion dollars, of which either $1.48 billion or $2.39 billion has not been contributed, leaving these forces operating with either a shortfall of 38% of their funds, or 62% of their funds. In short, UN peacekeeping is under funded by perhaps 40%, and I believe the forces are also severely undermanned.
These sixteen missions barely contain the much broader conflict environment that in any given year includes roughly 25 inter-state conflicts killing 1,000 or more a year, roughly 75 inter-state conflicts killing fewer than 1,000 a year, and roughly 175 intra-state ethnic and other sub-state conflicts.[4]
Now what about broader challenges? Below are illustrated what I view as the top ten challenges for information peacekeeping.
Figure 2: Top Ten Challenges for Information Peacekeeping
What we have here is a global failure of governance with very heavy information failures as a major aspect of each challenge. Censorship denies reality while corruption misdirects resources and impoverishes the masses at the expense of a corrupt elite. Each of the other challenges is an information challenge. In most cases, we have chosen to ignore early warnings and to avoid early investments—what General Al Gray called “peaceful preventive measures.”[5]
If the Earth is a limited environment, and globalization makes it possible for each of these challenges to cross borders with impunity, if most of these challenges are associated with too many people, too much poverty, then we have to ask ourselves: can information peacekeeping make a difference?
Let’s look at this through two other perspectives. According to the most recent high-level panel commissioned by the Secretary General of the United Nations, there are six clusters of threats that face all of us now and in the decades ahead:
1. Economic and social threats, including poverty, infectious disease, and environmental degradation
2. Inter-state conflict
3. Internal conflict, including civil war, genocide, and other large scale atrocities
4. Nuclear, radiological, chemical, and biological weapons
5. Terrorism
6. Transnational organized crime
Figure 3: Six Threat Clusters of Concern to All Mankind[6]
Most interestingly to me, this report places terrorism, correctly, I believe, below the first four threat clusters.
Our second reference point is J. F. Rischard, Vice President of the World Bank for Europe, whose book, HIGH NOON: 20 Global Challenges, 20 Years to Solve Them (Basic, 2002), gives us three clusters:
Group one (sharing our planet) includes global warming; biodiversity and ecosystem losses, fisheries depletion, deforestation, water deficits, and maritime safety and pollution.
Group two (sharing our humanity) includes massive step-up in the fight against poverty, peacekeeping-conflict prevention-combating terrorism, education for all, global infectious diseases, digital divide, and natural disaster prevention and mitigation.
Group three (sharing our rule book) includes reinventing taxation for the 21st century, biotechnology rules, global financial architecture, illegal drugs, trade-investment-competition rules, intellectual property rights, e-commerce rules, and international labor and migration rules.
Mr. Rischard excels in concluding his book with a proposal for the creation of global issue networks as horizontal and bottom-up companions to the existing vertical and top-down approaches that characterize the Member nations of the UN. The possibilities that Mr. Rischard envisions are within our grasp—one pre-eminent thought leader in this area, Mr. Anthony Judge, offers several decades of writing whose concepts can now be implemented within the Internet and with the new technologies discussed in this article.
In each category, regardless of what set of categories one chooses to work with, I believe that we must devise information metrics and information-sharing standards that provide for copyright, privacy, and security, while also providing for the optimization of what can be known—and acted upon—by nations, organizations, and collectives of individuals.
· Information Metrics must allow us to establish what can be known about any given challenge, what we do know in relation to what can be known, and the cost of action as well as the cost of inaction.[7] Eventually—over many political objections—this will lead to reality-based budgeting and international public diplomacy that secures informed domestic public support (e.g. within the US) for increased expenditures in the area of soft power and peaceful preventive measures.[8]
· Information-Sharing Standards must be promulgated as quickly as possible. Extended Mark-Up Language (XML) is one such standard. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is another. A U.S. Government-funded Open Source Information System – External (OSIS-X), could migrate the Intelink standards to the rest of the world, and reap a bonanza of open source information (OSIF) in return.[9]
Many individual have been working for decades to overcome the reluctance of the UN to adopt the proven practice of intelligence to support its decision-making,[10] while many others have labored with equal diligence to get the United States to overcomes its reluctance to take the UN seriously.
Realizing that U.S. funding can be a catalyst for overcoming obstacles and experimenting with new ideas, I want to explore three U.S. policy areas where there may be an intersection of UN and US needs. Let me preface this review by noting that in the history of the Nobel Peace Prize, the U.S. has earned 22 awards, just over twice as many as the next nation, Switzerland, with only the United Kingdom being in the double-digits, at 10. The US can indeed be a force for peace, and my objective is to make it so in this specific case.
There are three—perhaps more—specific opportunities for creating a joint venture in information-sharing between the UN, the US Departments of Defense and State, and perhaps other elements of the U.S. Government (but not the U.S. Intelligence Community[11]).
· Global War on Terror (GWOT). Dr. Stephen Cambone, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, has provided a very fine articulation of his six needs for intelligence in the age of distributed non-state terrorism. Whatever the UN leadership and its varied Member nations may feel about the current US propensity toward unilateral militarism, there is one undeniable fact: it is in the mutual interests of the UN and the US to share as much unclassified information—universal coverage at the sub-state level—as possible. UN access, UN unclassified information, when combined with US money and US information technology, represents a break-through for all governments and a break-through for the UN.
· DoD Directive 3000.cc (“Transition to and from War”). Sponsored by the policy side of defense, but with a heavy information-sharing aspect, this directive implements the September 2004 recommendations of the Defense Science Board’s Task Force on Strategic Communication (Public Diplomacy). This directive represents and extraordinary departure for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, for it recognizes that great nations which engage in warfare have specific responsibilities in the transition to and from war;[12] that non-governmental organizations are essential partners in minimizing collateral damage and optimizing the speed and depth of the reconstitution of civil society in the aftermath of war; and that open sources of information (OSIF) are the common language—the currency of choice—in creating and sustaining effective partnerships between the US forces, UN forces, and NGOs as well as indigenous organizations including the indigenous government. Although focused in its language on “outgoing” public diplomacy themes, a careful reading of both the report and the directive reveals a full appreciation for the urgency of achieving “Global Coverage” using sources and methods that can be easily shared among varied parties without security obstacles or biases. If there is a Defense Open Source Program (DOSIP) or an Open Source Agency (OSA), it will be funded and justified in relation to this Directive, rather than the less compelling 9-11 Commission Report and the impoverished “reform” legislation.
· DoD Global Information Grid (DoD GIG). Finally, and this is almost too big to be considered, but it is relevant, we have the longer-term objectives of the U.S. Department of Defense Global Information Grid. In brief, this program is in trouble, but new information technologies—three in particular—suggest that we can soon leap-frog over the 1970’s legacy systems, the ugly burdensome aspects of manual configuration management, and directly into a new world where all information can be made sense of “on the fly.” More on this in a moment—what matters in this context is that DoD has a need, the UN has global information access and content, and information technology now makes it possible to inexpensively harness UN information while giving back “sense-making” capabilities such as only the US can afford to buy. It is not possible for DoD to achieve its stated objective of “information superiority” without first harnessing all that the UN knows about the world. DoD may own outer space, but the UN owns ground truth. The two must be joined for the benefit of all.
Although I have three decades experience in national intelligence and related matters, it is only recently that I have come to appreciate what is called “collective intelligence.” I want to spend a moment on this, because it comprises the heart and soul of the possibilities for information peacekeeping.
Let me begin with an example from James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of the Crowds (Doubleday, 2004), for his work—and the many other works that he cites, turns the “intelligence” inside out. The bottom line: on any given topic, most experts do not agree with one another and are “correct” roughly 65% of the time. The crowd by contrast, with bias and ignorance, when normalized, is “right on target” roughly 90% of the time. Taking a simple example, guessing how many jelly beans are in a jar on display, practical experiments have shown that experts, or the best individual guess, will get within roughly 20 of the right answer, while the crowd, with all its diversity and ignorance, when its answers are aggregated, will get within 2 of the exact answer. This is a compelling analogy for the Global Coverage and accuracy the UN can hope for.