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Robert David Steele (Vivas)
Intelligence & Information Operations (I2O) with its foundation, OpenSource Intelligence (OSINT) will demand 80% of Command & Staff (C&S) time henceforth. 80% of the relevant information will not be secret, online, in English, or available from the U.S. Intelligence Community.The next wars will not be won if we allow our selves to blur the lines between outright Lies, Propaganda or Psychological Operations (PSYOP), and Public Relations (PR) Only truth rapidly discovered, discriminated, distilled, and disseminated, will re-capture and retain the moral high ground and win World War III. This is a 100-year six-front war of belief systems at the sub-state level, waged via global coverage, real-time sense-making, and ”by name” targeting. On the back end, at home, we have to address ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers in a holistic manner, with coherent reality-based inter-agency budgeting.
WORLD WAR III, LIKE I AND II: neither necessary nor accidental. It is a continuation of a long-running three-way conflict for power among a handful of banking families, varied governments, and the publics of the world, most of the latter suffering the looting of their natural resources and cultural heritages, stolen in an informal but systematic secret campaign to leverage war and pestilence in order to create excessive profit for the few, and unaccountable misery for the many.[1] Behind the global class war[2] of elites bribing elites, all of whom sell out their publics, is a greater cancer, the 300-500 wealthiest and the secret societies they use to “harvest” profit from a planet they believe they own, all humans as their slaves. This statement is intended to shock. It is plausible, but for lack of comprehensive and consistent attention to “ground truth” going back 200 years, we cannot actually prove it. Our task is to be able to do so in the future.
The complete integration of Intelligence & Information Operations (I2O) is the anti-thesis to this perennial attack on humanity, leading to a synthesis of peace and prosperity.[3] I2O is seventh generation total war for the permanent peace.[4] The first six levels as defined by Dr. Max Manwaring, Col, USA (Ret), are illustrated in Figure 1 below, with only the last being our own contribution, in bold italics.[5]
First Generation / Low-Tech / AttritionSecond Generation / Relatively Higher Tech / Attrition and/or Maneuver
Third Generation / From Hard to Soft Power / From Force to Brain Power
Fourth Generation / Non-State Threats / Asymmetry
Fifth Generation / Information and High-Tech / Knowledge & Technology & Organization
Sixth Generation / Military-Technology Revolution / Bio-Informational
Seventh Generation / Belief Systems & Global Accountability / All Information, All Languages, All the Time
Figure 1: The Seven Generations of Warfare
General Smedley Butler, among a handful of Marines most decorated in their respective generations, is on record as saying “War is a racket….War is largely a matter of money. Bankers lend money to foreign countries and when they cannot pay [it back], the President sends Marines to get it.” General Butler is also on record as saying that he did not enjoy being an enforcer for U.S. corporations looting Third World countries under the protection of the U.S. Marines.[6]
It is not possible to review all the facts in the public record in this brief proposal for conceptual and doctrinal change. Suffice to say that just under 800 non-fiction books reviewed by the author at Amazon,[7] all conclude, in general terms, the following:
1) Information openly available in all languages now allows us to follow the money, make politics and budgeting transparent, achieve early warning[8] of emerging threats while recognizing the negative implications of inappropriate behavior[9] at home and abroad, and consequently, to implement “peaceful preventive measures,”[10] applying information as a substitute for violence, capital, and labor,[11] thus creating infinite wealth[12] that will stabilize and reconstruct equitable sustainable society across the globe.
2) Secret intelligence is not only not helping, ignoring the realities of secret society banking campaigns, related white-collar crime,[13] and the corruption of all political parties, but it is pathologically inept and grotesquely expensive because of its focus on secret systems that create profit for the military-industrial complex, rather than sense-making and public intelligence that is actionable by all relevant parties.[14]
3) Morality and meaning are the foundation of I2O. Morality has a strategic value of incalculable proportions,[15] and any obfuscation of the meaning of language is nothing more than a nuance on lying[16] to ourselves, on “cooking the books” as we did in both Viet-Nam[17] and in the decision to invade Iraq.[18] The American media is badly under-reporting or falsely reporting on reality—one genocide instead of seventeen, 2 wars instead of the 27 or so that are extant, and so on. I2O gets us back in touch with reality. As I like to say, mutating Trotsky on war,
You may not be interested in reality, but reality is surely interested in you.
We are now ready to go to the next level of warfare, the Seventh Generation, a happy coincidence with what our Native American victims of colonial genocide called “seventh generation thinking.” Seventh generation warfare, shown in context in Figure 1 above, is I2O warfare, finally achieving Sun Tzu’s acme of skill by defeating all enemies, foreign and domestic, with intelligence and information operations in all languages, 24/7.
In my view, I2O is the path to informed democracy and moral communal capitalism such that fraud, waste, and abuse are eliminated, and all individuals everywhere are afforded equal opportunities to achieve life, liberty, and happiness (the intelligent interpretation of the latter element of the Declaration of Independence equates it to fulfillment or achievement, not vacuous joy alone).
I2O will take at least ten years to identify and bring to justice those individuals who use secrecy and the power of money as well as blatantly and pervasively illegal means to manipulate governments and loot the global commonwealth—we must focus on white-collar crime at the top and transnational organized crime at the bottom—these are actually the two sucking chest wounds that prevent us from reasonably and collegially addressing all the other high-level threats. During these ten years, but requiring an additional fifteen years to achieve sustainable global stabilization, we can also apply information to heal the planet and eradicate the ten high-level threats itemized below, along with the percentage of relevant information for each that is public, not secret (and hence not ably collected today):
· Economic and social threats including 95%
o poverty, 99%
o infectious disease and 95%
o environmental degradation 90%
· Inter-State conflict 75%
· Internal conflict, including 90%
o civil war, 80%
o genocide and 95%
o other large-scale atrocities 95%
· Nuclear, radiological, chemical, and biological weapons 75%
· Terrorism 80%
· Transnational organized crime 80%
Figure 2: OSINT Relevance to Global Security Threats[19]
The average utility and relevant of OSINT to these global threats is—on the basis of my informed estimate—82.5%, which comes very close to the generic “80-20” rule. We must conclude that any nation that persists in spending 99.9 percent of its intelligence funds on collecting secrets,[20] and less than one half of one percent of its intelligence funds on OSINT, is quite literally, clinically insane (or insanely corrupt) at the highest levels.[21] The secret intelligence world ignores eight of these ten high-level threats, and does poorly on the two it acknowledges as vital, proliferation and terrorism.
We are ready now for a massive “paradigm shift”[22] in both how we define and how we achieve national security and national prosperity in the context of also achieving global security and prosperity. I2O is the engine for achieving both inter-agency collaboration and coordination at a level of detail heretofore unimaginable and unattainable, while simultaneously achieving what the Swedes call Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information Sharing (M4IS).[23]
We will not achieve this paradigm shift, nor be able to do I2O, unless the U.S. Army leads the way and offers security to those leading the charge against those secretly manipulating money. The latter are incredibly well-organized, extremely well-informed, and they are willing to assassinate Presidents, over-throw governments, and impoverish or murder (the murder appearing to be a suicide) individuals who dare to challenge them. I choose to focus on this, and implore the U.S. Army to take this seriously.
I2O is needed now, precisely because most informed authorities believe we have less than ten years to begin making draconian changes in our over-all approach to living on a planet with limited resources.[24]
In practical terms, discussed in more detail in the balance of this work, winning World War III will require the following three steps.
1) Creating an independent Open Source Agency (OSA) so as to be able to nurture both OSINT and also Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS), along the lines pioneered by STRONG ANGEL[25] and now immediately available to both Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) critical to the transition to and from hostilities, and to state and local authorities who cannot today readily access national-level intelligence nor share bottom-up collection with national agencies and among themselves, both essential to achieving our objectives in relation to Homeland Security.[26]
2) Charge that new organization, the OSA, with taking Serious Games/Games for Change, to a new level, as vehicles for receiving and making sense of real-world and near-real-time OSINT in all languages and mediums, in order to allow the inter-agency and coalition gaming of alternative scenarios and alternative multinational and inter-agency investment strategies for stabilization and reconstruction. World3, which has evolved from the original “Limits to Growth” model sponsored by the Club of Rome, and SecondLife, sponsored by Mitch Kapor (founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation) and others, could serve as a foundation for creating a SimGlobe on steroids, fully integrating the ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers, and also integrating our new-found realization that money and individual personal relationships as well as belief systems have to be and can be tracked to avoid surprise and make sense of all we can know about our irreplaceable Earth.[27] I will be blunt here: single so-called legitimate individuals are secretly creating situations that impoverish millions, reduce national securities, make national prosperity impossible to achieve, and they are getting away with it. We are looking in the wrong direction. We are responsible for all enemies, domestic and foreign, and I2O will help us sort this out.
3) Apply our new-found ability to do I2O on the national budget,[28] and then on all budgets. We must “follow the money” at all levels, in near-real-time, and use this to quickly identify fraud, waste, abuse, corruption, and mis-direction. With our automated machine-speed model and distributed networks of experts, both paid and volunteer, we will over time be able to eliminate the secret deals and directions that are destroying the planet, we will be able to identify disconnects between policy, the budget[29], reality, and our desired outcomes of sustainable peace and prosperity both nationally and globally.
Grand Strategy & The Application of I2O
The “end game” is not the military defeat of all possible opponents—only a very badly-educated and poorly-read person would believe for even an instant that violence can subdue over seven billion people, five billion of whom are in dire straits of poverty, but being mobilized to the possibilities by their own incidental access to globalized information resources.
Information converted into intelligence, and information used to reduce risks and costs while increasing profits and shared wealth, is the ultimate national resource and the single factor that might permit sustained peace and a full distribution of infinite wealth in the context of sustainable evolution.
The next figure, Figure 3, illustrates a frame of reference, a mind-set, within which all information in all languages, at all times, can help us restore and extend informed democracy, moral capitalism, and reasoned international relations at both the state and the sub-state levels.
We will still need some secrecy, some force, but in this larger context of I2O, we can apply the bulk of our resources to waging peace and nurturing distributed prosperity.
Figure 3: Grand Strategy & The Application of I2O
Human Belief Systems[30]
Communications and computing systems are a means of creating, censoring, sharing, or destroying knowledge about reality, and then establishing agendas, goals, and outcomes favorable to our public.
This matters in relation to war and peace. As Alvin & Heidi Toffler have documented over time, information can be substituted for violence, capital, and labor while producing wealth. I2O is the emergent operationalization of what the author has, since the 1990’s, called “information peacekeeping.”[31]
The first step in preventing war and distributing prosperity is to understand that the 21st Century’s Order of Battle (OOB) is comprised of the individual mind-set, the individual human belief system, and the relatively autonomous Collective Intelligence or group belief systems that characterize neighborhoods, tribes, and ethnic groups. The most important group, the group previously impervious to scrutiny because of its deep intimate secrecy and limited numbers, is the network of secret societies clustered around 300-500 key financial figures (both overt and criminal) who may be the behind-the-scenes instigators of wars for harvesting profits.[32]
Computers expand—or compromise—the human belief systems they represent or support. Depending on the priorities extant in their design, computers can “forget” decades to centuries of sensor information, of historical knowledge, or cultural nuance. Or, instead, computers can provide their human clients with global vision, real-time situational awareness, acute sensitivity to body language, and perfect integration of all relevant knowledge bearing on a situation or decision.
Dr. Robert Garigue tells us that “Computers are epistemological exploration machines. They are means and ways to investigate the life cycle of knowledge. Right now, these ways and means are still simple but eventually, computational systems will construct valid theories and discover new knowledge all by themselves.” His vision includes graphical, temporal, spatial, and acoustic aspects.
Before moving on the remainder of this section, it is helpful to understand just how deficient our current computing and communications environment actually is. This is very important because all too many commanders and their staffs have an almost mystical belief in “the system” as all-knowing if one only knows how to find the needle-in-the-haystack, when in fact not only do we not know 80% of what we need to know, but the 20% that we do know is totally hosed by human error and other problems.