1

Robert David Steele (Vivas)[1]

Intelligence & Information Operations (I2O) with its foundation, OpenSource Intelligence (OSINT) will demand 80% of any leader’s time henceforth. 80% of the relevant information will not be secret, online, in English, or available from the secret Intelligence Community.At the strategic level, I2O is about understanding the costs of the ten threats, the savings that can be achieved by the twelve policies, and the profits available to our Common Humanity if we help the eight challengers avoid our many mistakes. At the operational level, 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 truthrapidly 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. Significantly, the socio-economics and the ideo-demographics of I2O are dramatically different from the Cold War era—bureaucrats with clearances are devalued, while citizen volunteers and international observers and experts render contributions here-to-fore impossible to access or integrate. Most of these contributions are free of cost, while creating socio-economic wealth vastly more valuable than the for-fee services of traditional vendors. I2O is means by which we save the Whole Earth.

Table of Contents

Introduction to Intelligence & Information Operations (I2O)

Figure 1: The Seven Generations of Warfare

Figure 2: OSINT Relevance to Global Security Threats

Grand Strategy & The Application of I2O

Figure 3: Grand Strategy & The Application of I2O

I2O Socio-Economics & Ideo-Demographics

Figure 4: I2O Socio-Economics & Ideo-Demographics

Human Belief Systems

Figure 5: Threats to the 20% We Know From the Information Technology Itself

Figure 6: Competing for Attention & Resources

The Smart Nation Act

I2O in War & Peace (Six Fronts, 100 Years)

Strategic Generalizations about Reality

10 Threats, 12 Policies, 8 Challengers

Figure 7: Unified Threat, Policy, and Challenger I2O Matrix

Predicting and Managing Instability (Revolution Matrix)

Figure 8: Monitoring, Understanding, and Stabilizing Pre-Conditions of Revolution

Levels of Analysis

Figure 9: Levels & Domains of Analysis for Integrated I2O

Tribes and Coalitions

Serious Games and Reality-Based Budgeting

Roadmap for I2O

Figure 10: The Future Global Intelligence Architecture

Figure 11: The Four Intelligence &Information Quadrants

Figure 12: The Eight Functionalities of the I2O World Brain Implementation

Figure 13: WIki-Calc Plan for Saving the World

Figure 14: Using Information to Achieve Progress

Conclusion

Figure 15: The Defunct Secret Intelligence Mess

Figure 16: Preview of the Earth Intelligence Network

About the Author

Robert David Steele (Vivas) has roots in Scotland and England on his father’s side, and in Colombia and the Catelan region of Spain on his mother’s side. He is natural citizen of the United States of America, resident in Virginia. After a lifetime overseas, including ten years in Asia and ten in Latin America, he became a Marine Corps infantry officer, then a service-level intelligence plans officer. From there he moved to become a clandestine case officer for the Central Intelligence Agency, serving three back-to-back clandestine tours and three Headquarters tours. He has programmed for future imagery architectures, helped support strategic signals operations, managed global counterintelligence operations, and explored advanced information technology applications for secret operations and analysis. He was the senior civilian responsible for founding the Marine Corps Intelligence Command, and as a result of that experience subsequently has spent eighteen years educating over 40 governments on the importance of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). With this paper, he begins a new long-term focus on creating public intelligence in the public interest, via the non-profit Earth Intelligence Network (EIN). He is married with three children, all of them digital natives with a healthy scorn for industrial era sources & methods. They are the future, and they will enter the future with an open mind, with global access and shared tools the secret world cannot fathom.

Introduction to Intelligence & Information Operations (I2O)

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 lattersuffering 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.[2] Behind the global class war[3] 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.[4] I2O is seventh generation total war for the permanent peace.[5] 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.[6]

First Generation / Low-Tech / Attrition
Second 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.[7]

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,[8] 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[9] of emerging threats while recognizing the negative implications of inappropriate behavior[10] at home and abroad, and consequently, to implement “peaceful preventive measures,”[11] applying information as a substitute for violence, capital, and labor,[12] thus creating infinite wealth[13] 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,[14] 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.[15]

3) Morality and meaning are the foundation of I2O. Morality has a strategic value of incalculable proportions,[16] and any obfuscation of the meaning of language is nothing more than a nuance on lying[17] to ourselves, on “cooking the books” as we did in both Viet-Nam[18] and in the decision to invade Iraq.[19] 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, and by nurturing all our citizens and allied nations as well as organizations, 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%
  • poverty,99%
  • infectious disease and 95%
  • environmental degradation90%
  • Inter-State conflict75%
  • Internal conflict, including 90%
  • civil war, 80%
  • genocide and 95%
  • other large-scale atrocities95%
  • Nuclear, radiological, chemical, and biological weapons75%
  • Terrorism80%
  • Transnational organized crime80%

Figure 2: OSINT Relevance to Global Security Threats[20]

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,[21] 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.[22] 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.

These threats can also be usefully considered in parallel with the eightMillennium Development Goals of the United Nations:[23]

Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education

Goal 3: Promote gender equality and empower women[24]

Goal 4: Reduce child mortality

Goal 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases[25]

Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability

Goal 8: Develop a global partnership for development

The juxtaposition of the threats validated by the United Nations, and the Millennium Goals that focus on development, is instructive—reality is complex, and reality demands a complex program of healing. The threats and the goals also combine to suggest that I2O is the critical enabler for global collaborative understanding, consensus, shared budgeting, and coalition action.

We are ready now for a massive “paradigm shift”[26] 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).[27]

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.[28]

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[29] 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.[30]

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.[31] 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,[32] 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[33], reality, and our desired outcomes of sustainable peace and prosperity both nationally and globally.

I2O, rather than the force of arms; I2O, rather than diplomatic demands, I2O, rather than economic extortion, I2O rather than cultural imperialism; I2O rather than demographic incursion, is the ultimate arbiter of non-violent, multi-cultural, sensible and sustainable solutions to mankind’s challenges.

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.

Figure 3: Grand Strategy & The Application of I2O

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 previous 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.

I2O Socio-Economics & Ideo-Demographics

Significantly, the socio-economics and the ideo-demographics of I2O are dramatically different from the Cold War era—citizens with clearances are devalued, while citizen volunteers and international observers and experts render contributions here-to-fore impossible to access or integrate. Most of these contributions are free of cost, while creating socio-economic wealth vastly more valuable than the for-fee services of traditional vendors. Using the Internet, and advanced security features such as are provided by the Application Oriented Network (AON) from CISCO, organizations will be able to cross-fertilize both data holdings at multiple levels of secure sharing, and individual expertise including foreign language and foreign area skills. The following figure illustrates both the new socio-economics and the new ideo-demographics of the new discipline of I2O, a discipline that is inherently democratic and moral.