Strategic Studies Institute SSI

Strategic Studies Institute SSI

War & Peace in the Digital Era:

Digital Natives, Serious Games, & the Way of the Wiki

Seventh Generation Information Operations

Irregular Warfare (Waging Peace)

Robert D. Steele

June 2008

This publication is a work of the United States Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, section 101. As such, it is in the public domain, and under the provisions of Title 17, United States Code, Section 105, it may not be copyrighted.

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REFLECTIONS

A Nation’s best defense is an educated citizenry.

Thomas Jefferson

A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

James Madison

I am constantly being asked for a bottom-line defense number. I don’t know of any logical way to arrive at such a figure without analyzing the threat; without determining what changes in our strategy should be made in light of the changes in the threat; and then determining what force structure and weapons programs we need to carry out this revised strategy.

Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA)

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.

General Tony Zinni, USMC (Ret)

Information costs money; Intelligence makes money. Don’t try to predict the future—use shared information and sense-making to shape it.

Robert Steele

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FOREWORD

For almost two decades, the author has been exploring the opportunitiesfor strategy, force structure, and inter-agency or coalition operations in light of changes in the real world. His first monograph, The New Craft of Intelligence: Achieving Asymmetric Advantage in the Face of Nontraditional Threats, outlined the relevance of his vision to asymmetric warfare, and has since been proven. His second monograph, Information Operations: Putting the “I” Back Into DIME, established the technical, conceptual, and doctrinal opportunitiesfor a world in which every soldier’s primary duty is not to be a rifleman (an inherent responsibility), but rather to apply the wisdom of Colonel John Boyd, USAF (Ret), and Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act (OODA)—to be, at all times, a consummate collector, producer, consumer, and analyst of real-world real-time information and intelligence, while also serving as a communicator at a face-to-face level.

With this third and final monograph in the series, the author, who is also the #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction, examines the opportunitiesof the digital era for the American Way of War and—still missing in action—the American Way of Peace. The author concludes, as Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA) first concluded during his tenureChairman of the Senate Armed Services (SASC), that we cannot establish a budget for national security until we first understand the threat and the environment, then devise a strategy, then specify the joint (and inter-agency and coalition) capabilities needed to implement that strategy, and finally—only then—train, equip, and organize the necessary personnel, hardware, software, and services across all the Cabinet departments as well as coalition and non-governments elements.

In this monograph the author examines the ten high-level threats—only one of which is strictly military in character—and the emergence of the Digital Natives (the Web 2.0 Generation) as the first to reject “command and control” in favor of “commander’s intent” in context. “Because I said so” no longer applies in peace or in garrison, and less so in combat. The author includes concise summaries of the 1998 and 2008 Army Strategic conferences, and concludes with observations on every current U.S. Army Strategic Issue.

DOUGLAS C. LOVELACE, JR.

Director

Strategic Studies Institute

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR

Robert David Steele (Vivas) is a natural-born citizen of the United States of America, resident in Virginia. After a lifetime overseas, 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 Center (today a Command), and as a result of that experience subsequently has spent twenty years educating over 40 governments on the importance of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). He is the author of the Open Source Intelligence Handbooks for, respectively, the Defense Intelligence Agency (1996), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO, 2000), and the Special Forces (2005, in draft). He has served on active duty with the U.S. Southern Command, is employed as a contractor providing OSINT to the U.S. Special Operations Command and the U.S. Central Command, and has lectured to all of the directors of military intelligence for NATO, the Partnership for Peace, and the Mediterranean Dialog nations; and to the leaders of the 90 national teams in the Coalition Coordination Center in Tampa, Florida.. He is the author of four seminal books on intelligence and information operations. He is also the contributing editor of PEACEKEEPING INTELLIGENCE: Emerging Concepts for the Future (2003) and most recently, the contributing publisher of COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace (2008). With this monograph, he concludes a twenty-year effort to reshape the paradigm for national security, proposing a Core Force, and four “forces after next,” and now begins a new emphasis on public intelligence and multinational information sharing in order to create a prosperous world at peace. 7th Generation Warfare is about Overt Civil Affairs, “outside the wire,” connecting dots to dots, dots to people, and people to people in order to create stabilizing local wealth while also harmonizing and orchestrating charitable giving and foreign assistance investments by all parties. Given the vulnerabilities of all of our digital systems, and Chinese advances in precision electronic neutralization, we have no alternative but to shift from Waging War to Waging Peace. Irregular Warfare ifit focused on the overt, and Civil Affairs if not tainted by clandestine antics, are the twin engines for Waging Peace.

DEDICATION

I started my own transformation program in 1988, after standing up the Marine Corps Intelligence Center (today a Command), as both the Special Assistant (civilian billet) and Deputy Director (military billet), to Col Walt Breede III, USMC (Ret), USNA ’68. It was there that we both learned that 80% or more of what we needed to do policy, acquisition, and operations support for the Fleet Marine Forces was not secret, not in English, not online, and not known to anyone in the National Capital Area. Despite winning over the General Al Gray, USMC (Ret), then Commandant of the Marine Corps, we were unable over the course of four years, from 1988-1992, to get any of the other Services, or any of the US Intelligence Community agencies, to accept either the logic or the urgency of making a massive investment in global open sources and methods in 183 languages we still do not speak, nor of embracing the drug mission as emblematic of the asymmetric threats of the future.[1]

Despite twenty years of endeavor, training 7,500 who today lead 25,000 Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) specialists, today, in 2008, our defense and intelligence leaders (less General Tony Zinni, USMC (Ret)) still do not understand the radical opportunities inherent in what the Swedes call Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information Sharing (M4IS), to which I have added Multinational Decision Support (MDS).

I dedicate this monograph to the US Army, to the Army War College, to the Strategic Studies Institute, to the U.S. Special Operations Command, once led by General Peter Schoomaker, and to the new Army Civil Affairs Brigade. We must all recognize that there are no winners in war, and that Sun Tzu had it right in the first place: the acme of skill is to defeat the enemy without fighting—even better, to have no enemies at all. The Singapore military has it right today: we must defeat all threats, not just armies. This patch depicts the Civil Affairs Brigade as the Native Americanarrowhead of the “white hat” side of the very Special Operations spear. Col Ferd Irizzary is our era’s Hal Moore. GO ARMY!

This monograph is “digitally-enabled” and available in PDF form at both the author’s page within the Strategic Studies Institute website, and at with many active links to books and other sources cited in both the main body of the monograph, and the notes.

This monograph and the two preceding monographs can all be viewed or downloaded at the below URL, the author’s page at the Strategic Studies Institute:

Added February 01, 2006

Information Operations: Putting the "I" Back Into DIME.

In the Age of Information, the primary source of National Power is information that has been converted into actionable intelligence or usable knowledge. Information Operations is the critical ingredient in early warning, peacekeeping, stabilization & reconstruction, and homeland defense.

Added February 01, 2002

The New Craft of Intelligence: Achieving Asymmetric Advantage in the Face of Nontraditional Threats.

This monograph is the third in the Strategic Studies Institute's "Studies in Asymmetry" Series. In it, the author examines two paradigm shifts--one in relation to the threat and a second in relation to intelligence methods-- while offering a new model for threat analysis and a new model for intelligence operations in support to policy, acquisition, and command engaged in nontraditional asymmetric confrontation and competition.

See also online:

Chapter 9, “Threats, Strategy and Force Structure: An Alternative Paradigm for National Security in the 21st Century,” in Steven Metz (ed.), Revising the Two MTW Force-Shaping Paradigm (Strategic Studies Institute, April 2001), pp. 139-163.

Chapter 12, “Presidential Leadership and National Security Policymaking,” in Douglas T. Stuart, Organizing for National Security (Strategic Studies Institute, November 2000), pp. 245-282

PART I: WHAT IS THE THREAT?

None have ever defined the national security challenge, from a leadership point of view, as well as Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA), then Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC). He said:

Despite efforts by an entire generation of asymmetric warriors in the 1990’s, from Colonels Mike Wiley, USMC and G.I. Wilson, USMCR, to Bill Lind, to the author, to information warfare pioneer Winn Schwartau—and a score of others—the political and the politically-appointed leaders of this great Nation have consistently refused to recognize any threat not traditionally embraced by the military-industrial complex. Service budget share, very expensive complex systems, and hundreds of thousands of contractor “butts in seats” including, Private Military Corporations (PMC) with a license to kill have been the standard approach to providing for “national security.”

Although there has been a broad literature on non-military threats including poverty, disease, and environmental degradation, and other great summative works have been placed before the public in the past twenty years, including everything written by Lester Brown and his annual State of the World reports and his Vital Signs reports (his most recent larger work being Plan 3:0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization[3]) and single works such as J. F. Rischards’ HIGH NOON: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them,[4] and E.O. Wilson’s The Future of Life[5], it was not until recently that every Nation, every organization, and every citizen had the benefit of a single universal work defining, in priority order, the ten high-level threats to Humanity. That work, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility--Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change,[6] all the more precious and credible because LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcroft, USAF (Ret) was the US representative, provides an incontrovertible baseline for redefining national security in the 21st Century. In Figure 1 I provide a depiction, not only of the ten threats in priority order, but of the degree to which those threats can be addressed by Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and Irregular Warfare or “White Hat” Special Operations and inter-agency or multinational coalition “white hat” capabilities, what Dr. Joseph Nye calls “Soft Power.”[7]

Economic and social threats / 95%
•Poverty / •99%
•Infectious Disease / •95%
•Environmental Degradation / •90%
Inter-State Conflict / 75%
Internal Conflict including / 90%
•Civil War / •80%
•Genocide / •95%
•Other Atrocities (Large Scale) / •95%
Weapons of Mass Destruction[8] / •75%
Terrorism (Large Scale Casualties) / 80%
Transnational Organized Crime / 80%

Figure 1: High-Level Threats[9] and the Relevance of Overt Soft Power

In summary, this chart, rooted in the high-level global and mature reflections of the panel of which LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcroft was the US member, answers the question from Senator Nunn, “what is the threat?” It also calls into question why we are spending $60-75 billion a year on secret sources and methods that address the 4% we can steal, and why we are spending close to $1 trillion a year on a heavy-metal military bogged down in two occupations, with hundreds of overseas installations that are rapidly becoming targets rather than launch pads.[10]

In the next few pages I provide paragraph-level summaries of each of the ten threats in priority order. A weekly report, GLOBAL CHALLENGES: The Week in Review, and an Overview & Forecast Report for each of these threats, are both easily available free online at Earth Intelligence Network, a 501c3 Public Charity dedicated to providing public intelligence in the public interest.[11]

In the context of both Program 50—the general military program—and Program 150—the international diplomacy and assistance program—it should be obvious that the above figure reveals revolutionary opportunitiesfor how we train, equip, and organize our military forces, and how we must develop new concepts and doctrine for inter-agency and combined operations with coalition and non-governmental organizations. In addition, the capstone idea within this monograph, we should realize that $500 billion a year is being spent by charitable foundations and other governments as well as corporations, and that we can use unclassified sense-making to create a Global Range of Gifts Table that harmonizes all of this money on an opt-in basis. Please allow me to emphasize this: unclassified decision-support is the key to guiding how hundreds of billions of dollars are spent—byothers at no cost to the US taxpayer—to stabilize and reconstruct the Earth and to assure a good life for all of the billions that we have neglected these past decades. Public intelligence applied in the public interest can address and resolve all ten of the high-level threats. Information—public intelligence—is the center of gravity for waging peace and creating global stabilizing prosperity.

THREAT #1: POVERTY[12]

Poverty in the developing world should not be confused with emergencies. Anyone can have a sudden need for food and shelter (New Orleans after Katrina). International programs against “poverty” go beyond this to building the capacity of a population to maintain and grow the means of self-sufficiency. If “real” aid is drilling wells, not bottled water, it is also about training locals to drill wells and maintain machinery. Action against poverty is now seen as a mix of Aid, Trade, Investment, Migration, Environment, Security, Technology. As well as shipping in bags of grain, it is more important to stop the war that will destroy the next crop, to invent appropriate technologies (the radio fueled by cow manurein India is one example), and to build local economies through investment and trade. Migration is contentious – accepting the unskilled and displaced counts as aid, but enticing every trained nurse in Ghana to London not only does not count as aid but is a negative step for Ghana. The US is 20th in the world for aid as a portion of GDP (0.14%). 72% of this is tied aid(“with strings”) and much goes to less poor and totalitarian regimes.* US aid is perceived to be largely directed by national interest, whereas some nations, such as Denmark(first in world ranking), seem motivated otherwise – if Danish secret agendas exist they are well hidden. But in the broadest view aid is about self-interest. In Somalia, failure to understand root problems and obsession with forming a nation in a preconceived image led to a decade of bronze-age governance. Islamistsnow seem the only hope for stable government, and a shining hope in Africa for Taliban-style regimes. What started as an aid problem ended as a political problem because the earlier efforts were tainted with politics lacking in historical context.[13]

US Army Opportunities

Poverty, and especially extreme poverty within the 50 failed states that host the one billion at the very bottom of the poverty scale, is not only easy to fix, it offers a return on investment that is nothing short of spectacular. A civil war rooted in scarce resources costs the country roughly $7 billion, and the region roughly $61 billion. In contrast, a $1 billion investment in technical and communications assistance ($250 million a year) can, in combination with actions by others and a sustained commitment to protect reformist governments from coups, lift these countries from extreme poverty in less than five years.