Subject: What Some Feds Think About the Future...
From:
Amos
Date: 25 Feb 01 - 10:55 PM
The following Federal white paper (extract) was written by the US Commission on National Security. I think some of its implications, as well as its postulated rationale and recommended strategies, are unnerving to say the least. If you have an appetitite for this kind of material, and excellent source can be found <a href="http://cryptome.org/">at this site</a> which is maintained by a private individual who is interested in the free flow of information (http://cryptome.org/). I do not know the scope of influence of this Commission, and I admire their effort to reach rational views on some very tough questions about the trends of the world.
But I am not sure I like where they are going very much! Regards, A
4 February 2001
Source: http://www.nssg.gov/phaseIII.pdf (1.5MB, 149 pages) Introduction: Imperative for Change The U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century was chartered to be the most comprehensive examination of the structures and
processes of the U.S. national security apparatus since the core legislation governing it was passed in 1947. The Commission's Charter enjoins
the Commissioners to "propose measures to adapt existing national security structures" to new circumstances, and if necessary, "to create new
structures where none exist." The Commission is also charged with providing "cost and time estimates to complete these improvements," as
appropriate, for what is to be, in sum, "an institutional road map for the early part of the 21st century."5 ____________________ 5 See Appendix 2 for the full text of the Charter. Our Phase III report provides such a road map. But Phase III rests on the first two phases of the Commission's work: Phase I's examination of
how the world may evolve over the next quarter century, and Phase II's strategy to deal effectively with that world on behalf of American
interests and values. In its Phase I effort, this Commission stressed that global trends in scientific-technological, economic, socio-political, and military-security
domains -- as they mutually interact over the next 25 years -- will produce fundamental qualitative changes in the U.S. national security
environment. We arrived at these fourteen conclusions: The United States will become increasingly vulnerable to hostile attack on the America homeland, and U.S. military superiority will not
entirely protect us. Rapid advances in information and biotechnologies will create new vulnerabilities for U.S. security. New technologies will divide the world as well as draw it together. The national security of all advanced states will be increasingly affected by the vulnerabilities of the evolving global economic
infrastructure. Energy supplies will continue to have major strategic significance. All borders will be more porous; some will bend and some will break. The sovereignty of states will come under pressure, but will endure as the main principle of international political organization. The fragmentation and failure of some states will occur, with destabilizing effects on entire regions. Foreign crises will be replete with atrocities and the deliberate terrorizing of civilian populations. Space will become a critical and competitive military environment. The essence of war will not change. U.S. intelligence will face more challenging adversaries, and even excellent intelligence will not prevent all surprises. The United States will be called upon frequently to intervene militarily in a time of uncertain alliances, and with the prospect of fewer
forward-deployed forces. The emerging security environment in the next quarter century will require different U.S. military and other national capabilities. The Commission's stress on communicating the scale and pace of change has been borne out by extraordinary developments in science and
technology in just the eighteen-month period since the Phase I report appeared. The mapping of the human genome was completed. A
functioning quantum computing device was invented. Organic and inorganic material was mated at the molecular level for the first time. Basic
mechanisms of the aging process have been understood at the genetic level. Any one of these developments would have qualified as a
"breakthrough of the decade" a quarter century ago, but they all happened within the past year and a half. This suggests the possible advent of a period of change the scale of which will often astound us. The key factor driving change in America's
national security environment over the next 25 years will be the acceleration of scientific discovery and its technological applications, and the
uneven human social and psychological capacity to harness them. Synergistic developments in information technology, materials science,
biotechnology, and nanotechnology will almost certainly transform human tools more dramatically and rapidly than at any time in human
history. While it is easy to underestimate the social implications of change on such a scale, the need for human intellectual and social adaptation
imposes limits to the pace of change. These limits are healthy, for they allow and encourage the application of the human moral sense to
choices of major import. We will surely have our hands full with such choices over the next quarter century. In that time we may witness the
development of a capacity to guide or control evolution by manipulating human DNA. The ability to join organic and inorganic material forms
suggests, that humans may co-evolve literally with their own machines. Such prospects are both sobering and contentious. Some look to the
future with great hope for the prospect of curing disease, repairing broken bodies, ending poverty, and preserving the biosphere. But others
worry that curiosity and vanity will outrun the human moral sense, thus turning hope into disaster. The truth is that we do not know where the
rapidly expanding domain of scientific-technological innovation will bring us. Nor do we know the extent to which we can summon the
collective moral fortitude to control its outcome. What we do know is that some societies, and some people within societies, will be at the forefront of future scientific-technological
developments and others will be marginal to them. This means more polarization between those with wealth and power and those
without-both among and within societies. It suggests, as well, that many engrained social patterns will become unstable, for
scientific-technological innovation has profound, if generally unintended, effects on economic organization, social values, and political life. In the Internet age, for example, information technologies may be used to empower communities and advance freedoms, but they can also
empower political movements led by charismatic leaders with irrational premises. Such men and women in the 21st century will be less bound
than those of the 20th by the limits of the state, and less obliged to gain large industrial capabilities in order to wreck havoc. For example, a few
people with as little as $50,000 investment may manage to produce and spread a genetically-altered pathogen with the potential to kill millions
of people in a matter of months. Clearly, the threshold for small groups or even individuals to inflict massive damage on those they take to be
their enemies is falling dramatically. As for political life, it is clear that the rapidity of change is already overwhelming many states in what used to be called the Third World.
Overlaid on the enduring plagues of corruption and sheer bad government is a new pattern: information technology has widened the awareness
of democracy and market-driven prosperity, and has led to increasing symbolic and material demands on government. These demands often
exceed existing organizational capacities to meet them. One result is that many national armies do not respond to government control. Another
is that mercenaries, criminals, terrorists, and drug cartel operators roam widely and freely. Meanwhile, non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) along with global financial institutions sometimes function as proxy service and regulatory bureaucracies to do for states that which
they cannot do for themselves -- further diminishing governmental control and political accountability. As a result of the growing porosity of borders, and of the widening scope of functional economic integration, significant political developments
can no longer be managed solely through the vehicle of bilateral diplomatic relations. A seemingly internal crisis in Sierra Leone, carefully
observed, implicates most of West Africa. A problem involving drug cultivation and political rebellion in Colombia cannot be addressed
without involving Panama, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, and Mexico. Financial problems in Thailand tumble willy-nilly onto
Russia, Brazil, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the United States. Demography is another major driver of global political change. Population growth tends to moderate with increased literacy, urbanization, and
especially changes in traditional values that attend the movement of women into the workplace. Thanks to these trends, the world's rate of
population increase is slowing somewhat, but the absolute increases over the next quarter century will be enormous and coping with them will
be a major challenge throughout much of the world. In some countries, however, the problem will be too few births. In Japan and Germany, for
example, social security and private pension systems may face enormous strain because too few young workers will be available to support
retirees living ever-longer lives. The use of foreign workers may be the only recourse for such societies, but that raises other political and social
difficulties. Yet another driver of change may be sustained economic growth in particular parts of the world. Asia may well be the most economically
dynamic region on earth by 2025. Much depends on China's ability to reform further the structure of its economy and on India's ability to
unleash its vast economic potential. But if these two very large countries achieve sustained economic growth -- and if the economies of Japan,
Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam also grow -- the focus of world power will shift away from the
dominant Western centers of the past five centuries. While America is itself increasingly diverse, it still shares more philosophically and
historically with Europe than with Asia. The challenge for the United States, then, may rest not only in a geostrategic shift, but in a shift in the
cultural fabric of international politics itself. In Phase II the Commission moved from describing objective conditions to prescribing a strategy for dealing with them. Subtitled A Concert
for Preserving Security and Promoting Freedom, the Commission stressed that America cannot secure and advance its own interests in
isolation. The nations of the world must work together -- and the United States must learn to work with others in new ways -- if the more
cooperative order emerging from the Cold War epoch is to be sustained and strengthened. Nonetheless, this Commission takes as its premise that America must play a special international role well into the future. By dint of its power
and its wealth, its interests and its values, the United States has a responsibility to itself and to others to reinforce international order. Only the
United States can provide the ballast of global stability, and usually the United States is the only country in a position to organize collective
responses to common challenges. We believe that American strategy must compose a balance between two key aims. The first is to reap the benefits of a more integrated world
in order to expand freedom, security, and prosperity for Americans and for others. But second, American strategy must also strive to dampen
the forces of global instability so that those benefits can endure and spread. On the positive side, this means that the United States should pursue, within the limits of what is prudent and realistic, the worldwide
expansion of material abundance and the eradication of poverty. It should also promote political pluralism, freedom of thought and speech, and
individual liberty. Not only do such aims inhere in American principles, they are practical goals, as well. There are no guarantees against
violence and evil in the world. We believe, nonetheless, that the expansion of human rights and basic material well-being constitutes a sturdy
bulwark against them. On the negative side, these goals require concerted protection against four related dangers: the proliferation of weapons
of mass destruction; international terrorism; major interstate aggression; and the collapse of states into internal violence, with the associated
regional destabilization that often accompanies it. These goals compose the lodestone of a U.S. strategy to expand freedom and maintain underlying stability, but, as we have said, the United
States cannot achieve them by itself. American leadership must be prepared to act unilaterally if necessary, not least because the will to act
alone is sometimes required to gain the cooperation of others. But U.S. policy should join its efforts with allies and multilateral institutions
wherever possible; the United States is wise to strengthen its partners and in turn will derive strength from them. The United States, therefore, as the prime keeper of the international security commons, must speak and act in ways that lead others, by dint of
their own interests, to ally with American goals. If it is too arrogant and self-possessed, American behavior will invariably stimulate the rise of
opposing coalitions. The United States will thereby drive away many of its partners and weaken those that remain. Tone matters. To carry out this strategy and achieve these goals, the Commission defined six key objectives for U.S. foreign and national security policy: First, the preeminent objective is "to defend the United States and ensure that it is safe from the dangers of a new era." The combination of
unconventional weapons proliferation with the persistence of international terrorism will end the relative invulnerability of the U.S. homeland
to catastrophic attack. To deter attack against the homeland in the 21st century, the United States requires a new triad of prevention,
protection, and response. Failure to prevent mass-casualty attacks against the American homeland would jeopardize not only American lives
but U.S. foreign policy writ large. It would undermine support for U.S. international leadership and for many of our personal freedoms, as well.
Indeed, the abrupt undermining of U.S. power and prestige is the worst thing that could happen to the structure of global peace in the next
quarter century, and nothing is more likely to produce it than devastating attacks on American soil. Achieving this goal, and the nation's other critical national security goals, also requires the U.S. government, as a second key objective, to
"maintain America's social cohesion, economic competitiveness, technological ingenuity, and military strength." That means a larger
investment in and better management of science and technology in government and in society, and a substantially better educational system,
particularly for the teaching of science and mathematics. The United States must also take better advantage of the opportunities that the present period of relative international stability and American
power enable. A third key objective, therefore, is "to assist the integration of key major powers, especially China, Russia, and India, into the
mainstream of the emerging international system." Moreover, since globalization's opportunities are rooted in economic and political progress,
the Commission's fourth key U.S. objective is "to promote, with others, the dynamism of the new global economy and improve the
effectiveness of international institutions and international law." A fifth key objective also follows, which is "to adapt U.S. alliances and other regional mechanisms to a new era in which America's partners
seek greater autonomy and responsibility." A sixth and final key objective inheres in an effort "to help the international community tame the
disintegrative forces spawned by an era of change." While the prospect of major war is low, much of the planet will experience conflict and
violence. Unless the United States, in concert with others, can find a way to limit that conflict and violence, it will not be able to construct a
foreign policy agenda focussed on opportunities. Achieving all of these objectives will require a basic shift in orientation: to focus on preventing rather than simply responding to dangers and
crises. The United States must redirect its energies, adjust its diplomacy, and redesign its military capabilities to ward off cross-border
aggression, assist states before they fail, and avert systemic international financial crises. To succeed over the long run with a preventive focus,
the United States needs to institutionalize its efforts to grasp the opportunities the international environment now offers. An opportunity-based strategy also has the merit of being more economical than a reactive one. Preventing a financial crisis, even if it involves
well-timed bailouts, is cheaper than recuperating from stock market crashes and regional recessions. Preventing a violent conflict costs less
than responsive peacekeeping operations and nation-building activities. And certainly, preventing mass-casualty attacks on the American
homeland will be far less expensive than recovering from them. These six objectives, and the Commission's strategy itself, rest on a premise so basic that it often goes unstated: democracy conduces generally
to domestic and international peace, and peace conduces to, or at least allows, democratic politics. While this premise is not a "law," and while
scholars continue to study and debate these matters, we believe they are strong tendencies, and that they can be strengthened further by a
consistent and determined national policy. We know, that a world characterized by the spread of genuine democracy would not be flawless,
nor signal "the end of history." But it is the best of all possible worlds that we can conceive, and that we can achieve. In Phase 1, this Commission presented four "Worlds in Prospect," agglomerations of basic trends that, we believed, might describe the world in
2025. The Democratic Peace was one. Nationalism and Protectionism was a second, Division and Mayhem a third, and Globalism Triumphant
the fourth. We, and presumably most observers, see the Democratic Peace as a positive future, Nationalism and Protectionism as a step in the
wrong direction, Division and Mayhem as full-fledged tragedy. But the Globalism Triumphant scenario divides opinion, partly because it is the
hardest to envision, and partly because it functions as a template for the projection of conflicting political views. Some observers, for example, believe that the end of the nation-state is upon us, and that this is a good thing, for, in this view, nationalism is the
root of racism and militarism. The eclipse of the national territorial state is at any rate, some argue, an inevitable development given the very
nature of an increasingly integrated world. We demur. To the extent that a more integrated world economically is the best way to raise people out of poverty and disease, we applaud it.
We also recognize the need for unprecedented international cooperation on a range of transnational problems. But the state is the only venue
discovered so far in which democratic principles and processes can play out reliably, and not all forms of nationalism have been or need be
illiberal. We therefore affirm the value of American sovereignty as well as the political and cultural diversity ensured by the present state
system. Within that system the United States must live by and be ready to share its political values-but it must remember that those values
include tolerance for those who hold different views. A broader and deeper Democratic Peace is, and ought to be, America's aspiration, but there are obstacles to achieving it. Indeed, despite the
likely progress ahead on many fronts, the United States may face not only episodic problems but also genuine crises. If the United States
mismanages its current global position, it could generate resentments and jealousies that leave us more isolated than isolationist. Major wars
involving weapons of mass destruction are possible, and the general security environment may deteriorate faster than the United States, even
with allied aid, can redress it. Environmental, economic, and political unraveling in much of the world could occur on a scale so large as to
make current levels of prosperity unsustainable, let alone expandable. Certain technologies -- biotechnology, for example -- may also
undermine social and political stability among and within advanced countries, including the United States. Indeed, all these crises may occur,
and each could reinforce and deepen the others. The challenge for the United States is to seize the new century's many opportunities and avoid its many dangers. The problem is that the
current structures and processes of U.S. national security policyrnaking are incapable of such management. That is because, just below the
enormous power and prestige of the United States today is a neglected and, in some cases, a decaying institutional base. The U.S. government is not well organized, for example, to ensure homeland security. No adequate coordination mechanism exists among
federal, state, and local government efforts, as well as those of dozens of agencies at the federal level. If present trends continue in elementary
and secondary school science and mathematics education, to take another example, the United States may lose its lead in many, if not most,
major areas of critical scientific-technological competence within 25 years. We are also losing, and are finding ourselves unable to replace, the
most critical asset we have: talented and dedicated personnel throughout government. Strategic planning is absent in the U.S. government and its budget processes are so inflexible that few resources are available for preventive
policies or for responding to crises, nor can resources be reallocated efficiently to reflect changes in policy priorities. The economic component
of U.S. national security policy is poorly integrated with the military and diplomatic components. The State Department is demoralized and
dysfunctional. The Defense Department appears incapable of generating a strategic posture very different from that of the Cold War, and its
weapons acquisition process is slow, inefficient, and burdened by excess regulation. National policy in the increasingly critical environment of
space is adrift, and the intelligence community is only slowly reorienting itself to a world of more diffuse and differently shaped threats. The
Executive Branch, with the aid of the Congress, needs to initiate change in many areas by taking bold new steps, and by speeding up positive
change where it is languishing. The very mention of changing the engrained routines and structures of government is usually enough to evoke cynicism even in a born
optimist. But the American case is surprisingly positive, especially in relatively recent times. The reorganizations occasioned by World War II
were vast and innovative, and the 1947 National Security Act was bold in advancing and institutionalizing them. Major revisions of the 1947
Act were passed subsequently by Congress in 1949, 1953, and 1958. Major internal Defense Department reforms were promulgated as well,
one in 1961 and another, the Department of Defense Reorganization Act (Goldwater-Nichols) in 1986. The essence of the American genius is
that we know better than most societies how to reinvent ourselves to meet the times. This Commission, we believe, is true to that estimable
tradition.
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