PANEL: Emerging Security Challenges
Master of Ceremonies:
Dr. John Henry Clippinger, Professor, Harvard University
Panelists:
Dr. Linton Wells, Distinguished Research Fellow and Force Transformation Chair, National Defense University
Major General Robert Schmidle, Assistant Deputy Commandant for Programs and Resources, United States Marine Corps
Dr. Eric Bonabeau, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Scientific Officer, Icosystem Corporation
H. E. Shaukat Aziz, Former Prime Minister, Pakistan
Dr. Paul Sullivan, Professor of Economics, National Defense University
Dr. Thomas Malone, Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management, MIT Sloan School of Management
Dr. Benoit Mandelbrot, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Mathematical Sciences, Yale University
Carol Dumaine, Deputy Director for Energy and Environment Security, U.S. Department of Energy
Panel summary by Max Currier, World Policy Journal
Dr. John Henry Clippinger began the discussion by enumerating a few of the many, disparate security challenges we face today: worsening climate change, unbridled access to conventional weapons, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Armed forces securing a perimeter, he said, is not a sufficient means of security anymore.
Former Prime Minister Aziz noted other security challenges such as economic instability and “uppermost…the lack of leadership and cohesion at the gl
obal level.” Mr. Aziz insisted that terrorism is not primarily a security issue, however, but rather a symptom of societal problems—human rights, basic needs, education, women’s rights, children’s rights, and a lack of effective dispute resolution (which leads to helplessness)—that must be addressed at the root cause. “Eventually,” Mr. Aziz said, “you have to have dialogue. You can’t kill an entire population. But you do have to negotiate from a position of strength…using both carrots and sticks.”
Carol Dumaine from the Department of Energy (DOE) paraphrased author Jared Diamond: “The single biggest problem is the idea that we have a single biggest problem…. It’s what we least expect that could be the greatest threat and also the greatest opportunity.” Accordingly, the Department of Energy is engaging an interdisciplinary approach to create “scenario and foresight techniques” that will allow for better identification of root causes and stresses on natural and man-made systems. This should, Dumaine contends, help the DOE anticipate how stresses may manifest in “high impact, unknown probability events in the area of energy security”—such as the impact of extreme weather on nuclear power facilities or Arctic ice-sheet disintegration on animal feed security.
All the remaining experts spoke with similar concern on the need to better anticipate new challenges. “The humbling part of the resource question,” said Dr. Paul Sullivan, “it’s recursive, [it’s] interconnected in ways that are not clear and those connections can change over time.” He suggested wind, solar, and geothermal energy should be more fully exploited to substitute for fossil fuels. He suggested building desalination plants on the Mediterranean and planting trees in Africa. “A few billion dollars could save a few million lives. How do we value a life?”
Maj. Gen. Bob Schmidle (USMC) began by explaining, “Nation-states today no longer have a monopoly to impart the use of force.” This trend, he says—a result of developing technology and increasing availability to “non-experts”—poses a “difficulty of attribution” in offensive attacks, which frustrates “what holds together the post-Westphalian global order.” Schmidle expressed frustration with the U.S. foreign policy establishment for slowly adapting to these realities: “We’re now talking more about societies than nations, and that requires a very different skill set.”
Lin Wells, the former undersecretary of defense for policy, suggested that better anticipation requires better understanding of history’s trends and shocks. Ultimately, Wells conceeded, because we can never predict the future, we need to emphasize our adaptive capacities and have “near real-time situational awareness.” He also sharply criticized the “grotesque failure of the media” to inform the public about complex challenges. “There ought to be some mechanism for those who want to be informed,” said Wells, noting that ignorance is an impediment to appropriately addressing security challenges.
Dr. Bonabeau highlighted globalization’s impact on security. “It takes about one week for an infectious virus to make its way around the world,” he said, citing the H1N1 virus as an example. “If you want a perfectly secure system, disconnect it.” But globalization has some unnoticed structural benefits. “We may be getting to a point where war becomes so expensive that it may not happen,” said Bonabeau, citing the intertwined relationship between India and Pakistan. Though tensions between these nations run deep, so to do social and economic interconnections, and this decreases the likelihood that they will go to war.
Finally, Dr. Tom Malone addressed how collective intelligence—“public as problem-solvers”—can help us address pervasive security threats. He cited Wikipedia, the “Lost” television series fan-site “Lostpedia,” and the U.S. government intelligence community’s “Intellipedia,” as examples of collective intelligence that have proved “moderately successful” at collecting, sharing, and analysing information across disparate organizations. We should “use the public as sensors and pattern recognizers,” he added, citing examples of neighborhood watch programs that have improved security at the local level. MIT’s climate collaboratorium is one practical outgrowth of this. He concluded, “If the real problem is fear itself, rather than the physical things we fear,” then maybe we can develop systems to become more tolerant of and resilient to those things we do fear.