Author: Michael D. McDonald, Dr.P.H.

Will the remnants of 20th Century national security mechanisms derail our own recovery and jeopardize the health, well-being and prosperity of Americans by consuming our societal attention and resources around the potential or actual next large terrorist attack, while other greater threats to our society and to the world continue to go unaddressed? Some argue, perhaps justifiably, that if our National Security apparatus operates again as it did in the years following the Al Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 9/11/2001, it may irreversibly alter the fabric or our civil society, our superpower status internationally, and undermine our position of economic and military leadership in the world during the 21st Century.

Will our nation, by continuing to operate under an architecture for its national security infrastructures architected in the 20th Century forever be protecting Americans with strategies, tools and methodologies appropriate designed to fight its last war. Will our society blindly cripple its broader socio-ecological fabric while all of its attention and resources are spent on the obvious threats from adversaries, near-term short-cycle economic downturn, and periodic natural disasters? If so, is it not probable that we will miss the opportunity to become an important part of global, collaborative networks in addressing the opportunities and dangers of economic long-wave phenomenon, climate change, other aspects of global change and novel 21st Century challenges in the window of opportunity we have to successfully address these concerns? Is there a high likelihood that our nation might miss its critical window of opportunity to address our emerging mission critical sustainable security gaps? If so, how can American society now engage a significant transformation toward an infrastructure that uses our most advanced scientific and technological resources to focus and sustain our national security initiatives on our society’s highest priority emerging challenges and opportunities.

We must now face the discomforting question of whether the U.S. government and American society in the years and decades ahead will be able to transform itself successfully if the major challenges to our society are less likely to come from terrorism alone or threats to our sovereignty, but from collapses in local, regional, and global socio-ecological carrying capacities. For example, It is argued here that a U.S. National Sustainable Security Infrastructure discourse must now be engaged at the highest levels of the U.S. government, with input from the rest of American society, to ensure that this threat to American society does not impact us without a process that can anticipate, cushion and protect our society from such an impact that could kill not a few thousand people, as in the 9/11 attacks or Hurricane Katrina, but potentially hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Americans.

The “Official Future” and Carrying Capacities

Unfortunately, the “official future” of the United States promulgated by the White House during the Bush and several previous administrations, was that serious carrying capacity concerns need not be considered, in that there are no carrying capacity issues that would challenge the viability of U.S. systems and the further expansion of our global socio-ecological fabric our society is dependent upon within the global market. The “official future,” has been maintained amidst a growing global outcry about dire outcomes — until the rapid economic downturn in the final years of the Bush Administration so blatantly uncovered the evidence of the growing consequences of U.S. policies dependent upon rapid growth with no social, economic, or ecological constraint.

Given that the U.S., and most other economies around the world, are now reeling from the over-extension of basic carrying capacities, perhaps consideration of fundamental transformation of U.S. infrastructures to ensure their successful adaptation under carrying capacity constraints might be prudent. At this point, thoughtful anticipatory design, as an alternative to delayed response, is essential to avoid the cycles of reactionary and ineffective adaptations to fundamental change in the constructs of incremental reforms. Early on in our emerging alternative constructs of a “Sustainable Future,” it would be best to engage our society’s discourse regarding sustainable security, because of its centrality to the health, well-being, and prosperity of Americans and their communities of interest worldwide.

Discourse on the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure

Whether one believes that reform or transformation is necessary, it is time to engage the discourse on the development of a new National Sustainable Security Infrastructure umbrella that envelops our entire society’s sprawling domestic and international security infrastructure. In this discourse, we should keep in mind that the concept of a National Sustainable Security Infrastructure requires immediate attention in ways that may not be intuitively simple to grasp within mainstream traditional discourse on Nation Security System reform centered on balance of power enemies, military assets, and terrorism, alone. The purpose of this discourse is to explore the advantages and disadvantages of transformation, as well as reform toward establishing a viable National Sustainable Security System in a time when our national security could be potentially seriously compromised due to systems collapses, as well as other conventional and novel threats.

To state that our National Sustainable Security System must be architected to be sustainable is obvious, but to grasp the relatively complex set of ideas that would make the National Sustainable Security System understandable as an incremental improvement of our largely 20th Century National Security Infrastructure is potentially a far more difficult task. Contemplating the enemy within, in terms of self evaluation of the consequences of our own actions is always a difficult process, especially for government and bureaucracies, but at this time it most likely will need to be a part of the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure. Below, a backdrop is provided for why a broadened definition of the U.S. National Sustainable Security Infrastructure is necessary now, and why we need to start developing and implementing rapid prototyping versions of a U.S. Resilience System immediately, whether one believes reform is sufficient or transformation is necessary. The key is to explore the possibilities that transformation might provide to counter systems collapses within American critical infrastructure in advance to ensure the success of efforts to prevent and manage social crises that might otherwise compromise the health and well-being of Americans and the socio-ecological systems upone which their lives depend.

Shifting Our Point of View on What Constitutes Sustainable Security

There is no question regarding there being well resourced, well organized communities of good and smart people laboring away on maintaining American infrastructure against conventional military, WMD, terrorist, and natural threats. It is widely understood that a significant level of effort is being performed on essentially all parts of the hard infrastructure and conventional soft infrastructure that protect America from various threats. This class of defense activity is necessary for an advanced society in our highly complex world of competing economic and social forces. What has not been widely understood in the late 20th Century and the first few years of the 21st Century, is that the seeds of our society’s degradation, collapse, and demise may arise from the over-extension of our strengths.

It is well understood from within Eastern disciplines like Aikido and Taoism, that balance and centering are essential. Unfortunately, from within mainstream America accustomed to the past half century of largely undifferentiated growth, it has been nearly impossible to help the American public and their leadership understand that within the successful rapid expansion of advanced economies and social systems — especially those dependent upon non-renewable resources, easy credit and large commitments of resources to coercive policies and state-sanctioned instruments of violence — there is a natural tendency to miss cues of excess. As these institutions start approaching carrying capacities, counter-pressures to further expansion emerge and can be scientifically evaluated, if the evidence is not hidden by interests that benefit from the perpetuation of current trends. Unfortunately, the electorate and their representatives must ensure that the very institutions that have provided us with material wealth, comfort, and protection against domestic and foreign threats do not promulgate their worldview and perpetuate the expansion of their bureaucracies with such momentum that their strengths extend their initiatives beyond the point of diminishing returns.

For example, it is not difficult to find American defense analysts (with a point of view, based upon training in 20th Century warfare, and extensive experience within the defense community during the early years of the 21st Century) that hold the belief that conventional U.S. national security and defense systems are evolving well, in a sufficiently robust and dynamic state (if, perhaps, somewhat challenged by their historical stovepipes and novel variants on conventional threats) as long as current funding increases in recent years in defense can continue. Most of those drawing their livelihood from the Defense industries, for example, would expect these systems will continue to function effectively, short of successful strategic attack with weapons of mass destruction, multi-system economic collapse or significant global changes. These systems (including DOD, DHS, IC, Department of Justice, HHS, and other departments of U.S. federal and state government as well as the civilian military and homeland security complex) are not the focus of my concern, in stating that there is a need to broaden the U.S. national security infrastructure to address our most glaring mission-critical gaps within an extended definition of the U.S. National Sustainable Security Infrastructure. Generally, the majority of the American people have shared a common view regarding the robustness of these mainstream American defense infrastructures, many of which have significant (some might say aging) architectures stemming from the mid to late 20th Century.

That said, it is a different class of the threats, vulnerabilities, and National Sustainable Security Infrastructure requirements, which now requires the development of new non-coercive infrastructure to enable the U.S. to remain resilient and sustainable in the early to mid 21st Century. The fact that there is a class of significant imminent threats and vulnerabilities, which have been known to the scientific community for three decades or more, that are now just beginning to be perceived as possible emerging threats and vulnerabilities worthy of attention as national security threats by the White House, DOD, and other federal agencies, is part of the reason why the U.S. requires a more broadly defined National Sustainable Security Infrastructure — with a better anticipatory capacity. The U.S. is already a couple of decades late in engaging significant resource flow to develop the core scientific, technological, and operational infrastructures to reduce the current and emerging risks to the American public and their communities of interest around the world in these new areas of concern relating to potential severe economic downturn and global change.

Human Security Index and Anticipatory Science

What appears to be grossly inadequate in maintaining sustainable security in the U.S. is our ability to provide an anticipatory sustainable human/machine infrastructure that addresses the issues assessed in the “Human Security Index,” (as a generational improvement over the “Enhanced Human Development Index”), especially under severe economic decline and global change as projected and validated over the past 30 years, within the World3 model. The bottomline: during a severe economic downturn, highly lethal pandemic, or standard-run global change scenarios (including one or more of the following: rapid and significant climate change, peak oil, severe water shortages, ecosystem collapses), the safety net will deteriorate rapidly for well over a billion people (potentially 2 billion) worldwide over the next decade. Today, we do not have a resilient and sustainable infrastructure to enable the American people, and their communities of interest worldwide, to maintain basic needs and social order under scenarios like the collapse of our highly complex, interconnected global economy, which is dependent upon inexpensive fossil fuels and growing mass consumption markets. 

The reality is that U.S. mass consumption is shrinking and is likely to continue to shrink, as China’s and India’s mass consumption trends will likely grow, until they collapse under significant global counter-pressures. To think that the U.S. is protected against massive multi-system discontinuities in its soft infrastructure is no longer an issue of myopia.  It can only be explained as denial. You just have to look at the U.S. housing industry, our banking system, credit industry, our energy systems, transportation industry, health system …  to realize that significant change must take place to protect the resilience and sustainability of American society.

Although we are rapidly applying the economic tools invented during our Great Depression to the current downturn, our country is far more complex today, and is responding to the stimulus sluggishly at best. For the purposes of examining the sustainability of our National Security apparatus, it would be prudent to question whether the tools of 75, 50 25, or even 10 years ago are still well adapted to managing severe economic downturn. What if they are no longer sufficient to deal with the complex set of systems failures we are now experiencing in our domestic and global markets?

Their primary limitations stem from the fact that they were not designed to deal with late cycle exponential growth and the complexity of our globally interdependent markets. To just look at one factor, a half century ago, we were living in a cash economy. Today, a far larger amount of financial transactions are in flux every day than exists in our entire global monetary system.

The considerations of exponential global socio-ecological change and ecosystem carrying capacity issues are even an order of magnitude more complex. The reality is that the American economy and its societal infrastructures as they are currently organized – including its historic National Security Infrastructure– are highly dependent upon domestic mass consumption and inexpensive greenhouse gas emitting energy systems. Unfortunately, current U.S. systems are not immune, as current conditions demonstrate, to massive multi-system downturn (and potential collapse). Severe social consequences of systems collapses can sometimes only be prevented and managed if systems disorders can be anticipated.

U. S. Resilience System

Within the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure discourse, the U.S. must soon confront whether it can now engage sufficient resilient and sustainable infrastructure to fall back on, protecting American citizens, and U.S. interests around the world, from the types of social crises that will emerge during significant downturns or societal systems collapse.  If these systems can be afforded, the “U.S. Resilience System,” will need to be scaled up quickly, before the consequences of its absence are inevitable. Engaging it, after the fact, may not be an option. Even when building resilience into our infrastructure is an option after the fact, the delay in building and scaling the U.S. Resilience System is likely to result in significantly larger human and economic cost than doing so proactively.

There are 775 million people without sufficient food today around the world. David Nabarro, Assistant Secretary of the U.N., in November of 2008 stated that the UN believes that number will go to over 1.1 billion people with insufficient access to food within three years, given current estimated impacts from the current global economic decline.  Well over a billion people do not have access to clean water. Access to life-sustaining water supplies are expected to becoming rapidly more scarce to even larger populations around the world. Ecosystems in many countries, and even in local areas in the United States  (e.g. water systems and agricultural systems in the Southwest) are approaching massive discontinuities and collapse.  

Those that have an understanding of complex adaptive systems that have been in enough real world events and simulated events with top officers and key decision makers in this country and other countries know that key decision-makers in hierarchical controlled systems often fail to respond effectively within the window of opportunity they have to address a novel challenge successfully with linear deductive reasoning unaided by anticipatory science and situational awareness.  Many natural and simulated experiments have been followed to study what the top officers see and don’t see in fast moving events, when they are limited to the use of retrospective science.  It is clear that our infrastructures in this country and overseas are not designed to address the types of “wicked” (complex) problems we now face. In the absence of a National Sustainable Security Infrastructure built on a Focus, Agility, and Convergence model of management and governance with an embedded U.S. Resilience System, we have been vulnerable with our leadership ignoring carrying capacity issues, and instead engaging incremental solutions that just exacerbate a larger set of problems. That has to change.

Advancing Science, Technology, and an Empowered Citizenry

We need systems architected with knowledge grounded in the sciences of complexity and globalizing intelligent social networks that are tested and proven to be resilient against threats like a high path H5N1 pandemic and climate change, not just 747s flown into buildings by jihadists, or denial of service attacks by cyberterrorists.  The HHS-led National Framework is a good start, but it misses the necessary activities (e.g., third generation biosurveillance capabilities and systems of organizing behavioral and social immunity) to even deal effectively with a single source threat like a pandemic. In addition, the stovepipe issues between the HHS-led National Framework and the competing and sometimes conflicting National Strategy put out by DHS since the release of the National Framework, leaves our nation vulnerable to mission critical delays in our Incident Command Systems. However, the greatest vulnerability is that we do not have the systems in place to constructively engage citizens at the home, neighborhood, and community levels, where most of the key decisions are made that will determine who will live and who will die in a pandemic, and other system crash scenarios.

On the international front, our current systems are not well suited to the Phase 0, 1, 2, and 5 interventions (using the DOD phases of war as a taxonomy) that are now needed to stabilize situations like Iraq and Afghanistan or reduce the likelihood of falling into future wars that could have been prevented. If people like Al Santoli, a two-time purple heart recipient is right, sending more “irregular warfare specialists” into places like the muslim communities of the Philippines with guns, barbed wire and antennas during the current food crisis is not going to do a lot to turn around the very high likelihood of growing social crisis and civil war.  The people of the Philippines, Sierra Leone, North Korea, Burma (Myanmar), the Congo, and a myriad of other nations already facing the overextension of their socio-ecological carrying capacities, need a path toward resilience and sustainability. Short of a true path to resilience and sustainability, they are potentially not far behind Sudan and Zimbabwe, in terms of social crisis during a significant global economic downturn.  Establishing viable resilience and sustainability in collapsing socio-ecological conditions requires a different kind of infrastructure, which is the essence of what we are architecting within the U.S. Resilience System.

The problem is not primarily a physical infrastructure problem and it is not going to be resolved by regime change alone.  The problems we are now facing are large-scale and escalating socio-ecological problems that are unaddressed by the massive coercive national security systems around the world.  Again, there is widespread agreement that the US has a world-class national security infrastructure hardened against a coercive enemy, natural disasters short of global change, and even economic downturns down to the equivalent of the Great Depression of the 1930s.  That said, it is not responsive to managing sustainable human security under conditions of multi-system meltdown or significant global change.

Decisions We Must Make Now

We do not yet have the systems we now require in terms of knowledge management and intelligent social networks, operating as complex adaptive systems (except in early prototype form). Our current National Security infrastructure, in all its complexity and robustness, is not designed to prevent, respond to, recover from, or mitigate global, regional, and local multi-system socio-ecological meltdowns.  The systems we have at DOD, State and USAID are a start, but do not go far enough or deep enough our 21st Century international concerns. Our homeland security systems are a start, but are poorly architected for citizen engagement at the community level. If we are truly trying to assess our mission critical gaps within our National Sustainable Security Infrastructure, we will have to go further to understand some painful realities about our current situation. When a national government is $55 trillion in debt and its people are living at potentially 30 to 40 times their sustainable ecological footprint and 30% to 40% beyond their current economic means before the shrinkage of our economy (even from a normal deep business cycle recession) throwing trillions more at 20th century infrastructures that are in multi-system collapse is not a viable solution.

Yes, we should take action to cushion the impact of the declines in our 20th Century infrastructures on the American public, while we build viable and resilient alternative 21st Century infrastructures.  That said, where is the source of investment in the U.S. infrastructures going to come from, if China, Japan, and other foreign investors in the United States decided that throwing many more trillions into a U.S. economic recovery was no longer in their economic interests?  What happens if the implosion of the 40 nations that are now in food crisis begins to expand rapidly to other nations to significantly impact the global economic system and the stability of regions, like the Middle East, Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia?  What if Southeast Asia, for example, falls into social crisis as the U.S. Resilience Summit 2008 projected in its simulation of the aftermath of a Cat 4 typhoon hitting the Mekong Delta?  It is great that our fiber networks and computers will continue to function properly, our special forces are well armed, and our nuclear weapons are still deployable, but that misses the point.  

We need a viable resilient and sustainable infrastructure that the American people and the good people of other nations around the world can rely on to ensure their access to food, clean water, health services, energy and other basic essentials as depicted in STAR-TIDES.   This is feasible but not under the limitations of our current National Security infrastructure. The Project on National Security Infrastructure Reform is a start, but its current discourse does not come close to addressing the changes that are necessary to address severe economic downturn and global change in a timely manner.

We have to seize the current window of opportunity to build a viable National Sustainable Security Infrastructure. The American public and the world have taken a deep breathe during the current change in American presidential leadership. However, this window of opportunity will close quickly, if the real change they have projected on to an Obama Administration does not address the challenges at hand.

The Window of Opportunity for the Obama Administration

Citizens at home and abroad have tentatively and temporarily suspended disbelief in the viability of current U.S. systems in the hopes that Obama will perform political and economic magic.  Even if President Obama and his administration is able to turn around the current economic crisis in a few years, it is still best that we rapidly put in place a U.S. Resilience System as a fallback during the current economic recovery efforts (e.g., the American car industry bailout, the housing industry bailout, the insurance industry bailout, the banking industry reform, the credit industry bailout, the restructuring of the U.S. energy systems, and health system reform). If the recovery goes like clock work under the Obama Administration so that multi-system meltdown is avoided, and we implement a viable National Sustainable Security Infrastructure with a robust, rapidly growing U.S. Resilience System, we will be able to focus on helping the expanded number of vulnerable communities within the United States and around the world cope with the difficult recession and recovery periods ahead, while ramping up to mitigate the impacts of global change.

If the U.S. recovery plans do not go as well as the American public and its leadership expect in a timeframe that is acceptable to all the global stakeholders, having a National Sustainable Security Infrastructure with a robust U.S. Resilience System would guarantee that Americans would have a viable system of healthy food, clean water, renewable energy, green transportation, communication, and other necessities to fall back on at 4 times our ecological footprint, while becoming part of the solution in preventing and managing global change. For Americans to live sustainably within resilient communities that inspire the citizens of other nations to become part of the solution in successfully mitigating the impacts of global climate change, it is proposed that the following U.S. Resilience System components are operating effectively within the United States and in all the regions around the world by 2012:

Resilience Networks for Managing Resilience and Sustainability

FAC-enabled Health, Humanitarian, and Disaster Management Teams

STAR-TIDES-associated Logistics and Distribution Systems

Trust Networks for Proactively and Non-coercively Managing Conflict

To have these systems fully functional by 2012, we need to immediately start investing approximately 20% to 30% of economic stimulus in the new elements of the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure, in particular in the U.S. Resilience System.

Michael D. McDonald, Dr.P.H.
President
Global Health Initiatives, Inc.

Coordinator
U.S. Resilience Summit 2008

Principal Investigator
Disaster Knowledge Management System
Resilience Networks

Note:

This is Working Draft 0.2 of the “National Sustainable Security Infrastructure.” This is a draft of a chapter that will be put in the U.S. Resilience Summit 2008 report, we are hoping to get to Obama and his cabinet members, before the inauguration.

It can be put up in Greater Democracy under the agreement that it may have to be pulled in association with the Summit Report initiative or subsequent publications with this material in it.

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