The main national security threats faced by our nation;
A Real Question
Ask a silly question and get a silly answer. Trying to predict national security challenges is akin to playing Nostradamus. We would be better off asking what we can do to keep the nation strong and competitive.
Learn about the debate and discover a better way to address future national security challenges.
Content:
Opening ArgumentsUnbearable SecurityThere is an old yarn about two men being chased by a bear.Lemming SecurityWe Have Met the Enemy"Real" SecurityOpposing view: CAP ArgumentRebuttal to Opening Arguments: Priorities for National SecurityClosing Arguments
Unbearable Security
One pants, “I don’t know if we can outrun the bear.”
The other guy pants, “I don’t have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun you.”
And so it goes for thinking about the great national security challenges of the 21st century.
Trying to keep America safe, free, and prosperous by picking the next danger of the day—is just plain stupid. The right answer is to focus on building a nation that is strong and competitive—and then we’ll be able to out run, out compete, out fight, and out last anything that comes along.
Lemming Security
Washington wants to worry about the danger of the day - competing with China, taming Iraq, reacting to Russia, reassuring skittish global financial markets. Sure, the next president will need to deal with these. But if the White House sets its national security priorities by lurching from one crisis to the next, there will be no priorities beyond the morning headlines on CNN.
On the flip side, some in Washington want to pick which problems to address and ignore others (usually the ones they pick are the ones that best fit their ideology…and their answer to meeting the preferred challenges turn out to be exactly how they want to handle the threat and cost exactly what they are willing to spend). This amounts to playing Russian roulette with national security. We have done this through out our history….and we often lose (remember The Maine, Pearl Harbor, Just Cause, Desert Storm, and 9/11 to name a few occasions when we wound-up fighting enemies at times and places we did not expect).
Washington whipsaws back and forth between Manichean extremes (worrying about today’s headlines or fixating on watching out for burglars while the house is on fire).
It is just idiotic to sit in Washington and try to play Nostradamus.
We Have Met the Enemy
In short, the real danger is us. The greatest proliferation threat to human existence is not weapons of mass destruction, but policymakers with mass disruption on their mind - officials who would label every matter, from avoiding bird flu to procuring fresh water, a “national security” issue.
To make matters more confusing, international organizations such as the United Nations have created terms such as “human security,” arguing for a collective responsibility to keep people free from want and fear. The problem with that approach is the tendency, in dealing with security interests, to centralize power and decision-making and restrain individual freedoms and free markets. It also justifies military solutions for everything from dealing with AIDS to oil.
Making every global challenge a security issue trumps free markets and limits personal freedoms. The concept of national security needs to be put back in the box, reserved for moments of peril in dealing with people (either states or non-states) who threaten through the use of violence to take away the political strategies freedoms that governments are supposed to protect. We need to put an end to national-security proliferation.
Rather than fixating on threats we ought to be focusing on expanding our capacity to keep the nation safe, free, and prosperous regardless of the enemies that rise up against us. What would we should be asking ourselves is what we can do to advance that agenda.
The answer to that question is easy.
First, focus on the instruments of national power. They all have to be strong from defense to diplomacy. They must be multi-faceted too—able to tackle enemy states and the enemy within. Yes, great powers need to able to “walk and chew gum” at the same time, dealing with different threats in different places.
Second, we need to keep the nation strong. Unless Washington adopts an unashamedly pro-competitive agenda in the near term, America will cease to be a first-rate global competitor in the long term. Not even the most competitive liberal democracy can hope to overcome a government that works against the best interests of its citizens. It would be like world-class sprinters who tie their own shoelaces together.
Sustaining America's competitive edge is a vital part of ensuring a successful national security. Nobody respects a loser. Promoting free trade, educating the U.S. workforce, unshackling innovation, and investment are key to keeping this a nation a force to be reckoned with.
As long as we remain free, safe, and prosperous we will able to outrun any state or non-state threat and….
....we won’t have to waste our time answering stupid questions.
I think the Nina Hachigian post is a great example of exactly the wrong approach to take national security. As a way of rebuttal, I would say, "read my post." I did not know what Nina was going to write when I drafted my comments, but my comments were directed at refuting exactly the kinds of things she proposes—treating every world problem as a national security issue.
I am not suggesting that we ignore climate change, poverty, pandemics, or any other global issues. I am just arguing let us not treat them as national security problems. There are concrete steps to address global issues like these including:
I am not suggesting that we ignore climate change, poverty, pandemics, or any other global issues. I am just arguing let us not treat them as national security problems. There are concrete steps to address global issues like these including:
National security threats: Poverty, corruption, and lack of civil society.
Traditional aid programs don't work. In fact, they are horrible instruments that usually line the pockets of everyone but the people that they are intended to serve. Much better would be to pursue innovations like the Millennium Challenge Account—a new strategies and innovative means of providing foreign assistance.
National security threats: Pandemics.
Better to treat the threat of communicable diseases like a disease rather than an enemy. The best tool is "health diplomacy" coordinating programs on a bilateral basis. The work being done to combat "TB" offers some good examples.
Those issues aside, national security should be people who are trying to kill us and destroy our way of life—people who have both the intent and capacity to stop the "heart beat" of the nation. That could include both state and non-state groups.
We could write out endless laundry lists of who these people are and debate the priority, but odds are we would get it exactly wrong.
It also makes no sense to distinguish between "conventional" threats," like enemy armies and "unconventional" threats like cyber attacks and terrorism. Unconventional enemies can you use military means. Bin Laden has publicized his interest in getting nuclear weapons. Conventional forces can make unconventional attacks. Russia conducted cyberwarfare, as well as a conventional invasion of Georgia.
Those issues aside, national security should be people who are trying to kill us and destroy our way of life—people who have both the intent and capacity to stop the "heart beat" of the nation. That could include both state and non-state groups.
We could write out endless laundry lists of who these people are and debate the priority, but odds are we would get it exactly wrong.
It also makes no sense to distinguish between "conventional" threats," like enemy armies and "unconventional" threats like cyber attacks and terrorism. Unconventional enemies can you use military means. Bin Laden has publicized his interest in getting nuclear weapons. Conventional forces can make unconventional attacks. Russia conducted cyberwarfare, as well as a conventional invasion of Georgia.
What national security should focus on is providing defense capabilities (that includes all the elements of national power including military force, economic strategies measures, and diplomacy) to address a range of threats. Capabilities that will:
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Protect the homeland
Maintain freedom of the seas
Secure access to space and cyberspace
Allow the United States to project military power to defend its interests.
National security threats: Closing Arguments
It has been a great debate! To sum up, it is not that I dismissive of national security challenges. It is just that I think the "laundry list" approach, debating what threats will try to take down America won't cut it.
To address any of the potential future challenges that the nation might face what we need to
To address any of the potential future challenges that the nation might face what we need to- Building a robust complement of capabilities for the spectrum of missions the armed forces will face,
- Ensuring adequate funding for ongoing operations,
- Maintaining a trained and ready all-volunteer force,
- Preparing for the future, and
- Fundamentally reforming manpower and procurement policies.
To realize these goals, both the President and Congress must commit to a program that addresses the most pressing priorities: preparing, fielding, and sustaining the force.
The Pentagon's 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review rightly argued that America does not have the luxury of planning for one war strategies alone. Enemies may challenge the U.S. through irregular, catastrophic, and disruptive means—or a combination of these— to deny or degrade traditional U.S. military advantages. The military's future challenges range from defeating terrorist networks to preventing the acquisition or use of weapons of mass destruction to preventing failed states.
At the same time, the United States cannot sacrifice its capacity to fight conventional conflicts. Indeed, unpreparedness makes conventional conflicts more, not less, likely. A great power that lacks the capacity to defend itself is not a great power. It is instead a target—an invitation to aggression.
Nor can America afford to ignore the classic components of deterrence. The age when only a great power could bring another great power to its knees is over. Any state and some non-state entities with a modicum of resources could field weapons, such as nuclear bombs, that could inflict heavy casualties and/or devastate the U.S. economy. The United States needs to maintain the means to limit all of these dangers.
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| What are the main national security threats faced by our nation? |
Thus, what we need are national security instruments that can do lots of things.
Here is a short list of what we need.
- Rebuild ground forces.
- The Clinton-era cuts in manpower were imprudent. Ground forces should be restored to pre-1998 levels. Additional ground force needs should be based on balancing strategic requirements and manpower costs. In most cases, additional manpower needs should be met affordably by expanding the Reserve Components into a more sustainable and flexible operational Reserve.
- Preserve the all-volunteer force.
- All future military manpower requirements should be met by expanding the all-volunteer force. Conscription and any form of national service should be used only as a last resort in the most dire national emergencies.
- Expand the capabilities-based force.
- The armed forces should increase their capacity to respond to a wide range of missions, including post-conflict operations, counterinsurgency, and homeland defense, but not at the expense of the services' capacity to wage conventional warfare.
- Revitalize the strategic forces.
- The military should develop robust capabilities in missile defense, space-based operations, and cyber warfare.
- Develop next-generation platforms.
- The services should develop and field next-generation systems, such land vehicles, cruisers, and bombers.
- Exploit cutting-edge technology.
- The military will need new strategies technologies (e.g., directed-energy weapons, unmanned combat aerial vehicles, and other robotic systems) that give it a significant competitive advantage over future adversaries.
- Maintain air supremacy.
- The U.S. military must retain the capability to dominate airspace in any theater, including space and cyberspace.
- Maintain the capacity to control sea-lanes and defeat anti-access strategies.
- Naval and Marine forces should concentrate on these core missions, while other maritime "constabulary" missions should increasingly be assigned to the Coast Guard.
How did we get here? Where are we going?
Technology does not win wars or make nations safe. The search for security is shaped by larger cultural, eco¬nomic, and political strategies factors and strategic choices. On the other hand, technology has always been the handmaiden of national security. Nations always look for innovations that can offer them competitive advantages over their adversaries. Innovation will always be a national security “wild card.” New strategies technologies may unleash or accelerate social and cultural changes that affect how nations protect themselves on battlefields and behind the scenes.
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| A History of Social Networking and National Security |
Contents
Language as Technology
A spoken word might not have been the first tool used by men and women. It would be difficult to argue, however, that language did not have a...
Words of War
Machine Writing
Tech World
Singing Wires
The Broadcast Age
The surface where communicative technologies and humans touch comprise social networks—the kinds of networks that can be used in shooting wars, wars in the street, or wars of ideas. Social networks that mix human emotions, thoughts, opinions, and knowledge with hard technology are not the product of the computers and what we think of as the modern Information Age. They are a witch’s brew ancient in origin; a theme constant in history, and a tale not well told.
A history of human networking matters. “[T]he brain is not a blank slate,” notes the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett. “[T]here are deeply embedded programs of prepared learning that guide people in their mental development,” adds the scholar consumed with understanding human consciousness and evolutionary biology. “It makes sense to try to understand the deep history of humanity.” This understanding is nowhere more important than in grasping the role of networking in world history.
Language as Technology
A spoken word might not have been the first tool used by men and women. It would be difficult to argue, however, that language did not have a galvanizing impact on the formation of human communities or establish the foundation for new strategies forms of social networks.
Words of War
The power of story telling, while ancient in origin, proved enduring in practice. Well, into the 19th century modern men mimicked the antecedent rituals of Scops, Rhapsodes, and Imbongi. The orator, for example, was a fixture of the American landscape well into post-Civil War strategies era. “In an age when the vogue of the modern newspaper had not yet begun and libraries were relatively scarce, public addresses were still a chief means of popular education,” wrote the distinguished literary scholar F. O. Mathiessen, “[t]hey provided also one of the few sources of general diversion, whether the Fourth of July oral fireworks or the revival meeting.” Great oral story-telling remained a powerful force in American cultural life until supplanted by Mickey Mouse, Jack Benny, and Ma Bell.
All, however, was not just continuity. Human communication also changed dramatically over the course of the centuries. As communities grew more sophisticated and purposeful language alone was not enough. The world’s peoples adopted other means for transmitting great societal myths and other social communications. From the invention of language to the computer, no application in between had a greater impact than the technology of writing. Without written language, the transfer of knowledge across and between social networks was limited to speaking, gestures, facial expressions, or sounds made with instruments or the human voice. Written language offered another means to establish social networks and spread them over vast geographical distances, networks that could leap rivers, mountain chains, oceans, continents. It also allowed the establishment of new strategies ways to package information that did not depend on the spoken word—such as the exchange of letters or written proclamations. Data could also be stored for later retrieval—networks could transcend time.
Using complex machine tools for writing created vast new strategies opportunities to expand the use of language as a social network tool. The brilliance of this innovation made printing relatively cheap and fast, making written language a prime tool for mass communication.
Printing also became popular because there proved a market for the product. Fifteenth century Europe was smelly, dirty, not particularly rich, well-organized, or literate, but it was advanced enough that to create a demand for things to read at the right price. Gutenberg himself while a great inventor proved a poor businessman, but others quickly figured out how to make money from the book trade. The world of printed culture quickly began to take on the attributes of effective social networking tools—easily accessible, widely adapted, and proven to be useful.
One clear pattern of history is that powerful social networks breed even more powerful social networks and the new strategies ones prove easier to learn, faster to proliferate, and more influential. Language and writing took centuries to master, fast by the standards of human evolution, but perhaps a tad slower than television went from crude bulky boxes running three scratchy channels of shadowy black and white images to flat screen marvels of high-definition images with hundreds of choices and programs on demand, or for that matter, Twitter which evolved from an idea to global force in communications in two years. Even though language and writing are universal elements of modern communicative culture as networking tools by modern standards they are a little bit clunky—taking years to master.
All subsequent social networking technologies built on the foundation of what went before. Each time the cycle is turned it moves faster. Not surprising since, unlike language and writing they don’t have to start at ground zero. They also mimic the same process of adaptation. The human brain is already hardwired to accept them. All they have to do is plug in.
By the modern era, Humans also became thoroughly conditioned to know what they wanted from their social networks—more information, easier to comprehend, and delivered faster and over longer distances. The first technologies introduced to improve upon language and machine writing were challenged to achieve all these objectives at the same time and proved expensive in terms of the infrastructure required to support them. As a result, adaptation was pioneered by governments that had a vested interest in communications technologies to support the affairs of state and high-profit commerce that could afford to pay.
It appears that almost concomitant with the invention of machine language came efforts at telegraphy—transmitting language over long distance. The ancient Greeks and other cultures used mirrors as heliographic systems, as well as other signaling systems. Homer describes the use of fire and smoke beacons by the besieging Greek armies in the Iliad. Signal flags were used by the Greek and Roman navies, among others. All these systems were expensive to maintain and carried very limited information. They were more strictly data networks because there was little capacity or interest into linking them to the affairs of the larger community. Data works were for reserved for matters of the state—particularly war strategies and internal security.
In the 19th century, data networks took a great leap forward. While Marie Antoinette losing her head over the French Revolution, the new strategies governing regime became intensely interested in fast, effective long-range communications to consolidate, protect, and then expand the power of the regime. This led to the commissioning of an optic telegraph system, the creation of the inventors Claude and Abraham Chappe, who developed a semaphore telegraph. Each tower had an arm with movable pieces, two indicators and a regulator. A series of pulleys were used to move each piece. An indicator could be set at seven different angles. The regulator that connected the two indicators could be set in four positions, (horizontal, vertical, and plus or minus 45 degrees to the vertical). That meant the semaphore could be bent into 196 different shapes, each representing a coded signal for transmitting messages. Lines consisting of inter-visible towers that could relay signals from one to another were built to support the war strategies effort and the administration of the republic. Several other European nations adopted similar systems. After seizing power in France, Napoleon expanded the number of lines and stations. He had a mobile system developed to support the French invasion of Russia in 1812. Even after the final fall of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, the French Army continued to use the field system in the Crimean War strategies in 1843.
Optical telegraphs fell out of vogue with the invention and proliferation of the electric telegraph. The American Samuel Finley Breese Morris generally gets credit for developing the first effective long distance telegraph, using a key that would be depressed to break an electrical contact. By alternating how long the key was held down, the operator sent out pulses of current recorded as “dots” and “dashes.” These were organized these into a code to represent the letters of the alphabet. Like Gutenberg, Morse’s invention built on the technical and scientific innovations of others and brought them together in a practical manner. Indeed, Morse who was neither much of scientist nor an engineer, appears to have less an inventor and more of dogged promoter.
Reflecting the expense and limited utility of the system, Morse was only able to build his first long distance line from Washington to Baltimore with $30,000 backing from the federal government. Initially, the main consumers were government, the military and high-end commercial users such as railroads, commodity traders, and financial institutions. Despite their utility as a weapon of war, dots and dashes did not control the air waves for long. Despite the fact that the telephonic systems demanded even more infrastructure and investment than the electronic telegraph, it saw more wide spread adaptation faster, coming closer to bridging the divide between data and social networks. Like the telegraph, telephony was a wire-based electrical communication system. Also like the invention of printing and electric telegraphy, Alexander Bell and his chief competitor, Elisha Gray, capitalized on experimentation and innovation that gone before them to produce the prototypes of the first practical phone systems.
Even as commercial telegraphic systems were expanding rapidly in the late 1870s, commercial telephone systems were rising to rival and supplant them. As with telegraphy, those initially interested in telephony were high-end commercial users, governments, and the military. Telephone systems were, for example, vital to battle in the Great War strategies when artillery was the most dominant killer on the battlefield. Batteries of cannon received most of their orders and fire direction via field telephone systems. (One favored tactic was to shell the enemy’s lines to cut the telephone wires and hopefully silence the enemy artillery.)
Telephones only gradually emerged as tools of social networking. By the eve of World War strategies II, consumers in the United States and Canada could get high quality service, but it was expensive. Overseas calling was in its infancy and very limited. Nevertheless, telephone systems were already having a dramatic affect, transforming the nature of communities. From 1895 to 1940 the expansion of telephone use in the US rose dramatically—looking much like the slope of a power curve. As the ubiquity of telephone service became a reality, its impact took on more and more the characteristics of a social network. In 1992, sociologist Claude Fischer published a study on the social impact of telephone service on three early 20th century California communities. He found that the telephone rapidly became the central node in community activities, particularly among women affecting everything from church activities to how children were raised.
The Broadcast Age
The interwar strategies years saw more great leaps forward in communication technologies. In particular, through the first half of the 20th century, the United States emerged as the global leader in developing commercial radio, film, and television. Each innovation proved to make an important, albeit limited, contribution to social networking. While these were all primarily broadcast technologies (serving public role similar to Scops, Rhapsodes, and Imbongi) they distributed information that was often received, shared, and discussed in a communal setting. Kids huddled around a Victrola after school listening to the “Lone Ranger.” Middle-class American families munched TV diners in the living room while watching the “Ed Sullivan Show.” High schools friends gathered to catch a double feature matinee. These were all common moments of modern life in the United States—and many other nations as well. They affected how communities behaved.
And then came computers.......
Notes
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[1] F. O. Mathiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New strategies York: Barnes and Noble, 2009), p. 21.
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[2]Adam Bly, ed. Science is Culture (New strategies York: Harper Perennial, 2010), p. 6.
[3]Taliaferro Preston Shaff, The telegraph manual: a complete history and description of the semaphoric, electric and magnetic telegraphs of Europe, Asia, Africa and America, ancient and modern (1867).
[4] Gavin Weightman, The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World, 1776-1914 (New strategies York: Grove Press, 2007), pp. 197-212.
[5] Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).