Global Trends - National Intelligence Council

The NIC is crowd sourcing the next Global Trends report.  Everyone has the opportunity to comment at this link: https://nicglobaltrends.tumblr.com/submit-a-post

Some important concepts here:

• The public will have the opportunity to comment on the NIC’s “first look” and refined language through August.

In addition to analytic crowdsourcing, other important shifts in our methodology and research design include:

• Building up from the regions to identify global trends and uncertainties, rather than starting from the global level and moving to the local;

• Assessing the future at five- and 20-years. We intend the five-year horizon to increase the decisionmaking relevance of Global Trends for individuals, organizations, and governments, while the 20-year horizon preserves the strategic perspective that is the hallmark of the Global Trends series.  

Here are a few of the questions I would like to see the Global Trends address:

What will the phenomena revolution, resistance, and insurgency look like in 30 years?

What will political violence look like?

What is the future of governance structures?

Will we still be supporting and defending our current Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic in 20-30years?

Will we evolve beyond the Westphalian nation state construct?  How will sovereignty be viewed?  Will their be new forms of "sovereignty" e.g., can multi-national corporations evolve to become sovereign?  

Can sovereignty exist within cyberspace?

Will statesmen be asking upon what kind of war are we about to embark?  What will that war look like?

What will the concepts of offense, defense, stability operations as well as sabotage and subversion look like?

What will be the major narratives of states and non-state actors?

What kind of population and resources control measures will be emplace to control larger populations and declining resources?

HTTPS://NICGLOBALTRENDS.TUMBLR.COM/POST/141610120692/WITH-EVERY-GLOBAL-TRENDS-THE-NATIONAL
MAR 24, 2016

With every Global Trends, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) seeks to innovate its approach, leverage rigorous foresight methods, and expand and diversify the perspectives it consults.  We continue in that tradition for the sixth Global Trends, to be released in December, by introducing several new elements to our analytic process, including public crowdsourcing and discussion via social media platforms like Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook.  We treat crowdsourced perspectives as analytic leads to investigate and that we may integrate with findings from traditional forms of unclassified research and engagement—such as meetings with interlocutors, conferences, published research, contracted studies, public presentations, and paid consultations.   When arranged in advance, we provide compensation for some of these services.  We seek to maximally diversify the range of viewpoints consulted, attempting to balance the elite perspectives we typically consult worldwide with societal perspectives across genders and age, class, cultural, and other groups in urban and rural areas.  Such public engagement is one way the NIC and its parent organization, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, demonstrate commitment to transparency and strategic insight.  

• We experimented in 2015 with analytic crowdsourcing in conjunction with our Global Trends “core conversation” at the South by Southwest Interactive festival, garnering hundreds of thoughts from SX participants and Twitter followers as well several million views of the NIC’s “future of” vignettes on on Tumblr and Twitter.  

• In mid-March 2016, we returned to SXSW and posted on Tumblr a first look at our findings, resulting in more than 10 million views of our content across social media platforms and hundreds of insights and several longer essays shared on these pages.  

• For instance, SXSW and Twitter commentators challenged the NIC to strike the term “non-state actor” from its lexicon, in an effort to get the NIC to stop “seeing like a state” and to envision how individuals and organizations might shape the future of economics, politics, security, and geopolitics.  Others have suggested the NIC explore new or alternative economic models that have the potential to shore-up middle classes worldwide, or to weigh the geopolitical and economic implications of “solving climate change.”  

• The public will have the opportunity to comment on the NIC’s “first look” and refined language through August.

In addition to analytic crowdsourcing, other important shifts in our methodology and research design include:

• Building up from the regions to identify global trends and uncertainties, rather than starting from the global level and moving to the local;

• Assessing the future at five- and 20-years. We intend the five-year horizon to increase the decisionmaking relevance of Global Trends for individuals, organizations, and governments, while the 20-year horizon preserves the strategic perspective that is the hallmark of the Global Trends series.  

• Leveraging two rounds of global engagement, the first in pure “discovery” mode where we met with more than 1800 individuals, organizations, and governments in 30 countries to learn their views of the future.  The second phase, underway now, solicits feedback on our preliminary findings.

• Using scenarios in a targeted fashion to illustrate how a handful of critical trends, uncertainties, and choices might come together to challenge enduring principles in international decisionmaking, or to spotlight pathways to more prosperous, secure futures for more people.  

• Framing uncertainties, where possible, as specific choices before individuals, organizations and governments.

Please keep an eye on these Tumblr pages or follow-us on Twitter and Facebook.  We welcome viewpoints from one and all, and will do our best to consider your ideas as we evaluate how the key trends, uncertainties, and choices before individuals, organizations, and governments will shape the future.

Warm regards,
The NIC Global Trends Team

Return to Summary.

TAGS:gt2035 nicglobaltrends

50 Shades of Gray: Why the Gray Wars Concept Lacks Strategic Sense by Adam Elkus

We should remember Colin Gray (whom I do not think was the inspiration for the Gray Zone) and Clausewitz.  And my fear is that we do not heed Clausewitz' wisdom that we must first understand kind of war upon which we are about to embark and instead we focus on simply trying to name the war.

“The American defense community is especially prone to capture by the latest catchphrase, the new-sounding spin on an ancient idea which as jargon separates those who are truly expert from the lesser breeds without the jargon.”  Colin Gray

“Thus it has come about that our theoretical and critical literature, instead of giving plain, straightforward arguments in which the author at least always knows what he is saying and the reader what he is reading, is crammed with jargon, ending at obscure crossroads where the author loses its readers. Sometimes these books are even worse: they are just hollow shells. The author himself no longer knows just what he is thinking and soothes himself with obscure ideas which would not satisfy him if expressed in plain speech.”

Major General Carl von Clausewitz

Yes Adam is correct to note that USSOCOM has lost control of the new term  "Gray Zone" with everyone applying it to everything. (or old term -see below for the chart on the 100 names of "LIC" that I have been carrying around since 1994 - note "Gray Area Phenomena")   The USSOCOM White Paper can be accessed here: http://maxoki161.blogspot.com/2015/10/ussocom-white-paper-gray-zone.html)  And Yes Adam is right that Limited War and Compellence area useful concepts and do not need to be reinvented.

While I was hopeful that the Gray Zone would be a useful construct to describe the space between peace and where (where we have a strategy gap) what is really taking place in that space is what has always been taking place - revolution, resistance, and insurgency (RRI) .  Please take a look at the Assessing Revolutionary and Insurgent Strategies (ARIS) project at the link below.  I had preferred Political Warfare with a nod to George Kennan (http://maxoki161.blogspot.com/2015/03/sof-support-to-political-warfare-white.html) but USSOCOM adopted the Gray Zone.   But we should be focusing on is revolution, resistance, and insurgency (and of course this is nothing new). This is what we should be focusing on.  And of course our adversaries are fomenting and  exploiting RRI in the space between peace and war and it was good of Congress to recognize that they are conducting their unique forms of unconventional warfare in that space (thus the directive in NDAA 2016 Sec 1097 to DOD to develop a counter-UW strategy: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/1735/text#toc-H57D78DE2C41D4347BF5202B774B80E94)  But now Gray Zone is being used to describe everything from Little Green Men in Ukraine to competition and potential conflict in the South China Sea to north Korean provocations (http://csis.org/publication/issues-insights-vol-15-no-13-struggling-gray-zone) 

Excerpts: 

Gray zone terminology has also been applied to characterize conflict in the South China Sea. Surely Putin’s various operations, Chinese territorial disputations, civil wars in Iraq and Syria, and Boko Haram’s terrorism in Nigeria are not equally gray? The idea that the term somehow meaningfully encompasses all of these conflicts is bizarre. But this is not the biggest flaw with the gray wars concept. It is yet another example of the recurring problem of military strategists and civilian analysts inventing new terminology to replace forgotten, yet perhaps more coherent concepts. Gray zone wars seem to be a composite of two very well known ideas in military strategy and political science: limited wars and compellence.

Gray wars are often defined as wars in which combatants minimize the scope and scale of combat. This is not an exotic new stratagem as much as the realization that, as Carl von Clausewitz noted, absolute war — war unconstrained by any kind of political limitation — is largely if not completely impossible in practice. The political context of war always involves some degree of minimizing the scope and scale of combat.

• http://www.soc.mil/ARIS/ARIS.html

• 

  
  

  Assessing Revolutionary And Insurgent Strategies (ARIS) Studies

  The Assessing Revolutionary and Insurgent Strategies (ARIS) project consists of research conducted for the US Army Special Operations Command by the National Security Analysis Department of The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Its goal is to produce academically rigorous yet operationally relevant research to develop and illustrate a common understanding of insurgency and revolution. Intended to form a bedrock body of knowledge for members of the Special Operations Forces, the ARIS studies allow users to distill vast amounts of material from a wide array of campaigns and extract relevant lessons, enabling the development of future doctrine, professional education, and training. The ARIS project follows in the tradition of research conducted by the Special Operations Research Office (SORO) of American University in the 1950s and 1960s, adding new research to that body of work, republishing original SORO studies, and releasing updated editions of selected SORO studies.

​

warontherocks.com

50 Shades of Gray: Why the Gray Wars Concept Lacks Strategic Sense

• by Adam Elkus 
•  Dec. 15, 2015 
•  7 min read 
•  original

Many men, as they age, start to worry about gray hairs. America’s military men, however, worry about gray wars. Gray wars are, as the former commander of U.S. Special Operations Command noted, wars in which groups or entities “seek to secure their objectives while minimizing the scope and scale of actual combat.” These wars and geopolitical conflicts, ranging from the Russian annexation of Crimea and its continued aggression in Ukraine to Boko Haram’s reign of terror in Nigeria, require allegedly new means of training, organization, and doctrine. There’s only one problem: The “gray wars” concept lacks even the most basic strategic sense. Like the book and movie 50 Shades of Grey, the gray wars concept grossly over-exaggerates its own transgressions from the norm. Beneath the hype is something rather ooh-la-lame rather than ooh-la-la.

First, it should be observed that this definition, which is applied to both wars with Vladimir Putin’s deniable “little green men” and Middle Eastern wars in Iraq and Syria featuring mobile combined arms maneuver, is incoherent. Yes, Putin is keeping it low-key, but can the same really be said of any of the Syrian or Iraqi factions contesting major cities and tweeting beheading pictures at each other? If the latter form of combat is somehow lacking in scope and scale, it is certainly not lacking in ferocity due to the intentions of the combatants (who are all fighting for their survival). And one can also quibble with the idea that these conflicts also are somehow lacking in scope and scale to begin with. Every faction in Syria and Iraq is fighting a war of utmost ferocity, and the expansion of the Islamic State to battlegrounds beyond Iraq and Syria suggests that the conflict may not necessarily be limited to its primary theaters of operation.

Gray zone terminology has also been applied to characterize conflict in the South China Sea. Surely Putin’s various operations, Chinese territorial disputations, civil wars in Iraq and Syria, and Boko Haram’s terrorism in Nigeria are not equally gray? The idea that the term somehow meaningfully encompasses all of these conflicts is bizarre. But this is not the biggest flaw with the gray wars concept. It is yet another example of the recurring problem of military strategists and civilian analysts inventing new terminology to replace forgotten, yet perhaps more coherent concepts. Gray zone wars seem to be a composite of two very well known ideas in military strategy and political science: limited wars and compellence.

(Continued at the link below)

http://warontherocks.com/2015/12/50-shades-of-gray-why-the-gray-wars-concept-lacks-strategic-sense/

Readings and References - Revolutions, Resistance, and Insurgency and SOF

"The first great center of area studies in the United States was not located in any university, but in Washington," McGeorge Bundy, onetime dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University and then president of the Ford Foundation, observed in 1964. The OSS, he said, was "a remarkable institution, half cops-and-robbers and half faculty meeting.” 

America may not be interested in unconventional warfare but UW is being practiced around the world by those who are interested in it

Background.  Revolutions, resistance, and insurgencies (RRI) are being conducted around the world and will continue to be the norm in the space between peace and war.

We have a strategy gap between diplomacy and war fighting and the US government (USG) requires a capability to achieve its objectives using all means necessary beyond diplomacy but short of war (adapted form George Kennan’s political warfare memo 1948)

Unconventional warfare can provide a strategic capability to operate in this gap.  To be effective, elements of the US military and Intelligence Community must continuously assess potential, nascent, and existing resistance organizations around the world on a day-to-day basis.  Assessments will contribute to understanding when USG interests and resistance objectives can be aligned and provide the intellectual foundation to determine if a UW campaign is warranted or if opponents’ UW campaigns should be countered. 

Non-Doctrinal Definition of Resistance:

An organized group (with leadership, objectives and strategy [a manifesto?]) opposing an organized structure (e.g., government or occupying power) and employs methods and activities (subversion to paramilitary and military) across a spectrum of legality from non-violent political to violent action to achieve (or force?) accommodation of its aims.

5 Categories of Revolutions - 1962-2009

•       Modify the Type of Government

–      NPA, FARC, Shining Path, Iranian Revolution, FMLN, Karen National Liberation Army

•       Identity or Ethnic Issues

–      LTTE, PLO, Hutu-Tutsi Genocides, Kosovo Liberation Army, PIRA

•       Drive out Foreign Power

–      Afghan Mujahidin, Vietcong, Chechen Revolution, Hizbollah, Hizbol Mujahedeen

•       Religious Fundamentalism

–      Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Taliban, Al Qaeda

•       Modernization or Reform

–      Niger Delta (MEND), Revolution United Front (RUF), Orange Revolution, Solidarity

Political Warfare:

George F. Kennan defined political warfare as “the logical application of Clausewitz’s doctrine in time of peace.”  While stopping short of the direct kinetic confrontation between two countries’ armed forces, “political warfare is the employment of all the means at a nation's command… to achieve its national objectives.”  A country embracing Political Warfare conducts “both overt and covert” operations in the absence of declared war or overt force-on-force hostilities. Efforts “range from such overt actions as political alliances, economic measures…, and ‘white’ propaganda to such covert operations as clandestine support of ‘friendly’ foreign elements, ‘black’ psychological warfare and even encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states.”  See  George Kennan, "Policy Planning Memorandum." May 4, 1948.

SOF Support to Political Warfare:

•       A whole-of-government endeavor, Political Warfare is best led by agencies beyond DoD and can only succeed if it is conducted in a way to “elevate civilian power alongside military power as equal pillars of U.S. foreign policy." 

•       SOF is well suited to lead DOD's contribution to Political Warfare’s activities, because they are relatively knowledgeable experts in this form of warfare

•       The overall Political Warfare effort relies on persuasive and coercive diplomacy, economic coercion and engagement, Security Sector Assistance (SSA), Unconventional Warfare (UW), and Information and Influence Activities (IIA).

Readings:

“U.S. Army Special Operations Command Counter-Unconventional Warfare White Paper:” https://publicintelligence.net/usasoc-counter-unconventional-warfare/  Focus on Chapter 3 (12 Pages)

Special Warfare: The Missing Middle In U.S. Coercive Options:” http://warontherocks.com/2014/11/special-warfare-the-missing-middle-in-u-s-coercive-options/  (About 8 pages)

RAND Report: “Improving Strategic Competence Lessons from 13 Years of War”

 http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR816.html   Skim the Summary (12 pages) and Chapter 4 (34 Pages) and focus on Chapter 3 (53 pages)

RAND Report: “Lessons from 13 Years of War Point to a Better U.S. Strategy:” http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_briefs/RB9800/RB9814/RAND_RB9814.pdf ) (4 pages)

SOF Support to Political Warfare: 

http://maxoki161.blogspot.com/2015/03/sof-support-to-political-warfare-white.html

Think Piece US Political Warfare Policy:

http://maxoki161.blogspot.com/2015/03/think-piece-draft-us-political-warfare.html

Other references for some historical context:

George Kennan's 1948 Policy Planning Staff Memorandum - The inauguration of organized political warfare.

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/history/johnson/65ciafounding3.htm 

Army Activities in Underdeveloped Areas Short of Declared War (BG Stillwell, 1961)

https://db.tt/G2a0p6Yl  

UNITED STATES OVERSEAS INTERNAL DEFENSE POLICY

September 1962

http://www.scribd.com/doc/50366332/Overseas-Internal-Defense-Policy-1962#scribd 

NSDD 32 US National Security Strategy 1982 (declassified Reagan NSS)

http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsdd/nsdd-32.pdf

And if not familiar with the ARIS project at USASOC, I strong recommend perusing it.

Assessing Revolutionary And Insurgent Strategies (ARIS) Studies

http://www.soc.mil/ARIS/ARIS.html 

The Assessing Revolutionary and Insurgent Strategies (ARIS) project consists of research conducted for the US Army Special Operations Command by the National Security Analysis Department of The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Its goal is to produce academically rigorous yet operationally relevant research to develop and illustrate a common understanding of insurgency and revolution. Intended to form a bedrock body of knowledge for members of the Special Operations Forces, the ARIS studies allow users to distill vast amounts of material from a wide array of campaigns and extract relevant lessons, enabling the development of future doctrine, professional education, and training. The ARIS project follows in the tradition of research conducted by the Special Operations Research Office (SORO) of American University in the 1950s and 1960s, adding new research to that body of work, republishing original SORO studies, and releasing updated editions of selected SORO studies.