Browsing by Subject "strategic intelligence"
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Item The Developing Global Crisis: Executive Summary(2017-03) Andregg, Michael M.The Developing Global Crisis: A Strategic Paradigm for Understanding Global Conflicts Today by Michael Andregg, University of St. Thomas, mmandregg@stthomas.edu Prepared for the ISA/ISS meetings in Baltimore, MD, USA, Feb. 22-25, 2017 -- Executive Summary – draft 9 The US Air Force has been at war continuously for over 25 years now, and large areas of its operations like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya are still convulsed by wars. Since then, those zones of conflict have grown, adding Syria, Yemen, Somalia and tribal areas of Pakistan to the regular Air Force target lists. Many Americans, including some troops who have deployed into war zones that their parents fought in, are starting to wonder why these wars do not end. The “Developing Global Crisis” is a strategic paradigm that tries to answer that question with a focus on why the wars are starting in the first place, and how to better address their ultimate causes, instead of just symptoms. That is the strategic “solution” to this problem: Focus on ultimate causes instead of just symptoms! Those ultimate causes of organized, armed conflict present a disturbing picture because militaries cannot easily influence many of them. Yet they have very serious consequences. This is a major reason why such wars are so hard to stop once started. Those forces, or ultimate causes, include population pressure, corruptions of governance, rising authoritarian law and militant religions that interact synergistically, severe and growing income inequalities, and derivative factors like climate change (a consequence of the ever-growing population pressures and corruptions of governance in addition to the obvious burning of fossil fuels and forests). That is six, very tough problems facing human civilization today. Basically, there are too many people trying to live on too little land in most conflict zones today, so genocide or at least ethnic “cleansing” is an option contemplated by far too many people and politicians. Fear of genocides, so amply illustrated by the ancient histories of such areas, also fuels violent resistance to elites. Syria provides an exceptionally vivid case with relatively hard numbers that can illustrate this “Developing Global Crisis,” and why that resists solution by both ancient and modern military methods. The confluence of WMDs and hundreds of millions of teen-aged males maturing into such desperate circumstances provides real urgency to the task of rethinking the old ways of conceptualizing global conflicts and how to solve them.Item Strategic Intelligence in an age of Polarization, Politicization and Fake News(2019-03-27) Andregg, Michael M.Strategic Intelligence in an Age of Polarization, Politicization and Fake News Michael Andregg, University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN, USA, mmandregg@stthomas.edu For the ISA conference in Toronto, Canada, March 26-29, 2019 abstract Strategic intelligence has always been a dwarf cousin to much larger tactical intelligence as measured by budgets, dedicated personnel, or policy-maker time. There are two fundamental reasons for this. First, political time horizons are notoriously short, while strategic intelligence looks over long periods of time. Second, attention of analysts and interest of policy makers skews toward secret intelligence, while strategic intelligence is almost all derived from open sources. One example would be the series of “Global Trends” forecasts produced by the US National Intelligence Council. These great interagency documents were much appreciated by scholars, but scarcely read (if at all) by active policy makers driven from one crisis to another. They typically seek immediate solutions to proximate problems. In war, for another example, there is typically great demand for tactical information to identify enemies and win battles, but relatively little attention is spent on why wars begin or how they can be prevented. The current period increases these distortions by global proliferation of “news” sources and the ever-growing sophistication of propagandists exploiting social, alternative and even mainstream media. This problem is compounded by the flow of information over networks instead of on mediated, edited, and limited channels, that once were devoted to more or less “objective truths” (at least in theory). Donald Trump has exploited these trends quite successfully, and amplifies them by constant devotion to selling things indifferent to anything close to objective truth. He also commands obedience from the largest, and in some ways the most sophisticated intelligence community on this earth. Politicization and polarization are thus becoming US-IC norms at the same time that the meme “Fake News” tarnishes the products of every mainstream media source. This paper will develop these themes through examination of cases. Intelligence professionals must still try to find their way through the wilderness of mirrors and professional disinformation to the goal of evidence-based advice for leaders with real lives in their powerful hands. But the task is made much harder by advances in modern propaganda techniques enabled by the internet, while “strategic intelligence” falls ever further behind responses to the urgencies of each day