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Real Security What is security? Where does it come from and who is responsible for it? from Resurgence Magazine issue #218 ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, the Revolution in Military Affairs shifted into fast forward. The asymmetric warfare we had worried about for decades became a reality. A poorly financed and technologically impoverished antagonist proved it could mount devastating attacks on the United States. It is clear that you can't effectively guard an open society, especially one that has inflicted itself with alarming vulnerabilities built up over decades. Vulnerabilities include energy, water, telecommunication, financial transfers, and transportation. If you destroy some critical bits of infrastructure, you can make a large city uninhabitable pretty quickly. Looking over the list of other issues that erode security - the effect of climate change and conflict on increasing flows of refugees; the risks of famine and war; water problems; disease outbreaks and genetically modified organisms - it's not a picture for a peaceful world. Traditional thinking about all these issues has been influenced by the supposition that governments are the axis of power and the locus of action, so we need to focus on governmental and international institutions and instruments. That's the wrong mindset, dangerously incomplete and obsolete, in a world that is now clearly tripolar, with power and action centred not just in governments, but also in the private sector and an internet-empowered civil society. In a tripolar society, power is enlarged and diffused, and everything can happen a lot faster, because there are a lot more ways and channels in which it can happen. In the model that we grew up with, governments rule physical territory in which national economies function, and strong economies support hegemonic military power. In the new model, already emerging under our noses, economic decisions don't pay much attention to national sovereignty in a world where more than half of the two hundred largest economic entities are not countries but companies. Governments can no longer control their economies or look after their people when trillions of dollars of capital are sloshing around instantaneously at a whim. The gap between rich and poor has grown, and this unwelcome growth is apparently accelerating. According to the World Bank, of the six billion people on Earth, three billion live on less than $2 a day, and 1.2 billion live on less than $1 a day, which defines the absolute poverty standard. Access to clean water is denied to 1.5 billion people. Meanwhile, the world's richest 200 people are worth an average of $5 billion each. This naturally increases envy and anger. The instability of economies and politics erodes a sense of national identity, and therefore decreases stability and makes conditions ripe for fundamentalism. When nations can't take care of their people, people lose confidence in them and often tend not to vote, because they're not pleased with any of the candidates. The growing influence of extreme right-wing parties in Western European countries certainly indicates that the problem of extremism and fundamentalism is not just limited to poor countries. What needs to emerge, and may be starting to emerge, is networked governance. But that only works if it's really tripolar, engaging all three poles - the public and private sectors, plus nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) or civil society. IN HINDSIGHT, it's clearly an error to think of 9/11 as evil in a vacuum. There has been much debate about root causes, trying to figure out why people are so angry with America. A lot has been said about the humiliation and deculturisation which America inflicts on others, and the hypocrisy that weighs non-American lives and freedoms less than our own. Working in about fifty countries, I've been endlessly impressed with how stupidly America can behave, even through its experienced diplomatic apparatus. We Americans are thoroughly disliked, to a degree much greater than our political leaders seem to realise. That's going to be very hard to turn around even if we start now. In fact, we're going hard in the opposite direction, eroding or undercutting practically every peace-promoting, risk-reducing effort put forward by the international community, appearing hypocritical and unilateral, imposing mass-media culture, and showing little understanding of the values of diversity and tolerance or even, of the rule of law for which we supposedly stand. The new American doctrine of exceptionalism (what used to be called 'isolationism') is uniting the rest of the world, even our closest allies, against us. I think we will look back on the rapid destruction of treaty regimes that have taken decades to create, and of the credibility we were trying to build, and ask, "What on earth possessed us to do that?" Strategies for Security In a remarkable speech on 2nd October, 2001, Tony Blair said, "We need, above all, justice and prosperity for the poor and dispossessed." Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us that "Peace is not the absence of war: it is the presence of justice." We also need to remember George Kennan's prescient warning, at the start of the Cold War, that the biggest danger was that we'd become like our enemies. Many elements of the Patriot Act passed by Congress after 9/11 - abrogating civil liberties, ignoring the Freedom of Information Act, generally constricting the flow of public information - move us in that direction. Military superiority won't be enough to win the 'War on Terrorism'. For true security we need five dimensions:
It's clearer every day that the world's best armed forces, costing $11,000 a second, are not making us secure. That's because there is no significant military threat to the United States that can be defended against. It is not possible to defend against, say, nuclear warheads or other weapons of mass destruction that are smuggled in without leaving a radar track or other return address. Someone could wrap a warhead in bales of marijuana, put it in a shipping container, bring it aboard a ship into any of our harbours, and nobody would notice. The point is that anonymous, asymmetric attacks can be quite devastating, but are undeterrable in principle, because you don't know who is responsible for them. That can be especially true with suicidal adversaries. We have already learned that interdiction by prior intelligence can't be relied upon. So the only lastingly effective defense is prevention. How do we do that? We have seen on 9/11 that at the level of intelligence foresight it doesn't work reliably. So what is the alternative? It is to work at the level of root causes. Only by eliminating the social conditions that feed and motivate the pathology of hatred can we bring about lasting security. SECURITY HAS TWO main elements: freedom from fear of privation or attack. Freedom from fear of privation and freedom from fear of attack are not independent, but are both vital to being and feeling safe. Can we be and feel safe in ways that work better and cost less than present arrangements? Is there a path to security that is achieved from the bottom up, not from the top down; that is the province of every citizen, not the monopoly of national government; that doesn't rely on the threat or use of violence; that makes others more, not less secure, whether on the scale of the village or the globe? Can a new approach to building real security also advance other overarching goals, and, ideally, save enough money to pay for other things we need? I think we can do that. Freedom from Fear of Privation Let's start with freedom from fear of privation, which has many obvious elements: reliable and affordable energy, food, water, shelter, sanitation, health; a sustainable and flexible system of production, transportation, communication, and commerce; universal education, strong innovation, vibrant diversity; a healthy environment; free expression, and profound spirituality; a legitimate and accountable system of self-government. Preserving our security requires all these things for the rest of humanity, too. General George Marshall said in 1947 that "there can be no political stability and no assured peace without economic security." He said that US policy must therefore "be directed not against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos." That was right then and it's right now. The UN Development Programme says that, today, every poor person on Earth could have clean water, sanitation, basic health, nutrition, education, and reproductive health care for about $40 billion a year. That's a good deal less than we're spending on our anti-terrorist programme in the United States. It's less than a quarter of the tax cut that President Bush bestowed on us. But where is the determination to build a global coalition to create a safer world in those fundamental ways? Wealthy nations have reduced their foreign aid contributions in recent years. The $11 billion the United States now allots annually to foreign aid amounts to 0.11 per cent of the nation's gross domestic product. Aid from rich countries is often leveraged to elicit certain behaviours from recipient nations. Treasury Secretary O'Neill said in Ghana that American aid will be directed only to those African nations that "encourage economic freedom" - in other words, those that privatise their industries, reduce subsidies, and open their markets to goods from the United States. But in fact the United States, along with other rich nations, continues to move away from a policy of open markets, slapping tariffs on foreign steel and lumber, and instituting an additional $35 billion in annual farm subsidies. Freedom from Fear of Attack The other side of security is freedom from fear of attack. Security Without War, by Hal Harvey and Mike Shuman, lays out a new security triad: (1) conflict prevention, (2) conflict resolution, and (3) non-provocative defense. Conflict prevention ought to be the highest priority. It's by far the most cost-effective way not to be attacked. It comprises elements like justice, hope, transparency, tolerance, and honest government. A critical tool for preventing conflict is advanced resource productivity - getting lots more work out of each unit of energy materials, water, topsoil, and so on. Advanced resource productivity can actually prevent conflict in four ways. First, it can make aspirations to a decent life realistic and attainable, for all. It removes apparent conflicts between economic advancement and environmental sustainability. You can implement it by any mixture of market and administrative practices you want. It scales fractally from the household to the world. It's adaptable to very diverse conditions and cultures. Secondly, resource productivity avoids resource conflicts over such things as oil and water. Military intervention in the Gulf becomes Mission Unnecessary because the oil will become irrelevant. Thirdly, resource productivity can make infrastructure invulnerable by design. And finally, resource productivity can unmask and penalise proliferators of weapons of mass destruction. Take nuclear power for example: if we use energy in a way that saves money and is enormously cheaper than building or even just running nuclear plants, any country that takes economics seriously won't want or have nuclear plants. They will be simply a waste of money. In such a world, the ingredients - the technologies, materials, skills, and equipment - needed to make bombs would no longer be an item of commerce. They wouldn't be impossible to get, but they'd be a lot harder to get, and more politically costly for both the recipient and the supplier to be caught trying to get, because for the first time, the reason for wanting them would be unambiguously military. You could no longer claim a peaceful electricity-making venture. It would be clear that you were really out to make bombs. Another example is organic agriculture, which tends to work better, cost less and be better for health and nutrition, and can at least equally well feed the world. This means that you don't have organophosphate pesticide plants, which means that you just removed the main cover story for nerve gas plants. The point is that resource conflicts are unnecessary and uneconomic - a problem we don't need to have, and it's cheaper not to. For example, 13% of US oil now comes from the Persian Gulf, which is clearly risky. Proposed domestic substitutes, such as drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, are at least as risky, and probably more so, because the Trans-Alaska Pipeline is about the fattest energy-related terrorist target there is. And therefore, in promoting expanded drilling in Alaska, the Department of Energy has been undercutting the mission of the Department of Defense. Both oil imports and vulnerable domestic infrastructure are unnecessary and a waste of money. To displace Persian Gulf imports would take only a 2.7 miles-per-gallon increase in the light vehicle fleet. Most United States oil use could be profitably displaced within a few decades with current technology. CONFLICT RESOLUTION is the next layer of defense if conflict avoidance or prevention fails. That's the realm of better international laws, norms, and institutions. Then, if the previous two layers of protection fail, and conflict occurs, the last layer of defense, and a very powerful one, is 'non-provocative defense', which reliably defeats aggression, but without threatening others. To date, Sweden has executed the most sophisticated design of military forces for non-provocative defense. Its coastal guns cannot be elevated to fire beyond Swedish coastal waters. It has a capable air force, but with short-range aircraft that can't get very far beyond Sweden. The radio frequencies used by the Swedish military are deliberately incompatible with both NATO and the Warsaw Pact, so Sweden will stay neutral. In every way, by technical and institutional design, they've sought to make Sweden a country you don't want to attack, but one that is clearly in a defensive posture. This approach can ultimately create a stable mutual defensive superiority - each side's defense is stronger than the other side's offence. The basic point of non-provocative defense is to structure and deploy your forces so your adversaries consider them mainly defensive. That is, you minimize your capability for pre-emptive deep strikes, or strategic mobility, and you maximize homeland defense. Non-provocative defense means layered deployment in non-provocative postures. It depends on forces that are at least as robust as the attacker's forces, but with a decentralized architecture that increases their resilience. Of course, non-provocative defense doesn't stop terrorism, any more than National Missile Defense would. But the resilient design helps to disincentives terrorism by reducing its rewards, just as the full spectrum of non-military engagement undercuts terrorism's ideological and political base. Reprinted with permission from Whole Earth magazine, Autumn, 2002. www.wholeearth.com Amory Lovins is Director of the Rocky Mountain Institute and is the author of Natural Capitalism. from Resurgence issue 218 |