Over the past two weeks, three key reports highlighting the changing strategic nature of the 21st Century world and making recommendations to meet the most likely threats, were released in the USA.

The first report, entitled Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, was released by the National Intelligence Council on October 20, 2008. In the Council’s words, “Global Trends 2025 is the fourth unclassified report prepared by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) in recent years that takes a long-term view if the future. It offers a fresh look at how key global trends might develop over the next 15 years to influence world events”.

The second report, entitled Forging A New Shield, was submitted to President Bush on November 26, 2008 by the Project on National Security Reform, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization working to modernize and improve the U.S. national security system to better protect the American people against 21^st century dangers. The project expects to prepare draft presidential directives and a new National Security Act to replace many of the provisions of the one enacted in 1947. The Project’s Executive Director, James R. Locher III, was interviewed by the reputed Foreign Policy magazine regarding the findings of the report, and his comments have been published on the magazine’s website and made available to the public.  The 830-page report thankfully also makes available an Executive Summary for those who wish to familiarize themselves with its main arguments, conclusions and recommendations.

The third report was submitted today to the US Congress by the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction and Terrorism, and is entitled World at Risk. The Commission, set up in accordance with the Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007, had as mandate to assess “any and all f the nation’s activities, initiatives, and programs to prevent weapons of mass destruction proliferation and terrorism. … [and] to provide concrete recommendations—a road map, if you will—to address these threats”.

World At Risk

The Commission chose to focus its findings on several areas where it found that the risks to the United States are increasing: the cross roads of terrorism and proliferation in the poorly governed parts of Pakistan, the prevention of biological and nuclear terrorism, and the potential erosion of international nuclear security, treaties and norms in an era of nuclear energy renaissance. Its key conclusion was that “…the risks that confront us today are evolving faster than our multilayered responses. Many thousands of dedicated people across all agencies of our government are working hard to protect this country, and their efforts have had a positive impact. But the terrorists have been active, too—and in our judgment America’s margin of safety is shrinking, not growing.”

In order to meet these challenges in a proactive, timely and effective manner, the Commission puts forwards thirteen recommendations:

Biological Proliferation and Terrorism:

RECOMMENDATION 1: The United States should undertake a series of mutually reinforcing domestic measures to prevent bioterrorism: (1) conduct a comprehensive review of the domestic program to secure dangerous pathogens, (2) develop a national strategy for advancing bioforensic capabilities, (3) tighten government oversight of high-containment laboratories, (4) promote a culture of security awareness in the life sciences community, and (5) enhance the nation’s capabilities for rapid response to prevent biological attacks from inflicting mass casualties.

RECOMMENDATION 2: The United States should undertake a series of mutually reinforcing measures at the international level to prevent biological weapons proliferation and terrorism: (1) press for an international conference of countries with major biotechnology industries to promote biosecurity, (2) conduct a global assessment of biosecurity risks, (3) strengthen global disease surveillance networks, and (4) propose a new action plan for achieving universal adherence to and effective national implementation of the Biological Weapons Convention, for adoption at the next review conference in 2011.

Nuclear Proliferation and Terrorism:

RECOMMENDATION 3: The United States should work internationally toward strengthening the nonproliferation regime, reaffirming the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons by (1) imposing a range of penalties for NPT violations and withdrawal from the NPT that shift the burden of proof to the state under review for noncompliance; (2) ensuring access to nuclear fuel, at market prices to the extent possible, for non-nuclear states that agree not to develop sensitive fuel cycle capabilities and are in full compliance with international obligations; (3) strengthening the International Atomic Energy Agency, to include identifying the limitations to its safeguarding capabilities, and providing the agency with the resources and authorities needed to meet its current and expanding mandate; (4) promoting the further development and effective implementation of counterproliferation initiatives such as the Proliferation Security Initiative and the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism; (5) orchestrating consensus that there will be no new states, including Iran and North Korea, possessing uranium enrichment or plutonium reprocessing capability; (6) working in concert with others to do everything possible to promote and maintain a moratorium on nuclear testing; (7) working toward a global agreement on the definition of “appropriate” and “effective” nuclear security and accounting systems as legally obligated under United Nations Security Council Resolution 1540; and (8) discouraging, to the extent possible, the use of financial incentives in the promotion of civil nuclear power.

RECOMMENDATION 4: The new President should undertake a comprehensive review of cooperative nuclear security programs, and should develop a global strategy that accounts for the worldwide expansion of the threat and the restructuring of our relationship with Russia from that of donor and recipient to a cooperative partnership.

RECOMMENDATION 5: As a top priority, the next administration must stop the Iranian and North Korean nuclear weapons programs. In the case of Iran, this requires the permanent cessation of all of Iran’s nuclear weapons–related efforts. In the case of North Korea, this requires the complete abandonment and dismantlement of all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs. If, as appears likely, the next administration seeks to stop these programs through direct diplomatic engagement with the Iranian and North Korean governments, it must do so from a position of strength, emphasizing both the benefits to both the benefits to them of abandoning their nuclear weapons programs and the enormous costs of failing to do so. Such engagement must be backed by the credible threat of direct action in the event that diplomacy fails.

Pakistan: The Intersection of Nuclear Weapons and Terrorism:

RECOMMENDATION 6: The next President and Congress should implement a comprehensive policy toward Pakistan that works with Pakistan and other countries to (1) eliminate terrorist safe havens through military, economic, and diplomatic means; (2) secure nuclear and biological materials in Pakistan; (3) counter and defeat extremist ideology; and (4) constrain a nascent nuclear arms race in Asia.

Russia and the United States:

RECOMMENDATION 7: The next U.S. administration should work with the Russian government on initiatives to jointly reduce the danger of the use of nuclear and biological weapons, including by (1) extending some of the essential verification and monitoring provisions of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty that are scheduled to expire in 2009; (2) advancing cooperation programs such as the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1540, and the Proliferation Security Initiative; (3) sustaining security upgrades at sensitive sites in Russia and elsewhere, while finding common ground on further reductions in stockpiles of excess highly enriched uranium; (4) jointly encouraging China, Pakistan, and India to announce a moratorium on the further production of nuclear fissile materials for nuclear weapons and to reduce existing nuclear military deployments and stockpiles; and (5) offering assistance to other nations, such as Pakistan and India, in achieving nuclear confidence-building measures similar to those that the United States and the USSR followed for most of the Cold War.

Government Organization and Culture:

RECOMMENDATION 8: The President should create a more efficient and effective policy coordination structure by designating a White House principal advisor for WMD proliferation and terrorism and restructuring the National Security Council and Homeland Security Council.

RECOMMENDATION 9: Congress should reform its oversight both structurally and substantively to better address intelligence, homeland security, and crosscutting 21st-century national security missions such as the prevention of weapons of mass destruction proliferation and terrorism.

RECOMMENDATION 10: Accelerate integration of effort among the counterproliferation, counterterrorism, and law enforcement communities to address WMD proliferation and terrorism issues; strengthen expertise in the nuclear and biological fields; prioritize pre-service and in-service training and retention of people with critical scientific, language, and foreign area skills; and ensure that the threat posed by biological weapons remains among the highest national intelligence priorities for collection and analysis.

RECOMMENDATION 11: The United States must build a national security workforce for the 21st century.

RECOMMENDATION 12: U.S. counterterrorism strategy must more effectively counter the ideology behind WMD terrorism. The United States should develop a more coherent and sustained strategy and capabilities for global ideological engagement to prevent future recruits, supporters, and facilitators.

RECOMMENDATION 13: The next administration must work to openly and honestly engage the American citizen, encouraging a participatory approach to meeting the challenges of the new century.

Global Trends 2025

The National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2025 Report takes a broader view of how world developments could evolve over the next two decades. Its main conclusion is that “[t]he international system—as constructed following the Second World War—will be almost unrecognizable by 2025 owing to the rise of emerging powers, a globalizing economy, an historic transfer of relative wealth and economic power from West to East, and the growing influence of nonstate actors. By 2025, the international system will be a global multipolar one with gaps in national power2 continuing to narrow between developed and developing countries. Concurrent with the shift in power among nation-states, the relative power of various nonstate actors—including businesses, tribes, religious organizations, and criminal networks—is increasing. The players are changing, but so too are the scope and breadth of transnational issues important for continued global prosperity. Aging populations in the developed world; growing energy, food, and water constraints; and worries about climate change will limit and diminish what will still be an historically unprecedented age of prosperity”.

The Council’s conclusions regarding the future trajectory of terrorism does not dispute the findings of World at Risk, but points to a possible course of action that could diminish such threats: “Terrorism, proliferation, and conflict will remain key concerns even as resource issues move up on the international agenda. Terrorism is unlikely to disappear by 2025, but its appeal could diminish if economic growth continues and youth unemployment is mitigated in the Middle East. Economic opportunities for youth and greater political pluralism probably would dissuade some from joining terrorists’ ranks, but others—motivated by a variety of factors, such as a desire for revenge or to become “martyrs”—will continue to turn to violence to pursue their objectives”.

In addition, the Global Trends 2025 Report puts forward four fictionalized scenarios highlighting “new challenges that could emerge as a result of the ongoing global transformation. They present new situations, dilemmas, or predicaments that represent departures from recent developments. As a set, they do not cover all possible futures. None of these is inevitable or even necessarily likely; but, as with many other uncertainties, the scenarios are potential game-changers”:

* In A World Without the West, the new powers supplant the West as the leaders on the world stage;

* October Surprise illustrates the impact of inattention to global climate change; unexpected major impacts narrow the world’s range of options;

* In BRICs’ (Brazil, Russia, India and China) Bust-Up, disputes over vital resources emerge as a source of conflict between major powers—in this case two emerging heavyweights—India and China;

* In Politics is Not Always Local, nonstate networks emerge to set the international agenda on the environment, eclipsing governments.

Forging a New Shield

Finally, the Project on National Security Reform’s Forging a New Shield finds that a new concept of national security is urgently needed in the USA: “we must learn to think differently about national security and devise new means to ensure it. The Cold War-era concept of national security has broadened as new categories of issues have pushed their way onto the national security agenda; yet others are bound to arrive in coming years, too, without neat labels or instructions for assembly and operation. This means that the operative definition of security itself must change from an essentially static concept to a dynamic one.”

The Report argues hat “…national security must be conceived as the capacity of the United States to define, defend, and advance its interests and principles in the world. The objectives of national security policy, in the world as it now is, therefore are”:

1. to maintain security from aggression against the nation by means of a national capacity to shape the strategic environment;

2. to anticipate and prevent threats;

3. to respond to attacks by defeating enemies;

4. to recover from the effects of attack; and to sustain the costs of defense To maintain security against massive societal disruption as a result of natural forces, including pandemics, natural disasters, and climate change To maintain security against the failure of major national infrastructure systems by means of building up and defending robust and resilient capacities and investing in the ability to recover from damage done to them.

In light of these objectives, the Reports identifies five key problems wih the current US national security system:

1. The system is grossly imbalanced. It supports strong departmental capabilities at the expense  of integrating mechanisms;

2. Resources allocated to departments and agencies are shaped by their

3. narrowly defined core mandates rather than broader national missions.
The need for presidential integration to compensate for the systemic inability to adequately integrate or resource missions overly centralizes issue management and overburdens the White House.

4. A burdened White House cannot manage the national security system as a whole to be agile and collaborative at any time, but it is particularly vulnerable to breakdown during the protracted transition periods between administrations; and

5. Congress provides resources and conducts oversight in ways that reinforce the first four problems and make improving performance extremely difficult.

The report concludes that when “[t]aken together, the basic deficiency of the current national security system is that parochial departmental and agency interests, reinforced by Congress, paralyze interagency cooperation even as the variety, speed, and complexity of emerging security issues prevent the White House from effectively controlling the system.

Consequently, the Report’s authors believe that a new National Security System must:

1. Mobilize and marshal the full panoply of the instruments of national power to achieve national security objectives;

2. Create and sustain an environment conducive to the exercise of effective leadership, optimal decision-making, and capable management ;

3. Devise a more constructive relationship between the executive branch and Congress appropriate for tackling the expanded national security agenda successfully;

4. Generate a sustainable capacity for the practice of stewardship—defined as the long-term ability to nurture the underlying assets of American power in human capital, social trust and institutional coherence—throughout all domains of American statecraft.

Finally, the Report puts forwards a series of recommendations designed to meet the objectives described above and which, if implemented, “…would constitute the most far-reaching governmental design innovation in national security since the passage of the National Security Act in 1947″, grouped under the following six rubrics:

1. adopting new approaches to national security system design focused on
national missions and outcomes, emphasizing integrated effort, collaboration, and agility;

2. focusing the Executive Office of the President on strategy and strategic
management;

3.  decentralizing the modalities of policy implementation by creating interagency teams and interagency crisis task forces, even as strategy formulationis are centralized;

4. linking resources to goals through national security mission analysis and mission budgeting;

5. aligning personnel incentives, personnel preparation, and organizational culture with strategic objectives;

6. greatly improving the flow of knowledge and information; and

7. building a better executive-legislative branch partnership.

Together, these three reports constitute the most up-to-date strategic thinking of the US intelligence and strategic epistemic community regarding the threats and opportunities facing the world in general, and the USA in particular, over the next two decades. Its conclusions and recommendations will undoubtedly constitute the starting point from which President-Elect Barak Obama and his National Security Team, led by his Secretary of State nominee, Sen. Hillary Clinton, will develop the foreign policy of the United States over the next four years. As such, they constitute essential reading not only for students of strategy and international politics, but for all global citizens who intend to take a proactive part in shaping our common future over the coming years.