National Sustainable Security Infrastructure

National Sustainable Security Infrastructure

Our nation cannot sustainably face the challenges of the 21st Century with a National Security Infrastructure architected to engage strategies, tools and methodologies focused on fighting wars under a Cold War Command and Control paradigm. Continuing to do so would only blind us to the most probable strategic threats we now face that lay outside of a Cold War and Global War on Terrorism context. Continuing at current trends, our national security systems could potentially contribute to a crippling of our nation’s broader socio-ecological fabric, while our national security experts spend far too much of our national attention and resources on problems stemming from “the last war.” The Project on National Security Reform (pNSR) has made it abundantly clear that we have delayed essential reforms for so long that more radical transformation is now necessary.

President Obama recognizes the need for a change in our National Security System that goes far beyond the ending of the Iraq war. He and his key advisors are likely to engage a National Sustainable Security Infrastructure that is architected to extend far beyond successful countermeasures to terrorism, while maintaining sufficient historical capabilities to meet challenges from adversaries with asymmetric attack plans, conventional weapons and WMD. However, in addition, the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure must do far more than extend our traditional defense systems. It must now engage a re-architected national security infrastructure to successfully address the opportunities and dangers of economic long-wave phenomenon, climate change, other aspects of global change and novel 21st Century challenges. As if this were not difficult enough to accomplish in the window of opportunity available to successfully anticipate, prevent and manage these concerns in a proactive manner, it must be accomplished with many of the resources that could have been used for a graceful transition, now squandered on an elective war in Iraq and an economy in collapse.

We now have to address the harder questions that have been taboo over the past eight years. The question, “What must be done to ensure that our nation seizes its window of opportunity to address our emerging mission critical sustainable security gaps?” is only the start. Now that a significant transformation toward a National Sustainable Security Infrastructure can no longer be delayed without serious consequences, how should new approaches to management and governance be engaged?

How should our most advanced scientific and technological resources be redirected to enable our national security initiatives to successfully target our society’s highest priorities? How can we immediately get to work on long-neglected current and emerging challenges and opportunities, with budgetary and acquisition policies that will resist change and perpetuate antiquated systems for years to come?

At this time in history, we no longer have the luxury of squandering our national security resources on ineffective bureaucracy at the expense of our highest priority mandates. Neither can we lose touch with the less novel necessities of shoring up conventional weapon systems in this process of finally facing the strategic threats that have so long be neglected and ignored regarding global change and economic downturn. Unfortunately, in the complexity of the world we now face, terrorism and traditional adversaries will not disappear.

Even though these weapons may drop out of the media spotlight, as we engage soft power policies to avoid the threats of terrorism and conventional war in the short run, we cannot be left defenseless in the medium and long-term against old or new adversaries. We also have a moral obligation, if we retain the capabilities to engage significant military power, to address the need for modernizing weapon systems that achieve “smartpower” objectives through deterrence. In addition, if we know that these conventional weapons generate unnecessarily large collateral damage if ever used, we must continue to refine the effectiveness of systems to eliminate violent and coercive powers, with little or no impact on innocents. Even though, in the best case scenarios, countermeasures to conventional threats may remain idle under smartpower strategies, we unfortunately cannot miss anticipatory opportunities to modernize antiquated counter-measures to coercive or violent adversaries, while at the same time we are under significant pressure to direct new resources to address social crisis associated with global change and severe economic downturn.

That said, without rapid adequate transformation directing immediate attention and significant resources to prevention and management of social crisis associated with economic downturn and global change – our nation’s shift to sustainable human security could remain under-funded for years under rigid hierarchical systems. We cannot wait for transformation until collapsing systems force change – only after the emergence of strategic vulnerabilities reach criticality. This would leave the United States highly susceptible to catastrophic conditions to which we cannot successfully adapt without unacceptable losses in the quality of life and functional life capacity of Americans. The establishment of a National Sustainable Security Infrastructure, with a U.S. Resilience System as a robust component, provides Americans with an alternative course toward sustainability and resilience in the face of all our significant 21st Century challenges.

With our National Sustainable Security Infrastructure and U.S. Resilience System building out with adequate stimulus resources during the first years of the Obama Administration, we can now face the discomforting questions of whether the U.S. government and American society in the years and decades ahead will be able to transform themselves successfully. We will have the infrastructures in place to help our most vulnerable Americans weather deep economic downturn. We will have established an infrastructure and system to anticipate and proactively address the most strategic 21st Century challenges to our society, which are less likely to come from terrorism or threats to our sovereignty from conventional military threats alone, than from collapses in local, regional, and global socio-ecological carrying capacities over the next two decades.

The pNSR argues that a U.S. National Security Reform discourse must now be engaged at the highest levels of the U.S. government. Those assembling to architect the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure (NSSI) and U.S. Resilience System (USRS) are also further arguing that the discourse and initial experiments have long been engaged, yet without sufficient resources or visibility during our 43rd President’s tenure. The American public, with appropriate USRS infrastructures in place, are ready to act in concert with the top experts to be a part of the solution in our transition to a viable NSSI.

Our key representatives with a clear vision of the NSSI and USRS are now engaging the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure and U.S. Resilience System at the international, national, federal, regional, state, and local levels – all the way down to the community, neighborhood, and household levels. We are fully aware that resilience and sustainability in America will only come by ultimately empowering the American public to actively embrace resilience and sustainability in service from the local level up, while American leadership in the Executive Branch and Congress simultaneously provides American society with the policies, mandate and resources to engage solutions productively through timely and measurable systematic interventions. The U.S. Resilience System and the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure are now ready for this engagement with the whole of American society, but need the policy and financial means to carry out their vital mandates.

It is time to immediately fund productive engagements of the U.S. Resilience System through federal resources to be matched over time with private sector, non-profit, state, and community resources. In the ashes of the Iraq war, the long suppressed USRS has now become the least controversial and most important component of our National Sustainable Security Infrastructure. With soft power in ascendancy, the long neglected, non-coercive and non-violent aspects of the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure can finally be released to shape the rapidly emerging 21st Century elements of what will truly make America great, strong, and secure during the 21st Century. In doing so using a FAC paradigm that has interoperable value across the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure, the USRS becomes the most crucial instrument of transformation for America’s national security.

Only from broad ownership and involvement in such a fundamental transformation will American society meet the challenges ahead successfully. During the campaign and the Presidential transition period, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and their supporters have done a brilliant job of engaging the public in ways that reach far beyond the usual political boundaries. However, this will become harder to maintain without the appropriate and timely build out of the U.S. Resilience System and the transformative restructuring of the U.S. Sustainable Security Infrastructure.

As American society now tests novel approaches and engages a process that can anticipate, cushion and protect our society from the impacts of economic downturn and world changing global events, the systematic build up of our sustainable security systems are essential. Without concerted attention and a new level of cooperation and unity of effort enabled by a maturing U.S.R.S. within a transforming U.S. National Sustainable Security Infrastructure, we could see casualties, not just in the thousands (as in the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina), but potentially in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Americans (such as due to a pandemic or collapsing ecosystems). Unfortunately, these numbers, which seem so large from an American perspective, are already playing out in other parts of the world (e.g., Indian Ocean Basin Tsunami, Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar, Darfur, the global food and global water crises).

The “Official Future” and Carrying Capacities

The most important activity for the Obama/Biden Administration to engage is to once and for all time dispel the myth of the “Official Future of the United States” as having no carrying capacity concerns that might impose any limitations on the way we behave individually and collectively in our global, regional, and local ecosystems and socio-ecological environments. The idea that America can grow exponentially in its population and consumption of non-renewable resources without serous negative consequences to Americans and the world is scientifically bankrupt. We, as a nation, can still grow in our wealth and power during the 21st Century; but only if we refine our definitions of wealth and power to include the wisdom and moral courage to live well and do good free from the misconceptions of our health, quality or life, and functional life capacities being intrinsically tied to exponential material consumption and excess military capacity, which has brought our nation to the precipice of domestic economic and global ecological collapse.

Unfortunately, the concept of the “Official Future of the United States” with no carrying capacity constraints has had significant political influence over the minds of Americans, when promulgated by the White House in recent administrations. It has reinforced and sometimes promoted an attractive myth that serious carrying capacity concerns, such as global climate change, need not be considered in the mainstream of public discourse, legislation, and our nation’s political agenda. The dominant message from the Executive Branch in recent years – in contrast to the scientific consensus – has been that there are no carrying capacity issues (including, but not limited to climate change and peak oil) that the United States need concern itself with in the process of maintaining and expanding the viability and superiority of U.S. systems.

This is a fraudulent concept playing on some of our most basic human desires to live in comfort without constraint. The overwhelming evidence from systems science – now emerging from careful observation of our planetary environments – is that further uncaring over-extension of our society’s global socio-ecological limits within a mass consumption and non-renewable resource-dependent global market is no longer feasible. The growing global outcry over the dire outcomes from further extending the “official future” beyond sustainable levels can no longer be ignored. Americans will now benefit more from balanced, realistic, and less ideological messages and policies, matched by behavioral and social patterns that pragmatically open new balanced economic patterns and frameworks for sustainable security.

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of the transition toward resilience and sustainability is going to be the shift in consciousness and the behavior change necessary in the vast majority of Americans. Ultimately, America’s future, and the health, quality of life, and functional life capacities of its citizens, are not up to their representatives in Congress and the White House alone. It is even more dependent upon their willingness to shift from being a part of the problem in over-extending carrying capacities to embodying within themselves the wisdom and balance to live with resilience and sustainability within a much reduced ecological footprint. It is dependent upon a shift demonstrated by their attitudes and behaviors. It is in this shift that the U.S. will find its economic recovery and leadership in the 21st Century.

If Americans continue to project the blame for the rapid economic downturn on the decisions of the Bush Administration alone, which has unfortunately hidden the evidence of carrying capacity concerns from the American people in the interests of short term gain, we as a culture will not have the deeper understanding, momentum and initiative necessary to rectify our course and move forward as one. Americans must now use the opportunity of having a president who truly believes in the power of a form of governance of the people, by the people, and for the people. Americans must assume not only the rights of citizenship, but also the responsibilities of citizenship — to be the change that we now collectively need to recover America’s future, and reinvent it within the constraints and still abundant opportunities within a 21st Century context.

America’s future is not pre-destined. It is of our making. There can be no “official future” without carrying capacities. We must build together a future that is resilient and sustainable from a set of scenarios, which provide opportunity and freedom for the individual pursuing their own happiness in a manner that also address the common good and the basic needs of all.

Every American must realize that a change in U.S. policies in the form of a National Sustainable Security Initiative — together with their individual and collective behavior engaged through the U.S. Resilience System — can now secure a resilient and sustainable future for all Americas and their communities of interest globally. As a result of this broad-based shift, the U.S., and most other economies around the world, now reeling from the over-extension of basic carrying capacities, will have a way forward through similar resilience systems and approaches to sustainable security.

Resilience and sustainability are not something that the United States will do to or for other nations. It is something our destiny shares and benefits from, with all other humans and societies on this spectacularly beautiful small planet. Now challenged by potentially catastrophic human-induced global changes, it is time to retire the blind neglect of the “official future.” In its place, we now begin a more sophisticated and science-based exploration of scenarios and options to deal with the many constraints and opportunities that we must shape to create futures that can be ours by wise, proactive, and cooperative engagement.

Proactive engagement in the fundamental transformation of U.S. infrastructures is now essential to ensure America’s and humanity’s successful adaptation under current carrying capacity constraints. Additionally, by engaging thoughtful anticipatory design and sharing a common operating picture and prospective best practices with peoples around the world, we can collectively engage the U.S. Resilience System as an alternative to clandestine, retrospective analysis hidden within stovepiped, classified systems alone. As a result of adopting the open source platform of the USRS, freely accessible to the American public, we now have a vehicle for cutting through delayed response from calcified and ineffective bureaucracies, unable to escape historical cycles of reactive and ineffective adaptation to fundamental change. We now have an approach to overcome the tendencies to engage only incremental reforms in a National Sustainable Security Infrastructure initiative sufficient to meet our 21st Century challenges head on.

Our society’s discourse regarding sustainable security on a broad and deep level within the U.S. public agenda and policy agenda is now being engaged and heeded. Because of its centrality to the health, well-being, prosperity, and security of Americans and their communities of interest worldwide, it has to have President Obama’s and Vice President Biden attention in the earliest days of forming their Administration. Thus an ideologically based “official future” serving historical vested interests, at the expense of the interests of the majority of the American public, can be replaced with an evidence-based sustainable future for all Americans.

Discourse on the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure

It is time to engage the discourse between the people of the United States and their federal government on the development of a new interoperable National Sustainable Security Infrastructure capable of enveloping our entire society’s sprawling domestic and international security apparatus. The National Sustainable Security Infrastructure must be designed from a 21st Century science and technology base with a 21st Century management and governance process — sufficient to assess and meet the challenges of the next few decades. The Project on National Security Reform (pNSR) clearly makes the case that incremental reform is no longer viable and radical transformation is now necessary.

In its Analysis of Options for Reform, the pNSR states:

“Considered separately or as a whole, these reforms are robust; even radical. They need not be adopted in toto, and hybrid solutions drawing upon some or all of these options are possible. However, the United States will need to adopt some combination of the reforms offered in this paper if it wants a national security system that consistently produces unified purpose and effort.”

As the policy development process of the pNSR discourse meets processes engaged to build and test the next generation national security infrastructure, the requirement set of a National Sustainable Security Infrastructure must not only to successful in defeating and degrading external threats; It must also protect against the risks of implosion or significant degradation from relying on antiquated systems beyond their design limitations. Arguably, in a time of severe economic downturn, maintaining massive expenditures on a large defense enterprise, extended far beyond the capacities of its original enterprise architectures, could be one of the U.S. National Security System’s most fundamental vulnerabilities. One of the criticisms of the Project on National Security Reform is that it only lays out a plan for changing the top strategic layer of the U.S. government in future years, whereas change needs to be operationalized quickly throughout U.S. society to address mission-critical gaps now.

Layering on more patches to an already overextended and collapsing paradigm, which promotes hard power as synonymous with national security to the exclusion of other national security imperatives, would increase, rather than decrease, the vulnerability of Americans. This is not only because it may unnecessarily bleed resources from other essential expenditures protecting the health and well-being of the American public and their communities of interest overseas. In addition to deflecting our federal government’s gaze from more important issues of national sustainable security, it may give a false sense of security, while creating a moral hazard of excess military capacity misperceived by a future Executive Branch or Congress as military superiority.

In his last speech about the military industrial complex President Eisenhower warned the American people against our defense sector growing beyond the point of utility and control, while becoming a self-perpetuating instrument of war. The use of our own biological weapons against the American people and our own government by one or more of our own top military scientists during the Anthrax attacks of 2001 was only one of a number of incidents of this kind to become widely known. One wishes that the American people and its elected representatives had heeded the lessons of the nuclear arms race during the Cold War, and its closest moment of mutually assured destruction in the Cuban Missile crisis, to more wisely and assertively turn us back from further attempts to seek security primarily through further escalation of military means.

Now with many obvious failures in our ability to assert U.S. public policy through hard power alone (counting the losing of the Vietnam War and the failure of the Iraq War at great expense, in lives and our public treasury), the U.S. military has further lost its value as a deterrent in the eyes of the world. In addition, the unilateral assertion of its military power in Iraq and in the broader “Global War on Terror” has created great suspicions around the world about the United States’ sincerity in working constructively with other nations for mutual benefit.

it is now abundantly clear that military means may, in some cases, provide an essential security window in which to conduct diplomacy and constructive policy, but is does not provide a constructive outcome by itself in the complex world we now live in. The assertion of hard power in the absence of constructive policy, especially if it violates the Geneva Convention and other international laws, such as in the cases of torture in Abu Ghraib prison and in detention centers at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, further degrades U.S. stature in working with other nations and their people. The Obama Administration’s National Sustainable Security approach must now remove the stain of this country’s assertion of hard power under highly suspect and questionable conditions during the first decade of the 21st Century.

It is clearly time to move toward a more stable foundation for sustainable security. We can count our nation as lucky that the lethal game of confusing excess military capacity with military superiority has not been even more immediately devastating to the health and well-being of the American public and to other people around the world. With the introduction of DoD Doctrine 3000.05 (focusing on reconstruction and stabilization), DoD Instruction 2205.02 (beginning the focus on activities on preventing conditions leading to war), and the closing of the Iraq war, we now have the opportunity to turn our nation forward again toward sustainable security. It is time to provide an infrastructure designed to sustain security with less likelihood that U.S. ambitions to retaliate or assert forward-leaning foreign policy through military means to the detriment of our national security, as in the case of the Iraq war, will go unchecked.

Although perhaps not receiving the same level of attention from the American public as health care reform among immediate concerns – an American public now directly burdened by the health care crisis under the further weight of significant economic downturn – transformation of national security requires immediate attention from the new Administration. This work may perhaps need to be conducted a bit more quietly than the primary focus on the health of Americans. As the Obama Administration stands up the top layers of its new security apparatus answerable to our new President, it will be significantly challenged to provide a budget addressing the emerging national sustainable security priorities, in ways that may not yet be intuitively apparent within the mainstream National Security discourse. President Obama and his Administration may be forced to make the most sweeping changes to U.S. National Security infrastructure since the end of World War II, whether these changes are politically popular or not. Counter-pressures by traditional defense industry special interests will likely be significant to improving the sustainable security for the American public, if it includes any moves to redirect budgets of historic but outdated importance to new sustainable security programs.

President Obama’s affinity for soft power and his Secretary of State’s affinity for smart power (combining an interweaving of military power with diplomacy) will likely shift the National Security apparatus, at least at the top, from its center of gravity under George W. Bush leaning forward toward preemptive war on real and imagined state and stateless threats. The current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recognizes the need for this transition and has already undertaken efforts to shift resources away from kinetic war toward reconstruction and stabilization, and to a lesser degree toward prevention and management of socio-ecological conditions that might in some cases enable the U.S. to expend resources it could better use toward other societal activities outside of war.

Significant initiatives toward building up conventional military assets are unlikely in the months ahead, considering no significant newly emerging military threat against the U.S. A more nuanced effort to prevent and manage social crisis, ideally when possible, short of war, is likely to replace the Bush Administration’s preoccupation with the “Global War on Terrorism.” The purpose of this discourse on the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure is to explore the advantages and disadvantages of transformation, as well as more incremental reform toward establishing a viable National Sustainable Security System, in a time when our national security could be potentially seriously compromised due to systems collapses outside of the traditional domain of “defense.”

To state that our National Security System must be architected to be sustainable is obvious. However, for the general public and their political representatives to grasp the relatively complex set of ideas that will shape an optimized National Sustainable Security System may be quite difficult. There may be an understandable political calculus involved in selling the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure as an incremental improvement of our largely 20th Century National Security Infrastructure, stemming from the cold war-inspired National Security Act of 1947. Nonetheless, an incremental approach to reform that would attain sustainability in 15 to 20 years, when systems collapses are already on the near term horizon, will not be acceptable.

The Obama Administration may provide simple explanations to the public for the complex adaptive systems of the NSSI. It would do so, at great peril, if over-simplified educational approaches locks these new systems into compromised framework of political rhetoric that informs legislation which encumbers all developmental processes within the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure by extruding them through current hierarchical controlled acquisition systems. This is why funding elements of the NSSI, and especially the USRS would ideally come as part of an economic stimulus package.

Contemplating the enemy within, in terms of self-evaluation of the consequences of our own actions is always a difficult process, especially for government and bureaucracies interested in their own perpetuation and expansion regardless of circumstance. Given the maturity and inertia of the U.S. bureaucracies, this issue may become one of the largest struggles between our new President and Congress, as well as between Obama Administration Cabinet members and their civil service and enlisted service sector layer, if the NSSI discourse is not engaged appropriately. Rapid change will require educational processes -- neither dumbing down the science, nor misleading the public as to the intentions and essential scope of the NSSI. The best type of education would involve public participation through the USRS.

A backdrop is provided below for why a broadened definition of the U.S. National Sustainable Security Infrastructure is necessary now, and why we need to start scaling up rapid prototyping versions of a U.S. Resilience System immediately (whether one believes reform is sufficient or that deeper transformation is necessary). The key to exploring the new possibilities that transformation provides to counter systems collapses within American critical infrastructure (and around the world in advance of global systems reaching the point of criticality) is to implement FAC teams within the nascent U.S. Resilience System, tested against 10 simulated and real world “experiments,” over the next two and a half years. During and following these tests, it will become abundantly clear why new non-hierarchical, non-controlled systems will be essential to replace expensive and non-responsive bureaucracies. Only with new system elements, such as the USRS, scaling up to ensure the success of efforts to prevent and manage social crises, will protect the health and well-being of Americans and the socio-ecological systems upon which their lives depend in months and years ahead, will our nation’s future remain secure.

As Barack Obama engages the full power of his Presidency, he and his Administration will need to work with Congress on economic stimulus packages, directed beyond the horizon of the bailouts provided so far. Moneys must also be spent on essential new infrastructure elements, which will soon be a critical factor in assessing and managing social crises emerging from our current economic downturn. Along with the challenges stemming from inheriting the problems of past administrations and the commonplace conflicting agendas of foreign actors, our new President must also have National Sustainable Security Infrastructure assets, such as those available through the U.S. Resilience System, to be prepared to deal with international relations, stressed to the breaking point by new levels of scarcity, from spinning out of balance.

Shifting Our Point of View of What Constitutes Sustainable Security

There is no question regarding there being well resourced and well organized communities of good and smart people dedicating their efforts to maintaining American infrastructure against conventional military, WMD, terrorist, and natural threats. It is widely understood that a significant level of effort is being performed on essentially all parts of the hard and conventional soft infrastructure that protects America from various threats. This class of defense activity is necessary for an advanced society in our highly complex world of competing economic and social forces. What has not been widely understood in the late 20th Century and the first few years of the 21st Century, is that the seeds of our society’s degradation, collapse, and demise may arise from the over-extension of our strengths.

Many cultures and religions throughout history have emphasized balance and centering as essential to health and harmony. Unfortunately, from within mainstream America (accustomed to the past half century of massive, undifferentiated growth and excess military capacity) it has been nearly impossible to help the American public and their leadership understand that within the successful rapid expansion of advanced economies and social systems — especially those dependent upon non-renewable resources, easy credit and large commitments of resources to coercive policies and state-sanctioned instruments of violence — there is a natural tendency to overshoot sustainable conditions. Essential cues of excess and vulnerabilities to our existing infrastructures can easily be missed until negative impacts are inevitable, if the realities of carrying capacity and exponential growth are not understood.

As our institutions start approaching carrying capacities, identifiable counter-pressures to further expansion often grow exponentially. At the point of overshooting carrying capacity, the evidence of negative consequences from further expansion can be scientifically evaluated from retrospective anaylsis, with less allowance for uncertainty but greater likelihood of significant damage. The key, however, is to enable the public, especially the most vulnerable public to use an anticipatory science base that helps them escape dangerous patterns of mass behavior reinforcing overshoot and collapse that increase their risks. They will, of course, only be able to be part of the solution if the evidence of over-extension is not hidden by interests that benefit financially or politically in the short term from the perpetuation of current misguided trends.

Unfortunately, the electorate and their representatives must ensure that the very institutions that have provided us with material wealth, comfort, and protection against domestic and foreign threats do not perpetuate the expansion of their bureaucracies with such momentum that their strengths extend their initiatives beyond the point of diminishing returns, and potential collapse. This threat in a substantial and rapid economic downturn is all too real today. The curbing of special interest politics will play a key role in ensuring that unbiased evidence and science drives our nation’s decision making on our sustainable security. But the problem is not simply a matter of the most crass self-interested manipulation of policy. In a time of massive transformation such as this, substantial inertia and potential conflicts arise as change conflicts with the fundamentals of long-standing threads of culture.

It is not difficult to find highly competent American defense analysts (with a point of view grounded in 20th Century warfare training, and extensive experience within the defense community during the early years of the 21st Century) who hold the belief that conventional U.S. national security and defense systems are evolving well. Given their focus on the more tactical elements of defense, perhaps directly experiencing gaps in the robust and dynamic state of the systems they work on, there will be a natural tendency to be protective of the defense industries, and want to expand defense systems they have labored hard within, and, in some cases, have defended at the risk of their life or livelihood. Those who make a living at an operational level within the defense sector, be they enlisted or civilian, may also have a tendency to believe that as long as the funding increases in defense of recent years can continue, our nation will be secure. They remain unaware of the evidence to the contrary, as America slips strategically toward the brink of economic and ecological collapse.

Unfortunately, belief structures (patterned by ideology and self interest informed by the extremes of the liberal or conservative political traditions) tend to bias the public against certain types of evidence. For example, the evidence of human-induced climate change, has until recently been ignored by the mainstream partly due to a spiral of silence reinforced by religious and political leaders and religious, political, or military doctrine. In the years ahead, even those working at the tactical level within government bureaucracies or smaller supportive defense companies and other industries, will need to have access to improved situational awareness of global change and economic issues to gain a better systems perspective, in order to overcome historical biases that now threaten our nation’s ability to adapt to exponential change.

The U.S. Resilience System, as part of the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure can provide a common operating picture, and better educational opportunities. It can provide just-in-time information resources to help with essential short term responses. In addition, over time it will help Americans redirect their careers, as opportunities shift away from their current occupation, opening up new horizons in the larger sustainable security infrastructure, and its associated green economy.

Our U.S. national security infrastructure must now be broadened to address our most glaring mission-critical gaps within an extended definition of the U.S. National Sustainable Security Infrastructure. Some of the most significant mission critical gaps that have appeared during the first decade of the 21st Century have arisen from an over-exuberant belief in hard power during the Bush Administration. This belief has diminished U.S. capabilities to engage smart power blending America’s hard power assets with non-coercive/non-violent soft power programs. With the failure of the Iraq War to deliver any discernable benefit to Americans, at great expense in lives and U.S. treasury, the pendulum is beginning to swing decisively and rapidly toward soft power. But what is needed is more than just a smart power approach with more balance between hard power and soft power. Americans and their political leadership need a National Sustainable Security Infrastructure that in addition to improving the level of intelligence in which America engages in the world theatre, it must also deal with new threats of social crisis associated with severe economic downturn and global change as sustainable security threats.

It is in addressing this new class of the threats, and vulnerabilities, that American citizens and their representatives will begin to realize the true value of the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure, and its additional benefits in also decreasing the risks of terrorism, the threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction, and conventional warfare. Only by developing the NSSI in a manner to address these new threats along with our historical defense concerns (with more intelligent engagement new non-coercive infrastructure) will the U.S. remain resilient and sustainable in the early to mid 21st Century. The fact that there is a class of significant imminent threats and vulnerabilities, which have been known to the scientific community for three decades or more, that are just now beginning to be perceived as possible emerging threats and vulnerabilities worthy of attention as national security threats by the White House, DoD, and other federal agencies, is the major reason the U.S. requires a more broadly defined National Sustainable Security Infrastructure — with a better anticipatory capacity. The U.S., now a couple of decades late in engaging significant resource flow to develop the core scientific, technological, and operational infrastructures to threats stemming from exponential change, must rapidly retool and reorganize to face severe economic downturn and global change.

Human Security Index and Anticipatory Science

As we build the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure, our new anticipatory capacities within sustainable human/machine infrastructure require new ways of assessing risk, vulnerability and resilience using simulation and prospective data. The Human Security Index, (as a generational improvement over the Enhanced Human Development Index) provides a new set of measures by which we can think about trends and their impact on our future. The issues of sustainable security placed in appropriate context by the Human Security Index provide us with new resolution on the priorities of our decisions and actions.

Under the threat of severe economic decline and global change, the tools and methods of the sciences of complexity can help us understand how to systematically face our highest priority challenges. As projected and validated over the past 30 years, for example within the World3 model, we can understand how complex threats can be monitored and managed far more carefully. The bottom line is that during a severe economic downturn, a highly lethal pandemic, or standard-run global change scenarios (including one or more of the following: rapid and significant climate change, peak oil, severe water shortages, ecosystem collapses), the safety net will deteriorate rapidly for well over a billion people and potentially 2 billion people worldwide. Today, we do not have a resilient and sustainable infrastructure to enable the American people, and their communities of interest worldwide, to maintain basic needs and social order under scenarios like the collapse of our highly complex, interconnected global economy.

The reality is that U.S. mass consumption is shrinking and is likely to continue to shrink, as China’s and India’s mass consumption trends grow until they collapse under significant global counter-pressures, or alternatively are wisely brought into balance using an anticipatory science base. To think that the U.S. is protected against massive multi-system discontinuities in its soft infrastructure is no longer an issue of myopia. It can only be explained as denial. The collapse over the past year in the U.S. housing industry, banking system, credit industry, energy supply systems, transportation industry, and health system makes it evident to the unbiased observer that significant change must take place to protect the resilience and sustainability of American society.

Although we are rapidly applying the economic tools invented during the Great Depression to the current downturn, our country is far more complex today. It is responding to the 110th Congress’ economic stimulus packages sluggishly at best. For the purposes of examining the sustainability of our National Security apparatus, it would be prudent to question whether the tools of 75, 50, 25, or even 10 years ago are still well adapted to managing severe economic downturn. What if the economic stimulus and other mechanisms applied to deal with the complex set of systems failures we are now experiencing in our domestic and global markets do not stem the collapse?

In fact, the tools and methodologies now being applied were not designed to deal with the collapse of late cycle exponential growth and the complexity of our globally interdependent markets. To just look at one factor, a half century ago we were living in a cash economy. Today, a far larger amount of financial transactions are in flux every day than exists in our entire global monetary system.

The considerations of exponential global socio-ecological change and ecosystem carrying capacity issues are in fact an order of magnitude more complex. The American economy and its societal infrastructures as they are currently organized – including its historic National Security Infrastructure-- are highly dependent upon domestic mass consumption and inexpensive greenhouse gas emitting energy systems. Unfortunately, current U.S. systems are not immune, as current conditions demonstrate, to massive multi-system downturn and potential collapse. Severe social consequences of complex systems collapses can only be prevented and managed if systems disorders can be observed, anticipated, and managed as complex adaptive systems.

U. S. Resilience System within the NSSI

Within the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure discourse, the U.S. must soon confront whether it can now engage sufficient resilient and sustainable infrastructure in a timely manner to fall back on during significant economic downturn and global change. Will the U.S. government have appropriate systems in place to protect American citizens, and U.S. interests around the world, from the types of social crises that will emerge during significant economic downturns or societal systems collapses. The "U.S. Resilience System," will need to be scaled up quickly, before the consequences of its absence are inevitable.

Engaging the USRS after the fact may not be an option, given the substantial investment in social capital involved in fully enabling it. The delay in building and scaling the U.S. Resilience System is likely to result in significantly larger human and economic cost than doing so proactively, assuming it were possible to build resilience into our infrastructure after the fact.

There are 775 million people without sufficient food today around the world. David Nabarro, Special Assistant to the Secretary General of the United Nations, in November of 2008 stated that the UN believes that number will go to over 1.1 billion people with insufficient access to food within three years, given estimated impacts from the current global economic decline. Well over a 800 million people do not have access to clean water. Life-sustaining water supplies are expected to become rapidly more scarce and inaccessible to ever larger populations around the world as global changes accelerate. Ecosystems in many countries, and even in local areas in the United States such as the water systems and agricultural systems in the Southwest, are approaching massive discontinuities and collapse.

Those who have an understanding of complex adaptive systems, and who have been in many real world events and simulated crisis events with top officers and key decision makers in this country and other countries, know that hierarchical controlled systems often fail to respond effectively. They all too often miss the window of opportunity they have to address a novel challenge successfully, instead applying linear deductive reasoning and attempting to assert their control after the greatest damage is already done. Unaided by anticipatory science, trigger point-based best practices, situational awareness, clear management of mission critical gaps, and the ability to engage unity of effort amongst diverse, independent institutions, the fog of social crisis rapidly envelops the representatives that citizens entrust to protect them, while resilience and sustainable security collapse.

The current situations in Zimbabwe and Burma (Myanmar)are clear examples of this problem, and how over-dependence on coercive and violent force further reduces a society’s capacity for resilience and sustainable security, while centralized decision-makers struggle to remain in control of escalating chaotic circumstances. Many natural and simulated experiments have been followed to study what the top officers see and don't see in fast moving events, when they are limited to the use of retrospective science. Recollection of the Hurricane Katrina disaster will quickly dispel any myth that this cannot happen within the United States.

It is clear that U.S. infrastructures within this country and overseas are not currently designed to address the types of complex problems we now face. In the absence of a National Sustainable Security Infrastructure built on a Focus, Agility, and Convergence model of management and governance with an embedded U.S. Resilience System, we have been vulnerable. Our government has largely ignored the exponential change taking place, as well as the carrying capacity issues, and instead has engaged incremental solutions that just exacerbate a larger set of problems. As stated by President Obama, “we can do better.”

Advancing Science, Technology, and an Empowered Citizenry

We need systems architected with knowledge that is grounded in the sciences of complexity and globalizing intelligent social networks that are tested and proven to be resilient against threats like a highly pathogenic H5N1 pandemic and climate change, as well as against novel terrorist threats, such as 747s flown into buildings by jihadists, and denial of service attacks by cyberterrorists. The HHS-led National Framework is a good start, but it misses the necessary activities (such as third generation biosurveillance capabilities and systems of organizing behavioral and social immunity) to even deal effectively with a single source threat like a pandemic. In addition, the silos separating the HHS-led National Framework from the competing and sometimes conflicting National Strategy put out by DHS since the release of the National Framework leave our nation vulnerable to mission critical delays in our Incident Command Systems. The greatest vulnerability, however, is that we do not have the systems in place to constructively engage citizens at the home, neighborhood, and community levels, where most of the key decisions are made and where actions have to be taken that will determine who will live and who will die in a pandemic, and several other system crash scenarios.

On the international front, our current systems are not well suited to the Phase 0, 1, and 5 interventions (according to the taxonomy of the DoD phases of war) that are now needed to stabilize situations like Iraq and Afghanistan or reduce the likelihood of falling into future wars that could have been prevented. If someone like Al Santoli, a former marine twice awarded the Purple Heart medal is correct, sending more "irregular warfare specialists" into places like the Muslim communities of the Philippines with “guns, barbed wire and antennas” during the current food crisis is going to do little to avert the very high likelihood of growing social crisis and civil war. The people of the Philippines, Sierra Leone, North Korea, Burma (Myanmar), the D.R Congo, and a myriad of other nations already facing the overextension of their socio-ecological carrying capacities, need a path toward resilience and sustainability. Short of a true path to resilience and sustainability, they are potentially not far behind Sudan and Zimbabwe, in terms of social crisis and socio-political collapse during a significant global economic downturn. Establishing viable resilience and sustainability in collapsing socio-ecological conditions requires a different kind of infrastructure, which is the essence of the U.S. Resilience System.

The problem is not primarily a physical infrastructure problem and it is not going to be resolved by regime change alone. The problems we are now facing are large-scale and escalating socio-ecological problems that are unaddressed by the massive coercive and often violent national security systems around the world. There is widespread agreement that the US has a world-class national security infrastructure hardened against a coercive enemy, natural disasters short of global change, and even economic downturns down to the equivalent of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Nevertheless it is not responsive to managing sustainable human security under conditions of multi-system meltdown or significant global change. A U.S. Resilience System must be architected and scaled up in advance of social crises arising from such eventualities, if the U.S. is to provide a sufficient safety net to American citizens and their communities of interest around the world.

Decisions We Must Make Now

We do not yet have the systems we now require in terms of knowledge management and intelligent social networks, operating as complex adaptive systems, except in early prototype form. Our current National Security infrastructure, in all its complexity and robustness, is not designed to prevent, respond to, recover from, or mitigate multi-system socio-ecological meltdowns at the global, regional, and local level. The systems that exist at DoD, State, USAID, and many NGOs are a start, but they do not go far enough or deep enough to address our 21st Century global concerns.

Our homeland security systems are moving in the right direction, but must be augmented to enhance citizen engagement at the community level. If we are truly trying to assess our mission critical gaps within our National Sustainable Security Infrastructure, we will have to go further to understand some painful realities about our current situation. When a national government is $55 trillion in debt and its people are living at many times their sustainable ecological footprint and are 30% to 40% beyond their current economic means, throwing trillions more at 20th Century infrastructures that are in multi-system collapse is not a viable solution.

We must, of course, take action to cushion the impact of the declines in our 20th Century infrastructures on the American public, while we build viable and resilient 21st Century infrastructures. That said, where is the source of investment in the U.S. infrastructures going to come from, if China, Japan, and other foreign investors in the United States decide that throwing many more trillions into a U.S. economic recovery is no longer in their economic or political interests? What happens if social crises in the 40 nations that are now in food crisis begins to expand rapidly to spill over into neighboring nations (e.g., Burmese boat people arriving in Thailand) with the aggregate effect significantly impacting the global economic system and the stability of regions, like the Middle East, Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia? What if Southeast Asia, for example, falls into social crisis (as the U.S. Resilience Summit 2008 explored in its simulation of the aftermath of a category 4 typhoon hitting the Mekong Delta)? It is great that our fiber networks and computers will continue to function properly, our special forces are well armed, our bombs are smarter, and our nuclear weapons are still deployable, but that misses the point regarding the protection of the health and well-being of the American people.

We need a viable resilient and sustainable infrastructure that the American people and the good people of other nations around the world can rely on to ensure their access to food, clean water, health services, energy, transportation, communication, waste management, and other basic essentials as depicted in STAR-TIDES. This is feasible but not under the limitations of our current National Security infrastructure. The Project on National Security Reform is a great start in reshaping the top levels of the U.S. government, but its current discourse must go broader and deeper into creating viable vehicles to effect the changes that are necessary to address severe economic downturn and global change in a timely manner, all the way down to the local level. This is the point of leverage in which the U.S. Resilience System must be introduced into the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure discourse.

We have to seize the current window of opportunity to build a viable National Sustainable Security Infrastructure, and rapidly scale up the experiments with the U.S. Resilience System, and its FAC Teams, Resilience Networks, STAR-TIDES, and Trust Networks. The American public and the world have taken a deep breath during the current change in American presidential leadership, and invested great political capital in President Obama. This window of opportunity will close quickly if the real changes expected from the Obama Administration do not address the challenges at hand, while the pain of social crises increases.

The Window of Opportunity for the Obama Administration

Citizens at home and abroad have tentatively and temporarily suspended disbelief in the viability of current U.S. systems in the hopes that President Obama will perform political and economic magic. Even if President Obama and his Administration is able to turn around the current economic crisis in a few months or a few years, it is still best that we rapidly put in place a U.S. Resilience System to address the needs of vulnerable populations. In addition, Americans need a fallback position during the current economic recovery efforts (e.g., the American car industry bailout, the housing industry bailout, the insurance industry bailout, the banking industry reform, the credit industry bailout, the restructuring of the U.S. energy systems, and health system reform) and in case the stimulus efforts are not successful. If the recovery goes like clock work under the Obama Administration so that multi-system meltdown is avoided, and we implement a viable National Sustainable Security Infrastructure with a robust, rapidly growing U.S. Resilience System, we will be able to focus on helping the expanded number of vulnerable communities within the United States and have the capacity to help other in need around the world cope with the difficult recession and recovery periods ahead, while ramping up to mitigate the impacts of global change.

If the U.S. recovery plans do not go as well as the American public and its leadership expect in a timeframe that is acceptable to all the global stakeholders, having a National Sustainable Security Infrastructure with a robust U.S. Resilience System would guarantee that Americans would have a viable system of healthy food, clean water, renewable energy, green transportation, communication, and other necessities to fall back on at a fraction of our current ecological footprint. By participating in the trigger point-based best practices in the U.S. Resilience System, Americans can actively become a part of the solution in preventing and managing undesirable aspects of economic downturn and global change. They would have the knowledge and organization to address problems at the local level until more systematic help can be provided.

With the U.S. Resilience System as a free open source platform for their actions, Americans will not be looking for politicians to blame. They will be actively transforming their lives building the green economy and living sustainably within resilient communities. In this way, Americans will again inspire the citizens of other nations to become part of the solution. Americans will collectively be leading the way toward successfully mitigating the impacts of global climate change and economic recovery, with the citizens of other societies.

It is proposed that the following U.S. Resilience System components (already operating in several pilots around the U.S.) are operating effectively throughout the United States and in all regions around the world by 2012:

- Resilience Networks for Managing Resilience and Sustainability

- FAC-enabled Health, Humanitarian, and Disaster Management Teams

- STAR-TIDES-associated Logistics and Distribution Systems

- Trust Networks for Proactively and Non-coercively Managing Conflict

To have these systems fully functional by 2012, we need to immediately start focusing our social capital and invest a small percentage of our economic stimulus in the new elements of the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure, in particular within the U.S. Resilience System. These new investments in fundamental infrastructure providing a safety net for all American can then become a platform for rapidly growing our green economy. This new economy is at the heart of our economic recovery and our ability to face global change in the years and decades ahead with a wisdom that protects and enlivens all humanity.
Our nation cannot sustainably face the challenges of the 21st Century with a National Security Infrastructure architected to engage strategies, tools and methodologies focused on fighting wars under a Cold War Command and Control paradigm. Continuing to do so would only blind us to the most probable strategic threats we now face that lay outside of a Cold War and Global War on Terrorism context. Continuing at current trends, our national security systems could potentially contribute to a crippling of our nation’s broader socio-ecological fabric, while our national security experts spend all our national attention and resources on problems stemming from “the last war.” The Project on National Security Reform (pNRS) has made it abundantly clear that we have delayed essential reforms for so long that more radical transformation is now necessary.

President Obama recognizes the need for a change in our National Security System that goes far beyond the ending of the Iraq war. He and his key advisors are likely to engage a National Sustainable Security Infrastructure that is architected to extend far beyond successful countermeasures to terrorism, as well as maintaining sufficient historical capabilities to meet challenges by adversaries with asymmetric attack plans, conventional weapons and WMD. However, in addition, the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure must do far more than extend our traditional defense systems. It must now engage a re-architected national security infrastructure to successfully address the opportunities and dangers of economic long-wave phenomenon, climate change, other aspects of global change and novel 21st Century challenges. As if this were not difficult enough to accomplish in the window of opportunity we have to successfully anticipate, prevent and manage these concerns in a proactive manner, it must be accomplished with many of the resources that could have been used for a graceful transition, now squandered on an elective war in Iraq and an economy in collapse.

We now have to address the harder questions that have been taboo over the past eight years. The question, “What must be done to ensure that our nation does not miss its window of opportunity to address our emerging mission critical sustainable security gaps, such as with global climate change?” is only the start. Now that a significant transformation toward a National Sustainable Security Infrastructure can no longer be delayed without serious consequences, how should new approaches to management and governance be engaged?

How should our most advanced scientific and technological resources be redirected to enable our national security initiatives to successfully target our society’s highest priorities? How can we immediately get to work on long-neglected current and emerging challenges and opportunities, with budgetary and acquisition policies that will resist change and perpetuate antiquated systems for years to come?

At this time in history, we no longer have the luxury of squandering our national security resources on ineffective bureaucracy at the expense of our highest priority mandates. And, in this process of finally facing the strategic threats that have so long be neglected and ignored regarding global change and economic downturn, we cannot lose touch with the less novel necessities of shoring up conventional weapon systems. Unfortunately, in the complexity of the world we now face, terrorism and traditional adversaries will not disappear.

Even though they may drop out of the media spotlight, as we engage soft power policies to avoid the threats of terrorism and conventional war in the short run, we cannot be left defenseless in the medium and long-term against old or new adversaries. We also have a moral obligation, if we retain the capabilities to engage significant military power to not ignore the need for modernizing weapon systems that achieve “smartpower” objectives through deterrence. In addition, if we know that they generate unnecessarily large collateral damage, if ever exercised, we must continue to refine the effectiveness of systems to eliminate violent and coercive powers, with little or no impact on innocents. Even though, in the best case scenarios, countermeasures to conventional threats may remain idle under smartpower strategies, we unfortunately cannot miss anticipatory opportunities to modernize antiquated counter-measures to coercive or violent adversaries, while under significant pressure to direct new resources to address social crisis associated with global change and severe economic downturn.

That said, without rapid adequate transformation directing immediate attention and significant resources on prevention and management of social crisis associated with economic downturn and global change – our nation’s shift to sustainable human security could remain under-funded for years under rigid hierarchical systems. We cannot wait for transformation until collapsing systems force change – only after the emergence of strategic vulnerabilities reach criticality, making the United States highly susceptible to catastrophic conditions we cannot successfully adapt to without unacceptable losses in the quality of life and functional life capacity of Americans. The establishment of a National Sustainable Security Infrastructure, with a U.S. Resilience System as a robust component, provides Americans with an alternative course toward sustainability and resilience in the face of all our significant 21st Century challenges.

With our National Sustainable Security Infrastructure and U.S. Resilience System building out with adequate stimulus resources during the first years of the Obama Administration, we can now face the discomforting questions of whether the U.S. government and American society in the years and decades ahead will be able to transform itself successfully. We will have the infrastructures in place to help our most vulnerable Americans weather deep economic downturn. We will have established an infrastructure and system to anticipate and proactively address the most strategic 21st Century challenges to our society, which are less likely to come from terrorism or threats to our sovereignty from conventional military threats alone, than from collapses in local, regional, and global socio-ecological carrying capacities over the next two decades.

The pNSR argues that a U.S. National Security Reform discourse must now be engaged at the highest levels of the U.S. government. Those assembling to architect the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure (NSIS) and U.S. Resilience System (U.S.R.S.) are also further arguing that the discourse and initial experiments has long been engaged, yet without sufficient resources or visibility during our 43rd President’s tenure. The American public with appropriate U.S.R.S. infrastructures in place are ready to act in concert with the top experts to be a part of the solution in our transition to a viable NSIS.

Our key representatives with a clear vision of the NSIS and USRS are now engaging the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure and U.S. Resilience System at the international, national, federal, regional, state, and local levels – all the way down to the community, neighborhood, and household levels. We are fully aware that resilience and sustainability in America will only come by ultimately empowering the American public to actively embrace resilience and sustainability in service from the local level up, while American leadership in the Executive Branch and Congress simultaneously provides American society with the policies, mandate and resources to engage solutions productively through timely and measurable systematic interventions. The U.S. Resilience System and the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure are now ready for this engagement with the whole of American society, but need the policy and financial means to carry out their essential mandates.

It is now time to immediately fund productive engagements of the U.S. Resilience System through federal resources to be matched over time with private sector, non-profit, state, and community resources. In the ashes of the Iraq war, the long suppressed USRS has now become the least controversial and most important component of our National Sustainable Security Infrastructure. With soft power in ascendancy, the long neglected, non-coercive and non-violent aspects of the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure, can finally be released to shape the rapidly emerging 21st Century elements of what will truly make America great, strong, and secure during the 21st Century. In doing so using a FAC paradigm that has interoperable value across the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure, the USRS becomes the most crucial instrument of transformation for America’s national security.

Only from broad ownership and involvement in such a fundamental transformation will American society meet the challenges ahead successfully. During the campaign and the Presidential transition period, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and their supporters have done a brilliant job of engaging the public in ways that reach far beyond the usually political boundaries. However, this will become harder and harder to maintain without the appropriate and timely build out of the U.S. Resilience System and the transformative restructuring of the U.S. Sustainable Security Infrastructure.

As American society now tests novel approaches and engages a process that can anticipate, cushion and protect our society from the impacts of economic downturn and world changing global events, the systematic build up of our sustainable security systems are essential. Without concerted attention and a new level of cooperation and unity of effort enabled by a maturing U.S.R.S. within a transforming U.S. National Sustainable Security Infrastructure, we could see casualties, not just in the thousands (as in the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina), but potentially in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Americans (such as due to a pandemic or collapsing ecosystems). Unfortunately, these numbers, which seem so large from an American perspective, are already playing out in other parts of the world (e.g., Indian Ocean Basin Tsunami, Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar, Darfur, the global food crisis, and global water crisis)

The “Official Future” and Carrying Capacities

The most important activity for the Obama/Biden Administration to engage is to once and for all time dispel the myth of the “Official Future of the United States” as having no carrying capacity concerns to impose any limitations on the way we behave individually and collectively in our global, regional, and local ecosystems and socio-ecological environments. The idea that America can grow exponentially in its population and consumption of non-renewable resources without serous negative consequences to Americans and the world is no longer just bankrupt scientifically. We, as a nation, can still grow in our wealth and power during the 21st Century; but only if we refine our definitions of wealth and power to include the wisdom and moral courage to live well and do good free from the misconceptions of our health, quality or life, and functional life capacities being intrinsically tied to exponential material consumption and excess military capacity, which has brought our nation to the precipice of domestic economic and global ecological collapse.

Unfortunately, the concept of the “official future of the United States” with no carrying capacity constraints has had significant political influence over the minds of Americans, when promulgated by the White House in recent administrations. It has reinforced and sometimes promoted an attractive myth that serious carrying capacity concerns, such as global climate change, need not be considered in the mainstream of public discourse, legislation, and our nation’s political agenda. The dominant message from the Executive Branch in recent years -- in contrast to the scientific consensus – has been that there are no carrying capacity issues (including, but not limited to climate change and peak oil) that the United States need concern itself with in the process of maintaining and expanding the viability and superiority of U.S. systems.

This is a fraudulent concept playing on some of our most basic human desires to live in comfort without constraint. The overwhelming evidence from systems science -- now emerging from careful observation of our planetary environments -- is that further uncaring over-extension of our society’s global socio-ecological limits within a mass consumption and non-renewable resource-dependent global market is no longer feasible. The growing global outcry of dire outcomes from further extending the “official future,” beyond sustainable levels, can no longer be ignored. Americans will now benefit more from balanced, realistic, and less ideological policies, matched by behavioral and social patterns that pragmatically open new sustainable economic patterns and frameworks for sustainable security.

Perhaps, the most difficult aspect of the transition toward resilience and sustainability, is going to be the shift in consciousness and behavior change necessary in the vast majority of Americans. Ultimately, America’s future, and the health, quality of life, and functional life capacities of its citizens, are not up to their representatives in Congress and the White House alone. It is even more dependent upon their willingness to shift from being a part of the problem in over-extending carrying capacities to embodying within themselves, demonstrated by their attitudes and behaviors, the wisdom and balance to live with resilience and sustainability within a much reduced ecological footprint. It is in this shift that the U.S. will find its economic recovery and leadership in the 21st Century.

If Americans continue to project the blame for the rapid economic downturn on the decisions of the Bush Administration alone, which has unfortunately hidden the evidence of carrying capacity concerns from the American people in the interests of short term gain, we as a culture will not have the deeper understanding, momentum and initiative necessary to move forward as one. Americans must now use the opportunity of having a president who truly believes in the power of a form of governance of the people, by the people, and for the people. Americans must assume not only the rights of citizenship, but also the responsibilities of citizenship -- to be the change that we now collectively need to recover America’s future, and reinvent it within the constraints and still abundant opportunities within a 21st Century context.

America’s future is not pre-destined. It is of our making. There is no “official future” with no carrying capacities. We must build together a future that is resilient and sustainable from a set of scenarios, which provide opportunity and freedom for the individual pursuing their own happiness in a manner that also address the common good and the basic needs of all Americans..

Every American must realize that a change in U.S. policies in the form of a National Sustainable Security Initiative -- together with their individual and collective behavior engaged through the U.S. Resilience System -- can now secure a resilient and sustainable future for all Americas and their communities of interest globally. As a result of this broad-based shift, the U.S., and most other economies around the world, now reeling from the over-extension of basic carrying capacities, will have a way forward through similar resilience systems and approaches to sustainable security.

Resilience and sustainability is not something that the United States will do to or for other nations. It is something, however, our destiny shares and benefits from, with all other humans and societies on this spectacularly beautiful small planet. Now challenged by potentially catastrophic human-induced global changes, it is time to retire the blind neglect of the “official future.” In its place, we now begin a more sophisticated and science-based exploration of scenarios and options to deal with the many constraints, and opportunities that we must shape to create potential futures that can be ours, by wise, proactive, and cooperative engagement.

Proactive engagement in the fundamental transformation of U.S. infrastructures is now essential to ensure America’s and humanity’s successful adaptation under current carrying capacity constraints. Additionally, by engaging thoughtful anticipatory design and sharing a common operating picture and prospective best practices with peoples around the world, we can collectively engage the U.S. Resilience System as an alternative to clandestine, retrospective analysis hidden within stovepiped, classified systems alone. As a result of adopting the open source platform of the U.S.R.S., freely accessible to the American public, we now have a vehicle for cutting through delayed response from calcified and ineffective bureaucracies, unable to escape historical cycles of reactionary and ineffective adaptation to fundamental change. We now have an approach to overcome the tendencies to engage incremental reforms alone in a National Sustainable Security Infrastructure initiative sufficient to meet our 21st Century challenges head on.

Our society’s discourse regarding sustainable security on a broad and deep level within the U.S. public agenda and policy agenda is now being engaged. Because of its centrality to the health, well-being, prosperity, and security of Americans and their communities of interest worldwide, it has to have President Obama’s and Vice President Biden attention in the earliest days of forming their Administration. By doing so, the replacement of an ideologically based “official future” serving historical vested interests, at the expense of the interests of the majority of the American public, can now be replaced with an evidence-based sustainable future for all Americans.

Discourse on the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure

It is time to engage the discourse, between the people of the United States and their federal government, on the development of a new interoperable National Sustainable Security Infrastructure capable of enveloping our entire society’s sprawling domestic and international security apparatus. The National Sustainable Security Infrastructure must be designed from a 21st Century science and technology base with a 21st Century management and governance process -- sufficient to assess and meet the challenges of the next few decades. The Project on National Security Reform (pNSR) clearly makes the case that incremental reform is now longer viable and radical transformation is now necessary.

In its Analysis of Options for Reform, the pNSR states:

“Considered separately or as a whole, these reforms are robust; even radical. They need not be adopted in toto, and hybrid solutions drawing upon some or all of these options are possible. However, the United States will need to adopt some combination of the reforms offered in this paper if it wants a national security system that consistently produces unified purpose and effort.”

As the policy development process of the pNSR discourse meets processes engaged to build and test the next generation national security infrastructure, the concept of a National Sustainable Security Infrastructure must shaped not only to successful not defeat and degrade external threats, but it must also protect against the risks of implosion or significant degradation from over-extending antiquated systems beyond their design limitations. Arguably, in a time of severe economic downturn, maintaining massive expenditures on a large defense enterprise, extended far beyond the capacities of its original enterprise architectures, could be one of the U.S. National Security System’s most fundamental vulnerabilities.

Layering on more patches to an already overextended and collapsing paradigm, which promotes “hard power as synonymous with national security” to the exclusion of other national security imperatives, would increase, rather than decrease, the vulnerability of Americans. This is not only because it may unnecessarily bleed resources from other essential expenditures protecting the health and well-being of the American public and their communities of interest overseas. In addition to deflecting our federal government’s gaze from more important issues of national sustainable security, it may give a false sense of security, while creating a moral hazard of excess military capacity misperceived by a future Executive Branch or Congress as military superiority.

President Eisenhower in his last speech about the “military industrial complex” warned the American people against our defense sector growing beyond the point of utility and control, while becoming a self-perpetuating instrument of war. The use of our own biological weapons against the American people and our own government by one or more of our own top military scientists during the Anthrax attacks of 2001 was only one of a number of incidence of this kind that has become widely known. One might think that the American people and its elected representatives would have heeded the lessons of the nuclear arms race during the Cold War, and its closest moment of mutually assured destruction in the Cuban Missile crisis, to more wisely and assertively turn us back from further attempts to seek security primarily through further escalation of military means.

Now with many obvious failures in our ability to assert U.S. public policy through hard power alone (counting the losing of the Vietnam War and the failure of the Iraq War at great expense, in lives and our public treasury), the U.S. military has further lost its value as a deterrent in the eyes of the world. In addition, the unilateral assertion of its military power in Iraq and in the broader “Global War on Terrorism” has created great suspicions around the world about the United States’ sincerity in working with other nation’s for mutual benefit.

it is now abundantly clear that military means may, in some cases, provide an essential security window in which to engage diplomacy and constructive policy, but is does not provide a constructive outcome by itself in the complex world we now live in. The assertion of hard power in the absence of constructive policy, especially if it violates the Geneva Convention and other international laws, such as in the cases of torture in Abu Ghraib prison and in detention centers at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, further degrades U.S. stature in working with other nations and their people. The Obama Administration’s National Sustainable Security approach regrettably must now undo the stain of this country’s assertion of hard power under highly suspect and questionable conditions during the first decade of the 21st Century.

It is clearly time to move toward a more stable foundation for sustainable security. We can count our nation as lucky that the lethal game of confusing excess military capacity as military superiority has not been even more immediately devastating to the health and well-being of the American public and to other people around the world. With the introduction of DOD Doctrine 3000.05 (focusing on reconstruction and stabilization), DOD Instruction 2205.02 (beginning the focus on activities on preventing conditions leading to war), and the closing of the Iraq war, we now have the opportunity to turn our nation forward again toward sustainable security. It is time to provide an infrastructure designed to sustain security with less likelihood that U.S. ambitions to retaliate or assert forward-leaning foreign policy through military means to the detriment of our national security, as in the case of the Iraq war, will go unchecked.

Although, perhaps not receiving the same level of attention of health care reform as an immediate concern from the American public (now directly burdened by the health care crisis under the further weight of significant economic downturn) transformation of national security requires immediate attention from the new Administration, if perhaps a bit more quietly than the primary focus on the health of Americans. As the Obama Administration stands up the top layers of its new security apparatus answerable to our new President, it will be significantly challenged to provide a budget addressing the emerging national sustainable security priorities, in ways that may not yet be intuitively apparent within the mainstream National Security discourse. President Obama, and his Administration, may be forced, whether it is politically popular or not, to make the most sweeping changes to U.S. National Security infrastructure since the end of World War II. Counter-pressures by traditional defense industry special interests will likely be significant to improving the sustainable security to the American public, if it includes any moves to redirect budgets of historic, but now outdated importance to new sustainable security programs.

President Obama’s affinity for soft power and his secretary of state’s affinity to smart power (combining an interweaving of military power with diplomacy) will likely shift the National Security apparatus, at least at the top, from its center of gravity under George W. Bush leaning forward toward preemptive war on real and imagined state and stateless threats. The current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recognizes the need for this transition and has already undertaken efforts to shift resources away from kinetic war toward reconstruction and stabilization, and to a lesser degree at this point toward prevention and management of socio-ecological conditions that might in some cases enable the U.S. to expend resources it could better use toward other societal activities outside of war.

There will unlikely be new initiatives toward building up conventional military assets in the months ahead, considering no significant newly emerging military threat against the U.S. A more nuanced effort to prevent and manage social crisis, ideally when possible, short of war, is likely to replace the Bush Administration’s preoccupation with the global war on terrorism. The purpose of this discourse on the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure is to explore the advantages and disadvantages of transformation, as well as more incremental reform toward establishing a viable National Sustainable Security System, in a time when our national security could be potentially seriously compromised due to systems collapses outside of the traditional domain of “defense,” as well as being further impacted from other conventional and novel threats.

To state that our National Security System must be architected to be sustainable is obvious. However, for the general public and their political representatives to grasp the relatively complex set of ideas that that will shape an optimized National Sustainable Security System may be quite difficult. There may be an understandable political calculus involved in selling the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure (NSSI) as an incremental improvement of our largely 20th Century National Security Infrastructure, stemming from the cold war-inspired National Security Act of 1947. That said, an incremental approach to reform that would get us to sustainability in 15 to 20 years, when systems collapses are already on the near term horizon, will not be acceptable.

The Obama Administration may provide simple explanations to the public for the complex adaptive systems of the NSSI. It would do so, at great peril, if over-simplified educational approaches locks these new systems into the over-simplified framework of political rhetoric that informs legislation which encumbers all developmental processes within the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure by extruding them through current hierarchical controlled acquisition systems. Contemplating the enemy within, in terms of self evaluation of the consequences of our own actions is always a difficult process, especially for government and bureaucracies interested in their own perpetuation and expansion regardless of circumstance. Given the maturity and inertia of the U.S. bureaucracies, this issue may become one of the largest struggles between our new President and Congress, as well as between Obama Administration Cabinet members and their civil service and enlisted service sector layer, if the NSSI discourse is not engaged appropriately, neither dumbing down the science, nor misleading the public as to the intentions and essential scope of the NSSI.

Below, a backdrop is provided for why a broadened definition of the U.S. National Sustainable Security Infrastructure is necessary now, and why we need to start developing and implementing rapid prototyping versions of a U.S. Resilience System immediately, whether one believes reform is sufficient or transformation is necessary. The key is to exploring the new possibilities that transformation might provide to counter systems collapses within American critical infrastructure and around the world in advance of systems reaching the point of criticality is to implement FAC teams within the nascent U.S. Resilience System, tested against 10 simulated and real world “experiments,” over the next two and a half years. During and following these tests, it should be abundantly clear why new systems requiring substantial resources to build will be essential to ensure the success of efforts to prevent and manage social crises, that might otherwise compromise the health and well-being of Americans and the socio-ecological systems upon which their lives depend in months and years ahead.

As Barack Obama assumes the full power of the Presidency, he and his Administration will need to work with Congress on economic stimulus packages, directed beyond the horizon of the bailouts provided so far. Moneys must also be spent on essential new infrastructure elements, which will soon be a critical factor in assessing and managing social crises emerging from our current economic downturn. Along with the challenges stemming from the historical artifacts of assuming the problems of past administrations and the conflicting agendas of foreign actors, our new President must also have National Sustainable Security Infrastructure assets, such as those available through the U.S. Resilience System, to be prepared to deal with a world spinning out of balance.

Shifting Our Point of View of What Constitutes Sustainable Security

There is no question regarding there being well resourced and well organized communities of good and smart people laboring away on maintaining American infrastructure against conventional military, WMD, terrorist, and natural threats. It is widely understood that a significant level of effort is being performed on essentially all parts of the hard and conventional soft infrastructure that protects America from various threats. This class of defense activity is necessary for an advanced society in our highly complex world of competing economic and social forces. What has not been widely understood in the late 20th Century and the first few years of the 21st Century, is that the seeds of our society’s degradation, collapse, and demise may arise from the over-extension of our strengths.

It is well understood from within Eastern disciplines like Aikido and Taoism, that balance and centering are essential. Unfortunately, from within mainstream America accustomed to the past half century of largely undifferentiated growth and excess military capacity, it has been nearly impossible to help the American public and their leadership understand that within the successful rapid expansion of advanced economies and social systems -- especially those dependent upon non-renewable resources, easy credit and large commitments of resources to coercive policies and state-sanctioned instruments of violence -- there is a natural tendency to miss cues of excess and vulnerabilities to the infrastructures. As our institutions start approaching carrying capacities, counter-pressures to further expansion emerge and can be scientifically evaluated, (as long as the evidence over-extension is not hidden by interests that benefit in the short term from the perpetuation of current misguided trends).

Unfortunately, the electorate and their representatives must ensure that the very institutions that have provided us with material wealth, comfort, and protection against domestic and foreign threats do not promulgate their worldview and perpetuate the expansion of their bureaucracies with such momentum that their strengths extend their initiatives beyond the point of diminishing returns, and potential collapse. This threat in a substantial and rapid economic downturn is all too real. The curbing of special interest politics will play a key role in ensuring that unbiased evidence and science drives our nation’s decision making on our sustainable security. But the problem is not simply a matter of the most crass type of self-interested manipulation of policy, in a time of massive transformation such as this, substantial inertia and potential conflict arises as change conflicts with the fundamentals of long-standing threads of culture.

It is not difficult to find highly competent American defense analysts (with a point of view, based upon training in 20th Century warfare, and extensive experience within the defense community during the early years of the 21st Century) that hold the belief that conventional U.S. national security and defense systems are evolving well. Given their focus on the more tactical elements of defense, perhaps directly experiencing gaps in the robust and dynamic state of the systems they work on, there will be a natural tendency to be protective of the defense industries, and want to expand defense systems they have labored hard within, and, in some cases, have defended at the risk of their life or livelihood. Those that make a living at an operational level within the defense sector (whether enlisted or civilian) may also have a tendency to believe (unaware of the evidence to the contrary) that, as long as the funding increases in defense of recent years can continue, our nation will be secure.

Unfortunately, that belief structure tend to bias them against the evidence of human-induced climate change, especially if further reinforced by religious and political leaders and religious, political, or military doctrine. In the years ahead, even those working at the tactical level within government bureaucracies or smaller supportive defense companies, and other industries, will need to have access to better situational awareness of global change and economic issues to gain a better systems perspective. The U.S. Resilience System, as part of the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure can provide a common operating picture, and better educational opportunities and just-in-time information resources, which over time will help all Americans redirect their careers, as opportunities shift away from their current occupation, but open up new horizons in the larger sustainable security infrastructure, including its green economy.

Having pointed out some of the vulnerabilities to sustainable security that eminate from the U.S. defense sector, short of successful strategic attack with weapons of mass destruction, multi-system system, economic collapse or significant global changes, the traditional defense/intelligence sector, including DOD, DHS, IC, Department of Justice, HHS, and other departments of U.S. federal and state government as well as the civilian military and homeland security complex) are not the main focus of concern within the NSSI, when stating that there is a need to broaden the U.S. national security infrastructure to address our most glaring mission-critical gaps within an extended definition of the U.S. National Sustainable Security Infrastructure, the most significant mission critical gaps appear to arise from a suppression of the potential of new non-coercive/non-violent soft power programs. Generally, the majority of the American people have shared a common view regarding the robustness of mainstream American defense infrastructures for so long, many of which have significant (if perhaps, aging) architectures stemming from the mid to late 20th Century, they don’t yet thoroughly understand the new threats of social crisis associated with severe economic downturn and global change as sustainable security threats.

It is this different class of the threats, vulnerabilities, and National Sustainable Security Infrastructure requirements, which now requires the development of new non-coercive infrastructure to enable the U.S. to remain resilient and sustainable in the early to mid 21st Century. The fact that there is a class of significant imminent threats and vulnerabilities, which have been known to the scientific community for three decades or more, that are just now beginning to be perceived as possible emerging threats and vulnerabilities worthy of attention as national security threats by the White House, DOD, and other federal agencies, is the major reason the U.S. requires a more broadly defined National Sustainable Security Infrastructure -- with a better anticipatory capacity. The U.S. is already a couple of decades late in engaging significant resource flow to develop the core scientific, technological, and operational infrastructures to reduce the current and emerging risks to the American public and their communities of interest around the world in these new areas of concern relating to potential severe economic downturn and global change.

Human Security Index and Anticipatory Science

What appears to be grossly inadequate in maintaining sustainable security in the U.S. is our ability to provide an anticipatory sustainable human/machine infrastructure that addresses the issues assessed in the "Human Security Index," (as a generational improvement over the "Enhanced Human Development Index"). The issues placed in appropriate context by the Human Security Index, especially under severe economic decline and global change as projected and validated over the past 30 years, within the World3 model (for example), can and must be monitored and managed far more carefully. The bottomline is that during a severe economic downturn, highly lethal pandemic, or standard-run global change scenarios (including one or more of the following: rapid and significant climate change, peak oil, severe water shortages, ecosystem collapses), the safety net will deteriorate rapidly for well over a billion people (potentially 2 billion) worldwide over the next decade and a half. Today, we do not have a resilient and sustainable infrastructure to enable the American people, and their communities of interest worldwide, to maintain basic needs and social order under scenarios like the collapse of our highly complex, interconnected global economy, which is dependent upon inexpensive fossil fuels and growing mass consumption markets.

The reality is that U.S. mass consumption is shrinking and is likely to continue to shrink, as China’s and India’s mass consumption trends will likely grow, until they collapse under significant global counter-pressures, or alternatively are wisely brought into balance using an anticipatory science base. To think that the U.S. is protected against massive multi-system discontinuities in its soft infrastructure is no longer an issue of myopia. It can only be explained as denial. Just observing the collapse, over the past year, of the U.S. housing industry, our banking system, credit industry, our energy systems, transportation industry, health system ..., it is evident to the unbiased observer that significant change must take place to protect the resilience and sustainability of American society.

Although we are rapidly applying the economic tools invented during our Great Depression to the current downturn, our country is far more complex today. It is responding to the Bush Administration economic stimulus packages sluggishly at best. For the purposes of examining the sustainability of our National Security apparatus, it would be prudent to question whether the tools of 75, 50 25, or even 10 years ago are still well adapted to managing severe economic downturn. What if they are no longer sufficient to deal with the complex set of systems failures we are now experiencing in our domestic and global markets?

Their primary limitations stem from the fact that they were not designed to deal with late cycle exponential growth and the complexity of our globally interdependent markets. To just look at one factor, a half century ago, we were living in a cash economy. Today, a far larger amount of financial transactions are in flux every day than exists in our entire global monetary system.

The considerations of exponential global socio-ecological change and ecosystem carrying capacity issues are even an order of magnitude more complex. The American economy and its societal infrastructures as they are currently organized – including its historic National Security Infrastructure-- are highly dependent upon domestic mass consumption and inexpensive greenhouse gas emitting energy systems. Unfortunately, current U.S. systems are not immune, as current conditions demonstrate, to massive multi-system downturn (and potential collapse). Severe social consequences of complex systems collapses can only be prevented and managed if systems disorders can be observed, anticipated, and managed as complex systems.

U. S. Resilience System

Within the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure discourse, the U.S. must soon confront whether it can now engage sufficient resilient and sustainable infrastructure in a timely manner to fall back on during significant economic downturn and global change. Will the U.S. government have appropriate systems in place to protect American citizens, and U.S. interests around the world, from the types of social crises that will emerge during significant economic downturns or societal systems collapses. The "U.S. Resilience System," will need to be scaled up quickly, before the consequences of its absence are inevitable.

Engaging The U.S.R.S., after the fact, may not be an option, given the substantial costs involved in fully enabling it. Even when building resilience into our infrastructure is an option after the fact, at least for our less vulnerable populations, the delay in building and scaling the U.S. Resilience System is likely to result in significantly larger human and economic cost than doing so proactively.

There are 775 million people without sufficient food today around the world. David Nabarro, Assistant Secretary of the U.N., in November of 2008 stated that the UN believes that number will go to over 1.1 billion people with insufficient access to food within three years, given current estimated impacts from the current global economic decline. Well over a 800 million people do not have access to clean water. Access to life-sustaining water supplies are expected to become rapidly more scarce to even larger populations around the world as global changes accelerate. Ecosystems in many countries, and even in local areas in the United States (e.g. water systems and agricultural systems in the Southwest) are approaching massive discontinuities and collapse.

Those that have an understanding of complex adaptive systems, that have been in many real world events and simulated crisis events with top officers and key decision makers in this country and other countries, know that key decision-makers in hierarchical controlled systems often fail to respond effectively. They all too often miss the window of opportunity they have to address a novel challenge successfully, by applying linear deductive reasoning and asserting their control through top down hierarchical systems. Unaided by anticipatory science, trigger point-based best practices, situational awareness, clear management of mission critical gaps, and the ability to engage unity of effort amongst diverse, independent institutions, the fog of social crisis rapidly envelops the representatives that citizens entrust to protect them, while resilience and sustainable security collapses.

The current situations in Zimbabwe and Myanmar/Burma are clear examples of this problem, and how over-dependence on coercive and violent force further reduces a society’s capacities for resilience and sustainable security, as centralized decision-makers struggle to remain in control of escalating chaotic circumstances. Many natural and simulated experiments have been followed to study what the top officers see and don't see in fast moving events, when they are limited to the use of retrospective science. Just recalling the Hurricane Katrina disaster will quickly dispel any myth that this would not happen within the United States.

It is clear that U.S. infrastructures within this country and overseas are not currently designed to address the types of "wicked" (complex) problems we now face. In the absence of a National Sustainable Security Infrastructure built on a Focus, Agility, and Convergence model of management and governance with an embedded U.S. Resilience System, we have been vulnerable with our government largely ignoring carrying capacity issues, and instead engaging incremental solutions that just exacerbate a larger set of problems. That has to change.

Advancing Science, Technology, and an Empowered Citizenry

We need systems architected with knowledge grounded in the sciences of complexity and globalizing intelligent social networks that are tested and proven to be resilient against threats like a highly pathogenic H5N1 pandemic and climate change, as well as against novel terrorist threats, such as 747s flown into buildings by jihadists, and denial of service attacks by cyberterrorists. The HHS-led National Framework is a good start, but it misses the necessary activities (e.g., third generation biosurveillance capabilities and systems of organizing behavioral and social immunity) to even deal effectively with a single source threat like a pandemic. In addition, the stovepiped impasses between the HHS-led National Framework and the competing and sometimes conflicting National Strategy put out by DHS since the release of the National Framework, leave our nation vulnerable to mission critical delays in our Incident Command Systems. However, the greatest vulnerability is that we do not have the systems in place to constructively engage citizens at the home, neighborhood, and community levels, where most of the key decisions are made and where actions have to be taken that will determine who will live and who will die in a pandemic, and other system crash scenarios.

On the international front, our current systems are not well suited to the Phase 0, 1, and 5 interventions (using the DOD phases of war as a taxonomy) that are now needed to stabilize situations like Iraq and Afghanistan or reduce the likelihood of falling into future wars that could have been prevented. If people like Al Santoli, a former marine with two time purple heart medals is correct, sending more "irregular warfare specialists" into places like the Muslim communities of the Philippines with “guns, barbed wire and antennas” during the current food crisis is not going to do a lot to turn around the very high likelihood of growing social crisis and civil war. The people of the Philippines, Sierra Leone, North Korea, Burma (Myanmar), the Congo, and a myriad of other nations already facing the overextension of their socio-ecological carrying capacities, need a path toward resilience and sustainability. Short of a true path to resilience and sustainability, they are potentially not far behind Sudan and Zimbabwe, in terms of social crisis and socio-political collapse during a significant global economic downturn. Establishing viable resilience and sustainability in collapsing socio-ecological conditions requires a different kind of infrastructure, which is the essence of what we are architecting within the U.S. Resilience System.

The problem is not primarily a physical infrastructure problem and it is not going to be resolved by regime change alone. The problems we are now facing are large-scale and escalating socio-ecological problems that are unaddressed by the massive coercive national security systems around the world. Again, there is widespread agreement that the US has a “world-class” national security infrastructure hardened against a coercive enemy, natural disasters short of global change, and even economic downturns down to the equivalent of the Great Depression of the 1930s. That said, it is not responsive to managing sustainable human security under conditions of multi-system meltdown or significant global change. A U.S. Resilience System must be architected and scaled up in advance of social crisis arising from such eventualities, if it is expected to provide a sufficient safety net to American citizens and their communities of interest around the world.

Decisions We Must Make Now

We do not yet have the systems we now require in terms of knowledge management and intelligent social networks, operating as complex adaptive systems (except in early prototype form). Our current National Security infrastructure, in all its complexity and robustness, is not designed to prevent, respond to, recover from, or mitigate multi-system socio-ecological meltdowns at the global, regional, and local level. The systems we have, for example, at DOD, State, USAID, and many NGOs are a start, but they do not go far enough or deep enough to address our 21st Century global concerns.

Our homeland security systems are a start, but are poorly architected for citizen engagement at the community level. If we are truly trying to assess our mission critical gaps within our National Sustainable Security Infrastructure, we will have to go further to understand some painful realities about our current situation. When a national government is $55 trillion in debt and its people are living at potentially many times their sustainable ecological footprint and are 30% to 40% beyond their current economic means, throwing trillions more at 20th century infrastructures that are in multi-system collapse is not a viable solution.

Yes, we should take action to cushion the impact of the declines in our 20th Century infrastructures on the American public, while we build viable and resilient alternative 21st Century infrastructures. That said, where is the source of investment in the U.S. infrastructures going to come from, if China, Japan, and other foreign investors in the United States decide that throwing many more trillions into a U.S. economic recovery is no longer in their economic or political interests? What happens if the implosion of the 40 nations that are now in food crisis begins to expand rapidly to other nations to significantly impact the global economic system and the stability of regions, like the Middle East, Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia? What if Southeast Asia, for example, falls into social crisis (as the U.S. Resilience Summit 2008 projected in its simulation of the aftermath of a category 4 typhoon hitting the Mekong Delta)? It is great that our fiber networks and computers will continue to function properly, our special forces are well armed, our bombs are smarter, and our nuclear weapons are still deployable, but that misses the point regarding the protection of the health and well-being of the American people.

We need a viable resilient and sustainable infrastructure that the American people and the good people of other nations around the world can rely on to ensure their access to food, clean water, health services, energy, transportation, communication, waste management, and other basic essentials as depicted in STAR-TIDES. This is feasible but not under the limitations of our current National Security infrastructure. The Project on National Security Reform is a start, but its current discourse must go broader and deeper into creating viable vehicles to understand the changes that are necessary to address severe economic downturn and global change in a timely manner. This is the point of leverage in which the U.S. Resilience System must be introduced into the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure discourse.

We have to seize the current window of opportunity to build a viable National Sustainable Security Infrastructure, and rapidly scale the experiments with the U.S. Resilience System, and its FAC Teams, Resilience Networks, STAR-TIDES, and Trust Networks. The American public and the world have taken a deep breathe during the current change in American presidential leadership. However, this window of opportunity will close quickly, if the real changes they have projected on to an Obama Administration do not address the challenges at hand as the pain of social crises increase.

The Window of Opportunity for the Obama Administration

Citizens at home and abroad have tentatively and temporarily suspended disbelief in the viability of current U.S. systems in the hopes that Obama will perform political and economic magic. Even if President Obama and his Administration is able to turn around the current economic crisis in a few months or a few years, it is still best that we rapidly put in place a U.S. Resilience System as a fallback during the current economic recovery efforts (e.g., the American car industry bailout, the housing industry bailout, the insurance industry bailout, the banking industry reform, the credit industry bailout, the restructuring of the U.S. energy systems, and health system reform). If the recovery goes like clock work under the Obama Administration so that multi-system meltdown is avoided, and we implement a viable National Sustainable Security Infrastructure with a robust, rapidly growing U.S. Resilience System, we will be able to focus on helping the expanded number of vulnerable communities within the United States and around the world cope with the difficult recession and recovery periods ahead, while ramping up to mitigate the impacts of global change.

If the U.S. recovery plans do not go as well as the American public and its leadership expect in a timeframe that is acceptable to all the global stakeholders, having a National Sustainable Security Infrastructure with a robust U.S. Resilience System would guarantee that Americans would have a viable system of healthy food, clean water, renewable energy, green transportation, communication, and other necessities to fall back on at a fraction of our current ecological footprint. By participating in the trigger point-based best practices in the U.S. Resilience System, Americans can actively become a part of the solution in preventing and managing undesirable aspects of economic downturn and global change.

With the U.S. Resilience System as a free open source platform for their actions, Americans they will not be looking for politicians to blame they will be actively transforming their lives building the green economy and living sustainably within resilient communities. In this way, Americans will again inspire the citizens of other nations to become part of the solution. Americans will collectively be leading the way toward successfully mitigating the impacts of global climate change, with the citizens of other societies.

It is proposed that the following U.S. Resilience System components (that are already operating in several pilots around the U.S.) are operating effectively throughout the United States and in all regions around the world by 2012:

- Resilience Networks for Managing Resilience and Sustainability

- FAC-enabled Health, Humanitarian, and Disaster Management Teams

- STAR-TIDES-associated Logistics and Distribution Systems

- Trust Networks for Proactively and Non-coercively Managing Conflict

To have these systems fully functional by 2012, we need to immediately start investing a small percentage of our economic stimulus in the new elements of the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure, in particular within the U.S. Resilience System. These new investments in fundamental infrastructure providing a safety net for all American can then become a platform for rapidly growing our green economy. This new economy is at the heart of our economic recovery and our ability to face global change in the years and decades ahead with a wisdom that protects and enlivens all humanity.