[Short draft we have prepared for eventual publication as a book chapter and/or journal article. The first sections summarize key points from our recent report on Whose Story Wins: Rise of the Noosphere, Noopolitik, and Information-Age Statecraft (RAND, 2020). The final sections are new — they offer our follow-on ideas new courses and curricula for teaching grand strategy and statecraft in the future. Original publication date here on blog: October 1, 2020.]
RETHINKING STRATEGY
AND STATECRAFT FOR THE INFORMATION AGE
David Ronfeldt and
John Arquilla
Around the world, national-security and foreign-policy
strategists are having difficulty adapting to the digital age. A rethinking is
needed. For decades, countless writings have pointed this out — ours among them
— and marginal improvements are being made. But it is time to urge a deeper
rethinking in light of new threats and other challenges to so many societies, institutions,
and cultures. The experts are not meeting these threats and challenges well
enough. Nor are strategists looking ahead the best ways possible.
It is not simply a technological matter — advanced
information, communications, and sensing technologies are increasingly
available. Instead, the challenge is mainly cognitive. Adversaries everywhere —
from nations to nonstate networks — are using dark new modes of political,
social, cultural, and psychological warfare against their opponents: wars of
ideas, battles of stories, weaponized narratives, memetic viruses, and
epistemic attacks. New kinds of cognitive warfare are being deliberately
designed to confound analytic and social strengths and exploit weaknesses in
individuals, institutions, and societies as a whole.
Strategists of all stripes — theorists and practitioners —
remain unsettled and often baffled about how best to analyze, organize, and act
amid this stormy flux. Trends and indications around the world suggest that
matters may grow worse before they become better — if they do become better — in the coming years.
The most advisable way ahead for information-age strategists,
especially in the world’s capitals, is to reposition statecraft and grand
strategy by merging two streams of thought: the first involves the well-known
distinction between hard power and soft power; the second engages a lesser-known
distinction about the geosphere, biosphere, and noosphere (the last term means
“realm of the mind,” as we clarify below). At first glance, the two streams may
seem unrelated; but they are starting to come together in ways that should be
recognized — the sooner the better. Doing so reveals a new kind of
information-age statecraft we call “noopolitik” as a successor to traditional “realpolitik.”
HARD POWER VERSUS SOFT POWER
Strategists have traditionally thought and planned primarily
in terms of tangible, material, “hard” forms of power — military forces,
economic capabilities, and natural resources. They refined “realpolitik” in the
19th and 20th centuries to express their hard-power dispositions
as a mode of statecraft that emphasizes seeking relative advantages through
displays, threats, and uses of force. A realization that immaterial,
ideational, “soft” forms of power — ideas, values, norms, and battles for
hearts and minds — may matter as profoundly as “hard” forms of power started to
take hold in the early 1990s, when the end of the Cold War and the relatively peaceful
dissolution of the Soviet Union helped demonstrate the potential effectiveness of
ideational approaches to statecraft. Hard power played a central role in
deterrence and containment strategies from the 1940s to the 1980s; but it was the
West’s soft power (for example, the advocacy of democracy and free flows of
information) that brought the decades of high-stakes confrontations to a
successful, peaceful conclusion. Moreover, by then, the Internet and other
digital information technologies were on the rise, and strategists, most of all
in the United States, were beginning to view information itself as a new form
of power, one that favored the “soft side” of the spectrum.
However, the American idea of soft power contained flaws.
The original definition tended to treat soft power as good and hard power as
bad, or at least as mean-spirited — i.e., soft power was said to be fundamentally
about persuasive attraction, hard power about coercion (Nye, 1990, 2004). But
in actuality, soft power is not just about beckoning in attractive, upbeat,
moralistic ways that make the United States and its allies, friends, and other
like-minded societies look good. It can also be wielded in tough, dark, heavy
ways too, as in psychological efforts to warn, embarrass, denounce, disinform,
deceive, shun, or repel a targeted actor. Moreover, soft power does not
inherently favor the good guys; malevolent leaders — say a Hitler, a Bin Laden,
or various of today’s authoritarians — often prove eager and adept at using
soft-power measures in their efforts to dominate at home and abroad.
Thus, while strategists and other leaders in the more
democratic societies were misconceiving the concept of soft power, even inflating
it into “smart power” by combining hard and soft power (Nye 2009), they neglected
to come up with a doctrinal derivative that could rival hard power’s
realpolitik; indeed, many simply persisted with realpolitik, trying to modify
it to suit the information age. Spread over several decades, this conceptual
inertia, even complacency, has left the United States, and quite often its
allies and friends, at a strategic disadvantage. The American conceptual
arsenal, not to mention those of its allies, is still sorely lacking for
understanding about how to apply soft power. Strategists who believe primarily
in hard power have developed quite set of concepts around it, particularly over
the past two centuries—e.g., realism, geopolitics, balance of power, and
realpolitik itself. A comparable conceptual arsenal has yet to be developed
around soft power.
Meanwhile, various adversaries and competitors of the West
and other liberal societies — from nation-state actors in Russia, China, North
Korea and Iran, to nonstate networks like Al Qaeda, the Islamic State (IS), and
Wikileaks —quickly learned to develop dark approaches to soft power, especially
online, in order to undermine American and other democracies and challenge
their positions in the world. Thus, Moscow fielded new narratives to extol
Eurasianism and deride democracy, while releasing a torrent of deception,
disinformation, reflexive conditioning and de-truthing operations. And Beijing
began concentrating on developing and deploying what it called “discourse
power” as its way of influencing how people think about China and its growing
reach around the world.
In short, democracy’s adversaries began deploying aggressive
soft-power strategies and tactics — lately called “sharp power” (Walker and
Ludwig, 2017a, 2017b) — far more adroitly than ever expected, catching
Washington and other liberal capitals quite unawares and unprepared during the
early years of the 21st century. Nonetheless, rather than rethink matters,
leaders in Washington and elsewhere have continued to neglect America’s soft-power
capabilities; instead, they have reverted to re-emphasizing hard power and
realpolitik (on this point, see Bacevich, 2010).
This state of affairs should be viewed with alarm — it
should prompt an awareness of the urgent need to rethink statecraft for the
information age. In our view, this means shifting away from realpolitik toward
noopolitik, a concept inspired by a second stream of thought.
EMERGENCE OF THE NOOSPHERE
Over the past hundred years, various scientists in Europe,
America, and Russia have worked on developing a stream of thinking about the
geosphere, biosphere, and noosphere. Whether appearing singly or jointly, these
three dimensions work as a set for understanding Earth’s eons of evolution as a
planet. Accordingly, first to evolve was a geosphere, consisting of the earth’s
geological mantle. Next, to evolve was a similarly widespread biological layer,
or biosphere, consisting of plant and animal life, eventually including people.
Third to grow and develop will be an all-encompassing realm of the mind, a
“thinking layer” termed the noosphere. These concepts were all in use by the
1920s, and continue to be today.
The last term emerged when French theologian-paleontologist
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, his friend French mathematician Edouard Le Roy, and
visiting Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky met in Paris in 1922 to
speculate about whether, because of humanity’s growth, our planet would ultimately
evolve a third layer: an all-enveloping noosphere, a term they coined from the
Greek word “noos” meaning “the mind.” Teilhard defined it as a “realm of the
mind,” a “thinking circuit” — in the later words of his colleague, Julian
Huxley, a “web of living thought” and “a common pool of thought” that would
lead to an “inter-thinking humanity.” For Teilhard, it was a spiritual as well
as scientific concept; for Vernadsky, it was strictly a scientific concept —
though both regarded it as having democratic political implications as well.
(Samson and Pitt, 1999)
At first, the concept of the noosphere spread slowly and
selectively among environmental scientists and social activists in the West.
Some early believers are credited with helping to inspire the creation of the
United Nations (UN), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO), and other “noospheric institutions” after World War II. In
addition, the postwar period led to UN-backed covenants that reflected
noospheric hopes, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention
on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, both in 1948. Not
long after, the noosphere concept attracted wide attention in Europe and America
in the 1950s and 1960s following the posthumous publication of Teilhard’s books
on The Phenomenon of Man and The Future of Man, as both became
bestsellers. Even so, the concept still spread mostly among a narrow range of
intellectuals — until the 1990s.
Since then, the rise of the Internet has excited a sense
among myriad theorists and prophets of the information age that cyberspace is
providing a technical foundation for the emergence of the noosphere. While the
concept has still not gone mainstream, it is proliferating far and wide, now at
the level of online platforms and not just individuals — Wired magazine, the Edge
website, Evolution Institute, and various magazines and websites associated
with pro-commons social theory and social activism on the Left often feature
articles supporting the concept’s potential. Indeed, from a political
standpoint, people and platforms on the Left have shown the greatest interest
in the noosphere and its future prospects. Interest on the Right is relatively
rare. Theorists and activists on the Right are deeply interested in
information-related concepts, systems, technologies, and their effects; but
they prefer traditional constructs such as culture, ideology, and the media,
maybe even atmosphere or zeitgeist, over noosphere or other futuristic notions.
Lately, various technologists and other scientists have
preferred concepts that are not focused exactly on the noosphere: e.g.,
collective consciousness, the global brain. But they all still descend partly
from the idea of the noosphere. Moreover, future successes with alternate
concepts are bound to help further the noosphere too. It is here to stay; it
will continue growing in significance and popular usage.
ONWARD INTO THE FUTURE WITH NOOPOLITIK
In sum, the noosphere concept provides logical grounding for
thinking broadly about policy and strategy in the information age. Furthermore,
our derivative concept — noopolitik — matches up with soft power, the way
realpolitik matches up with hard power. No alternative concept does this as
well — by comparison, cyberspace and the infosphere are smaller, more
technological domains. The noosphere is the best all-encompassing concept for
thinking about information-based realms and their dynamics.
We first proposed noopolitik as an alternative to realpolitik
back in 1999 (Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 1999; also see Ronfeldt and Arquilla, 2007,
2020). But little happened then to further its development. Ever since, other
strategists have proposed kindred concepts — notably, cyberpolitik, netpolitik,
infopolitik, information engagement, information statecraft, information
geopolitics — yet they too have failed to gain traction. Individually, these
kindred concepts vary somewhat definitionally; but what is more important is
that, collectively, they all represent innovative but so-far-unsuccessful
efforts to improve the conceptual arsenals of strategists for dealing with
information-age threats, challenges, and opportunities, in particular by urging
strategists to emphasize networks more than hierarchies and nonstate actors as
much as, sometimes more than state actors.
All of which leads to two points. First, noopolitik remains
a suitable proposal for reorienting statecraft in the information age. Next,
even if this particular concept does not take hold, strategists had better come
up with something very similar, fast, before the world’s dark adversaries do
irreversible harm to the United States and other open societies by continuing
to apply their own vexing mutations of noopolitik. At stake is the essence of
effective strategy and statecraft in the information age: whose story wins.
Taken seriously, the noosphere concept has particular
implications for developing noopolitik as an approach to statecraft. The noosphere
began as a scientific and spiritual concept, but it has also acquired a
forward-looking political cast. Its expansion implies the ascendance of
ideational and other soft-power matters. It favors upholding ethical and
ecumenical values that seek harmony and goodwill, freedom and justice,
pluralism and democracy, and a collective spirit harmonized with individuality. South Africa’s Nelson Mandela and Desmond
Tutu have served as exemplars to the world of this kind of value-driven
statecraft.
Noopolitik is also an anti-war and pro-environment concept.
Strategically, it implies thinking and acting in global / planetary ways while
minding long-range ends, and the creation of new modes of agency to shape
matters at all levels. It implies humanity coming together through all sorts of
cognitive, cultural, and other close encounters. It is about the co-evolution
of the planet and humanity — thus it implies understanding the nature of social
and cultural evolution far better than theorists have so far. And it means
engaging nonstate as well as state actors in a quest to create a new
(post-Westphalian) model of world order less tethered to the nation-state as
the sole organizing principle and focus of loyalty. Furthermore, it favors the
widespread positioning of sensory technologies and the creation of sensory organizations
for planetary and humanitarian monitoring and response purposes.
Yet, positive and peaceful as all this may seem, growth of
the noosphere also implies having to deal with persistent ideational clashes
and conflicts. Indeed, Teilhard, Le Roy, and Vernadsky said to expect ruthless
struggles, shocks and tremors, even an apocalypse, as different parts of the noosphere
begin to mingle and fuse around the world. These are not implications the
founders simply tacked on; rather, they stem from discerning principles and
dynamics that attended the prior development of the geosphere and biosphere as
global envelopes.
Proponents and practitioners of noopolitik should heed these
distinctive implications, and not view noopolitik as a self-aggrandizing public
relations or propaganda game. When the switch to noopolitik deepens in the
decades ahead, strategists will gradually figure out how different it is from
realpolitik. For noopolitik requires a fresh way of looking at the world — a new
kind of mindset, situational awareness, knowledge base, and assessment
methodology, along with a generally more philosophical and theoretical outlook.
How to look at hard power, thus realpolitik, is quite standardized by now. But
how best to understand and use soft power is far from settled. Noopolitik
depends on knowing — and finding new
ways of knowing — about ideational, cognitive, and cultural matters that have
not figured strongly in traditional statecraft. As the information age deepens
in the decades ahead, it will eventually be seen that noopolitik is not only an
information-age alternative to realpolitik, but also a prospective evolutionary
successor to it. (See Table 1, which compares aspects of realpolitik and
noopolitik.)
Table 1. Contrast
Between Realpolitik and Noöpolitik
|
Realpolitik
|
Noöpolitik
|
|
States as key unit of analysis
|
States, nonstate actors, networks as key units
|
|
Primacy of national self-interests, sovereignty
|
Primacy of shared interests, mutuality
|
|
Primacy of hard power
|
Primacy of soft power
|
|
System as anarchic, conflictual
|
Harmony of interests, cooperation
|
|
Power politics as zero-sum game
|
Win-win as preferred game
|
|
Politics as unending quest for advantage
|
Politics as pursuing a telos (end purpose)
|
|
Alliances conditional (oriented to threat)
|
Alliance networks vital to security
|
|
Ethos is amoral, if not immoral
|
Ethics are crucially important
|
|
Behavior driven by interests, threats
|
Behavior driven by common values, goals
|
|
Balance of power as the “steady state”
|
Balance of responsibilities
|
|
Power embedded in nation-states
|
Power also embedded in “global fabric”
|
|
Guarded, manipulative about information
|
Seeks information-sharing, inter-thinking
|
In essence, noopolitik is ultimately about whose story wins — the power of narrative —
not whose military seems stronger. This means that the conduct of noopolitik
will depend on carefully crafting strategic narratives to suit varied contexts.
The fact that narratives are crucial for maneuvering in today’s world is widely
accepted — as one expert has noted, “Kinetics may win battles; narratives win
wars” (Maan, 2018). But designing strategic narratives remains more an art than
a science, and there is still plenty of room for new ideas about how to build
expertise and wield influence.
For example, U.S. efforts to promote democracy abroad —
often through the use of force — have proceeded unsuccessfully, even
defectively, for many years. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, still a favorite
philosopher of many conservative (as well as some liberal) strategists,
cautioned back in the 1950s that “the greater danger [for U.S. strategy] is
that we will rely too much on military strength” (1958, p. 35) — a warning that
has come all too true. Given the sorry
record of militarism, the matter of how best to promote democracy may well
become a key opportunity for noopolitik; and the answer(s) and strategies that
noopolitik may develop will likely prove quite different from what has been
assumed and pursued under past grand strategies.
Here are some of the steps we have recommended to enable and
energize a shift to noopolitik:
- Rethink
“soft power,” especially its dark sides: We should not have to list this;
it should be cleared up by now — but it is not.
- Create
international “special media forces” that could be dispatched into crisis
and conflict zones to help settle disputes through the discovery and swift
dissemination of accurate narratives, and for purposes of rumor control.
- Uphold
“guarded openness” as a strategic principle: This means remaining open
(particularly among allies) in accordance with democratic values, while
also creating mechanisms for guardedness (e.g., mutual defense treaties,
robust cybersecurity norms, disease detection and control early warning
systems) to mitigate the risks inherent in being open.
- Take
up the cause of protecting and managing the “global commons” — those air,
sea, land, space, and other parts of our planet that belong to no single
state or jurisdiction — as a pivotal issue area for the future of the
noopolitik. Though valued by many civilian activists and military
strategists, the global-commons concept has yet to gain public
recognition, and it is presently under challenge from arch-traditionalists
who prefer a return to nationalist/neo-mercantilist policies in the name
of state sovereignty.
- Institute
a governmental requirement for periodic reviews of the nation’s
“information posture”: One’s information posture toward allies and
adversaries is now as crucial as one’s military posture. The latter
receives regular review; it is time to figure out how best to assess and
enhance the national information posture as well. (If a national
information posture assessment were conducted at this time by, for
example, the United States, it would surely clarify that Washington is in strategically
worse shape — on matters ranging from cybersecurity to America’s standing
in world opinion — than its regular military and economic posture assessments
seem to indicate.)
Such measures can open up transformational possibilities and
opportunities for shifting from realpolitik to noopolitik as the basis of a new
mode of statecraft attuned to the information age. They could help burnish the
image of the United States and its allies and friends in the world once again,
lessen the bitterness and violence of conflicts, revitalize diplomacy,
especially public diplomacy, and set the world on course toward sustainable
peace and prosperity. Whereas realpolitik treats international relations as
intractably conflictual, the starting point for noopolitik is faith in
upholding our common humanity, and a belief that, in statecraft, ideas can
matter more than armaments.
Even now, many shifts, risks, and conflicts that are
commonly categorized as geopolitical in nature are, on closer examination,
primarily noopolitical. For example, during the past decade the Arab Spring — affecting
countries from the Maghreb to the Levant — the rise of the Far Right in Europe,
Hindi-Muslim clashes in South Asia, and protest movements in Venezuela, Sudan,
Lebanon, Hong Kong and Belarus all have geopolitical implications; but they may
be better understood as having an essentially noopolitical nature. Around the
world, many cognitive wars — ideological, political, religious, and cultural
wars — are underway, aimed at shaping people’s minds and asserting control over
this or that part of the emerging noosphere. At the same time, people are also
searching for new ways to get along together and cooperate in addressing such
global challenges as climate change and refugee settlement. Here, too, policies
and strategies guided by noopolitik rather than realpolitik will likely fare
better for the common good.
NEW FRONTIERS FOR TEACHING STATECRAFT AND GRAND STRATEGY
Colleges and
universities have long offered courses, programs, and degrees in international
relations and other topics that concern statecraft. However, those that focus specifically on
grand strategy are quite recent. The first appeared only ten years ago, at Yale
University, with the creation of its Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy.
Today not only Yale but also Duke University, the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT), The Institute of World Politics (IWP), and a few other
schools offer their own courses, programs, and degrees on grand strategy and
statecraft.
For the most part, these courses revolve around classic
readings in strategic thought and practice, from ancient Greece through modern
times. They educate students about political, military, economic, social,
and cultural forces that have affected international relations, often through
assigned readings in military
and diplomatic history. The focus is mostly on state-led
strategies and policies across the centuries; but modern nonstate, citizen-activist,
social-change movements may receive bits of attention too, as may the ways such
movements benefit from the rise of new networked forms of organization enabled
by the digital information revolution. Accordingly, class syllabi may range
across writings by Thucydides, Niccolò Machiavelli, Carl von Clausewitz, H.J.
Mackinder, Hans Morgenthau, Henry Kissinger, et al. The list can be made very long when it
extends to including writings by the latest crop of theorists and
practitioners.
A very broad range of both hard- and soft-power factors may
thus be covered. But, for the most part, the hard-soft distinction is not a
major theme, except when including what is deemed the single essential reading
on this topic: Joseph Nye’s seminal book Soft Power: The Means to Success in
World Politics (2004). Even so, these courses on grand strategy and
statecraft generally cover the important roles that values, ideas, narratives,
communications, culture, and other “soft” ideational factors may play in
international relations, in peacetime as well as in war (see Kennedy, 1991).
But much greater attention is usually devoted to educating students about
strategic concepts that have grown around the “hard” material forms of power:
e.g., geopolitics, realpolitik, realism, the use of economic coercion and
military force, the balance of power, great-power competition, etc. Ever since
Nye fielded the concept of “soft power” in the late 1990s, strategists have
increasingly attended to the significance of soft-power factors, but not in systematic
ways — no particular set of strategic concepts has yet arisen around it.
Suppose our forecast is correct about the noosphere and
noopolitik. Then imagine how this may reshape curricula for graduate coursework
on grand strategy. Current-day curricula seem quite staid, looking far more to
the past than to what looms ahead. In recent decades, “realists” have run into theoretical
and practical challenges that their conventional approaches to strategy have
proved insufficient for characterizing or meeting, much less mastering. Classes
and readings for educating about noopolitik will have to be very different from
those used for realpolitik. Realpolitik requires knowing primarily about
tangible military, economic, technological, and other geopolitical forces, and
much less about intangible ideological, social, and cultural forces. In
contrast, noopolitik requires knowing primarily about ideational, cultural,
social, and other noopolitical forces — and finding new ways of knowing about
them.
In the United States, strategic thinkers have long known,
and urged, that grand strategy should attend to socio-cultural as well as
political, military, technological, and other “hard” contextual factors. But,
in practice, strategists have repeatedly neglected analyzing operational
environments so comprehensively during the past few decades — they have
neglected cultural and cognitive conditions to strategy’s detriment, notably in
Iraq and Afghanistan (see Hoffman, 2020; Lynch, 2020). Calls are finally
emerging for rethinking grand strategy so that it attends equally, and
properly, to “the social dimension,” including its domestic import for grand
strategy (see Arquilla and Roberts, 2020). A future turn toward noopolitik will
require this.
A comprehensive guide for how to become a knowledgeable
practitioner of noopolitik is unavailable at this time — the concept remains
too new, the writings too few. Nonetheless, we can list some topics that will
surely require elevated if not entirely new kinds of attention as the noosphere
and noopolitik take hold. We discuss
them briefly below, in order to suggest their prospective future importance for
teaching and learning in forward-looking courses and curricula about grand strategy.
However, we expect that the topics we list here will eventually require far
more pages of argument and elaboration before strategists steeped in traditional
approaches become convinced that such a reorientation is needed.
• Recognizing the significance of social evolution for
grand strategy: We have never seen a writing that explicitly pairs social
evolution and grand strategy for analysis. Yet, grand strategies often rest on judgments about social evolution — who is
gaining strength, progressing the best, becoming a model for others to follow,
etc. Modern examples include containment theory in the 1950s, modernization
theory in the 1960s, and democratic enlargement in the 1990s. During the 2000s,
three ideas advanced during the previous decade that touched on social
evolution theory — the “end of history,” “the clash of civilizations,” and
“export of democracy” concepts — influenced strategists engaged in the “global
war on terrorism,” which became notable for its presumptuous naiveté about
imposing a democratic political evolution on tribalized, strife-torn societies
in Afghanistan and Iraq. Attempts to
reroute the currents of history and culture in these sad lands have foundered,
at terrible human and material cost.
What a grand
strategist thinks (or dismisses) about social evolution can make a decisive
difference. Indeed, a case can be made that grand strategy would benefit
immensely if it were grounded in better theory about social evolution. This may
seem a passing matter for realpolitik, but it may be a requisite concern for
noopolitik — better ideas about social evolution will be needed in the coming
age of the noosphere. Grand-strategic thinking that ignores social-evolutionary
dynamics will not be worth much for long (especially for such purposes as
fighting terrorism and promoting democracy). The fact that there is no
agreed-upon theory of social evolution does not obviate this concern.
Exactly what a
noopolitik-oriented curriculum should include is not clear today; but the aim
would be to educate students to think more deliberately about social evolution
and its implications for grand strategy, without opting necessarily for a
particular framework or theory. To this end, readings by Peter Turchin (e.g.,
2016) and David Sloan Wilson (e.g., 2018) may be advisable, along with selected
writings by David Ronfeldt (e.g., 1996, 2009). Readings on specific topics —
e.g., the evolution of government institutions, market systems, political
democracy, and civil-society networks — may also deserve inclusion.
• Realizing the significance of social cognition for
grand strategy: According to realpolitik, strategy is the art of relating
ends, ways, and means — usually as defined in hard-power terms (see Marcella
and Fought, 2009). Strategy from a noopolitik perspective will be more about
identifying, assessing, and affecting peoples’ cognitions, a soft-power
concept. Assuming that peoples’ key cognitions are about space, time, and
agency, then strategy may then be seen as an art of positioning for spatial,
temporal, and agency-oriented advantages. For noopolitik, this may mean
thinking and acting in global/planetary ways (spatially), while minding
long-range future end-states (temporally), and creating new modes of action to
shape matters at all scales of deliberate (i.e., agency-driven) activity.
Why focus on people’s space, time, and agency (or action, or
efficacy) cognitions? Because numerous psychological, sociological, anthropological,
and other studies have shown that people’s key cognitions are about space,
time, and action (or agency). These cardinal cognitions — space, time, action —
take form in people’s minds during childhood, and play key roles in shaping
their beliefs and behaviors from then on. They are essential building blocks
behind the development of consciousness and culture. No mind, culture, or
society can function without its particular set of space, time, and action
cognitions. Moreover, changes in people’s space-time-action cognitions — their
worldviews and mindsets — can lead to changes not only in an individual’s
beliefs and behaviors, but also in how a mass public thinks and acts
collectively throughout an entire culture and society.
Thus, the better strategists can find ways to analyze
people’s space-time-action perceptions, the better they can ascertain why
people think and behave as they do, how societies and cultures evolve, and what
makes one historical era or phase different from another. Through such
learning, strategists will be better positioned to assess the effects that
different strategic options may have.
Today, it would not be easy to design courses and curricula
to educate students about the significance of multidimensional cognitive
analysis for grand strategy. Most experts have specialized in just one of the
three key cognitions, in isolation from the others (even though the others
always creep into their analyses). For the time being, courses and curricula
would have to rely mainly on single-focus studies — say, Philip Zimbardo’s
writings about time orientations (e.g., Zimbardo and Boyd, 2008), or Albert
Bandura’s about efficacy orientations (e.g., Bandura, 2006). But they should
still head steadfastly in the direction of multidimensional cognitive analysis
until new readings emerge (as argued and forecast in writings by David Ronfeldt
(e.g., 2018)).
• Finding ways to
assess and improve national information postures: The United States has,
over the past 75 years, provided an illuminating example of the governmental
encounter with information strategy and policy, though it has yet to call for
regularly assessing its “information posture” the way it has its military
posture. Nevertheless, the American government does have a history of treating the
nation’s de facto information posture seriously — just not under that name. A
modern landmark arose in 1946 with George Kennan’s seminal “containment”
concept, which was meant to be applied more in the ideational than the military
realm. Later, in 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower created the United States
Information Agency (USIA), and always
included its director in cabinet-level meetings. As another landmark event, President
Ronald Reagan (“the Great Communicator”) called on his administration in March
1984, with his National Security Decision Directive 130, to develop a formal
information strategy and posture review process. He then used it to help guide
his summitry with Premier Mikhail Gorbachev and end the Cold War. Quite a set
of accomplishments!
But after the Cold
War ended, President George H.W. Bush did not see fit to extend Reagan’s
initiative, preferring instead to proclaim an American-led “new world order”
based on preponderant military and economic strength. And in 1999 President
Bill Clinton dis-established the USIA as an independent entity (it was folded
into the State Department, where it remains today, much weakened). Thus, the
U.S. government began turning its back on developing a formal information
posture at the very time when the digital information revolution was getting
underway. “Information” was already being reconceptualized as a new form of
power, but mostly by state and nonstate competitors who were intensifying their
usage of new information operations against the United States, its allies and
friends — without American or other friendly policymakers and strategists
adequately realizing much of any of this.
Today, new voices
are calling on the U.S. government to revitalize the USIA and rekindle the
process that Reagan so wisely developed in 1984. These are good ideas. But far
more than a limited institutional renaissance in one country — the United States
is still too enamored of trying to impress other societies with its hard-power
capabilities — will be needed in order to assure that policymakers begin to
require national information-posture assessments as a regular matter.
Posture assessments
are normally about a nation’s capabilities to apply all manner of power on
behalf of its national interests — the case with U.S. national military,
economic, and cybersecurity assessments. They are supposed to identify a
nation’s strengths and weaknesses, its priorities and possibilities, as well as
vulnerabilities and risks, the better to enable a nation’s leaders to craft
strategies for meeting the ideational, organizational, operational, and other
challenges that lie ahead.
To our knowledge,
no one has ever tried to do a formal national information posture assessment.
It could prove daunting as well controversial to undertake. To begin,
“information power” and “information posture” (not to mention “information
space”) are far from settled concepts. But if they could be broadly defined,
spanning ideational as well as material aspects of “information” (as we think
they should be), then a posture assessment might be well advised to cover the
following:
— key aspects of a nation’s image (the “face” it presents to the world,
its “brand identity”), in particular the national values, goals, character, and
the reputation it means to uphold and project, at home and abroad;
— the wealth (or lack) of information resources a nation has at its
disposal and is developing (or failing to retain and develop) in schools,
universities, research centers, libraries, and elsewhere in the “infosphere,”
including in the nation’s civil, public, and private sectors;
— the information policies and practices a nation favors, for example
“freedom of information” and “guarded openness” in the American case;
— the status of infrastructures pertaining to stocks and flows of
information, including the ways access is distributed or concentrated,
management is centralized or decentralized, ownership and intellectual property
are proprietary or shareable, and whether the designs are suited to meeting
national needs in case of emergency.
— the information-monitoring and -sharing networks that exist for
coordination and cooperation across all levels of government, domestic and
foreign, as well as with IGOs and NGOs around the world on all manner of
issues, and with business and civil-society actors at home;
— the range of media that are used for information gathering and
broadcasting, as well as for uses that may range from message projection to
early warning.
Such an assessment
should identify strengths and weaknesses in a nation’s information posture, its
points of resilience and vulnerability in case of an attack or other disaster.
It should consider how well the posture serves to attract and work with friends
and allies, as well as to deter adversaries. It should set priorities and
specify options for future improvements.
Today, the idea of
formally assessing and improving a nation’s information posture is so new, and
so lacking in background materials, that it would be difficult to design
educational courses and curricula. Yet it is too significant a topic to set
aside. So, for now, it may be best to approach the topic via exploratory workshops,
rather than instructional classes. It may also be advisable for such workshops
to try to design ways for all governments to eventually produce
information-posture assessments, not just one’s own government (or other
entity).
• Additional
topics for education in noopolitik: The preceding three topics are easy to
suggest, for they derive from our recent work. Yet they are just a beginning;
other topics could easily be added to this list. For instance, the significance
of strategic narratives — in light of the centrality of “whose story
wins” to noopolitik, future strategists should receive training in the
construction and application of forward-looking strategic narratives. Another
topic might be the growing significance of having (and building far more) networks of sensory technologies and sensory
organizations around the world to monitor, share, and act on information about
global health, education, environmental, and other critical matters that cross
jurisdictional boundaries. At first, this may sound like a mostly technical
matter. But no, for this topic will prove to be mostly about designing and
building vast organizational networks that involve all sorts of state and
nonstate actors, large and small, near and far. Thus, as the noosphere and
noopolitik grow in tandem, organizational races to build networks may well
prove more important than the technological races to build ever newer products
and weapons, catalyzed by the digital information revolution.
CODA
New courses and
curricula for such matters would make for a very different, far more
future-oriented approach to educating students about statecraft and grand
strategy attuned to the decades ahead. To our knowledge, such matters are not
being addressed much, neither singularly nor collectively, if at all, in
today’s institutions of higher learning. Moreover, the ideas and observations
we have offered here are preliminary — for example, further discussion should
surely lead to more refined ways to do a national information posture
assessment. Yet, if our forecasts about the rise of the noosphere and
noopolitik are correct, then it is already past time we all begin exploring and
adapting to these new frontiers.
SELECT
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ABOUT THE
AUTHORS
David Ronfeldt, now
retired, worked for more than 35 years at the RAND Corporation as a political
scientist. His work resulted in new ideas about information-age modes of
conflict (cyberwar, netwar, swarming), future security strategy (guarded
openness, noopolitik), and social theory (nascent frameworks for analyzing
social evolution and social cognition). He has a Ph.D. in political science.
John Arquilla is
distinguished professor of defense analysis at the Naval Post-Graduate School.
Beyond his work with David Ronfeldt, his books include The Reagan Imprint
(2006), Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (2011), and Why the Axis
Lost (2020). He has a Ph.D. in political science.
While at RAND,
Ronfeldt and Arquilla coauthored many reports, including In Athena’s Camp:
Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age (1997), The Zapatista
“Social Netwar” in Mexico (1998), The Emergence of Noopolitik: Toward an
American Information Strategy (1999), Swarming and the Future of
Conflict (2000), and Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime,
and Militancy (2001).
RETHINKING STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT FOR THE INFORMATION AGE by David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla is licensed under CC BY 4.0 CC iconby icon
