RETHINKING STRATEGY AND STATECRAFT FOR THE INFORMATION AGE

[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 19^th and 20^th 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 BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

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https://nationalinterest.org/feature/how-coronavirus-exposed-flaws-america%E2%80%99s-security-strategy-166830

 

Arquilla, John, and David Ronfeldt, The Emergence of Noopolitik: Toward An American Information Strategy, Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, MR-1033-OSD, 1999.  Available at: http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1033/index.html

 

Bacevich, Andrew J., Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2010.

 

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Kennedy, Paul, ed., Grand Strategies in War and Peace, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991.

 

Maan, Ajit, “What We Do,” Narrative Strategies: Changing the Way Power Works, website, 2017, at: https://www.narrative-strategies.com/what-we-do

 

Marcella, Gabriel, and Stephen O. Fought, “Teaching Strategy in the 21st Century,” Joint Forces Quarterly, issue 52, 1st quarter, 2009, pp. 56-60. Available at:
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA515184.pdf

 

Niebuhr, Reinhold, The World Crisis and American Responsibility, New York: Association Press, 1958.

 

Nye, Joseph S., Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power, New York: Perseus Books, Basic Books, 1990.

 

Nye, Joseph S., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, Cambridge, Mass.: PublicAffairs, 2004.

 

Nye, Joseph S., “Get Smart: Combining Hard and Soft Power,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 88, no. 4, July/August 2009, pp. 160-163. Available at:
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2009-07-01/get-smart

 

Ronfeldt, David, Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks: A Framework About Societal Evolution, Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, P-7967, 1996. Available at:
https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P7967.html

 

Ronfeldt, David, “Explaining Social Evolution: Standard Cause-and-Effect vs. TIMN’s System Dynamics,” Materials for Two Theories, blog, September 18, 2009. Available at: http://twotheories.blogspot.com/2009/09/explaining-social-evolution-standard.html

 

Ronfeldt, David, “People’s Space-Time-Action Orientations: How Minds Perceive, Cultures Work, and Eras Differ,” draft, November 2018. Available at:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3283477

 

Ronfeldt, David and John Arquilla, “The Promise of Noöpolitik,” First Monday, August 2007. Available at:
http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1971/1846

 

Ronfeldt, David and John Arquilla, Whose Story Wins: Rise of the Noosphere, Noopolitik, and Information-Age Statecraft, Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, PE-A237-1, 2020. Available at:
https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA237-1.html

 

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Walker, Christopher, and Jessica Ludwig, “From ‘Soft Power’ to ‘Sharp Power’: Rising Authoritarian Influence in the Democratic World,” in Sharp Power: Rising Authoritarian Influence, Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for Democracy, International Forum for Democratic Studies, December 2017b. Available at: https://www.ned.org/sharp-power-rising-authoritarian-influence-forum-report/

 

Wilson, David Sloan, This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution, New York: Pantheon Books, 2019.

 

Zimbardo, Philip, and John Boyd, The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life, New York: Free Press, 2008.

 

 

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