Kategori: Resilient Civilians

Myndighetenes tilnærming til ubåt-saken i Tromsø viser dessverre at de ikke stoler på befolkningen.

Av: Gunhild Hoogensen Gjørv, professor ved UiT Norges arktiske universitet

3. mai inviterte Forsvarsdepartementet i samarbeid med Statsforvalteren i Troms og Finnmark, Direktoratet for strålevern og atomsikkerhet (DSA), Forsvarets operative hovedkvarter (FOH), Troms politidistrikt og Tromsø kommune til et digitalt og fysisk folkemøte for å informere om besøk av amerikanske reaktordrevne ubåter til Tromsø.

Arrangementet kunne ha vært et forbilde i sivil-militært samarbeid, der flere instanser, både sivile og militære, samarbeidet om planleggingen og beredskapen i forbindelse med mottakelsen av allierte militære fartøy og tiltak i tilfelle fartøyene fikk problemer eller en ulykke skjedde.

Slikt samarbeid har blitt en viktig del av totalforsvarskonseptet, beskrevet blant annet i rapporten «Støtte og samarbeid» fra 2018, ny langtidsplan for forsvarssektoren og i stortingsmeldingen «Samfunnssikkerhet i en usikker verden» fra 2020.

Målet er norsk sikkerhet

Selv om forsvaret av landet er en nasjonal oppgave hvor Forsvaret står sentralt, har det blitt anerkjent at et helhetlig forsvar ikke er mulig uten en vel koordinert innsats fra også sivile myndigheter og organisasjoner. Målet er norsk sikkerhet, som oppnås med en kombinasjon av kunnskap, tillit, og styrke (etter behov). Totalforsvaret – som er avhengig av et vel koordinert samarbeid mellom Forsvaret, myndighetene, samt sivile organisasjoner og enheter – er utviklet til å håndtere kriser og konflikter av alle slag.

Avhengig av hva slags krise det gjelder (naturkatastrofe, sikkerhetspolitisk krise etc.), vil den organisasjonen som er best skikket håndtere krisen, støttet av de andre innenfor totalforsvaret.

Etter forrige ukes møte, så står man igjen med i hvert fall ett spørsmål. Fungerer dette?

Folkemøtet ga inntrykk av at svaret er «nei».

Elementet som ble oversett, hvis ikke helt glemt, var de sivile. Det vil si befolkningen i Tromsø og regionen.

Tok oss på senga

Vi har allerede i over ett år vært eksponert for en stor krise. Koronapandemien tok hele verden på senga til tross for mange advarsler om en kommende pandemi. Gjennom et godt samarbeid mellom regjeringen, flere departementer, kommuner og relevante organisasjoner har Norge klart å håndtere den mest alvorlige krisen siden andre verdenskrig. En vesentlig del av suksessen var åpen kommunikasjon og dialog med befolkningen (via media, zoom-møter osv.), også når ting ble gjort feil eller ikke holdt mål.

Informasjon, ydmykhet og dialog har vært vesentlig for å beholde et høyt tillitsnivå mellom den norske befolkningen og myndighetene, for å få en enighet om hvordan vi som et land best skulle håndtere krisen.

Kommunikasjon, dialog og tillit var ikke det inntrykket vi satt igjen med etter folkemøtet i Tromsø.

Møtet var heller en kaotisk blanding av bekymringer, uenigheter og til dels motstand. Dette bare en uke før den første ubåten skulle ankomme Grøtsund industrikai i Tromsø.

To bekymringer

Tematisk sett kan man dele disse bekymringene i to: 1) beredskap og tiltak for å håndtere ulykker, 2) forskjeller i sikkerhetsperspektiver. Mange bekymringer ble lagt frem under møtet fra flere hold rundt manglende beredskapsplaner, fare for atomstråling etter en ulykke, og muligheten for evakuering. Det var lite presis informasjon, annet enn at myndighetene ikke trodde at det kom til å bli noe problem.

At kommunen jobber på spreng etter møtet for å utlevere jod-tabletter til alle skolene og barnehagene er bare et eksempel på det.

Når det gjaldt sikkerhetsperspektiver kan denne gruppen igjen deles i to: For det første de som ikke nødvendigvis var uenig i det nasjonale sikkerhetsbildet. De var enige i at Russlands opprustning må møtes med avskrekking, men skjønte ikke hvorfor, for eksempel, Olavsvern fortsatt ikke kunne brukes av store ubåter. For det andre, de som rett og slett hadde et annet sikkerhetsbilde enn det som kommer fra Oslo – det vil si at de ønsket tiltak som ville føre til beroligelse.

Det gjelder derfor ikke bare avskrekking der Russland ikke skal behandles som en mulig fiende, men at vi heller må satse på samarbeid og kontakt. Her hørte vi også sikkerhetsperspektiver der folk følte seg mer truet av tilstedeværelse av amerikanske ubåter enn av Russland.

Hvem som har rett er tydeligvis mindre relevant. De offentlige diskusjonene rundt disse sikkerhetsperspektivene har ikke funnet sted.

Må bygge tillit

En viktig del av forsvaret av landet ligger hos befolkningen. Befolkningens tillit til myndighetene sier mye om hva slags informasjon folk skal tro på, og hvordan folk skal reagere under krise eller krig. Manglende informasjon og dialog truer tillit i samfunnet, som er et kjerneelement i norsk sikkerhet. Dette er ikke målet. Tillit krever åpenhet og god kommunikasjon. Et folkemøte inviterer til innspill og diskusjon.

Det var ikke det som skjedde på folkemøtet i Tromsø.

Et ordentlig folkemøte burde blitt gjennomført for lenge siden, allerede da man startet å tenke på å bruke den sivile kaia på Grøtsund til militære formål.

Informasjon og diskusjon om forskjellige konsekvenser av forskjellige muligheter skulle vært diskutert, støttet av forskningsbaserte innspill fra universitetet (UiT) og andre forskningsmiljøer. Dette ville sannsynligvis fortsatt ha åpnet for protester fra forskjellige politiske miljøer, men den belastningen må myndighetene ta for at folk skal oppleve at de har medbestemmelse og blir hørt.

Samtidig burde det blitt satt i gang beredskapsplanlegging – ikke bare planlegging og øvelser blant relevante myndigheter, men også planlegging sammen med befolkningen. Det ble i 2018 sendt ut en brosjyre til alle husstander «Du er en del av Norges beredskap». Husker noen denne? Dette burde vært utgangspunktet i et informasjons- og forberedelsesopplegg for befolkningen.

Det vil si at skolene ikke bare blir tildelt jod-tabletter, men at de er også blir kontaktpunkter i tilfelle krise, ikke minst hvis strøm og internett går ned – et sted der folk vet at de kan få informasjon.

Det samme kan gjøres med religiøse møtesteder, idrettsklubber, osv. Universitetene kunne ha fått ansvar for å jevnlig invitere til møter/seminarer om beredskap, sikkerhetsperspektiver – rett og slett hvordan vi kan og bør forstå verden vi bor i dag. Jo bedre informert folk er, jo bedre forberedt.

Stoler ikke på befolkningen

Myndighetenes tilnærming til denne saken viser dessverre at de ikke stoler på befolkningen. De tar heller for gitt at den tilliten som finnes i dag alltid vil være der og at folk bare følger med. Men befolkningens tillit bør ikke være noen selvfølgelighet for våre myndigheter, særlig hvis de ikke er godt informert (eller verre, feilinformert).

Godt sivil-militært samarbeid innebærer at myndighetene stoler på befolkningen like så mye som at det forventes at befolkningen stoler på dem.

Dette er fundamentet i norsk sikkerhetspolitikk.

 

Kronikken ble først publisert i Forsvarets forum 12. mai 2021.

Last’s week election and its aftermath are confirming the breadth and depth of divisiveness in our not-so-United States, to the peril of the great experiment in self-governance the nation’s founders laid out nearly a quarter-millennium ago, and its current place in the pantheon of world powers. Over half the country is hoping a change in political leadership will help break the logjam, but if politics is so much the problem, how can it really be the solution? There must be a better way.

By: Christopher Holshek

Besides, aren’t we placing too much power into the hands of one person, like the man on the white horse, to save us from ourselves? That smacks more authoritarian than democratic. As Time columnist David French cautioned, “Americans should not see their individual liberty or the autonomy of their churches and communities as so dependent on the identity of the President.”

But there were other things from last week’s election-count drama our sensationalist media mentioned in passing. One was how 25 more million Americans may have woken up to the realization that citizenship is not just residence, by exercising their foremost civic responsibility. “In an atmosphere of increasing negative polarization and geographic separation,” French went on, “we can no longer take our nation for granted. We must intentionally care for the state of our union.”

Another was less obvious — how tens of thousands of poll workers in thousands of communities across the fourth largest and third most populous country in the world, almost all of them volunteers, from all walks of life, Republican and Democrat inspectors side-by-side, tirelessly took tremendous care to ensure as accurate and complete a count of that record-breaking number of votes, in the midst of all this division and misinformation, in the middle of the greatest pandemic crisis in a century, and amongst the complexity of the permutations of procedural regulations in 50 separate states, a few territories, and overseas ballots to boot.

This was nothing short of miraculous. And yet this quiet act of citizen service performed at every election was an affirmation of the vitality of our democracy. As a 30-year Army veteran, writing these words on Veterans Day: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your service in ensuring a country worth my own service and sacrifice.

It’s not just the election that may be showing us the way forward in an annus horribilis whose end is not yet in sight. When fear of the pandemic gripped us in the spring, love also broke out for the work of health care professionals. They and a panoply of “essential workers” to include postal and delivery workers, and even shelf-stockers and cashiers began to permeate an emerging national narrative already inhabited by the military, the police, firefighters and other first-responders. Then there were all those, formally and informally, who helped battle the worst wildfires in the West and the impacts of so many named hurricanes and storms to the east and south that we had to adopt the Greek alphabet.

“Thank you for your service” is becoming a more an acknowledgement of the inclusive responsibility of all than the exclusive burden of few — and that is good news. The value of service is democratizing as our embittered and divided society is reaching almost irreconcilable dysfunction.

The National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service defines service as “a personal commitment of time, energy, and talent to a mission that contributes to the public good by protection the Nation and its citizens, strengthening communities, or promoting the general social welfare.”

A relatively strong sense of service and volunteerism is among America’s greatest national strengths, going as far back as it contentious and divisive political culture. In its final report, issued this past March, the Commission noted: “From the earliest days of the Republic, service has been a central part of what it means to be an American — and it remains so today. Civic engagement and service are critical to the health and well-being of the Nation; by bringing people together to tackle common problems, service makes communities stronger and strengthens American democracy.”

For some time since 9/11, there’s been increasing talk of national and community service in one form or another. Popular support for it is overwhelming. Demand for service opportunities has been outstripping supply. Millennials in particular are becoming more service-oriented as well as civic-minded. Among the many virtues they and others are discovering is that service to others, which doesn’t require a uniform, brings people together. In a hyper-divided nation, this is more than good news.

In addition to the Commission is the Serve America Act as well as the late Senator John McCain’s bill to create a 21st Century Civilian Conservation Service Corps to engage young Americans and veterans in restoring national parks and other public lands. Meanwhile, former presidential couple Barack and Michelle Obama are encouraging community service through the Obama Foundation. More and more high schools and colleges include community service as a graduation requirement, reducing the stigma of community service as a form of punishment for misdemeanors.

Building from our well-developed infrastructure like AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps, and myriad public and private programs, retired General Stanley McChrystal and Service Year Alliance chair argued, “could unleash the energy of our young people to tutor and mentor students in low-performing schools; support the elderly so they age with dignity; help communities respond to disasters; assist veterans reintegrating into their hometowns; and perform a thousand different tasks of value to our country.”

Moreover, he exhorted, service learning ”teaches young Americans the habits of citizenship, and the power of working in teams to build trust is one of the most powerful ways this generation can help restore political and civic responsibility — and in the process help to heal a wounded nation.”

As my own project, The National Service Ride, emphasizes at school seminars, service-powered citizenship provides a sense of personal and collective identity not found in smart phones or social media — real, human connectivity in an increasingly alienating, narcissistic, and atomizing society. Identity being values in action, it helps develop the internal moral GPS needed to navigate a complex, dynamically interconnected, and information overloaded world. It helps people feel more empowered and hopeful, resistant to the darker narratives of exclusion and division by replacing enmity with empathy. It could even help restore faith in government by giving people something to talk about other than politics, creating space for less toxic civil dialogue.

A narrative of service to others fosters a collaborative mindset, establishing real common ground for less toxic and polarized civil dialogue on matters inexplicable in 280 characters. Besides revitalizing citizenship along the lines of thinking globally and acting locally, a more universal sense of service and sacrifice remedies an unwholesome civil-military relationship. Rather than slogans and bumper stickers, the best way to honor those who put their lives on the line for others is to walk and not just talk. Patriotism, after all, is something you do more than something you feel or say.

USA Today opinion contributor Jonathan Zimmerman is right to point out that our schools can play a big part in helping us move past partisan division, by helping our kids be better citizens and not just employees. On a more practical side, service learning is where real education begins. Citizenship starting with civic action can also enfranchise disconnected youth and marginalized groups, improving social cohesion and resilience and even reducing crime.

Community service also helps them obtain vital 21st century economic qualifications like team-playing, team-building, and team-leading, as well as interpersonal and problem-solving skills, and how to build the personal and professional networks from which most people now find vocations.

And it can lower the aggregate cost of public service delivery. The implications for a better qualified and more competitive work force, a revitalized and more stable middle class, more shared prosperity, and general societal resilience are enormous. It would no doubt help the U.S. become more competitive in an increasingly fierce global marketplace.

People need not wait for the government to come up with something, nor go very far, for there are myriad ways to become citizens as responsible to neighbors as to nation. While more hands, hearts, and minds are needed for public and national service, most Americans can best serve their country by serving their community. It is, after all, its communities — not its capital — that makes the United States the country it is. Besides, the ground-up dynamics of building peace and security that our aid specialists see working over there are the same that work over here — whether with community policing, gender equality, race and religious relations, and so on.

The blessings of liberty ultimately come through shared sense of community fostered from and not despite our diversity. This country’s founders were aware of this, going out of their way to make sure America works better from below than from above. And like charity, citizenship begins on the block.

Americans have more power to change things than they think. The sooner enough of us act upon the common-sense notion that we do better for ourselves when we do better for each other, our country will again move forward together in meaningful way. As I say in my project video: “Washington’s not going fix America; America is going to fix America.”

 

This blog post was first published at Medium, November 11 2020.

Christopher Holshek, Colonel, U.S. Army (Ret.), is founder of the National Service Ride project and author of Travels with Harley — Journeys in Search of Personal and National Identity. He is also a senior civil-military advisor to the NATO ResilientCivilians project.

 

Koronaviruspandemien er sikkerhetsscenariet vi var minst forberedt på. Dette kan vi lære av.

Av: Gunhild Hoogensen Gjørv, professor ved UiT

Med mindre vi starter å tenke utenfor boksen for «tradisjonell sikkerhet», kan vi fortsette å bli tatt på senga. Selv om nasjonalstater er ansvarlige for sikkerhet, er de avhengige av sivile ressurser og motstandsdyktige befolkninger.

Mens pandemien fortsetter å dominere helse- og landets sikkerhet med økende antall COVID-19 tilfeller, så har Norges innsats for å etablere en trygg havn for amerikanske atomdrevne ubåter, som bidrar til å øke en avskrekkende holdning mellom USA/NATO/Norge og Russland, blitt begrenset av Tromsø kommune. For kommunen handler dette om et sikkerhetsperspektiv.

Nord-Norge har spilt en viktig beroligende samarbeidsrolle i forhold til Russland. Forsvaret og regjeringen gjenspeiler et annet sikkerhetsperspektiv basert på allianseforpliktelser og avskrekking mot økende militære aktiviteter fra Russland i nord.

Noen ganger er sikkerhetsperspektivene konkurrerende, ikke minst mellom den lokale befolkningen og myndighetene. Totalforsvarskonseptet er avhengig av begge, og et fungerende sivil-militært samarbeid som krever felles tillit, forståelse, og motstandsdyktighet.

Sivil-militært samarbeid og totalforsvarskonseptet har et vanskelige brytningspunkt når sikkerhetsperspektiver kolliderer.

Dagens trusler – «gråsonen»

Trusler mot samfunnet i dag skapes i økende grad på ikke-militære eller ikke-voldelige måter. I stedet for å krysse grenser med stridsvogner, har motstandere funnet enklere (og billigere) måter å skape kriser eller konflikter på, der det sivile samfunnet er en stor del av målet.

I dag bruker de desinformasjon eller nettangrep på infrastruktur for å ødelegge tilliten til myndighetene og fremme samfunnsmessig og/eller politisk uro, ved å undergrave tjenester og infrastruktur, fremme ekstremisme eller vold, og utnytte eksisterende politiserte sårbarheter fra valg, migrasjon, og pandemier til å forverre politiske konflikter mellom regioner.

Med andre ord, truslene tar utgangspunkt i våre egne, eksisterende sårbarheter.

Slike trusler og angrep som fører til destabilisering blir ofte referert til som «hybride» eller «gråsone» trusler. Gråsonen gjelder det stadig mer uskarpe skillet mellom fred og krig, og skaper et kontinuum av konflikt. Skillet mellom fred og krig har blitt langt mindre klart ettersom desinformasjon og cyberangrep er kontinuerlige kampanjer designet for å forstyrre og ødelegge, muligens uten ende.

Gråsonen omfatter tiltak som skaper destabilisering og konflikt under terskelen til åpen vold, inkludert forstyrrende taktikk som desinformasjon, psykologiske operasjoner og cyberangrep på infrastruktur.

Alvorlige uenigheter eller konflikter skaper sårbarheter som kan bli misbrukt.

Totalforsvaret og tilpasningsdyktighet

Å forberede seg på kompleksiteten av usynlige gråsonetrusler krever en mer kompleks tilnærming enn for konvensjonell krigføring. Responsen er totalforsvaret. Det krever god sivil-militært samarbeid – det vil si en fleksibel balanse og koordinering mellom sivile og militære ressurser, avhengig av krisens natur.

Det krever tillit mellom samfunnet og myndighetene, og motstandsdyktighet innenfor samfunnet.

Artikkel 3 i NATOs grunnleggingstraktat definerer motstandsdyktighet som «samfunnets evne til å motstå og komme seg raskt fra slike sjokk, og kombinerer både sivil beredskap og militær kapasitet.» Dette betyr at en stat og dens samfunn er i stand til å motstå og komme seg etter et stort sjokk som en naturkatastrofe, svikt i kritisk infrastruktur eller et hybrid eller væpnet angrep på grunnlag av «deres individuelle og kollektive kapasitet».

Motstandsdyktighet er en viktig komponent i totalforsvaret, og sivil motstandsdyktighet er avgjørende. Med andre ord, handlinger og reaksjoner fra mennesker og hva de gjør for å sikre deres «hverdagslige» sikkerhet spiller en viktig rolle i suksessen eller fiaskoen til en totalforsvarstilnærming.

Åpne og demokratiske samfunn kan være ekstremt sårbare for desinformasjon og polarisering av politiske synspunkter, som destabiliserer den sosiale tilliten som samarbeidet bygger på, og reduserer motstandsdyktigheten til å tilpasse seg eller sprette tilbake så raskt som mulig.

Men hva om det ikke er mulig, som i COVID-19-krisen?

Motstandsdyktighet i samfunnet kan kreve justeringer av ‘nye’ normaler, inkludert nye oppfatninger av sikkerhet og usikkerhet. Å utvikle oppfatninger av lokal, sivil sikkerhet er ikke alltid i samsvar med nasjonale eller militære sikkerhetsoppfatninger. Dette krever velutviklede kjeder for kommunikasjon og kommando mellom samfunn, sivile myndigheter og militæret. Ofte trenger militæret å bli informert, men forsvaret bør ikke være den primære sikkerhetsaktøren.

Har vi lært noe?

Muligheten for en global pandemi har lenge vært diskutert som hypotetisk trussel. Men hadde helse blitt sett mer seriøst på som et sikkerhetsspørsmål, hadde vi kanskje tenkt mer effektivt på dette scenariet og forberedt oss langt bedre. COVID-19-krisen gir innsikt i utfordringer som vanligvis ikke faller inn under militarisert (bruk av makt) sikkerhet, men kan likevel destabilisere, om ikke lamme, hele samfunn.

Denne krisen illustrerer den komplekse naturen til sikkerhet, der flere aktører er involvert og sivile er sentrale for å forstå sikkerhetsbildet. I dag er vi omgitt av ufullstendig informasjon, villedende informasjon, desinformasjon og ofte for mye informasjon eller en «infodemic». Denne overbelastningen av informasjon og falske nyheter retter seg mot mennesker med sikte på å utløse handlinger og reaksjoner som kan bidra til potensiell destabilisering. Redusert tillit og/eller økt polarisering mellom mennesker og deres regjeringer påvirker hvordan befolkningen reagerer på kriser.

Pandemien øker vår forståelse av sikkerhetsscenarier, inkludert de som er knyttet til gråsonetrusler, der Forsvaret ikke er den primære sikkerhetsaktøren. Likevel må Forsvaret samtidig kunne reagere proporsjonalt, redusere skade og justere tenking i henhold til kontekst.

Som en del av det å sikre nasjonal beredskap er det viktig å evaluere i hvilken grad vår forståelse av motstandsdyktighet er realistisk og/eller trenger endring, og hvem som er inkludert i den prosessen.

Neste krise

Et helhetlig sikkerhetsperspektiv krever en balanse mellom det nasjonale/allierte og det regionale/lokale. Dette er ikke lett. Vi vet ikke tilstrekkelig hvordan den sivile befolkningen vil reagere eller oppføre seg under forskjellige krisescenarioer.

Totalforsvaret og motstandsdyktighet er operasjonalisert ovenfra og ned. Det vil si at det er avhengig av statlige- og andre allianseaktører for å gjennomføre. Det er en antagelse om at sivile i beste fall gir full tillit til myndigheter for å håndtere krisen. Mangel på tillit til myndigheter kan imidlertid føre til potensielt polariserende politiske synspunkter, og kan problematisere forskjellige eller konkurrerende sikkerhetsperspektiver.

Disse kan forverres ytterligere av spredning av feil- eller desinformasjon hvis det ikke er tilstrekkelige arenaer eller prosesser for kommunikasjon og dialog.

Nord-Norge har enorm strategisk betydning for både norsk sikkerhet og NATO.

Dette er ikke nytt, Nord-Norge og spesielt folket som bor i regionen har i flere tiår spilt en nøkkelrolle i å bidra til beroligelse og samarbeid med hensyn til en følsom og mektig nabo, Russland. I kombinasjon med det norske prinsippet om ikke å tillate atomvåpen på norsk territorium, og en tilnærmet transparent praksis av Forsvaret, har trusselnivået i regionen vært relativt lavt.

Dette har nylig blitt utfordret av en uenighet mellom nasjonale myndigheter, nærmere bestemt Forsvarsdepartementet, og lokale myndigheter, Tromsø kommune. Forsvarsdepartementet har arbeidet i flere år med å etablere en passende havn for å motta allierte (amerikanske) reaktordrevne ubåter ved den kommunale havnen på Grøtsund i Tromsø.

Tidligere amerikansk forsvarsminister Jim Mattis nevnte saken i sin åpningstale under Hærens toppmøte (Army Summit) i 2020, hvor han understreket betydningen av denne havnen for allierte/amerikanske ubåter og for sikkerheten i regionen.

Tromsø kommune hevder at det ikke er gitt tilstrekkelig grunnlag for å rettferdiggjøre en slik etablering, særlig i forhold til sikkerhet og miljø. Tromsø kommune vedtok derfor i mars 2019 å avvise denne etableringen. Tromsø-avgjørelsen gjenspeiler store bekymringer rundt det lokale sikkerhetsperspektivet hvor man mener at tilstedeværelsen av amerikanske reaktordrevne ubåter utgjør en sikkerhetstrussel som vil jobbe mot en beroligelse med nabolandet Russland.

Konflikten illustrerer både relevansen av forskjellige, om ikke konkurrerende, sikkerhetsoppfatninger mellom lokale og nasjonale myndigheter, men også hvordan slike forskjeller kan utvikle seg. Hvis regjeringen vil fortsette å stå på sin beslutning om å bruke havnen i Grøtsund til militære formål, kan dette føre til økt mistillit mellom den lokale befolkningen, lokale myndigheter og nasjonale myndigheter.

Nord og sør

Ulike sikkerhetsoppfatninger mellom Nord-Norge og myndigheter i sør er allerede svært følsomt. Mange lokale mener fortsatt at det mangler kritiske ressurser innen transport, helse og infrastruktur som gjør befolkningen enda mer sårbar under kriser. Den potensielle kombinasjonen av kaos, krise eller konflikt i regionen kombinert med redusert tillit etterlater en av Norges viktigste regioner for sikkerhet enda mer utsatt for desinformasjon eller cybertrusler.

Oppdaterte kommunikasjonssystemer mellom sivile og militære myndigheter, kombinert med bedre dialog om ulike, men like relevante, sikkerhetsperspektiver, er sentralt i et fungerende sivil-militært samarbeid innenfor totalforsvaret.

Vi må benytte anledningen under den nåværende pandemien til å lære viktige leksjoner om tillit, motstandsdyktighet, totalforsvaret og kompleksiteten som er involvert i å skape og sikre sikkerhet i dagens verden av usynlige trusler i gråsonen.

 

Artikkelen ble først publisert i Forsvarets forum, 10. oktober 2020.

The Army should manage its capabilities for competition in the moral dimension with the same rigor that it does for capabilities in the material dimension to succeed in conflict.

By: Colonel Christopher Holshek, U.S. Army, Retired

In war, moral factors account for three quarters of the whole; relative material strength accounts for only one quarter.
–Napoleon Bonaparte

To win in the competition continuum, unified land operations call for dominance in both the moral and the material dimensions. The U.S. Army has adopted Multi-Domain Operations (MDO) to drive change “to ensure that the intellectual precedes the physical in the development of the future force, enabling the United States to win in competition and conflict in the future.”¹ At the same time, the Army must address its cognitive incapacity for MDO support of Joint All-Domain Operations (JADO) to “prevail in competition…penetrate and dis-integrate enemy anti-access and area denial (A2/AD) systems and exploit the resultant freedom of maneuver to achieve strategic objectives (win), and force a return to competition on favorable terms.”² It must do this to stay on the winning side of a constant, multi-dimensional power struggle – power being the demonstrated capacity, ability or will to change or influence behavior or the course of events.

MDO describes the operational continuum as continuous competition vice the binary notion of conflict as war or peace. The Army needs “to actively compete left of conflict in order to enable winning in conflict” and “to expand the battlefield” beyond physical domains to cognitive capacities, developing full-spectrum capabilities to engage and influence the strategic and operating environment in decisive ways.³ These capabilities are as essential to war-winning as combat forces and do not exist merely to set conditions for victory in conflict or return to competition. The Army’s ability to influence populations and leaders through an effective narrative, combined with unified actions and informational power, are critical to holistic MDO.

Expanding from the Material to the Moral

The premier challenge in this expansion is conceptual. In this era of strategic competition, contested norms and persistent disorder, there is a requirement for “the seamless integration of multiple elements of national power – diplomacy, information, economics, finance, intelligence, law enforcement, and military.”⁴ This is regardless of when or where in the competition continuum, and it is not a new idea. Competition is “older than warfare itself; it is the original politics.”⁵ War is its extension, entailing a violent contest of wills, and is fundamentally political, human and psychological.

Conflicts since 9/11 have shown clearly that “to wage war effectively, civilian and military leaders must operate as successfully on political battlegrounds as they do on the physical,” and that “integrating efforts across those battlegrounds is essential to success in war.”⁶ They also revealed that “military power alone is insufficient to achieve sustainable political objectives, and there are limited means to achieve integration across the instruments of national power.”⁷ This requires expansion beyond the physical domains that form almost all of MDO to concepts that are better aligned with interorganizational activities prescribed in the Stabilization Assistance Review and DoD Directive 3000.05, Stabilization.⁸

The Information Environment

The information element of power is a paramount operational and strategic consideration. In modern war and competition, “the information domain determines winners and losers and the best weapons do not fire bullets.”⁹ The Joint Concept of Operations in the Information Environment (JCOIE) concedes that the U.S. military has “failed to maximize the potential of informational power.”¹⁰ It also states the core military problem of JADO: “How will the Joint force integrate physical and informational power to change or maintain the perceptions, attitudes, and other elements that drive desired behaviors of relevant actors in an increasingly pervasive and connected information environment to produce enduring strategic outcomes?” In this environment, civil and cognitive reconnaissance are essential, and synthesizing the civil and information components with military considerations is key in joint intelligence preparation of the operational environment.

Winning in the Information Environment

In order to win in the information environment, the joint force must have “the ability to understand the perceptions, attitudes, and other elements that drive behaviors that affect joint force objectives; the ability to characterize, assess, synthesize and understand trends of relevant actor activities and their impacts on the information environment throughout cooperation, competition and conflict; the ability to execute integrated physical and informational activities designed to achieve psychological effects; and, the ability to assess and modify informational power with the same level of competency as physical power.”¹¹ Information-related capabilities to shape and influence the human geography can give the Army decisive advantage.

Operationalizing integrated physical and informational power requires institutionalizing it. Informationally-driven MDO and JADO are inherently strategic. Strategy “seeks to influence and shape the future environment as opposed to merely reacting to it.”¹² To institute a “competitive mindset,” the National Defense Strategy emphasizes greater strategic thinking, even at lower levels of military leadership, to win modern wars. Understanding complex and dynamic strategic conditions is critical to successful competition. An update to the Officer Professional Military Education Policy lists strategic thinking and communication first among joint learning activities.¹³ This, however, is only the first step in solving a more systemic problem.

Beyond Information to Influence

To expand MDO from the physical to the psychological, the Army’s view of informational power must go beyond conventional Information Operations (IO) messaging of selected target audiences. It must defeat more sophisticated use of information in support of strategic aims. As noted strategic thinker Brigadier General Huba Was de Czege, USA, Ret., observes:

Our opponents mean to fracture our alliances, partnerships, and resolve. They intend to influence our home and Allied publics. They mean to create ambiguity, slow our recognition of danger, confuse our policy decisions, and block or misdirect our reactions. This would be a clearer statement of the problems we must address: Just how does the Army contribute to this political, military, and economic realm of international affairs?¹⁴

Tactical actions have direct political consequences.¹⁵ Soldiers compete on complex human terrain, often overmatched by adversaries with a superior understanding of that terrain, cultural interior lines and greater leeway to manipulate local dynamics in order to achieve holistic effects.

Despite the allure of technology, the Army remains the premier force for human interaction. “Cyberwar’s real power in modern warfare is influence, not sabotage. Using the internet to change people’s minds is more powerful than blowing up a server.”¹⁶ The United States is considering expansion of Army Cyber Command to an information warfare (IW) command that will include IO and IW, as well as cyber and electronic warfare.¹⁷ But is that enough?

As with “competition,” the Army lacks a clear definition of integrated influence operations. RAND, however, does provide a definition: “[Integrated influence operations means] the coordinated, integrated, and synchronized application of national diplomatic, informational, military, economic, and other capabilities in peacetime, crisis, conflict, and post-conflict to foster attitudes, behaviors, or decisions by foreign target audiences that further U.S. interests and objectives.”¹⁸ The U.S. Army should work with the Joint Staff to get this approved as a DoD definition.

Regarding the narrative, strategist Dr. Ajit Maan explains it as “the telling of a story in a certain way for a certain purpose. The way is identification. The purpose is influence. Through narrative, we construct our personal and cultural identities. Ideas and beliefs result from those identities, and actions follow.” Narrative warfare is thus a strategic struggle over the meaning of information, less about facts or truth and more about the beliefs that they may underwrite. Narrative concepts of strategy or warfare, as cognitive visualization tools (versus physical operations measures and evaluations) are not integral to the current concept of MDO.¹⁹

Getting Back to Engagement

The Army may already have an integrative, unifying concept of applied informational power in the warfighting functional concept it introduced in 2014.²⁰ MDO describes engagement as “the combination of physical, informational, and psychological actions taken to influence actors’ decisionmaking.” Because war is fundamentally and primarily a human endeavor, the 2018 MDO Concept stresses that the joint force “must address the cognitive aspects of political, human, social, and cultural interactions to achieve operational and national objectives.”²¹ Inherently offensive, engagement expands the competitive space through conflict and return to competition, including gray-zone unconventional or irregular warfare. As a core competency, commanders and statesmen should “offer competitors and adversaries an outstretched hand, open to opportunities for cooperation but from a position of strength and based on our national interests.”²²

Engagement builds partner institutional and governance capacities and joint, interorganizational and multinational (JIM) networks in order to see, understand, shape and influence the operating environment. Engagement grows strategic capital to draw from in response to unanticipated non-linear attacks and hybrid warfare. The U.S. Army should use engagement not just to mitigate adversary influence operations, but to regain the initiative, to lift the fog of competition and to accelerate response decision cycles to win without decisively committing combat forces, as Sun Tzu would have it.

“We have to continually be countering information warfare and unconventional warfare,” Deputy Commanding General of Army Futures Command Lieutenant General Eric Wesley urged. “That requires day-to-day coordination among the U.S. military, U.S. civilian agencies and allies [through] operational headquarters that are conducting competition every single day in an aggressive and rapid manner.” Despite legal and bureaucratic hurdles, the Army cannot ignore this challenge. “This can’t be done agency-by-agency or even country-by-country,” he added. “One of the reasons we struggle with it is we see it as an afterthought. We do it episodically, anecdotally.”²³

More than strategic economy-of-force, comprehensive, continuous and consistent engagement is a scaled-up version of General Stanley McChrystal’s “collaborative warfare.”²⁴ Joint Publication 3-08, Interorganizational Cooperation, describes collaboration as “a process where organizations work together to attain common goals by sharing knowledge, learning, and building consensus.”²⁵ As an employment of a strategic narrative of inclusion, a collaborative warfare approach to engagement enables the United States and its partners to stay ahead of the power curve, seize strategic initiative and shape the competitive space, rather than being shaped by it.

The current MDO Concept adds that engagement enables the joint force to “outmaneuver an adversary cognitively as well as physically and virtually to deter, counter, and deny the escalation of violence in competition, and defeat the enemy if armed conflict cannot be avoided.” As such, engagement forces are essentially maneuver forces, beneficial both for decisive strategic action and for setting operational conditions in the cognitive spaces that make up expanded MDO and competition.

To enable the strategic benefits of engagement, combatant and service component commanders and their unified action partners must “build campaign plans that integrate, converge, and leverage national elements of latent, indirect, and direct powers” in the highly complex and dynamic environments of especially urban areas of competition and A2/AD. Such politico-military decisionmaking support requires integrated civil-military planning teams at theater and joint force commands. They serve as a competition mechanism for civil-military convergence and for interorganizational stabilization; they also consolidate military and security gains into desired political and civil outcomes. Commanders and interorganizational partners require a full range of integrated moral and material options for executing simultaneous and sequential operations across all domains. If these capabilities are not optimized at the institutional level, they will most assuredly not be optimized at the execution level.

Organizational Challenges

To expand MDO from the material to the moral, the JCOIE says that the joint force must have “the ability to organize, train, equip, and maintain organizations that deliberately leverage information and the informational aspects of military activities.” It must also be able to integrate actions, organizationally and operationally. The Army provides most of these capabilities in the following arenas: Civil Affairs (CA); Psychological Operations (PSYOP) and IO/IW; Foreign Area Officers; and Public Affairs. It also has broad access to unified action partners to bring additional (and often more appropriate and effective) capabilities to bear. For competition, the Army maintains numerous security cooperation activities – beyond its overwhelming focus on train-and-equip and including International Military Education and Training – with the goal of establishing “rapport between the U.S. military and the country’s military to build alliances for the future.”²⁶

Many of these programs leverage reserve forces capacities. The National Guard’s State Partnership Program, a highly-effective, low-cost training and institution-building program, builds relationships that can generate strategic and operational capital. Similarly, the U.S. Military Observer Group, a joint program run by the Army, provides United Nations field missions with staff augmentation and military observers who act as “strategic scouts” and “strategic enablers.”²⁷ In addition to benefits to readiness and emergency response, the Army Reserve Command’s Private Public Partnership (P3) program helps to leverage America’s commercial power. Another promising initiative is regionally aligned Security Force Assistance Brigades, focused on improving “the capability and capacity of partner nations’ or regional security organizations’ security forces” to conduct combat operations.²⁸ The relationship-building benefits of these programs are unmistakable.

The Army, however, does not holistically manage its capabilities for competition in the moral dimension with the same energy that it does for those capabilities in the material dimension. Nested among disparate commands, components and functional authorities, with disjointed mission focus, organizational cultures and force development and management priorities, their institutional disaggregation complicates the ability of theater, operational and tactical commands to calibrate and converge them to conduct MDO and JADO in either competition or conflict.

The U.S. Army Civil Affairs & Psychological Operations Command (Airborne), or USACAPOC(A), is a clear example of both the problem and much of the solution. With the overwhelming majority of DoD engagement capabilities (over 82 percent of its CA capabilities, 83 percent of its PSYOP capabilities and 71 percent of its IO capabilities), it is the ideal core for a more robust Army command to manage and deploy integrated information-related capabilities, in part because of the unique civilian-acquired knowledge and skills sets of its members. It is an Army reserve organization that the Army should designate as a multi-component command with active component, information-related capability forces.²⁹ With its seven-year Force 2025 strategy, USACAPOC(A)’s “harnessing collective influence” approach looks to integrate CA/PSYOP/IO and grow functional specialist and other human capital in partnership with private sector and non-governmental organizations. This is good, but not enough.

USACAPOC(A) constitutes 5 percent of the Army Reserve, yet accounts for over 20 percent of its deployed operations tempo. Continued high demand presents unique challenges for Army and joint commands that need CA/PSYOP/IO more than ever for competition missions. The Army and the joint force have difficulty accessing them, short of partial or full-scale mobilization, due to cumbersome Cold War-era mobilization authorities and budgetary mechanisms. This, and USACAPOC(A)’s force, training and readiness management practices, follow a conventional big-war model, ill-suited for continuous competition. Rather than functioning as a much-needed operational integration command, USACAPOC(A) is a force provider of small teams and personnel to tactical and operational commands for exercises and operational support.

USACAPOC(A) is not optimally structured for success in the competition continuum. And if it is not optimally structured to integrate physical and informational power, then neither is the Army nor the joint force.

Securing the Victory in Competition

Addressing this critical vulnerability calls for changes at the wholesale as well as retail level. For starters, to expand MDO beyond its predominantly physical domains requires institutionalizing an informational, human or cognitive domain. For General Robert Brown, former commander of U.S. Army Pacific, the cognitive is the most important of all domains.³⁰

To integrate military-civilian physical and informational power, the Army should establish an engagement or influence warfighting function, with its own unified command structure, such as a U.S. Army Engagement Command. It should also establish a center of excellence to organize all the forces and activities – with strategic direction from the Defense Security Cooperation Agency – that should be able to maneuver in competition the same way that infantry and armor do in combat.

The conceptualization, organization, command and control, development, management, equipping, deployment and employment of Army engagement forces must be done with the same rigor as is done for combat forces. In addition to their own domain and command, they need representation on the Army and joint staffs – e.g., the Army G9 covers installation management, while the Joint Staff J9 is now an advanced concepts and technology directorate. Any use of the “9” staff designation should be for the engagement function to coordinate related forces and activities in a command area of responsibility.

To operationalize moral-material integration and win in competition, the Army should: institutionally converge and calibrate its engagement forces and activities; foster a learning organization within and beyond military structures; and seize opportunities to be a greater force for engagement and influence through collaboration in national strategic initiatives, such as the Stabilization Assistance Review and the Global Engagement Center. It must build an industrial base in applied social sciences, related individual and organizational learning technologies, and political and civil information management and human terrain mapping and analysis systems. Above all, it must invest in people more than platforms. It should cultivate strategic and operational capital through its recruiting and talent management initiatives. This will enable the Army to gain and maintain strategic initiative and optionality, to win left-of-bang and to preserve blood and treasure. These actions can enable the Army, borrowing from the Civil Affairs motto – Secure the Victory – to dominate in strategic competition.

Much is already afoot. The Army must move quickly, however. As 88th Readiness Division Commanding General Major General Darrell Guthrie cautioned in his 2019 guidance to his former Civil Affairs command: “We must become an adaptable, agile learning organization or we will be replaced by one that is.”³¹

 

This report was first published by Association of the United States Army, in Spotlight 20-4, August 2020. It can also be downloaded as a pdf.

Colonel Holshek, USA, Ret., is Vice President for Military Affairs of the Civil Affairs Association and Senior Civil-Military Advisor to Narrative Strategies, LLC, the Alliance for Peacebuilding and the NATO Resilient Civilians project. The opinions expressed in this report are his own.

 

Notes

1. Lieutenant General Eric J. Wesley, USA and Colonel Robert H. Simpson, USA, Ret., Expanding the Battlefield: An Important Fundamental of Multi-Domain Operations, Land Warfare Paper 131 (Arlington, VA: Association of the United States Army, April 2020), 2.
2. Department of the Army (DA), U.S. Army Training and Doctrine (TRADOC) Pamphlet 525-3-1, The U.S. Army in Multi-Domain Operations 2028 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, December 2018), 17.
3. Wesley and Simpson, Expanding the Battlefield, 2.
4. General James N. Mattis, Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy: Sharpening the American Military’s Competitive Edge (Washington, D.C.: DoD, 19 January 2018), 4.
5. Kelly McCoy, “In the Beginning, there was Competition: The Old Idea behind the New American Way of War,” The Modern War Institute, 11 April 2018.
6. Nadia Schadlow, War and the Art of Governance: Consolidating Combat Success into Political Victory (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2017), 2.
7. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Concept for Integrated Campaigning (Washington, DC: DoD, 16 March 2018), 4.
8. U.S. Department of State (DoS), U.S. Agency for International Development and DoD, Stabilization Assistance Review: A Framework for Maximizing the Effectiveness of U.S. Government Efforts to Stabilize Conflict-affected Areas (Washington, D.C., 2018); DoD Directive 3000.05, Stabilization (Washington, DC: DoD, 13 December 2018).
9. Christopher Holshek, 2020 Civil Affairs Roundtable Report Roundtable Goes Virtual—and Viral—in Response to Coronavirus (Fort Bragg, NC: 5 May 2020), 2.
10. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Concept for Operating in the Information Environment (Washington, DC: DoD, 25 July 2018), iii, vii-vii and 7.
11. Joint Concept for Operating in the Information Environment, xi and 35–39.
12. Harry R. Yarger, Strategic Theory for the 21st Century: The Little Book on Big Strategy (Carlisle, PA: Army Strategic Studies Institute, February 2006), 5–6.
13. Joint J-7, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction 1800.01F, Officer Professional Military Education Policy (Washington, DC: DoD, 15 May 2020), A-A-1.
14. Brigadier General Huba Wass de Czege, USA, Ret., Commentary on “The U.S. Army in Multi-Domain Operations” (Carlisle, PA: Army Strategic Studies Institute, April 2020), 17.
15. Cleveland et al., Military Strategy in the 21st Century: People, Connectivity, and Competition (New York: Cambria Press, 2018) and Emile Simpson, War from the Ground Up: Twenty-First-Century Combat as Politics, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
16. Sean McFate, The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder (New York: William Morrow, 2019), 16.
17. Sydney J. Freedberg, Jr., “Army To Build New Info War Force—Fast,” Breaking Defense, 22 August 2019.
18. Eric Larson, Richard Darilek, Daniel Gibran, Brian Nichiporuk, Amy Richardson, Lowell Schwartz, Cathryn Quantic Thurston, Foundations of Effective Influence Operations: A Framework for Enhancing Army Capabilities (Santa Monica, Arlington, Pittsburgh: RAND Arroyo Center, 2009), 1-201.
19. Ajit Maan and Thomas Ricks, “Narratives are about ‘meaning,’ not ‘truth,” Foreign Policy, Thomas E. Ricks, 3 December 2015; Ajit Maan, Narrative Warfare (Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace, 2018) and Plato’s Fear (Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace, 2020).
20. DA TRADOC Pamphlet 525-8, U.S. Army Functional Concept for Engagement (Fort Eustis, VA, 24 February 2014).
21. TRADOC Pamphlet 525-3-1, C-10.
22. Mattis, Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, 4–5.
23. Sydney J. Freeburg, Jr., “Fog of Information War: Army Asks Civilians, Allies for Aid,” Breaking Defense, 25 September 2019.
24. Assad A. Raza, “Collaboration: Key to Successful Civil-Military Operations,” Eunomia Journal, 20 May 2020
25. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Publication 3-08, Interorganizational Cooperation (Washington, DC: DoD, 12 October 2016), I-11.
26. See the Defense Security Cooperation Agency website.
27. Christopher Holshek, “America Needs Peacekeeping Missions More Than Ever,” Foreign Policy, 10 November 2015
28. Army Techniques Publication ATP 3-96.1, Security Force Assistance Brigade (Washington, DC: Headquarters, Department of the Army, 2 May 2018), 1-3.
29. Major Assad A. Raza, “True Civil Affairs Integration: From Three Tribes to One,” Eunomia Journal, Civil Affairs Association, 31 October 2019 [updated 8 June 2020].
30. Major Kimber Nettis, USAF, Multi-Domain Operations: Bridging the Gaps for Dominance, Sixteenth Air Force (Air Forces Cyber) newsletter, 16 March 2020.
31. Christopher Holshek, “Executive Summary,” in Integrating Civil Affairs, Civil Affairs Issue Papers, vol. 6, 2019–2020 (Arlington, VA: Association of the United States Army, April 2020), 11.

Norsk sikkerhet krever en politikk i nord som adresserer bredt og inkluderer både dialog og infrastruktur for å redusere avstander fysisk og mentalt.

Av: Gunhild Hoogensen Gjørv

Nord-Norge består av en tredjedel av Norges fastlandsareal og dekker 80 prosent av landets havområder. De siste 60 årene har utviklingen og verdiskapningen i Nord-Norge vokst sterkere enn resten av landet, og har hatt stor betydning for den norske økonomien. Viktige næringer er i marine sektorer som fiskeri, havbruk, i maritime næringer som olje og gass, bygg og anlegg og reiseliv. Det antas at nordnorsk næringsliv framover vil tjene på en stadig mer vektlegging av bærekraftighet for eksempel gjennom en god forvaltning av fornybare ressurser. Landsdelen er ikke bare viktig for menneskene som bor her, mange er avhengig av arbeid i regionen slik «søringkarantenen» under koronakrisen illustrerte. Veksten i nord fører således til økt behov for transport av varer og mennesker.

Grensen til Russland gjør at Nord-Norge også er politisk strategisk viktig for Norge og for NATO. Kolahalvøya står sentralt i Russlands militære tilstedeværelse i Arktis og i det russiske forsvaret basert på maritime og luftbaserte styrker. Russlands forsvar er avhengig av å sikre sine baser på Kola for å ta kontroll over Barentshavet og lenger sør i den nordlige Atlanteren ved en eventuell konflikt med NATO. Dette perspektivet på Russlands strategier kalles også en utvikling basert på bruk og styrking av det russiske bastionforsvaret. Mesteparten av den russiske militære innsatsen i dette forsvaret kommer mest sannsynlig til å bli gjennomført av luft- og sjøstyrker fra nordområdene i Russland. Men territoriell ekspansjon, dvs. at landstyrker kan gå inn i Finnmark og Troms har også blitt trukket fram. Kinas økende interesse i nordområdene krever et «bredere» sikkerhetsperspektiv med en betydelig økning av økonomiske investeringer og såkalt «soft power» adressert nordlige regioner.

Den norske regjeringen har anerkjent viktigheten av styrket norsk militær tilstedeværelse i Nord-Norge. Sikkerhet er imidlertid også knyttet til lokale erfaringer i en landsdel hvor det bor under 10 prosent av den norske befolkningen og med lange avstander mellom større og mindre bosettinger. Tilgang til helse, utdannings- og sosiale tjenester er ujevnt og ulikt fordelt, og mange må reise langt for å få dekket sine behov. Befolkningen er liten og består av mange forskjellige grupper som inkluderer samer, nordmenn og kvener, samt russere og andre innvandrere. Alle med sin historie, politiske posisjoner og rettigheter.

I hele etterkrigshistorien har flere flyttet ut enn inn av Nord-Norge, og folketallet er synkende. Det lave folketallet har betydning for både økonomisk utvikling og statens muligheter for å gi samfunnene i nord sikkerhet. Små lokale og regionale markeder fører til at produkter som er laget i Nord-Norge fraktes ut og sør, med mange vogntog fram og tilbake som et av resultatene. Økende passasjertrafikk, turister og arbeidsfolk, er avhengig av fly eller vei. Mesteparten av transporten mellom nord og sør er på veier som er smale, rimelig dårlig vedlikeholdt, og hvor snøforholdene gjør dem ekstra farlige åtte måneder i året. Det er også disse veiene som er kjernen til logistikk og de største forsyningslagrene i sør ved krig eller annen krise.

Sikkerhet vurderes gjerne i forhold til om hendelser har lav sannsynlighet, men høy risiko hvis de skulle skje, eller om hendelser har høy sannsynlighet for å oppstå men hvor risikoen er lav. I dag kan et ekspansivt russisk forsvar av sitt bastionforsvar ha lav sannsynlighet, men ha høy risiko om dette likevel kommer til å skje. Det vil innebære krig, stort sett gjennom luft- og maritim innsats i norsk farvann og langs kysten av Nord-Norge, og kan også inkludere territoriell ekspansjon over grensen inn på Finnmark og Troms.

Hvis dette skjer, vil det ha stor betydning for Norge og NATO. En slik hendelse vil være utfordrende å hindre på land på grunn av få militære ressurser fordelt over lange avstander. Angrep på den lille militære infrastrukturen kan føre til befolkningsflukt. Selv med «liten» befolkning gjør et svakt veinett at det kan oppstå kaos både for transport av forsyninger, militære styrker og kjøretøy.

Mer sannsynlig, og da også med en ganske stor risiko, innebærer bruk av ikke-militære virkemidler, for eksempel desinformasjonskampanjer gjennomført av skjulte aktører som er svært vanskelig å spore. Desinformasjon kan nøre opp under eksisterende konflikter for å øke mistilliten mellom folk og regjering, og mellom ulike befolkningsgrupper. Både stater som Russland og Kina, og ikke-statlige aktører som ideologiskbaserte politiske grupper kan ha interesser i den ressursrike og strategiske delen av Norge og tjener på destabilisering. I et slikt bilde kan det som i dag synes som en økende mistillit mellom sentrale styresmakter og folk i Nord-Norge kan spille inn. I flere sammenhenger de siste årene er det trukket fram at nordlendingenes virkelige venner er i Russland. Trolig er det likevel liten risiko for at slike forhold vil virke inn i det trusselbildet og den militær situasjon Norge har i nord i dag..

Det som likevel er klart er at sikkerheten i nord er hele Norges sikkerhet og at denne sikres gjennom en bred tilnærming blant annet gjennom nordområdepolitikken. Norsk sikkerhet krever en politikk i nord som adresserer bredt og inkluderer både dialog og infrastruktur for å redusere avstander fysisk og mentalt.

 

Kronikken ble først publisert i Nordlys, 29. juni 2020.

While many policymakers like to refer to ‘connecting the dots’ to derive accurate pictures of forthcoming events, this picture is highly inaccurate and unhelpful. In the case of hybrid threats, the dots are missing because they fall below the threshold, they look different due to deception or disinformation, or are impossible to understand due to some kind of encryption.

By: Sebastiaan Rietjens

A warning system is a crucial ingredient in countering hybrid threats. Informing the decision-makers of affected countries as well as the population at large enables them to take appropriate measures. However, as Patrick Cullen (2018) convincingly argued in his Strategic Analysis, hybrid threats are wicked problems. They are ambiguous and fuzzy and lack proven knowledge and fixed standards to adequately address them. This makes devising a warning system for such threats intrinsically difficult and challenging.

Before hybrid threats materialize, they often send out only weak signals that are hard to detect and cannot easily be linked to any known trend or phenomenon (Kuosa, 2014). Moreover, these weak signals reside in a massive amount of irrelevant or misleading information, often referred to as noise (Gentry & Gordon, 2019). Furthermore, as Cullen argues, “hybrid threats are designed to blur the distinction between peace and war, as well as complicate and fall below the target’s detection and response thresholds”. He therefore concludes that hybrid threats require new solutions for warning. Treverton et al. (2018, p. 91) reach a similar conclusion when they state that warning for hybrid threats is “tricky but not impossible”, and Nyheim (2015, p. 16) also stresses the need to adapt warning methods to the “emerged reality of hybrid conflicts”.

This Strategic Analysis addresses this call for attention and explores how the warning process, including communicating these warnings in a timely manner, should be adapted to the context of hybrid threats. In doing so, the analysis draws upon insights from the strategic warning and early warning literature as well as the literature on complexity theory. Overall, it builds on Cullen’s strategic analysis by focusing on the “how” of warning.

To this end, the paper discusses four phases in the warning process: (1) the direction of the warning efforts, (2) collecting the information, (3) analyzing the threats, and (4) communicating the warning analyses.

 

This is an excerpt from Rietjen’s paper «A warning system for hybrid threats – is it possible?». Read the full paper published in Hybrid CoE Strategic Analysis 22, June 2020.

Whether freedom’s just another word depends on those who use or abuse it. It cannot be doled out to us; we must take it, and all that goes with it.

By: Christopher Holshek

As editor of my high school newspaper, I interviewed our principal, Herbert Fliegner. Starting in the Hitler Youth, he was pressed, as a child soldier, to defend Berlin, then again involuntarily inducted into the Young Pioneers in the Soviet zone before escaping to West Germany. After he emigrated to the United States, the Army drafted him. Unlike most Americans, with conscription in three national armies, Mr. Fliegner experienced three modern forms of government — fascism, communism, and democracy.

During the discussion of freedom of expression, including inflammatory articles in our paper and spontaneous student protests, Mr. Fliegner peered at me over his spectacles. “Freedom is not license to just do what you want”, he said in his thick Teutonic accent. “With each and every right comes an equal and concomitant responsibility”, he paused. “When you fail to assume those responsibilities, sooner or later you will forfeit the rights that go with them.” Those words have stuck with me ever since.

Freedom, at least as a word, has had quite a bit of airplay lately. There was a “distorted discussion of freedom” in the hyper-politicization of the false choice between economic livelihood and personal and community safety, culminating in the imagery of beachcombers and partygoers massed in defiance of coronavirus social protocols.

In many ways, the fear-based stay-at-home messaging has worked too well, as British author Frank Furedi suggested in Spiked. “This is why so many people seem willing to accept such a grievous loss of freedom — because they want to be safe.” Especially since 9/11, the deification of safety and security has pervaded nearly every aspect of life to the point of dominating all other social values — played out in narratives that heroize those in the business of protection, from soldiers to police to health care professionals.

The barrages of bad news, political upheavals, and rapid-fire crises of late have accelerated an acculturated insecurity and its addiction to safety. All the made-up mayhem distracts from any sense of control over personal or community life, shoving us toward simple autocratic solutions for complex, collaborative problems. It tears the guiding threads of age-old norms in the fabric of civil society and our resilience to manipulation. “Control requires a willingness to attempt to manage and live with uncertainty”, Furedi pointed out. “Unfortunately, the capacity for dealing with uncertainty has been undermined by a culturally induced sense of helplessness.”

In the swirl of worldwide pandemic, telling others to “stay safe” has become a ritualistic twist of narrative — a way of reinforcing the widely held belief that we are constantly at risk, so we have to accept and do what we’re told. Except that more and more of us aren’t buying it.

The tension between freedom and security is nothing new. Security is among the most basic of human motives, as Abraham Maslow would attest. Alexander Hamilton warned that “even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates.

”Freedom, on the other hand, is an appeal to something much higher in the human condition, and thus much harder to gain and sustain. The struggle for liberty, not security, is the traditional default of America’s national operating software. Some have explained it in terms of “freedom” meaning different things to different people. Irbam X. Kenid recently posed in The Atlantic that this dichotomy in American culture lies in “reconciling the unreconcilable: individual freedom and community freedom”, or the freedom of the slaveholder versus the slave. One is the individual freedom to enslave, disenfranchise, exploit, impoverish, demean, and silence; whereas the other is the communal freedom from all these injustices.

“From the beginning of the American project, the powerful individual has been battling for his constitutional freedom to harm, and the vulnerable community has been battling for its constitutional freedom from harm. Both freedoms were inscribed into the U.S. Constitution, into the American psyche.” The current pandemic, Kenid further argues, is eviscerating “the very core of American existence: the slaveholder clamoring for his freedom to infect, and the enslaved clamoring for our freedom from infection.”

This is an interesting framing of the problem. In understanding freedom, however, it is also inadequate. What Kenid and others, including white supremacists, are really missing is the difference between freedom and privilege — another word for freedom without responsibility. Digital journalist Justin King, in his video essay, noted how “those who have focused solely on their rights and not on their responsibilities, their obligations to humanity and society… it just reeks of privilege.”

Privilege is the entitlement of a few to do anything without obligation; freedom is the right of all to do what they deem essential to their way of life — provided they respect the right of others to do likewise. The Golden Rule. When Amy Cooper, a self-professed liberal, threatened to call the cops on Christian Cooper in Central Park, she was exercising privilege, because she took no responsibility for the consequences of her action. Even “if you have the right to do anything”, King went on, “you also have shared responsibility for everything.” If you refuse the latter, then you can’t expect to have and hold the former — which is what Mr. Fliegner was talking about.

The pandemic has done its part to reinvigorate this core discussion of American identity. The murder of George Floyd in broad daylight by an officer of the law has triggered what retired Admiral Mike Mullen called “an inflection point” on whether all or some are eligible to enjoy the blessings of liberty. Beyond the conflict between the better and lesser angels of our nature, freedom vs. privilege has been the root question since the founders forged a Republic out of a compromise with the demons of racism for the sake of national unity.

Now, for the very same reason, we must exorcise them.

“The hate epidemic is far more destructive to our well-being and survival than the COVID-19 pandemic could ever be”, social scientist Renu Persaud pointed out. “There is no treatment for the malaise of racial inequality. The treatment depends on our pre-existing potential for compassion.” Freedom, however, requires more than empathy.

“Historically, the virtue of courage was regarded as the most effective antidote to fear. Western society still holds courage in high regard”, Faredi reminded us. “As the philosopher Hannah Arendt explained, courage not only provides society with hope — it also underwrites society’s capacity to exercise freedom.” Moral or civil courage — the willingness to walk what we talk — is the responsibility of the many and not just the few.

In today’s post-truth psycho-system, its pursuit is especially arduous. “In everyday life we have become so estranged from it that we do very little to cultivate it”, Faredi observed. “In effect, the ideal of courage has been downsized, reduced to just another instrument in a self-help toolkit.” The same goes for moral consciousness, which the American theologian Thomas Merton called “the soul of freedom” in No Man Is an Island. “Without conscience, freedom never knows what to do with itself.” This is why rights cannot exist without responsibilities.

The struggle we now face is what retired Marine general and former defense secretary James Mattis called, in his rebuke of Donald Trump, “a wholesome and unifying demand — one that all of us should be able to get behind. We can come through this trying time stronger, and with a renewed sense of purpose and respect for one another. The pandemic has shown us that it is not only our troops who are willing to offer the ultimate sacrifice for the safety of the community. Americans in hospitals, grocery stores, post offices, and elsewhere have put their lives on the line in order to serve their fellow citizens and their country. We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis — confident that we are better than our politics.”

The question of whether there should be “new birth of freedom,” as Lincoln called it, has already been answered. The question is whether we can recognize the call to action of our time and assume its inherent responsibilities, to each other as well as ourselves. “If you want change in America, go and register to vote. That is the change we need in this country”, Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms implored her fellow citizens.

Freedom, indeed, is not free. This generational call to join the march of inclusiveness in the American journey to form a more perfect Union requires far more than social media posts or the cleverest memes or slogans. That journey entails a marathon, not a sprint. Nor is its outcome a given. Whether freedom’s just another word depends on those who use or abuse it. It cannot be doled out to us; we must take it, and all that goes with it.

“Just remember, this country was founded on protest: it is called the American Revolution, and every step of progress in this country, every expansion of freedom, every expression of our deepest ideals has been won through efforts that made the status quo uncomfortable”, former president Obama reminded younger Americans in a virtual town meeting. “And we should all be thankful for folks who are willing, in a peaceful, disciplined way, to be out there making a difference.” In other words, freedom, like democracy itself, grows from the ground up.

There is a reason why demonstrations for racial justice in America are taking place in nearly 20 other countries as well as 50 states. If the experiment in self-governance fails over here, it will likely fail over there. What Hong Kongese are doing is inspiring, a reminder of how freedom cannot come cheaply. We owe them — and ourselves — the same display of compassion, courage, conscientiousness, and commitment. “Only by adopting a new path — which means, in truth, returning to the original path of our founding ideals — will we again be a country admired and respected at home and abroad”, Mattis concluded.

“Follow your bliss”, the American mythologist Joseph Campbell advised his students; but bliss, like freedom, is not just doing what you want. It’s doing what you know is right, as an individual, as you find your place in the world. It’s taking responsibility for the destiny that calls you to a higher purpose than self-preservation.

 

This blog post was first published at Medium, 5 June 2020.

The coronavirus pandemic is the security scenario we were least prepared for. While nation states are responsible for security, they depend highly upon civilian resources and resilient populations. This is a test for civil-military cooperation and requires a comprehensive approach.

By: Gunhild Hoogensen Gjørv

Just like the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union – and despite the warnings – we really did not see this coming. The possibility of a global pandemic has long been bandied around as hypothetical threat. But had health been seriously considered more broadly as a security issue, we might have thought more effectively about this scenario, and prepared for it differently.

Framing a pandemic as a security issue does not mean “it is time to panic,” nor that a pandemic should be equated to a war or a military issue. It is, however, definitely a security issue. As such, the pandemic requires clear heads and the best information possible, often in a situation of incomplete data. This crisis illustrates the complex nature of security, where multiple actors are involved and civilians are central to understanding the security picture.

Today, we are surrounded by incomplete information, misleading information, disinformation and, in fact, too much information (an “infodemic”). This overload of information and fake news targets people with a view to trigger actions and reactions which could contribute to potential destabilisation. Reduced trust and/or increased polarisation between people and their governments affects how populations respond to crises.

The coronavirus crisis provides insight into challenges that do not typically fall under militarised (use of force) security but could nevertheless destabilise, if not cripple, whole societies. It is an important test of “resilience” across society, as well as an opportunity to revisit how we define “resilience”.

The pandemic increases our understanding of security scenarios, including those associated with hybrid threats and hybrid warfare, where militaries or NATO are not the primary security actors. Yet, at the same time these actors need to be able to react proportionally, mitigate harm, and adjust thinking according to context. As part of ensuring national preparedness, it is important to evaluate the extent to which our understandings of resilience are realistic and/or need modification, and who is included in that process.

Resilience

Article 3 of NATO’s founding treaty addresses resilience, with the expectation that each member country is able to resist and recover from a major shock such as a natural disaster, failure of critical infrastructure, or a hybrid or armed attack on the basis of “their individual and collective capacity”. Resilience is understood as “a society’s ability to resist and recover easily and quickly from such shocks and combines both civil preparedness and military capacity.”

Resilience reflects an ability to “bounce back” and tackle a crisis and/or threat, but also an ability to evolve or adapt to abrupt and potentially long-lasting change. Assumptions about resilience are evident in narratives about “returning back to normal” after the coronavirus crisis. Such assumptions do not take into account how changes themselves may become normalised over time, and how attitudes and behaviours – not least among citizens – change as a result. People expect governments to solve a crisis as soon as possible. But what if, like in the coronavirus crisis, that is not possible? Resilience in society may demand adjustments to “new” normals, including new perceptions of insecurity.

Examining the current pandemic is useful for reviewing our understanding of resilience as well as national and NATO preparedness for three reasons:

1. The COVID-19 virus presents a threat to the health, economy and social cohesion of societies on a global level, generating a crisis response.
2. The pandemic increases our understanding of how governments and populations respond to such a widespread crisis over time.
3. It is simultaneously a crisis that is increasingly subjected to attempts to politicise it through disinformation campaigns, which provides us with real-time data on how societies and their populations react when crises are further complicated by politics.

Invisible, hybrid and “grey zone” threats

Threats to society today are increasingly generated through non-military or non-violent means. Rather than crossing borders with tanks or firing weapons, adversaries have found easier ways to create crises or conflict. Today’s strategy of choice for state and non-state actors is to use disinformation or cyberattacks to erode trust in authorities and foster societal and/or political unrest, for example, by undermining services and infrastructure, promoting extremism or violence, and exploiting existing politicised vulnerabilities from elections, to migration, to pandemics. Such destabilisation activities are often cheaper to conduct than armed attacks – they pose invisible threats, which are difficult to detect and trace, and to attribute to a specific adversary.

Though not necessarily an enemy in itself, disease is an invisible threat, which can be used politically and has recently been exploited for the purposes of misinformation, disinformation and infodemics. We need to understand how invisible threats – whether generated by human activity or natural causes – can be operationalised and, often unwittingly, amplified by average citizens.

Many of the invisible threats and attacks that lead to destabilisation are commonly referred to as “hybrid”. Evolving from earlier conceptions of hybrid warfare, which maintained a kinetic or lethal component, the increased use of information warfare and targeting of public opinion as well as cyberattacks on infrastructure became a core distinguishing feature by 2014.

Invisible, hybrid threats are a central feature of “grey zone” conflicts, a term that refers to the increasingly blurred distinction between peace and war, creating a “continuum of conflict”. War has always had an “end state.” The distinction between peace and war are far less clear now as disinformation and cyberattacks are continuous, rolling campaigns designed to disrupt and destablise, possibly without end. The grey zone encompasses measures that create destabilisation and conflict below the threshold of overt violence, including disruptive tactics such as disinformation, psychological operations and destabilising legal processes. Crisis and conflict are part of the same continuum of insecurity, where crisis is an earlier stage of instability and uncertainty before conflict that represents even greater, hostile instability, which can move from a non-violent to violent nature. Much of this continuum represents instabilities that are not strictly military in nature.

One of the largest challenges is that we do not adequately know how civilian populations will react and/or behave during a crisis. Our resilience baseline requirements are top down, that is, dependent upon state and alliance actors to implement, often making a default assumption that average civilians are passive elements in a crisis situation. However, lack of trust in authorities could lead to increased “self-help” solutions by individuals or groups of people based on false or misleading information. Thus, defence against disruption or destabilisation requires not only state-based measures, but also societal capacities.

Reinvigorating a comprehensive approach?

Preparing for the complexity of invisible and hybrid threats requires a much more complex approach than for conventional warfare. It calls for a flexible balance and coordination between civil and military resources depending on the nature of the crisis. A comprehensive approach includes a large repertoire of non-military-centric responses, allowing for different constellations of actors according to the context.

Resilience is an important component in a comprehensive approach and civilian resilience (both institutional and within society itself) is crucial. Elisabeth Braw noted, at a 2018 NATO seminar on civil preparedness, that the civil-military relationship and particularly societal resilience is a part of modern deterrence. This entails an improved civilian situational awareness and a clear understanding of evolving relationships between civilian and military – but prioritises citizen leadership relying on trust between citizens and the authorities to work together and support each other in crisis. However, as Braw also noted, open and democratic societies can be extremely vulnerable to disinformation and polarisation of political views, which destabilises the social trust upon which cooperation relies, and reduces resilience capacities to adapt or “bounce back”.

Maintaining a well-educated and informed citizenry is essential for an effective comprehensive approach. Independent and transparent information/media outlets combined with rigorous, science-informed and socially responsible education programmes are crucial to in times of crisis. Some NATO member states, including Estonia and Germany, and partner countries such as Sweden and Finland, have issued guidance to their citizens in the form of brochures. Finland even starts its fight against fake news in primary schools.

Learning from the pandemic

Hostile actors are using disinformation about the pandemic to polarise views amongst civilians and generate selective distrust, as noted in a recent special report published by the European External Action Service. Selective distrust occurs when people pick and choose which guidelines, measures or authorities to heed, often on the basis of who they are or the politics they represent.

The ways citizens choose to act and react to disinformation say a lot about how successfully authorities, in cooperation with communities, establish security in society. It makes a difference to security when people express distrust in a unified response to a threat, for example by defying quarantine regulations, hoarding toilet paper or responding with anti-social bravado (‘I am not afraid of a disease’). Those countries that have higher levels of trust – regardless of political regime – have been more successful in combating the pandemic than those with lower trust levels.

Understanding threats, developing responses, and sharing insights with its member states and cooperating with partners (including the European Union) is a NATO task. Increasingly complex threats require complex solutions. It is clear from the current pandemic that to manage crises, we need to think critically about the role of comprehensive approaches involving multiple actors from governments to research, civil society, the private sector, militaries and police, and not least, citizens in their communities.

Starting with lessons learned from previous attempts, we need to redesign a comprehensive approach with current contexts in mind, learning from real-time coronavirus crisis data and building from the community/ground up. We need to map resources and strengths that already exist in communities including: developments in education programmes; the role of local civil-society organisation and short-notice capacities to recruit volunteers; availablility and reliability of local resources (transport, energy, communictions, food and water); status of municipal information and preparation measures; and how societal trust works at local, regional and national levels.

This bottom-up approach combined with the guidance of the baseline requirements for resilience will provide the groundwork to identify further initiatives or gaps to be addressed, including national crisis preparation initiatives supporting civilians, evaluation and preventative strengthening of essential social services (health, transportation, infrastructure) and extensive exercising with multiple civilian actors.

We need to seize the opportunity provided by the current pandemic to learn crucial lessons about trust, resilience, comprehensive approaches, and the complexities involved in creating and ensuring security in todays’s world of invisible threats.

 

The article was first published in NATO Review, 20 May 2020.

A common sense of service would make us better citizens, tempering our narcissist tendencies and helping us meet challenges we must inevitably face together.

By: Christopher Holshek

Over the past few years, every time I heard people thank me for my military service, I responded by asking them about their own careers. Some tell me about their public service as police officers, firefighters, emergency responders, civil servants, teachers, journalists, and so on. Others talk about their volunteer or charity work in their communities. To which my response is always: “Well, then, thank you for your service.”

At times I’ve received strange looks or a dismissal that it’s not the same thing. “It’s one thing to defend your country; it’s another to have a country worth defending,” I explain empathetically, relating a fundamental element of civics in a democratic society — the compact between the citizen and the soldier. “What you’ve done gives value to what I’ve done,” I add.

I put this paradox to practice most recently in thanking the staff of Valley View Nursing Center here in upstate New York for their compassionate care of people like my mother, who succumbed to COVID-19 early this month. While sensing the emptiness many feel in near-catechistic recital of what West Point professor Elizabeth Samet called a “mantra of atonement”, it felt different when I delivered the sandwiches and cookies. Many knew me as my mother’s caregiver and brother of a registered nurse working there longer than my 30 years in the Army. In awe of their vocation and aware of my own unsuitability for it, I was able to return the favor of gratitude with a meaning well beyond a catchphrase.

Since especially 9/11 the military has been the most esteemed institution in this country, because many see soldiers as the ultimate public servants. That wasn’t always true. Inasmuch as Vietnam was a low point in our civil-military relations, we have swung to an equally unhealthy extreme. Too many of our political, economic, social, and media elites unabashedly exploit “patriotism” as a prop in pursuit of their own agendas. Businesses of all kinds cash in on the good PR it generates. To “support the troops” has become equivalent to motherhood, apple pie, and kissing babies.

The more perilous flipside to the militarization of our ethos of national service, however, is that it is intrinsically authoritarian, undemocratic, and elitist. Our decision in 1973 to pay the economic rather than social costs for a large, standing peacetime army has resulted in an increasingly professional but correspondingly disconnected warrior class. And the more they are, the more the 99% of us and our elites who never wore a combat uniform are willing to employ them to execute the last mile of policies they advocate but have little personal stake in. “No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare,” James Madison warned us.

It’s time for us to move forward again, but in a different way. Gradually, we have been coming to recognize and value the service and sacrifice of others — police, fire, and other first responders at first. As of late, our enthusiasm has swung toward public health and medical professionals and even essential service workers many haven’t believed should make $15 an hour.

There’s also goodness in the rising movement for a comprehensive national service bill. “As a nation, the United States has not unlocked the full, transformational potential of service in all its forms”, National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service Chairman Joseph J. Heck wrote in the introduction to its final report. “We believe that the current moment requires a collective effort to build upon America’s spirit of service to cultivate a widespread culture of service — a culture in which individuals of all backgrounds both expect and aspire to serve their nation or community and have meaningful opportunities to serve throughout their lifetime.”

The national mythology that summons our psychic as well as physical energies should champion role models from all walks of life and every corner of our country, tapping the essential strengths and comparative advantages of a diverse society under the rubric of e pluribus unum. Volunteerism is the way Americans reconcile individualism and community. It defines much of our national character as well as brands our sense of citizenship. Our heroes are avatars of the values in action that form our personal and national identities.

The coronavirus pandemic has opened more opportunities to democratize and demilitarize our national narrative of service, if we seize them. This would no doubt bring us a little closer together — we may still not respect each other’s opinions; but we should at least respect each other’s commitment to community and country as well as personal wellbeing.

It would do more than that. It’s clear to me, as a former citizen-soldier, that a common sense of service would make us better citizens, tempering our narcissist tendencies and helping us meet challenges we must inevitably face together. And when we become better citizens, we become a better country. Our long-standing penchant for charity, volunteerism, and bottom-up change is among the things that has made the United States the country it promises to be. And like charity, citizenship begins on the block.

It would also enable a generational process of passing the baton of leadership to prepare the next cohort of Americans to take their own journey to find an answer to the question of who we are and what we’re about. By encouraging and empowering not just young people to do good work closer to home, paying it forward as well as giving back, they can see how service to others benefits everyone including themselves, helping them find more authenticity in their lives than social media and reality shows. Each of us can set that example, without waiting for political leadership.

It’s more than service itself that does this. Shared values also come from shared cost. Service requires sacrifice, which gives service its value. It’s why we have Memorial Day. Yet, just as with service, we take for granted the sacrifice of the many and not just the few. We lose more police and firefighters in America each year than troops abroad. In the same places we have sent our soldiers, we overlook the loss of civilian contractors, diplomats and developers, and volunteers in organizations like the Peace Corps and the United Nations. Already hundreds of public health professionals have lost their lives on the front lines fighting COVID-19. We need to pay all of these people as much reverence for their sacrifices, great and small, as we do for military servicemembers.

As America itself has, Memorial Day evolved along a path of greater inclusiveness. First called Decoration Day to honor those who died preserving the Union in the Civil War, in 1926, Congress authorized and directed the Secretary of War to designate Memorial Day a national holiday and changed it from honoring Union soldiers to honoring all Americans who died fighting in all wars. We should continue that march. Memorial Day should henceforth honor all who gave their lives in national, public, or community service.

If Americans truly wish to honor veterans and so many others in service, in and out of uniform, who have given the last full measure of devotion, then they should strive to make this a country worth their sacrifice by walking the walk more than talking the talk. It doesn’t require a uniform or even a program; it begins with simple acts of kindness. And when you serve your community, you serve your country.

The best way to stand up for all the fallen is to be citizens as responsible to our neighbors as to our nation, because they are one and the same. Only united can we stand the tests of our times.

 

This blog post was first published at Medium, 23 May 2020.

The Association of the United States Army’s Institute of Land Warfare has published the 2019-20 Civil Affairs Issue Papers on “Integrating Civil Affairs.”

Edited by ResilientCivilians senior civil-military advisor retired U.S. Army Civil Affairs Colonel Christopher Holshek, this sixth volume is a collection of five papers authored by various civil affairs (CA) professionals, as well as a foreword, executive summary, and workshops report. It details the discussions and progress on civil-military force development at the annual Symposium organized by the Civil Affairs Association in collaboration with partners like the CIMIC Center of Excellence, also a partner to the ResilientCivilians project. While focused on U.S. civil affairs, its discussion of this critical part of NATO’s ability to meet hybrid and population-centric threats is instructive.

The Issue Papers provide a unique, crowdsourced forum for discussion of current topics in civil-military force development along the lines of policy, doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel and facilities (DOTMLPF-P). This platform also advances a more strategic, comprehensive understanding of issues facing NATO as a whole. It also helps foster a learning organization, beyond military structures, to include interorganizational partners.

Along with expanding opportunities for civil-military professionals to think and write about future of their enterprise in outlets the Association provides, the Issue Papers “help improve CA writing skills as a function of intellectual readiness and building human capital,” as Association President Col. (Ret.) Joe Kirlin wrote in the Foreword.

Among this year’s conclusions was that CA (and CIMIC) can find better integration, beyond established capacities, as a force for influence, collaboration, and competition in a world of convergent threats and challenges, including for example hybrid and irregular warfare and “gray zone” conflicts. However, NATO civil-military forces like CA must modernize mission capacities across the competition continuum and full range of military operations to meet and adapt to changing military operations requirements as well as strategic imperatives. This includes civil information management – long a major force vulnerability and a significant challenge.

In addition to drawing on and reinforcing core competencies and capabilities better known and understood by supported commands at tactical and operational levels, CA (and CIMIC) must also seize opportunities to “harness collective influence” through national and international strategic initiatives where such forces can find greater effect. It must also help grow an industrial base to improve the civil-military operations state of the art through applied sciences and technology.

The U.S. Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command (Airborne) – a force of over 10,000 civil-military professionals – has taken the institutional lead in a seven-year strategy to better integrate civil affairs, psychological operations, and information operations capabilities as well as to grow CA functional specialist capabilities and other human capital through partnerships with the private sector and non-governmental organizations.

Such forces must also modernize and better integrate quickly. As the USACAPOC(A) Commanding General Maj. Gen. Darrell Guthrie warned: “We must become an adaptable, agile learning organization or we will be replaced by one that is.”

All the Civil Affairs Issue Papers are downloadable on the Association website.