A Civilization's Resilience Is Measured By Its Ability To Adapt Its Values To Economic Modernization

THERE IS A PREVALENT BELIEF THAT WESTERN SOCIETIES ARE MORE SOCIALLY BRITTLE WHEN IT COMES TO ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, WHILE EASTERN SOCIETIES ARE MORE RESILIENT. This is often expressed in terms of Asian societies featuring stronger social bonds and more community emphasis on the collective versus the individual, while Westerners are depicted as being more selfish, self-centered, and thus more likely to sever social bonds when stressed. A key depiction of these difference between Western and Asian values is found in the East's claim that they value families more, to include both a prioritization of their children's needs and a genuine veneration of their elders. Westerners, due to modernization, are often viewed in the East as having abandoned those values, only to suffer the painful social consequences.

My argument here is not to defend the West, but to point out that modernization and economic development tends to make individualists of us all. When I was young, I heard the Asian values argument with regard to rising Japan. But what we've seen with Japan is that the divorce rate - a great measure of family stress - rose with economic development.  Today roughly one-in-three Japanese marriages end in divorce, which represents a quadrupling since the 1950s and a doubling since the 1970s.  Today's divorce rate in Japan sits at a very European level - not as bad as America's but quite a bit different from its idealized past.

After Japan rose and then tapered off, we in the West heard the same arguments for China as it rose: the Chinese value their children more than Westerners, venerate their elders more than Westerners, and divorce less than Westerners.  Such Asian values would serve China well and mark its ascent as being different - and better - than the Western powers that rose before it.

Except we're seeing the same-old, same-old transformation of society in China that we've previously witnessed in Japan and, before that, in the West.

From a recent Economist article:

Divorce rates are rising quickly across China. This is a remarkable transformation in a society where for centuries marriage was universal and mostly permanent (though convention permitted men to take concubines). Under Communist rule, traditional values have retained a strong influence over family relationships: during much of the Mao era, divorce was very unusual. It became more common in the 1980s, but a marriage law adopted in 1994 still required a reference from an employer or community leader. Not until 2003 were restrictions removed.

Then came marketization and globalization:

In the past 35 years, the biggest internal migration experienced by any country in human history has been tearing families apart. Traditional values have been giving way to more liberal ones. Women are becoming better educated, and more aware of their marital rights (they now initiate over half of all divorce cases). Greater affluence has made it easier for many people to contemplate living alone—no longer is there such an incentive to stay married in order to pool resources.

Sound familiar?

As long as both sides agree on terms, China is now among the easiest and cheapest places in the world to get a divorce. In many Western countries, including Britain, couples must separate for a period before dissolving a marriage; China has no such constraints. In 2014, the latest year for which such data exist, about 3.6m couples split up—more than double the number a decade earlier (they received a red certificate, pictured, to prove it). The divorce rate—the number of cases per thousand people—also doubled in that period. It now stands at 2.7, well above the rate in most of Europe and approaching that of America, the most divorce-prone Western country (see chart). Chongqing’s rate, 4.4, is higher than America’s.

But the big change dynamic is simply heightened individual freedom of action, as in, go more places, meet more people, do more things, live different ways ...

Married people previously had limited opportunities to meet members of the opposite sex in social situations, according to research by Li Xiaomin of Henan University. Peng Xiaobo, a divorce lawyer in Chongqing, reckons 60-70% of his clients have had affairs.

Naturally, this development worries the government:

Many commentators in the official media talk of separation as a sign of moral failure; they fret that it signifies the decline of marriage, and of family as a social unit—a threat, as they see it, to social stability and even a cause of crime. The spread of “Western values” is often blamed.

Bingo!  "They did it to us!"

But marriage is not losing its lustre. In most countries, rising divorce rates coincide with more births out of wedlock and a fall in marriage rates. China bucks both these trends. Remarriage is common too. The Chinese have not fallen out of love with marriage—only with each other.

Give them time ...

And then factor in the stress of a rapidly aging population. China is "aging" three-times faster than US right now, its median age rising 3 years for every year America's rises through mid-century.

Yan Yunxiang of the University of California, Los Angeles, says “parent-driven divorce” is becoming more common. As a result of China’s one-child-per-couple policy (recently changed to a two-child one), many people have no siblings to share the burden of looking after parents and grandparents. Thus couples often find themselves living with, or being watched over by, several—often contending—elders. Mr Yan says the older ones’ interference fuels conjugal conflict. Sometimes parents urge their children to divorce their partners as a way to deal with rifts.

Naturally, that will be a very stressful development for Chinese society going forward.

Last, depressing similarity is that women suffer worse from divorce than men:

Women are more likely to be the ones who suffer financially when this happens. Rising divorce rates reflect the spread of more tolerant, permissive values towards women, but legislation tends to favour men in divorce settlements.

None of this is to pick on China, just to note that economic change drives social and political change, and when the former is fast enough and profound enough, the latter become quite brittle.

One positive upshot of all this socio-economic tumult: after "exporting" their "surplus" female babies for so many years (full disclosure - my fourth child is adopted from China), the international adoption flow out of China has slowed dramatically, meaning that Chinese society's age-old bias against adoption due to "strong" family values/biases against non-relatives is finally dissipating. Some of this is due to women putting off marriage and pregnancy to pursue more education and career opportunities and then finding it harder to conceive, and, most certainly, the lifting the of the one-child policy should radically decrease babies being put up for adoption. Plus, as the reality of single kids having to care for aging parents kicks in, those future parents have come to realize that, contrary to the age-old rural bias for males as farm workers, a modern, urbanized, and aging society and its members tend to value females more because those daughters are far more likely to care for them in their old age.

The irony here is that these changes are all so Marxian: economic and technological change begetting profound social and - eventually in China - political transformations. Marx was right on that transformational power; he just dramatically underestimated the capacity of empowered individuals - and their responsive governments - to adapt themselves to these changes in a constant, co-evolutionary fashion.

Marx simply dismissed that sort of social and political resilience.

The Extremes To Which Non-Resilient National Medical Systems Must Go When Facing a Potential Epidemic

LATIN AMERICAN COUNTRIES, EXPERIENCING OUTBREAKS OF A PREVIOUSLY MUNDANE VIRUS (ZIKA) THAT HAS APPARENTLY MUTATED TO THE POINT OF TRIGGERING DEVASTATING BIRTH DEFECTS, ARE TAKING THE UNPRECEDENTED STEP OF ASKING WOMEN TO DELAY PREGNANCIES - IN ONE CASE UNTIL 2018. Mosquito-borne, Zika seems to be expanding its reach with climate change and the heightened international travel dynamics associated with globalization. In other words, this growing medical challenge feels like a glimpse of the world's near-term collective future, one which places unusual and profound pressures on the resilience of national medical systems. (The map above comes from the CDC).

The gist from a great WAPO piece over the weekend:

The rapid spread of the Zika virus has prompted Latin American governments to urge women not to get pregnant for up to two years, an extraordinary precaution aimed at avoiding birth defects believed to be linked to the mosquito-borne illness.

What until recently was a seemingly routine public health problem for countries that are home to a certain type of mosquito has morphed into a potentially culture-shaping phenomenon in which the populations of several nations have been asked to delay procreation. The World Health Organization says at least 20 countries or territories in the region, including Barbados and Bolivia, Guadeloupe and Guatemala, Puerto Rico and Panama, have registered transmission of the virus.

Although the Zika virus has been documented since the 1940s, it began its assault on Latin America in the past several months. The hardest-hit country has been Brazil, where more than 1 million people have contracted the virus. In the past four months, authorities have received reports of nearly 4,000 cases in which Zika may have caused microcephaly in newborns. The condition results in an abnormally small head and is associated with incomplete brain development. Colombia, which shares an Amazonian border with Brazil, reacted to its own Zika outbreak, numbering more than 13,000 cases, by urging women not to get pregnant in the next several months. Other countries, including Jamaica and Honduras, also have urged women to delay having babies.

After more than 5,000 suspected Zika cases were reported last year and in the first weeks of 2016, El Salvador on Thursday took the most extreme stance so far: Deputy Health Minister Eduardo Espinoza urged women to refrain from getting pregnant before 2018.

Culture-shaping is the operative term here. We've long associated globalization with culture/society-shaping dynamics - particularly in the violent responses it can spawn in terms of insurgencies and terrorist movements designed to "safeguard" locals from its perceived pernicious effects (often surrounding the social standing of women who are disproportionally empowered by gender-neutral networks that invade traditional societies in globalization's wake). But climate change will clearly fall into the same category of impact: social behavior will be transformed. Here, we're talking overwhelmingly Catholic societies being asked to embrace birth control by states fearful of medical costs associated with an unfolding epidemic.

But as we've learned with "the pill," AIDS epidemic and abortion rights, it gets really hard to alter that most intimate of social behaviors.

Outside the National Maternity Hospital in San Salvador, Selina Velasquez Cortez, a 30-year-old employee of a sardine factory who has been trying to get pregnant for two years, said there is no way she will stop trying now.

Clearly the US is already taking note and following a similar path of prevention - for now:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday added eight to a list of 14 countries and territories it has urged pregnant U.S. women to avoid because of the risk associated with Zika outbreaks. So far there is no vaccine for the virus.

Having the right vaccine is the ultimate resilience reservoir, as we've learned across the 20th century, when the biggest killer (at 300 million) by far was chicken pox - not warfare. Humanity basically doubled its life-expectancy at birth from 1900 to 2000 (from low-30s to mid-60s globally), and early childhood vaccines were the primary engine of that amazing achievement. Prior to vaccines, that life expectancy at birth measure hadn't move much at all over the previous 10,000 years of human existence.

But now humanity enters into a new age (Anthropocene, as some in the scientific community call it) where our cumulative and growing impact on the planet doubles back upon us with sped-up evolutionary challenges that not only trigger one of Earth's biggest extinction spasms (loads of species disappearing in a massive die-off) but likewise force nations to rethink what it means to have truly resilient national medical systems.

 

Climate Change Tests Metropolitan Resilience With Wider Array Of Weather Dynamics

I RECENTLY MET A SAN DIEGAN - A TRANSPLANT FROM WISCONSIN (WHERE I LIVE) - AND SHE WAS FLABBERGASTED TO NOTE A RECENT TORNADO WARNING THERE, COURTESY OF EL NINO.  Having grown up with tornados in southwestern Wisconsin, I was curious to discover how often this happens in sunny southern California, and, according to the Tornado History Project, it's not all that often - roughly once every 6-7 years for the immediate San Diego metro area. Having endured 6-7 such warnings every summer as a kid, that strikes me as pretty rare, so, sure, when they happen in San Diego, it must seem awfully exotic - like an earthquake in Wisconsin.

Well, with humanity having so reshaped the planet's surface and atmosphere these past decades and centuries, what were once outliers in probability are becoming more routine.  Yes, fewer people die in disasters today than in decades past - something like 98% fewer people compared to 1900! But the costs and the dislocations are clearly rising with serious speed.  Per the US Global Change Research Program's recent National Climate Assessment Assessment, we can cite the following extreme-weather trends:

As the world has warmed, that warming has triggered many other changes to the Earth’s climate. Changes in extreme weather and climate events, such as heat waves and droughts, are the primary way that most people experience climate change. Human-induced climate change has already increased the number and strength of some of these extreme events. Over the last 50 years, much of the U.S. has seen increases in prolonged periods of excessively high temperatures, heavy downpours, and in some regions, severe floods and droughts ...

Heat waves are periods of abnormally hot weather lasting days to weeks. The number of heat waves has been increasing in recent years. This trend has continued in 2011 and 2012, with the number of intense heat waves being almost triple the long-term average. The recent heat waves and droughts in Texas (2011) and the Midwest (2012) set records for highest monthly average temperatures. Analyses show that human-induced climate change has generally increased the probability of heat waves., And prolonged (multi-month) extreme heat has been unprecedented since the start of reliable instrumental records in 1895 ...

Heavy downpours are increasing nationally, especially over the last three to five decades. The heaviest rainfall events have become heavier and more frequent, and the amount of rain falling on the heaviest rain days has also increased. Since 1991, the amount of rain falling in very heavy precipitation events has been significantly above average. This increase has been greatest in the Northeast, Midwest, and upper Great Plains – more than 30% above the 1901-1960 average. There has also been an increase in flooding events in the Midwest and Northeast, where the largest increases in heavy rain amounts have occurred.

One measure of heavy precipitation events is a two-day precipitation total that is exceeded on average only once in a 5-year period, also known as the once-in-five-year event. As this extreme precipitation index for 1901-2012 shows, the occurrence of such events has become much more common in recent decades ...

The mechanism driving these changes is well understood. Warmer air can contain more water vapor than cooler air. Global analyses show that the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere has in fact increased due to human-caused warming.,,,This extra moisture is available to storm systems, resulting in heavier rainfalls. Climate change also alters characteristics of the atmosphere that affect weather patterns and storms ...

Flooding may intensify in many U.S. regions, even in areas where total precipitation is projected to decline. A flood is defined as any high flow, overflow, or inundation by water that causes or threatens damage. Floods are caused or amplified by both weather- and human-related factors. Major weather factors include heavy or prolonged precipitation, snowmelt, thunderstorms, storm surges from hurricanes, and ice or debris jams. Human factors include structural failures of dams and levees, altered drainage, and land-cover alterations (such as pavement) ...

There has been a substantial increase in most measures of Atlantic hurricane activity since the early 1980s, the period during which high quality satellite data are available.,,These include measures of intensity, frequency, and duration as well as the number of strongest (Category 4 and 5) storms. The recent increases in activity are linked, in part, to higher sea surface temperatures in the region that Atlantic hurricanes form in and move through. Numerous factors have been shown to influence these local sea surface temperatures, including natural variability, human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases, and particulate pollution. Quantifying the relative contributions of natural and human-caused factors is an active focus of research ...

Winter storms have increased in frequency and intensity since the 1950s, and their tracks have shifted northward over the United States., Other trends in severe storms, including the intensity and frequency of tornadoes, hail, and damaging thunderstorm winds, are uncertain and are being studied intensively. There has been a sizable upward trend in the number of storms causing large financial and other losses. However, there are societal contributions to this trend, such as increases in population and wealth.

All this is to say that US metropolitan areas should expect to suffer weather "freak-outs" on a far more consistent basis in coming years and decades - over a far wider array of dynamics. Right now we're witnessing such a freak-out in the Washington DC area, and, I can tell you, having lived there for years myself, it is indeed a freak-out primarily because local, state and federal agencies there simply don't put in the time and effort to work these extreme winter storms (either in advance or during) and because so much of the population living there is un-experienced in navigating their way amidst such conditions.  And yet, it grows ever more obvious that major US metro areas will be forced to deal with such extreme-weather events on a far more regular basis, meaning those skills will need to be developed and honed - by everyone throughout the government, society, and economy.

Per the NOAA chart above, we will measure these events primarily in damages incurred (private insurance, publicly-funded reconstruction) and lost economic activity (business continuity), and yes, that is a huge improvement over the age-old statistic of lives lost. But we are talking about metropolitan governments needing to be "masters" of so many more "domains" over time that it's clear there will need to be a lot more transparency, planning, and preparation efforts jointly pursued by private and public-sector entities.

You know the old joke about a conservative being a former liberal who once got robbed? Well, a resilience-aware executive/political leader is oftentimes simply someone who's had to answer for a weak response to an extreme-weather event.

Transparency Begets Measurability Begets Improvement Begets Resilience

YOU CANNOT IMPROVE AN INDUSTRIAL ACTIVITY THAT YOU CANNOT MEASURE, BUT YOU CANNOT MEASURE THAT ACTIVITY IF THE INDUSTRY ISN'T BEING HONEST. The world's fisheries are under a great deal of stress right now, between pollution and rising ocean acidity triggered by higher CO2 absorption rates. Unsurprisingly, the more regulated Western nations, having themselves long overfished, now do a much better job of measuring and managing fish stock. But with the ballooning middle class emerging across the East and South, two global regions even more given to eating fish than the West, the pressure for bigger catches is immense among those very nations featuring weaker governments and regulatory oversight, begetting a classic "tragedy of the commons" that is now being addressed by an aggressive expansion of aquaculture (fishing "farms") across Asia, which, in turn, generates new and profound environmental stresses along that continent's littoral zones.

The key to managing fish stocks is reliable data, which is hard to come by, the crucial requirement being open and transparent cooperation among commercial fishing firms and the scientific community. Where is that going to best happen? Where the regulatory environment is strongest.

However, a recent study suggests that, on a global basis, fish catches are systematically under-reported:

Tens of millions more tons of fish have been taken from the seas than are recorded in official statistics, suggests a huge and controversial project aiming to estimate the ‘true catch’ of the world’s fishing industry.

The work is detailed in a paper in Nature Communications by fisheries researchers Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and it builds on a decade-long project that has drawn in hundreds of researchers from around the world.

According to Pauly and Zeller, global fisheries catches hit a peak of 130 million tons a year in 1996, and they have been declining strongly since then. This is substantially higher than the data collected by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), which report that catches reached 86 million tons in 1996 and have fallen only slightly.

Actually, when you look at the above chart (note the typo on the vertical axis) that compares the two estimates (FAO v Sea Around Us), they appear to track with one another fairly tightly, with the new estimate just consistently higher throughout (roughly 50-60% larger).  But that's the point: if your most closely watched official estimate (FAO) is off by as much as one-third (underestimating the "damage"), then your calculations of fish-population resilience are likely to be significantly off.

Here's the real issue in data collection - a weak global authority relying on the honesty of member countries that are highly incentivized to low-ball their numbers to avoid criticism/penalties/etc.:

The FAO numbers have long been the only estimate of how many tons of fish are caught at a global level. But “the FAO doesn’t have a mandate to correct the data they get,” Pauly told journalists during a conference call.

This leaves the organization reliant mainly on the numbers submitted by member countries, he says, and “the countries have the bad habit to report only the data they see”. This means that many official statistics do not account for a huge amount of the world’s fisheries catch, such as that by small-scale and subsistence fisheries or fish thrown back as ‘discards’—species other than those being hunted.

To fill in the holes in official statistics, Pauly’s team embarked on an epic project to supplement the official baseline data from member nations. This included using results from peer-reviewed research, interviews with local specialists and consumption information from population surveys.

What I really about Pauly's team effort: it goes above and beyond the usual official reporting requirements and attempts to amass bigger data that yields more accurate truths.

A World In Which China’s Economic Resilience Seems As Important To The World As America’s

AP photo, used in WAPO citationIT MAY SEEM AN OBVIOUS - ALMOST TRITE - OBSERVATION AT THIS POINT IN HISTORY, BUT YOU WOULDN'T KNOW IT FROM THE WAY WASHINGTON, THE PENTAGON, AND OUR CURRENT SLATE OF PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES SPEAK ABOUT CHINA.  That fundamental disconnect is somewhat scary to, as well as dangerous for, the rest of the world. And no, I don't note that as some subtle plea for better and less contentious relations with China, because it will always take two to tango. I do, however, note it as a continuing negative trend when it comes to these two nations' co-management of global economic stability.

A couple of Reuters' pieces today remind us of just how important China has become to global markets and their expectations.  First, any new economic forecast figures from China are momentous enough to shift IMF calculations for future global economic growth:

The International Monetary Fund cut its global growth forecasts for the third time in less than a year on Tuesday, as new figures from Beijing showed that the Chinese economy grew at its slowest rate in a quarter of a century in 2015.

To back its forecasts, the IMF cited a sharp slowdown in China trade and weak commodity prices that are hammering Brazil and other emerging markets.

The Fund forecast that the world economy would grow at 3.4 percent in 2016 and 3.6 percent in 2017, both years down 0.2 percentage point from the previous estimates made last October. It said policymakers should consider ways to bolster short-term demand. [emphasis mine]

Unsurprisingly, the Reuters pieces notes that "concerns about Beijing's grip on economic policy have shot to the top of global investors' risk list for 2016 after falls in its stock markets and the yuan stoked worries that the economy may be rapidly deteriorating."  So, it's not just a matter of China's economic health but what Beijing intends to do about it.  Frankly, until very recently in history, the only countries that registers at that level of impact has been the United States, Japan, and the EU as a collective.  But come back with me to review the stimulus spending that unfolded in response to the global financial distress of 2008-09, and the numbers there previewed just how central China had become:

• US - 800 billion USD
• China - 600 billion USD
• EU - 220 billion USD
• Japan - 150 billion USD.

In other words, when push came to shove and big economies needed to pony up the money to shore up global economic demand, China outperformed the EU and Japan put together by making an effort bested only by the US.

This is why, per the second Reuters citation, just as many eyes are on Beijing as Washington right now:

Global equity markets on Tuesday snapped back from a rout at the start of the year after data showing weak economic growth in China prompted speculation Beijing would boost stimulus efforts, but a renewed drop in U.S. oil prices raised a cautionary flag.

China's rise from being a detached corner of the global economy - just four decades ago - to its status as second-most important pillar is akin to America's stunning, turn-of-the-20th-century rise to global prominence following our Civil War. And yes, the US of that era scared a lot of the world with its ambition, arrogance, and self-centeredness - just like China does today.

But we lucked out and picked up a mentor in the British, who, over time, had no choice but to encourage our rise as central to their own continued prosperity, security, and even national survival. The truth is, with all the world has on its plate right now with climate change, terrorism, technological leaps, and so on, the US is as likely to become as entirely co-dependent on China's national resilience in the 21st century as the British once became on US resilience in the 20th century.

Do I see any such recognition among our political and military leaders on this score?  No I do not.  And that worries me.

Do I see it across this country?  It depends on your age, as in, the older you are, the more you tend to fear China.  You also tend to fear China more if you are located in the interior and east of the US versus the Pacific-minded US West.

But I do see a different mindset among the Millennials, which, by all polling, appear to view China more as an ally in co-managing this world than an antagonist. And, based on my time in China, I spot enough of the same among China's youth to suggest that this co-dependent relationship will ultimate work out just fine.

What worries me most is getting from now to then.

The US spent decades after WWII working to spread and sustain an international liberal trade order that we now dub "globalization."  We were enormously successful in this endeavor, triggering the greatest reduction in global poverty and the greatest upsurge in global development that the world has ever seen.  But, in doing so, we created a host of economic "challengers" whom we must eventually come to accept as co-enablers of our own national resilience, as well as the resilience of the planet.

The hardest part for Americans seems to be this supposition that, if a foreign civilization joins this global trade order (as China has) and becomes highly capitalistic (as China has), it must rather rapidly become highly American as well (raucously pluralistic in politics).  However, to our continuing bafflement, almost half a century after Nixon went to China, the Chinese are still Chinese.

I know, right?  How dare they!

And that seems to upset a great deal of Americans to no end - but particularly older Americans, many of whom now seem to see, in China, a monster of our/globalization's making - a Frankenstein who cannot possibly be tamed (much less told what to do).

As suggested earlier, I expect generational change in both countries to solve this trust-divide that currently keeps the world's two greatest economies (and militaries) from realizing the full extent of their co-dependencies.  For now, it's important enough for players - and citizens - on both sides to realize just how much we collectively rely on one another's national capacities for resilience in face of common threats and challenges, AND to remember just how different this relationship is from the one we once endured with the Soviet Union - an empire that was bound to our national survival in terms of its nuclear weaponry but not to our economic resilience to any appreciable degree.

And that is what makes China entirely different.

YouTubes of 2015 Washington DC speech

Video segments of September 2015 briefing to an international military audience in the Washington DC area.

Part 1: Introductions and US grand strategy

 Part 2: America's looming energy self-sufficiency

Part 3: Climate Change and its impact on food & water

Part 4: The aging of great powers

Past 5: Millennials & Latinization of U.S.

Part 6: Evolution of US Military under Obama

Part 7: Dangers of a "splendid little war" with China

Part 8: Middle East without a Leviathan

Part 9: Answers to audience questions

A Squirrelly Argument Regarding Critical Infrastructure And Our Resilience In The Face Of Attacks

THE NATIONAL SECURITY COMMUNITY TENDS TO ATTRACT DOOMSDAY TYPES, WHILE THE UTILITIES SECTOR TENDS TO ATTRACT PRETERNATURALLY CALM ENGINEER TYPES - GO FIGURE! That's the just the nature of their respective businesses, so no big surprise that, when national security officials highlight the hacking threat to critical infrastructures (most frequently, electrical grids), plenty of practitioners in the utilities arena counter that "alarmism" with more prosaic examples of power outages - namely, those caused by rodents and birds. This is a classic argument between those who focus their professional attention on low-probability/high-impactevents (e.g., foreign military hackers attacking our critical infrastructure as a prelude to war-initiation) and those who must deal with high-probability/low-impact events - like a squirrel chewing through a wire and triggering a local blackout.

So, good on WAPO's The Switch column for running this story asking, "Are Squirrels a Bigger Threat to the Power Grid Than Hackers?" Yes, the use of the modifier "bigger" here is stunningly indiscrete (newspaper headlines tend to do that to pique your interest), but the author does provide a real-world threat "floor" to the notional threat "ceiling" routinely cited on WAPO's front page. On the latter score, I recall the near-constant drumbeat of fear-instigating stories (all presumably "leaked" by the Obama Administration), in the weeks leading up to the 2009 launching of US Cyber Command, about how seemingly everyone in the world was waging cyber-warfare against America, when, of course, we know full well that the U.S. Government itself is the preeminently offensive player in this arena - as it should be.

So, no, squirrels are not a "bigger threat." That's an idiotic notion (or - more politely - an imprecise notion). Significant cyber-warfare-capable nation-states and non-state actors are the bigger threat.  Squirrels are just the more common threat.

Another way to look at the difference: I am constantly subject to the common cold, but I still consider cancer to be the bigger threat to my health. Does that mean I ignore the cancer threat (lower probability but far higher impact) to focus more on the common cold? Hardly. Like everyone, I attempt to balance risk between the two.

I also most certainly do not discount the cancer threat merely because I find it stunningly hard to prevent my contracting the common cold on a regular basis, which is the implied argument here (Focus on real problems and don't believe the hype!). Wait long enough on today's national-security "hype" and eventually somebody nefarious will give that scenario a run for its money. And when they do?  The high-probability/low-impact skeptics will be nowhere to be found, while the public - and Congress - demands answers (and scapegoats) for this huge failure of national intelligence!

The Ultimate Enemy Of Resilience – And Democracy – Is Fear Of The Future

THE POOR WANT PROTECTION FROM THEIR CIRCUMSTANCES WHILE THE RICH WANT PROTECTION FROM THE POOR, BUT THE MIDDLE CLASS WANTS PROTECTION FROM THE FUTURE. They've achieved something both modest in scope but profound in political implications - a good life that they seek to protect. And when that middle class no longer feels sanguine about the future? Then their fears become the political system's driving dynamics.

As noted previously, this is where things now stand in America and throughout much of the West. Globalization has clearly created the world's first majority middle class, but that development has set off competitive dynamics (the West's middle class v. the East/South's "cheap labor" middle class) that have undeniably put a squeeze on this nation's resilience-defining socio-economic middle.

Remember back to when Europe and America, thanks to the Second Industrial Revolution of the late 1800s, saw their middle classes balloon. Two reactions arose in tumultuous-but-still-monarchy-bound Europe: a radical impulse from the Left to prevent the rise of the bourgeoise (Marxism-Leninism) and a reactionary impulse from the Right to protect the shopkeepers from radicalized Labor (Fascism). In combination, these twin movements sparked unprecedented bloodshed across the great Europe-Asia landmass.

America, meanwhile, lucked out with the two Roosevelts, Teddy and Franklin, signaling this country's tremendous DNA-debt to the Dutch, who both spawned that famous political dynasty and impregnated us with that free-wheeling socio-economic mindset once known as New Amsterdam and now known as New York City - where the Roosevelts long reigned as political patriarchs. Our great good fortune was to see the American Middle come to rule itself, versus succumbing to either the Bolshevik Left or the Fascist Right. That political reality has defined America's national resilience ever since.

But clearly that stabilizing dynamics is under great duress right now. The Middle Class' fear of the future is what elected Barack Obama to the presidency, and thus it is no surprise that he spent much of his swan-song State of the Union address noting his enduring failure in eradicating that fear - despite guiding us rather ably through the Subprime Crisis and the Great Recession.

President Obama nailed his description of this deep angst when he noted:

We live in a time of extraordinary change -- change that's reshaping the way we live, the way we work, our planet, our place in the world. It's change that promises amazing medical breakthroughs, but also economic disruptions that strain working families.

It promises education for girls in the most remote villages, but also connects terrorists, plotting an ocean away. It's change that can broaden opportunity, or widen inequality. And whether we like it or not, the pace of this change will only accelerate.

Well said. But he should have used the modifier "revolutionary" versus "extraordinary."

Globalization is a revolutionary force in its aggressive connectivity. That promise of education for village girls is what drives a great deal of blowback anger among radical fundamentalist groups. Recall how the Taliban treats girls education in Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan (attacking schools and shooting - in the head - the [subsequently] Nobel Peace Prize-winning teenage girl who champions female education), or what ISIS does to women (sex slaves) within its territory. Remember also the nickname local Nigerians gave to their northern radical Islamic insurgency - Boko Haram (Western education is forbidden), and how that group brazenly kidnapped a couple hundred young females (later forced into marriages with their soldiers and combat roles) to demonstrate their control and instill fear among the citizenry.

President Obama cites that "change" in a distant, abstract manner (as he cites so many things), when, in truth, these revolutionary dynamics are greatly of America's making ... and spreading (since World War II) ... and defending (since the Cold War's end). He distances America from that "change" because he does not see - as others do (including myself) - that historical lineage and the national responsibilities it creates.  In Obama's perspective, this is not so much a world of our creating but one of our enduring.

Over the long haul, President Obama will be more right than wrong. While I would argue that globalization is a world - first and foremost - of America's creating, our great success in doing so does eventually diminishes our standing as superpower-without-parallel (a status he reflexively asserts at the end of his address, so as not to appear un-American).

He shouldn't have to - of course. The only way America could remain the sole superpower would have been to deny the opportunities for others to rise, which would have been profoundly un-American. After WWII we championed the resurrections of Italy, Germany, and Japan, and after the Cold War we did our level best with Russia and hit the jackpot with China. We could have done otherwise, but we did not. And now we "suffer" a more competitive world that's also beget the first majority middle class in human history and seen those living in deep poverty reduced to less than 10% of world population - also unprecedented.  

Oh, and by the way, the world of today features fewer, shorter and less deadly wars than at any previous time in human history - the threat of catastrophic/everyday terrorism being stipulated. The world is also more democratic than ever before.

You add that all up and it is clear that the world advanced magnificently under America's alleged global "hegemony" - without a doubt surpassing all the previous efforts by European and Asian empires throughout history.

So what I'm saying here is that these are the best problems that America and the world have ever faced, even as they propel us collectively into new and uncertain situations where fear about the future will be difficult to tame.

And here is where President Obama's address also gets it supremely correct:

America has been through big changes before -- wars and depression, the influx of new immigrants, workers fighting for a fair deal, movements to expand civil rights.

Each time, there have been those who told us to fear the future, who claimed we could slam the brakes on change, who promised to restore past glory if we just got some group or idea that was threatening America under control. And each time, we overcame those fears.

We did not, in the words of Lincoln, adhere to the dogmas of the quiet past. Instead we thought anew and acted anew.

We made change work for us, always extending America's promise outward, to the next frontier, to more people. And because we did, because we saw opportunity where others saw peril, we emerged stronger and better than before.

What was true then can be true now. Our unique strengths as a nation -- our optimism and work ethic, our spirit of discovery, our diversity, our commitment to rule of law -- these things give us everything we need to ensure prosperity and security for generations to come.

In fact, it's in that spirit that we have made the progress these past seven years. That's how we recovered from the worst economic crisis in generations.

Brilliantly stated - except for that last claim. No one outside the Obama Administration would swallow the notion that America's "spirit" has been restored these past 7 years. We got a breather alright, and Obama deserves great credit there (then again, that's why we elected him twice - to give us a breather from Bush's exhausting presidency), but America has also taken a sort of strategic vacation from managing the world, a situation that's invited other great powers (Russia, China, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia - to name the most prominent) to step in and try their own hands - a development that America instinctively mistrusts - with some good reason - no matter how much we implicitly beg the Rest to rid us of this infernal global policeman burden!

President Obama ended his speech with four questions, which, if answered, presumably end our nation's growing fears about the future:

First, how do we give everyone a fair shot at opportunity and security in this new economy?

Second, how do we make technology work for us, and not against us, especially when it comes to solving urgent challenges like climate change?

Third, how do we keep America safe and lead the world without becoming its policeman?

And finally, how can we make our politics reflect what's best in us, and not what's worst?

Not a bad list, but they can all be better summed up with: How do we make America the most resilient country in the world?  Less brittle, less reactive, and more flexible in our adaptations to this brave new world?

Yes, that is a looking-out-for-numero-uno approach at first glance, but can you name a better country to pioneer a redefinition of national resilience moving ahead? One more likely to share that learning curve with others?

Police Pioneering Minority Report-Like, Big Data-Driven, Predictive Technique On Individual Criminals

AS THE U.S. MILITARY EMBRACED COUNTER-INSURGENCY AND "SMALL WARS" AFTER 9/11, IT INVARIABLY PIVOTED FROM CLASSIC DEFENSE TO UNCONVENTIONAL SECURITY, AND - SINCE THEN - THAT SHIFT HAS TRICKLED DOWN TO POLICE DEPARTMENTS ACROSS THE NATION IN THE FORM OF REVOLUTIONARY TECHNOLOGIES DEVELOPED AND FIELDED. If you're the type who errs on the side of 9/11 changed everything, then this is a good example of its wide impact: what began in the national-security community, driven by the ambition and urgency to connect the dots, now migrates into law enforcement. Drones fall into this category (they connect the dots operationally and tactically in a myriad of ways), and so do Big Data techniques designed to sniff out potentialities and likelihoods.

Per a great WAPO piece (almost 2k in length), this is a glimpse of the future of policing - namely, the cops have serious insight, in hand, as to your potential for violence, as they approach your door or vehicle:

While officers raced to a recent 911 call about a man threatening his ex-girlfriend, a police operator in headquarters consulted software that scored the suspect’s potential for violence the way a bank might run a credit report.

The program scoured billions of data points, including arrest reports, property records, commercial databases, deep Web searches and the man’s social- media postings. It calculated his threat level as the highest of three color-coded scores: a bright red warning.

The man had a firearm conviction and gang associations, so out of caution police called a negotiator. The suspect surrendered, and police said the intelligence helped them make the right call — it turned out he had a gun.

Hard to blame the police for wanting to know as much as possible before going in. I sure as heck would. And you have to hope such foreknowledge obviates those overkill responses when they they go in with the wrong worst-case assumptions. Then again, your "opponent" always gets a vote, and once criminals know full well that any approaching police will have their backstory in hand, that may well push them to go uptempo much more quickly. So, this knowledge will alter behavior on both sides. But, have no doubt, Big Data will transform policing like it's transforming everything else. Policing is essentially a service industry, and in service industries, it is highly advantageous to know as much as you can about your customers/clients so that you can tailor your efforts to the maximum degree.

“This is something that’s been building since September 11,” said Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “First funding went to the military to develop this technology, and now it has come back to domestic law enforcement. It’s the perfect storm of cheaper and easier-to-use technologies and money from state and federal governments to purchase it.”

The piece goes on to profile the Real Time Crime Center currently being used by the Fresno (CA) Police Department:

On 57 monitors that cover the walls of the center, operators zoomed and panned an array of roughly 200 police cameras perched across the city. They could dial up 800 more feeds from the city’s schools and traffic cameras, and they soon hope to add 400 more streams from cameras worn on officers’ bodies and from thousands from local businesses that have surveillance systems.

The cameras were only one tool at the ready. Officers could trawl a private database that has recorded more than 2 billion scans of vehicle licenses plates and locations nationwide. If gunshots were fired, a system called ShotSpotter could triangulate the location using microphones strung around the city. Another program, called Media Sonar, crawled social media looking for illicit activity. Police used it to monitor individuals, threats to schools and hashtags related to gangs . . .

But perhaps the most controversial and revealing technology is the threat-scoring software Beware. Fresno is one of the first departments in the nation to test the program.

But here's where it gets supremely tricky:

Exactly how Beware calculates threat scores is something that its maker, Intrado, considers a trade secret, so it is unclear how much weight is given to a misdemeanor, felony or threatening comment on Facebook. However, the program flags issues and provides a report to the user.

I can't wait for the lawsuits on that one. All you need is one over-reaction based on somebody's algorithm, resulting in deadly police shooting, and wham! You've got a big-time political controversy that won't be tamped down with a plea of "proprietary data."

I have to think that, it's one thing for private corporations to act that way on defense weapons/platforms/etc., but quite another thing for such products to hold significant sway in the world of law enforcement - where victims have all manner of legal recourse.

Something definitely to watch as it unfolds.

Nations Are Only As Resilient As Their Middle Class is Happy

IN HIS BRILLIANT BOOK ON "THE MORAL CONSEQUENCES OF ECONOMIC GROWTH," HARVARD POLITICAL ECONOMIST BENJAMIN FRIEDMAN DEMONSTRATED HOW AMERICA'S RESILIENCE AS A NATION IS - AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN - DIRECTLY RELATED TO THE ECONOMIC VITALITY OF ITS MIDDLE CLASS.  Whenever that middle class enjoyed rising income and expanding economic opportunity, the nation was more welcoming of immigrants, more tolerant of diversity, more progressive in its reforms, and more beneficently - and outwardly - focused in its state affairs.  In short, a happy middle class makes for a better America and better American leadership in this world.  But, when the opposite conditions arise, and the US middle class feels pressed upon, marginalized, and economically threatened, then America inevitably turns less welcoming of immigrants, less tolerant of diversity, more regressive in its politics, and more withdrawn from global affairs.

Any guesses as to which phase America is in now? Since enduring the 2008 subprime crash that set off the Great Recession that still reverberates throughout the vast majority of US households?

America's middle class is not happy right now, and hasn't been in quite some time.  But this is not the first time the US has endured this sort of inner rage and political tumult.

And while it may come as a surprise, when America has previously endured such clear class tensions, our tendency has been to reach for a New York patrician - as in Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt.  Could Manhattan billionaire Donald Trump and former NY Senator Hillary Clinton, the current Republican and Democratic front-runners, respectively, for the US presidency meet such lofty historical standards?  Only time can tell.  My sole point in the comparison is to suggest that America has met this historical challenge before, and regained its economic and political footing.

I have no doubt that this time around will be our most difficult test yet, if only because this globalization - largely of America's creating and spreading - now poses competitive economic challenges of unprecedented ferocity and complexity.

We live in an age when corporate CEOs declare their firms too vast and too complex for even they to understand - much less ethically operate, when national leaders reach for "firewall" solutions versus tackling internal problems head-on, and when great powers no longer aim to defeat the enemies of order but merely to "thin their herds" on a consistent basis.

So, no surprise, Americans are more fearful of the present and future than they've been in a long time.  Our middle class is desperately unhappy, and that makes America desperately unhappy.

Unhappy societies are not resilient societies.  They're brittle as all get-out.  Shocks tend to shatter, pushes come to shoves, and civil discourse is anything but civil.

But a reasonably happy society, one with a rapidly expanding middle class?  That nation can face all manner of problems, dangers, threats, and deprivations and remain unusually resilient. I travel to China frequently in my work, and I am constantly amazed at how upbeat people are there now - despite the myriad of challenges there.  Could that all reverse the minute China's expanding middle class suffered a profound set-back?  Quite possibly.  But a lot depends on that middle class's sense of historical advance.  Right now, no matter what happens in China, life for the growing middle is one heckuva lot better than it was 10, 20, 30, 40 or even 50 years ago.  That buys you a lot of social resilience.

Nigeria falls into a similar category.  Does it have problems?  They're absolutely godawful.  But this is a country where middle-class households are growing at a fantastic rate, where just-opened shopping centers attract crowds like a new ride at Disney World.  You make that big of a chunk of your population optimistic about the future, and that buys you a lot of social resilience.

So where does that leave America?  Searching for answers right now and angry as hell.

Teddy Roosevelt promised a "square deal," while FDR promised a "new deal."  Go watch the hit movie "The Big Short" and you'll readily understand why so many Americans feel like they've been given a raw deal.  There's that sense that circumstances need to be re-rationalized, markets re-tamed, and the economic playing field re-graded . . . all a good deal more in favor of the "99%."  As we saw with the two Roosevelts, that's not so much a Republican or Democratic thing as a "traitor to your class" thing, meaning Americans tend to reach for a One-Percenter in these circumstances (recall how viciously both TR and FDR were pilloried by their fellow plutocrats for their reforms).

The World’s Greatest Stability Enabler – Can North American Agriculture Remain Resilient?

WHEN I FIRST SAW THIS CHART IN THE WASHINGTON POST ALMOST A DECADE AGO, I WAS GENUINELY SHOCKED TO REALIZE HOW CENTRAL TO GLOBAL FOOD SECURITY NORTH AMERICA HAD BECOME. The chart basically shows which regions in the world produce more grains than they need, thus making them available for export - in a net fashion. That's the key point:  everyone exports some grains, but which regions export more than they import? Where are the reserves in the global food system? Where can we count on our resilience as food producers to keep feeding humanity?

Grains are the obvious focal point of any thinking on global food security, because they provide the bulk of humanity's caloric intake. The thing is, thanks to globalization's enabling of the rise of humanity's first-ever majority middle class cohort (reaching 50% of the world's population back in 2006), that demand for more calories significantly outpaces population growth itself - translating into a far more quickly rising demand for grains (used - at varying levels of intensity - to create all manner of foodstuffs).

So, when you look at the map, you quickly realize how global grain reserve capacity exists really in only four regions: North America (US, Canada), South America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile), the Black Sea Region (Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan), and Oceania (Australia, New Zealand), with North America typically providing more than half and upwards of two-thirds of that moveable feast on an annual basis.

So what happens if North American agricultural production were to take a long-term - or even a sudden, short-term - hit? Well, food prices would spike globally, and when food prices spike in places like the agriculturally-insecure Middle East and North Africa, where the vast bulk of their food is imported AND accounts for the bulk of household spending, you get political instability and revolution. Bread prices rose dramatically in Egypt in the months leading up to the Arab Spring dynamics there.

Now, America has long viewed itself primarily as a security-exporter (US military's global footprint and operations) and a technology-exporter (Silicon Valley's numerous advances),  but, in truth, one can easily argue that the most important US export is food, where we rule on corn, soybeans, wheat and - unsurprisingly - food aid.

Yes, we can worry about the developed world's approach to monoculture agriculture, and we should remain vigilant on the subject of bio-terrorism against food production, but, long term, the chief threat is clear - climate change and the stress it puts on crops in terms of droughts (longer and more harsh, by all modeling).

I'd like to highlight two MSM pieces that recently bookended - in my mind - our current challenge. The first is a Time summation of a scientific study published in Nature:

Researchers ... found that drought and extreme heat reduced crop yields by as much as 10% between 1964 and 2007. Extreme cold and floods did not result in a significant reduction in crop production, according to the study.

The research provides key insight on the effects of climate on agriculture as policymakers prepare for the number of extreme weather events to spike in the coming decades due to global warming. The study, which evaluated the effect of 2,800 weather disasters on cereal crops like corn, rice and wheat, suggests that the effects of drought worsened after 1985 and are expected to continue to deteriorate in the coming decades. The study speculates that’s because of more intense droughts driven by climate change, increased vulnerability to drought and changed reporting methods, but couldn’t confirm any individual factor with certainty.

Developed countries experienced some of the most severe crop loss due to drought and heat, according to the research. Crop production in North America, Europe and Australia faced nearly a 20% decline(emphasis mine) thanks to drought and extreme heat, compared to less than 10% in Africa and Latin America. Researchers attributed the disparity to a difference between the agricultural methods employed in the different areas. Farmers in developed countries tend to grow crops uniformly across large areas. Drought affects those crops uniformly.

Recent spikes in global food prices typically unfolded in response to reduced production in places like the Black Sea Region and the Horn of Africa - important regions but nowhere near as important to the global system as North America.

So the question then becomes, how is North America - and the US in particular - readying itself for this looming technological challenge? The answer, as argued in a recent NYT op-ed, is not well at all:

DESPITE the four-year drought that has parched California and led to mandatory restrictions on water use, farmers there have kept feeding the country. California produces more of 66 different food crops than any other state, $54 billion of food annually.

Maintaining this level of productivity has been quite a challenge in recent years and is likely to become more difficult over the next few decades as weather patterns, available water and growing seasons shift further and threats of invasive weeds, pests and pathogens rise.

If agriculture is to have any chance of answering these challenges, we must have new and improved techniques and technologies. The problem is that agricultural innovation has not kept pace.

The last time our nation was in a similar crisis was just after the Dust Bowl years in the 1940s, but the country’s agricultural science enterprise was in much better shape. At that point, almost 40 percent of American research and development spending was focused on agriculture. This ambitious embrace of research was part of the “green revolution” that significantly boosted agricultural output around the world.

Today, farm production has stopped growing in the United States, and agriculture research is no longer a priority; it constitutes only 2 percent of federal research and development spending. And, according to the Department of Agriculture, total agricultural production has slowed significantly since the turn of the century. We need another ambitious surge in agricultural science.

Why not leave that to the handful of US agricultural multinational corporations that dominate the world's grain trade?

While private sector research and development in agriculture have grown over the past decade and now exceed what is federally funded, this financing is focused on shorter term benefits. On the other hand, more than 80 percent of federally funded research is designed to provide the building blocks for long-term production increases to address the many problems we face in the decades ahead.

So, how is the US Government doing on funding agricultural research? The answer is, awfully stingy when compared to the behemoth Defense Department R&D budget.

And that's something we should question as citizens of this world, as we collectively move deeper into this century of global climate change.

Ukraine's Electrical Grid Gets Knocked Down, But It Gets Up Again … In a Sign of Threats to Come

RUSSIA IS OFTEN CREDITED WITH EXPLORING THE SUB-THRESHOLDS OF TRADITIONAL STATE-ON-STATE WARFARE, OR WHAT ONE DEFENSE ACADEMIC HAS DUBBED "GREY-ZONE CONFLICTS."  In some ways, Moscow's experiments in interstate aggression represent a continuing acknowledgment of the overarching strategic reality of mutually assured destruction created by the still-formidable nuclear arsenals of the world's major military powers - i.e., Russia knows not to go there.  But great powers still want to act like great powers, so they meddle, they intervene, they topple governments, they support proxies in civil wars, they build artificial islands and militarize them, they insert computer viruses into other states' networks . . . and sometimes they merely send a signal like I can turn off your lights whenever I want.

Vladimir Putin's regime has an established reputation for this sort of international cyber-bullying, launching somewhat impressive online attacks against Estonia in 2007, Georgia in 2008 (as part of its land grab there), and more recently against Ukraine in 2014.  Western security reviews of such incidents typically find little-to-no evidence of official government involvement, and this is the central characteristic of the maskirovka approach (an old Soviet-era term that equates to covert military operations - i.e., masked).  So yeah, the whole point of such shenanigans is to be hide your tracks even as you are rather overtly signaling both capability and intent.

As we used to say about the Soviets during the Cold War, they will try every door and every window until they find one that's unlocked.

Thus, the world is meant to take notice of what recently happened in Ukraine, per WAPO:

Hackers caused a power outage in Ukraine during holiday season, researchers say, signalling a potentially troubling new escalation in digital attacks.

"This is the first incident we know of where an attack caused a blackout," said John Hultquist, head of iSIGHT Partner's cyberespionage intelligence practice. "It's always been the scenario we've been worried about for years because it has ramifications across broad sectors."

Indeed, the hackers-taking-down-electrical-grids is the sine qua non of the "cyber Pearl Harbor" or cybergeddon attack scenario that worries owners and operators of critical infrastructures around the world - but particularly in the US, where 88% of them are private-sector firms.

More details ...

Half of the homes in Ukraine's Ivano-Frankivsk region were left without power for several hours on December 23rd, according to a local report that attributed the blackout to a virus that disconnected electrical substations from the grid. Researchers at iSight on Monday said their analysis of malware found on the systems of at least three regional electrical operators confirmed that a "destructive" cyberattack led to the power outage.

Impression made ...

Why it matters for critical infrastructure writ large:

Electrical outages can lead to ripple effects that leave communities struggling with things like transportation and communication, according to security experts who have long warned about the potential for cyberattacks on the power grid.

Here the attack almost veers into clandestine mode, meaning the actor in question doesn't worry all that much about its identity being revealed:

In this case, the attackers used a kind of malware that wiped files off computer systems, shutting them down and resulting in the blackout, Hultquist said. At least one of the power systems was also infected with a type of malware known as BlackEnergy. A similar combination was used against some Ukrainian media organizations during local elections last year, he said.

So just imagine who was messing with Ukrainian media during local elections last year, and then realize that that same actor didn't bother changing up his cyber pitch this time around because . . . hey, that's not the point here.

Here we get to the true signaling:

While [cybersecurity company] ESET's analysis showed the destructive element was "theoretically capable of shutting down critical systems," it said BlackEnergy malware's ability to take control of a system would give attackers enough access to take down the computers. In that case, the destructive element may have been a way to make it harder to get the systems up and running again, according to ESET. (bolding mine)

That is what should grab the attention of any nation's critical infrastructure operators - not just the takedown capability but the suggested keepdown capacity.

Yes, the fingerpointing is eastward . . .

Hultquist believes the attacks that caused the blackout were the work of a group iSight dubs "Sandworm" that the company previously observed using BlackEnergy. In a 2014 report, iSight said the group was targeting NATO, energy sector firms and U.S. academic institutions as well as government organizations in Ukraine, Poland  and Western Europe.

"Operators who have previously targeted American and European sensitive systems look to have actually carried out a successful attack that turned the lights out," Hultquist said.

He described the group as "Russian," but declined to connect it to a specific government or group . . .

Such is the nature of maskirovka, remembering, of course, that Putin began his career in the KGB.

Now the part that most clearly matters to us here at Resilient Corporation:

The picture can often become clearer as more information trickles out, but the public and even some of those investigating may not be operating with all the facts, according to Cross.

"When a plane crashes, the FAA publishes all of the details about the incident. That makes sense because we pilots want to know what to do to avoid the next crash," he said. "In our industry, when something like this  happens, some information comes out and some doesn't."

Great analogy, suggesting that the lack of industry transparency here can cost us in the long run.  One doesn't counter maskirovka with "proprietary" concealment but with information-sharing.

Not everyone necessarily has an interest in fully disclosing the attacks because it might embarrass them or give new information to attackers, Cross said. But he argues that the more people  know the details about the attack, the better the security industry can prepare for the next one.

"People should operate with an abundance of caution and assume the threat  is real while demanding technical detail and evidence," he said.

Bingo!

As for Ukraine, the final bit of news was heartening:

Assuming that the hackers did take out the power in Ukraine, there was a silver lining, according to Cross: The grid seems to have rebounded quickly.

"The world didn't end here - they did get power back up," Cross said.

This time, yes.  But this scenario will grow less exotic over time, and that's why our resilience still-set must keep pace .

A Troubling Start to 2016 and Global Energy Security

NBC News CRUDE OIL PRICES ARE PRESENTLY TESTING HISTORIC LOWS, WITH "NEW" IRANIAN OIL SET TO HIT THE MARKET IN 2016.  In general, that's good news for a global economy that's greatly benefited from lower energy prices thanks to the North American-led fracking revolution in tight oil and shale gas production.  That production growth has allowed the US to continue to cut its crude oil imports, thus allowing major Persian Gulf exporters to further concentrate on meeting South and East Asia's ever growing demand.

It's no mere coincidence that America's willingness to play "global policeman" in the Persian Gulf has declined commensurately with its growing energy self-sufficiency.  Yes, war-weariness was the proximate cause for Washington's strategic disengagement from the region under President Obama, who packaged that move as a necessary "strategic pivot" from Southwest Asia to East Asia so as to counter China's growing military "muscle flexing."  But that was why Obama was elected - twice.  As we've seen with the Paris terror strikes of weeks back, a Western great power (France) can easily find itself sucked back into the Middle East's many battlefields, so Americans should not delude themselves into thinking that such renewed pacifism is permanent.  The right constellation of terror strikes in the US could easily push the next president (Clinton?  Trump? Rubio?) into more vigorous action, no matter how much the Pentagon prefers to plan its high-tech future wars against more conventional opponents (Russia, China).  I mean, sometimes America's foreign policy happens to the world, and sometimes the world happens to America's foreign policy.

Ultimately, however, it will more likely be America's rising energy self-sufficiency that dissuades Washington from reassuming a lead balancing/stabilizing military role in the Persian Gulf - that, and the rise of the Millennial Generation as a force in American politics (hint, they don't see China as an enemy and greatly prefer multilateralism over unilateralism).

But here's the trick:  even as it is China, India, Japan and South Korea that import the vast majority of Persian Gulf oil (from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran), none of them show much interest in replacing the US with its Carter Doctrine notion (now fading) of keeping the Gulf open and available to the global energy trade.  Frankly, the only great power that seems to harbor such ambitions is Russia, with its surprise entry into Syria's civil war.  Yes, China just signed a naval basing agreement with Djibouti on Africa's nearby "horn," but Beijing's interests seem decidedly limited to protecting its energy shipping versus playing a direct role in tamping down the region's many bitter rivalries - any one of which could directly impact global energy security.

So that's why today's headlines about Saudi Arabia once again breaking off diplomatic ties with regional rival Iran are seriously disturbing.

Saudi Arabia severed diplomatic relations with Iran on Sunday, escalating the regional crisis that erupted after the execution of a Shiite cleric triggered outrage among Shiites across the Middle East and beyond.

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir told reporters in Riyadh that the Iranian ambassador to Saudi Arabia had been given 48 hours to leave the country, citing concerns that Tehran’s Shiite government was undermining the security of the mostly Sunni kingdom.

Saudi diplomats had already departed Iran after angry mobs trashed and burned the Saudi Embassy in Tehran overnight Saturday, in retaliation for the execution of Sheik Nimr Baqr al-Nimr earlier in the day.

The rift sets the region’s two biggest powerhouses on a collision course at a critical time for U.S. diplomacy aimed at bringing peace to the Middle East, and it raises the specter of worsening violence in countries where they back rival factions, such as Yemen and Syria.

Despite their countless international feuds, it was the first time since a two-year rupture in 1988-1990 that diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia had formally been severed, according to Abdullah al-Shamri, a Saudi analyst and former diplomat.

To put it in perspective, an equivalent scary development in East Asia would require a similar severing of ties between China and Japan over South/East China Sea maritime disputes.  That's because the biggest and most important commodity flow in the global economy today is Persian Gulf crude oil flowing from Southwest Asia to South and East Asia by sea.  That flow can be disrupted at its source or at its destination, but either way, any such crisis would be highly destabilizing.

We in the West have long assumed that the big flow was from the PG to us, but that reality dissipated a long time ago.  The Persian Gulf is the 5th most-important source of US crude oil after (1) domestic production, (2) North America (Canada, Mexico) imports, (3) South American imports (historically Venezuela but Brazil will emerge over time), and (4) African sources.  Somebody blows up the Persian Gulf tomorrow and - in direct terms - it's a speed bump for the US economy.  It would, however, bring Asia's economic pillars to their knees rather quickly, which, in turn, would harm the rest of the global economy in due course.

So yes, we in the West should be very concerned by Iran and Saudi Arabia's long-running and highly bitter rivalry breaking out in the open so decisively right now.  We don't actually live in a "G-Zero world" (the notion that none of the G-20 powers is interested in managing the international system right now).  Russia wants to manage it's "near abroad" alright, and America seeks to manage East Asia with its "pivot" there, to match China's clear ambitions to do the same.  It's just that no one seems all that interested - save for meddling Putin - in doing the same for the tumultuous and tense Persian Gulf.

And that's a scary way to start 2016.

(RESILIENT BLOG) Government and Corporate Transparency Are Resilience Indicators

RESILIENT CORPORATION'S STOCK-IN-TRADE IS BASICALLY TRANSPARENCY IN THE SERVICE OF ORGANIZATIONAL RESILIENCE.  Everybody talks about resilience, but few can agree on what it means because it's so inherently specific to any enterprise's goals and missions.  That's why we define resilience as an organization’s capacity to anticipate disruptions, adapt to events, and create lasting value.  That last bit about "lasting value" may strike you as a bit of a punt on our part - Shouldn't you be more specific? But if you're talking to the entire universe of public and private enterprises out there, you need to leave in that definitional space for them to individually declare what it is they're trying to protect in terms of their core enterprise functioning/service/goal . . .

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(RESILIENT BLOG) Dependency as Vulnerability Means the Best Cyberdefense is a Wicked Cyberoffense

NATIONAL SECURITY, AS A BUSINESS DOMAIN, IS DRIVEN BY THE MANTRA OF "BE AFRAID, BE VERY AFRAID.  When we're just talking among ourselves, the conversation remains professional.  But there's always that temptation to go all apocalyptic when you take those conversations into the public realm.  It's the old if you only knew what I know trump-card that any professional has a hard time not using.  We can currently blame this dysfunctional dialogue on the media (driven to sensationalism) and the Internet (nutcases galore), but we cannot dismiss the grounded reality at the core of these discussions, which is dependency as vulnerability . . . 

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Check it out: "The Past as a Prologue: The Future of the U.S. Military in One Graphic"

The author is Daniel Sukman -- strategist in the U.S. Army and a member of the Military Writers Guild. 

Interesting and ambitious look at US military operations since 1980, positing logical operational postures for the Combatant Commands on that basis.  Starts off with a fascinating world map, and then goes through the COCOMs individually.  Very nicely executed.

The conclusion caught Dave Emery's eye, so he sent it to me.

Conclusion

The New Map…The Non-Integrating Gap aligns with U.S. Operations over the past 30 years

Interestingly, this review of operations since 1980 confirms the Non-Integrating Gap theory proposed by Thomas Barnett in his seminal book, The Pentagon’s New Map. According to Barnett, areas of lesser development — Latin America, the Middle East, and areas of the Pacific — constitute this gap. Moreover, use of the military element of national power tends to occur in these areas. Nations outside of the gap tend to resolve conflict without outside intervention.

To address global requirements, Barnett introduced the concept of the Leviathan and Sysadmin force. In Barnett’s paradigm, the focus of the Leviathan force is major combat operations. The focus of the Sysadmin force is other missions ranging from humanitarian assistance to “Phase 4” nation building activities.

The creation of the Sysadmin and Leviathan force as envisioned by Barnett may not achievable in an era of fiscal constraints. However, the joint force should prioritize the ten missions outlined in the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review per geographic area of responsibility. Using the past as a prologue indicates the feasibility of this approach.

(RESILIENT BLOG) Rating US Healthcare Systems On Infectious Diseases: Which US States Are Most Resilient?

IN THE ADVANCED WEST, WE'VE LONG AGO SHIFTED OUR THINKING ON HEALTHCARE FROM INFECTIOUS DISEASES TO CHRONIC OR "LIFESTYLE" DISEASES.    Why?  Vaccines, antibiotics, and better sanitation in general put most infectious diseases (and subset communicable diseases) in the West's rearview mirror, compared to the East and South. Plus, they've been our biggest killers for a long time, thanks to modernization. Moreover, the big medical gains that we've seen with globalization's spread include a strong shift from infectious to chronic diseases in the "rising" East and a similarly unfolding shift across the South.  Now, of the top-ten killers in the world, according to the WHO, seven are considered chronic problems  That's the good news ...

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(RESILIENT BLOG) EU Leapfrogs US On Data Privacy Rules – And Punishments, Creating A Regulatory Disruption

THE EUROPEAN UNION FANCIES ITSELF AS A "RULES SUPERPOWER," meaning it creates new rules within its ranks and, by the power of its economic heft, they are effectively "exported" to other regions in a sort of regulatory osmosis (you do business with Europe, you adapt to those rules, those rules spread throughout your enterprise).

Fair enough, and certainly something the U.S. has been doing on trade for decades ...

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(RESILIENT BLOG) How Climate Change Will Test Our Resilience On A Very Local – Even Intimate – Level

LIVING IN THE NORTHERN UNITED STATES, ONE DOESN'T EXPECT TO CONTRACT ESSENTIALLY TROPICAL DISEASES LIKE MALARIA (see Lancet's chart on left), and yet, would you be surprised that, in the early-to-mid-19th century, Norwegian pioneers settling in Wisconsin - as a rule - feared malaria significantly more than cholera?  Malaria actually remained endemic in much of the United States (more in the South, obviously) through the 1940s, whereas today in a state like Wisconsin, virtually all cases that present themselves (roughly a dozen a year) feature travelers just back from tropical locations.  But that's changing, per a great WAPO in-depth story of a few days back ...

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(RESILIENT BLOG) Everybody Talks About The [Insert Gripe Here], But Nobody Does Anything About It . . . Without First Establishing Metrics

Resilient CorporationTHE ORIGINAL QUOTE, MISTAKENLY ATTRIBUTED TO MARK TWAIN, CONCERNED THE WEATHER, BUT WE COULD EASILY INSERT "RESILIENCE" TODAY - ALSO MISTAKENLY. It would be a mistake because a lot of people all over the world are working resilience, and yet, like any triumphant management buzzword (big enough to create a C-suite position trend), there's a significant range of thinking as to what the term actually means - hence the interesting blog post ("What is This Thing Called Resilience") by a Harvard academic last year on that very subject. The author, Eric J. McNulty, currently serves as director of research at the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative at Harvard's JFK School ...

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