5. Seek alignment among all players. When Wyler found it difficult dealing with the government-owned monopoly, he bought it. When that avenue is unavailable (which it rarely is), a way must be found to align government and business policies so that unnecessary conflicts don’t stymie progress. Wyler didn’t enter the Rwanda market out of altruism. He expects to make money. The government understands that profitable companies pay better wages, pay more taxes, invest more in their infrastructure, etc. The goals of one enterprise (though different than the goals of the other) are different but complementary. Complementary strategies among players can generally be found and they should be a priority. “

A few brief remarks by me; I will analyze the strategy paper itself in a separate post and will limit myself here to the intersection of DiB and implementation of the counter terror strategy:

DiB point # 3, ” Create a customer base” is on par in terms of counterterrorism with providing security. It is simply that important and has been the area of greatest American weakness. The efforts and developing a culturally attuned, linguistically competent, intellectually creative, strategic influence policy aimed at isolating Salafist-Jihadi extremists from their co-religionists have been insufficient.

Part of the problem is the need for an unavoidably time-consuming build-up in personnel with the requisite cultural intelligence and linguistic skill-sets to do the variety of tasks – analysis, interrogation, translation, operational planning, information operations – that need to be done. At best, it is an 8-10 year investment but our current deficits can be remediated to a degree by point # 4.

Moving the IC and military out of the highly compartmentalized, vertical thinking, Cold War era, view of internal security uber alles and toward building a counterterrorism Community of Practice is vital. A community that embraces expertise outside of the insular and narrow confines of beltway bureaucracy and integrates private sector, academic and where appropriate, foreign talent to vastly accelerate the cycle of innovation and knowledge dispersal. Greater horizontality in thinking, greater interconnected modularity in community structure.

In turn, this morphs into Steve’s fifth point of seeking alignment. I would go a step further – the broad private-public community of practice should be “aligned”; the public IC-diplo elements should leapfrog beyond alignment to begin building “jointness” in their activities the way the military began to do in the early-mid 1980’s. A system administration force for counterterrorism where synergy of action, not bureaucratic chart reorgs, is the objective.

DiB principles can be directed as usefully at our own bureaucratic systems as societies languishing in the Gap.

LINKS:

tdaxp -“Like CPUs and Operating Systems, Countries Matters

Dr. Barnett “Jaffe profiles Abizaid and his definition of SysAdmin as the tool to win the Long War”

Conversation Base Blog “Systems approach on a global scale: Military-Market Nexus“

Homeland Security Watch -“DHS issues final rule for handling private-sector CI information“

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