Domestic Security: Some Complex Thinking

A recent article by John Tirman argues that progressives have missed a great opportunity to stake out an alternative strategy for security that would be modestly less expensive than the conservative strategy that has been used since Bush took office, more effective, and provide a host of other social and environmental benefits in the process. The gist of his argument is shown in the first three columns below. I’ve added as a fourth column the preventative strategy that I have argued for on these pages, which has also been advocated in a number of European newspapers.

My recent study of complex systems (and the politics of international terrorism are nothing if not complex) and the approaches to dealing with them have given me pause. All of the agendas above are designed for complicated systems, not complex ones. They all presume to have a monopoly on understanding of the cause-and-effect relationships behind acts of terror. The very terms ‘deterrence’, ‘preemption’ and ‘prevention’ are rooted in complicated systems theory, and are meaningless and perhaps even dangerous when applied to complex systems. They are all about trying to understand and exercise control over a system that is simply unknowable and uncontrollable. Perhaps this is why neocons and all previous imperialists have striven to impose homogeneity over global culture, with the unattainable objective of making us all so much alike that civilization becomes a predictable, merely complicated system. Diversity is a dirty word to conservatives. Progressives support diversity as a matter of principle, but have been notoriously poor at understanding its implications — resulting in bizarre behaviours like ‘political correctness’, which no one seems to like.

Here’s a quote from Dave Snowden talking over on AOK about another social issue where conservatives and progressives disagree completely and have tried to impose policies based on different cause-and-effect oversimplifications. The issue is capital punishment:

Apply this thinking to the Schiavo case and it will make your head spin.

The article cited above explains the Grameen bank case as follows:

Some of the techniques for ‘complex thinking’ he suggests:

• Manage by monitoring for the emergence of pattern to sustain or disrupt, rather than managing by objective, to plan or to a model;
• Focus on effectiveness (with requisite diversity and allowance for inefficiency for adaptability) rather than efficiency;
• Explore don’t exploit;
• Strive for resilience and adaptability not stability;
• Measure the stability of ‘barriers’ and ‘identities’, and the attractiveness of ‘attractors’, rather than using reductionist measures like ROI;
• Simulate emergence to see the patterns of possibility, rather than analyzing and relying on ‘experts’;
• Understand that our different ‘identities’ make decisions based on personal experience and stories representing collective knowledge (we usually think of individuals making decisions based on enlightened self-interest).

So how might we apply ‘complex thinking’ to domestic security? Rather than trying to solve causality, or rank and address all of the potential security risks, how could we discover and ‘disrupt the patterns’ of acts of terror? Does this imply that until/unless we can discover the patterns, it’s a waste of time and money doing anything? Decentralizing targets and diversifying sources of supply would seem to be a good way to build resilience into critical systems. What else could we do? If we acknowledge that the barriers we have erected at borders are unstable (and next to useless for combating terrorism, while particularly effective at disrupting commerce and tourism), are there other barriers we could use instead? Are there ‘attractors’ we could put in place that would draw those with an axe to grind against the West elsewhere (Iraq seems to be an unexpectedly good attractor these days)? What kinds of simulation could we run that might help us see what the impact on terrorist activity might be of various interventions — would building good schools in the Mideast help or hurt for example? And what kind of stories can we surface and tell that would inform the decisions of those inclined to loathe us and act on that loathing?