Smart/Soft Power CT/COIN/Stability Strategy -> GlobalServiceAcademy@GovernorsIsland (Part3-of-3)

June 11, 2009

Dear General Abizaid:

A proposal outlining the above referenced strategy was e-mailed to Dr. Joseph Nye at Harvard on December 25th 2008. It consisted of a three-page letter; partial transcripts of Dr. Joseph Campbell’s six-part series, The Power of Myth; a Governors Island profile; and two NY Harbor School brochures (letter & e-mails attached).

Dr. Nye replied on December 31st (e-mail attached).

The binder to which Dr. Nye’s e-mail refers was Fedex’d to him on January 9th 2009 (substantive cover letter & e-mail attached).

He provided feedback on January 15th (e-mail attached).

Four follow-up e-mails were exchanged (two from me; two from him).

The zip folder contains both letters and twelve e-mails (APPENDIX-1=DrNye-081225-090116).

In his last e-mail, Dr. Nye called a Global Service Academy that puts young people from around the world on a path to service rather than suicide “a nice vision.” And when asked directly: “Is the proposal too incomplete? undeveloped? unfocused? amateurish? utopian?” He replied: “It was one of the most professionally done presentations I have received. If anything, there is too much to absorb.”

With your expertise in Middle Eastern affairs; LTC Conrad Crane (ret.), Maj. William Casebeer, and Mr. James Russell’s grasp of culture, narrative, exemplars, and myth; LTG T.G. Jenes (ret.) and Mr. James Cooke’s experience with M&S; LTG William Caldwell’s integrated, whole-of-government, interoperable, military/civilian, unity-of-effort, stability operations plan; Gen. James Mattis’ Joint Forces Command (JFCOM); and Ambassador Richard Solomon’s US Institute of Peace (USIP) – this nice vision could be welcoming its pioneer class of police cadets and distance-learning techs in October, 2010.

DoD and USIP have almost everything needed to develop and operationalize a simulation/training program that equips billions under-25 with the skills, tools, and resources required to return to their societies ready to provide humanitarian aid; post-conflict reconstruction services; and development assistance. Neither congressional approval or funding is needed. According to the United States Institute of Peace Act, Section 1705 (Powers and Duties), sub-section (h) (1): “… the Institute may obtain grants and contracts, including contracts for classified research for …the Department of Defense … and receive gifts and contributions from government at all levels.”

Ambassador Chester Crocker speaks for many DoD admirers: “The Defense Department …excels at doing jointness. The Defense Department has learned about joint-operations and joint-planning and inter-service coordination – learned the hard-way – but learned, so it’s part of the culture now. DoD’s capacity for planning and actually implementing its plans is spectacular!… And it’s not surprising that State is sort of left in the dust when it comes to planning for joint operations. The second point I’d make is that the State Department was never set up to do operations in zones of conflict. That’s not State’s role, traditionally – historically. It’s not meant to be conducting programs in zones of conflict overseas. It’s meant to be doing diplomacy. Traditionally, that’s the way it’s been designed. So it’s facing wholly new challenges now: about how to develop at least some operational capacity … that culture of jointness needs to be worked on [at State] – it is being worked on – but it is taking a long time.” (CSIS, 11/27/07, 71:45)

RE: Smart/Soft Power CT/COIN/STABILITY Strategy: A GlobalServiceAcademy@GovIsland

Christine Lederhouse | 219 East 25th Street, Studio 5E | NY, NY 10010 | [email protected]


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Unfortunately, time is exactly what DoD doesn’t have. Between Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, there are over 49.9 million young people in the 15-24 cohort; 19.6 million 25-29 year-olds; and 91.8 million under-15. The reports and meetings on post-conflict reconstruction strategies refer repeatedly to this abundant source of chronic instability. However, none offer comprehensive, executable plans to address the resentment and rage generated by foreign occupiers openly doing the work these unemployed/unemployable youth so desperately need to give meaning and purpose to their lives. (See Appendix)

Adding complexity to the youth glut is the myth vacuum that has globalized since first predicted by Dr. Joseph Campbell over two decades ago. During his interview with Bill Moyers in 1986, Dr. Campbell warned that we had entered a period of history in which the millennium-old myths/ religions no longer functioned:

Myth has to give life models and the models have to be appropriate to the possibilities of the time in which you are living. And our time has changed and changed and changed – and continues to change so fast that what was proper 50 years ago is not proper today. The virtues of the past are the vices of today and many of what were thought to be the vices of the past are the necessities of today. The moral order has to catch up with the moral necessities of actual life in time – here and now – and that’s what it is not doing. … And that’s why it’s ridiculous to go back to the old-time religion. … [W]hen you go back to the old-time religion it belongs to another age, another people, another set of human values, another universe. The world changes – then the religion has to be transformed.

When asked by Bill Moyers: “So what happens when a society no longer embraces powerful mythology?” Dr. Campbell replied:

What we’ve got on our hands … if you want to find what it means to have a society without anyrituals read the New York Times … [where you’ll find] the news of the day – young people who don't know how to behave in a civilized society. … I imagine 50% of the crime is by young people in their 20's and early 30's that just behave like barbarians.

The analogy Dr. Campbell drew between myths and computer software provides a way forward:

I’ve had a revelation from my computer about mythology. You buy a certain software with a whole set of signals that lead to the achievement of your aim. Once you’ve set it – if you begin fooling around with signals that belong to another system they just won't work. You have a system there – a code – a determined code that requires you to use certain terms.Now, similarly in mythology – each religion is a kind of software that has its own set of signals and will work. If a person is really involved in a religion and really building his life on it, he had better stay with the software that he's got.

The [future] myth has to incorporate the machine just as the old myths incorporated the tools that people used – the forms of the tools are associated with power systems that are involved in the culture. We have not a mythology that incorporates these – the new powers are being surprisingly announced to us by what the machines can do. We can't have a mythology for a long, long time to come, because things are changing too fast. The environment in which we are living is changing too fast for it to become mythologized. The individual has to find the aspect of myth that has to do with the conduct of his own life.

Dr. Campbell cautioned:

You can’t predict what a myth is going to be any more than you can predict what you’re going to dream tonight. Myths and dreams come from the same place. They come from realizations of some kind that have then to find expression in symbolic form. Every mythology, every religion is true in this sense: it is true as metaphorical of the human and cosmic mystery. But when it gets stuck to the metaphor – then you're in trouble. … The real horror today is what you see in [Jerusalem] – where you have the three great Western religions –Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – and because the three of them have three different names for the same biblical God they can't get on together – they're stuck with their metaphor and don't realize its reference. Each needs its own myth … love thy enemy – open up. Don't judge.


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Later in the interview, Dr. Campbell advised:

The only myth that’s going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that’s talking about the planet: not this city, not these people, but the planet and everybody on it. That’s my main thought for what the future myth is going to be. And what it will have to deal with will be exactly what all myths have dealt with: 1) the maturation of the individual, the gradual, pedagogical way to follow from dependency through adulthood to maturity, and then to the exit, and how to do it; 2) And then how to relate to this society and how to relate this society to the world of nature and the cosmos. That’s what the myths have all talked about. That’s what this one’s got to talk about. But the society that it’s got to talk about is the society of the planet. And until that gets going you don’t have anything.

And therein lies the problem: we still don’t have anything. The American myth – born in 1776, tested in the 1860’s, and dominant for most of the 20th century – was mortally wounded in 2001 and crippled over the last eight years – discredited by tradeoffs made in the name of national security and economic stability. Incompatible with value systems in non-Western civilizations, it just can’t compete in this 21st century face-off between liberal democracy and fundamentalist theocracy. After several decades of godless communism and soulless capitalism, the pendulum swing from material to spiritual systems should come as no surprise. Unfortunately, it has.

The scale and complexity of this human Y2K challenge exceeds all current, pipeline, and projected governmental capabilities and capacity. Top-down is not the solution. Adding to the urgency: our noosphere adversaries have an eight-year head-start in this soft power, idea-sharing, information war being waged in the globe-girdling realm of the mind. (See Appendix)

With a Global Service Academy (GSA), USIP and JFCOM can develop dedicated, disciplined, mission-ready, joint-capable, indigenous, civilian-expeditionary forces based on small, high-performing units comprised of young exemplars who are honest, hard-working, open-minded, and warm-hearted. Indigenous youth modernizing their societies from the inside-out/ground-up without westernizing them is more effective and less expensive than human-terrain-team-guided platoons of foreign occupiers. Peace will replace persistent conflict when the energy of 546 million young people (15-29) – most unemployed/unemployable – swarming in dozens of primitive/ premodern population centers and spread over approximately 33.8 million sq kms of land on four continents in 70 failed/fragile states is focused on peace-keeping and state-building, rather than war-fighting and caliphates. (See Appendix)

The proposed Academy institutionalizes strategic concepts derived from the insights of the following scholars, scientists, mathematician, futurists, and practitioners:

Dr. Joseph Campbell – comparative myth and religion; Dr. Jay Giedd – the teen brain;Dr. Benoît Mandelbrot – fractal geometry and self-similarity;Dr. Edward Lorenz – butterfly-effects and strange-attractors; Dr. Stuart Kaufman – self-organization;Mr. Anthony Judge – human values as strange-attractors;Drs. Roger Nelson, John Arquilla, and Mr. David Ronfeldt – global consciousness and noosphere;Professor Thomas Malone and Mr. Howard Rheingold – collective intelligence and smart mobs;Dr. Joseph Nye – soft power and international relations;Ambassador James Dobbins and Dr. Robert Orr – indigenous ownership of state-building;Mr. Gary Simons – Prep-for-Prep.

The GSA’s tactical theory hinges on the exuberant/plastic early/late adolescent brain (11-23) and the science of change to fill the globalized myth vacuum in the noosphere with the kernel of a narrative that enhances the legacy operating systems on which most of the world still runs. The goal is to employ chaos theory (specifically – fractal geometry, self-similarity, self-organization, strange-attractors, and the butterfly-effect) to insert a few new values (e.g. peace, tolerance, accountability) without overwriting core beliefs, values, and norms: the task is analogous to updating ISP software without erasing favorites, downloads, and archived e-mail. (See Appendices)


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From pop-culture, religion, and politics to think tanks and the US military, all agree. In every dimension and on every scale, narrative is key. Dr. Douglas Johnston and his team at the International Center for Religion & Diplomacy (ICRD) have tapped into the narrative fountainhead in Pakistan and are enhancing the intolerant and hateful binder/narrative [that] they are using to prepare suicide bombers and [provide] many destructive ways to get back at the West. For the last five years, Dr. Johnston’s madrasa enhancement project has worked with more than 2000 madrasa administrators and teachers from more than 1300 madrasas to: expand the curriculum; promote critical thinking skills; and provide skills needed to train others. He has proven that it is possible to reverse the damage done in the ’80’s by the anti-Soviet, social-engineering project/textbook that helped plant the seeds of jihad in the madrasas in the first place. ICRD’s model of engagement and its demonstrable track record of success can point the way forward not only throughout Pakistan, but in other parts of the world where similar tensions exist. (See Appendices)

But narrative alone is not enough. It is only one of three primary factors in the fractal geometry of mythology, where Human=H:

H=H(Narrative [epic+poetic] x Rituals [daily+weekly+annual+lifetime] x Symbols [landmarks+relics+sounds+images])

To achieve full force and effect, according to Dr. Campbell, narratives must be enacted in rituals and reinforced by symbols. Doing so taps into the power of myth: the “bits of information from ancient times which have to do with the themes that have supported man's life, built civilizations, informed religions over the millennia – [that] have to do with deep inner problems, inner mysteries, inner thresholds of passage – [they are] the guide-signs along the way, [without which] you have to work it out yourself. But once this catches you there is always such a feeling from one or another of these traditions of information of a deep, rich, life-vivifying sort that you won’t want to give it up. Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.” (Joseph Campbell)

Myths are for soft power what atom bombs were for hard: chain-reacting force-multipliers.

You are now where General Leslie R. Groves was in September of 1942 when he took over the Manhattan Project. The same integrated military/civilian effort that went into uranium enrichment, atom-splitting, and charge-shaping in the early ’40’s must now go into human-capital enrichment, state-building, and narrative-shaping (ironically, partnering military and civilian expertise this time is urgently needed to avert rather than create a cataclysmic chain-reaction).

This triple challenge is complex, but no more so than computer-generated landscapes, gene-splicing, or viral marketing. The difficulty lies in coordinating and integrating the wealth of soft power knowledge and experience scattered around the world currently operating in isolation.

Dr. John Hamre, President of CSIS, stepped into the shoes of Vannevar Bush in 2006 when he mobilized the bipartisan Commission on Smart Power to develop a vision to guide America’s global engagement. A few months later, at the launch of the Smart Power Speaker Series, he cut through the complexity and captured all the themes with the timeless keystone question: “What is the broader narrative that binds America together – looking forward? We’ve become in some ways quite a tortured and torn country. The Cold War gave us – through external forces – a kind of consensus that carried us for quite a ways – and we are struggling now – what is that – what could it be?” On the micro and the macro scale, the need for narrative is universal and eternal.

Ambassador Dobbins and Drs. Robert Orr, Larry Diamond, Karin von Hippel, Beth Ellen Cole, et. al. have produced volumes of post-conflict state-building how to’s and what not to’s based on historic cases and hands-on experience. Earnest efforts by everyone involved have been undermined by difficulty institutionalizing lessons learned, as well as a lack of anticipation, preparation, coordination, indigenous ownership, and consideration for the religious/spiritual dimension of statecraft. Introduced as the “Dean of our field” by Rick Barton at a CSIS Smart Power event in 2008, Ambassador Dobbins is the perfect J. Robert Oppenheimer for this Y2K-Manhattan Project. Given that failed and fragile states are the problem, “informed, strategic, operational, and concerned with results” is exactly what’s needed. Who better to design the curriculum and direct development of the indigenous, civilian-surge capacity required to restore/establish stability and functionality in these ungoverned spaces?


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For your National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) you have the foundational luminaries already named and the following extraordinary knowledge-base: The Hon. Richard Armitage, Dr. Spencer Wells, Dr. Jared Diamond, Dr. Steven Kull, Dr. Jon Alterman, Dr. L. Michael White, Juan Zarate, Prof. Marc Lynch, Anupam Ray, Mitchell Silber, Arvin Bhatt, Ahmed Rashid, Jessica Stern,Liora Danan, Prof. Jeffrey Haynes, Dr. Samuel Huntington, Dr. Anne O’Donnell, Dr. David Steele, Patrick Cockburn, Karim Sadjadpour, Dean Victor Kazanjian, Anna Greenberg, Charles Firestone, Michael Furdyk, Chad Hurley, Larry Sanger, Jimmy Wales, Rebecca Linder, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, Dr. Alpheus Bingham, Michael Gray, Dr. James Lovelock, Dr. John Briggs, Pierre Chao, Loren Carpenter, George Lucas, Christopher Vogler, Bryan Fuller, Greg Garcia, Brian McAllister, Ian Cross, Andrew Niccol, Tom Forman, JD Roth, Will Wright, Dr. Gerald Lesser, Gary Knell, Murray Fisher, Carol Bellamy, Dr. Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, Dr. Vartan Gregorian, Bryan Alexander, Dr. Tony Corn, The Hon. Mac Thornberry, Dr. Kathleen Hall Jameson, Dr. Christopher Paul, Dr. Russell Glenn, David Brooks, David Ignatius, Walter Isaacson, Ami Dar, Michelle Nunn, Capt. Westley Moore, Alan Khazei, Flavia Pansieri, Jay Backstrand, Chris Myers Asch, Shawn Raymond, Dr. James Traub, Dr. Jessica Matthews, Dr. Nancy Birdsall, Jean-Marie Guéhenno, Dr. Kemal Dervis, Dr. Lael Brainard, Stuart Bowen, Steve Radelet, and Dr. Gordon Adams; together with their colleagues at CSIS, RAND, Brookings, Aspen, ICRD, USIP, Carnegie, Stimson Center, NYPD, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford, UCLA, Santa Fe Institute, Annenberg, Edutopia, TakingITGlobal, InnoCentive, UN Volunteers, Idealist, USPSA, et. al.; have taken the lead in human migration, societal collapse, radicalization, power of religion, complexity, narrative-shaping, education exchanges, wikis, mobile-learning, strategic communication, service, post-conflict reconstruction, and foreign aid reform.

Finally, to operationalize this CT/COIN/STABILITY strategy, a permanent home for smart/soft power equal to that of the regional training centers in UAE and Jordan is required. The same reasons General Petraeus cited in his Changing Regional Security Architecture speech apply:

[W]e can leverage regional training centers for greater collective benefit. The Gulf Air WarfareCentre in the UAE and the soon to open King Abdullah II Special Operations Training Centre in Jordan are examples of very impressive facilities, and there are others in the region … Leveraging these training centers … and the already substantial number of bilateral and multilateral maritime, air, and ground exercises we conduct, will improve our abilities to work together and hone the experience of our various forces.

The training centers represent important opportunities for multilateral training, capacity building, and partnership, and we should seek to leverage them in major multinational exercises … (The Fifth IISS Regional Security Summit, Bahrain, 12/14/08).

Governors Island in New York Harbor is looking for a highest and best use; its history, proximity, and restricted access make it an ideal location. According to Dr. Patrick Okedinachi Utomi, decades ago the precedent was set; 747’s full of young people came to the US to be trained and then returned to their homes to play the roles that they played. (See Appendix)

Where better to build General Mattis’ fourth block and begin the 21st century narrative that promotes global service as the honored hero sacrifice – than under the guiding light and watchful eye of Lady Liberty?

With gratitude and admiration,

Christine LederhouseP.S. Hoping you’ll agree – your first-hand experience/knowledge of the region, irregular warfare, indigenous troop/police training, post-conflict reconstruction, military academy transformation, Pentagon culture, and bureaucratic impediments turn this confluence of coincidences into a Jungian synchronicity. By comparison, a CT/COIN/STABILITY strategy that’s three-parts Road Trip Nation, Globe Trekker, and hero adventure; equal-parts Truman Show and PSYOPS; and thirteen-parts Kid Nation, vocational training, and Endurance – seems perfectly plausible.

Playing a part would be an honor. Please be assured, however, no strings are attached to this proposal; getting a Global Service Academy on Governors Island is ALL that matters!


APPENDIX – 1 Submission To/Response From Dr. Joseph S. Nye, Jr.:

Letters & e-Mail – (12/25/08 - 1/16/09)

APPENDIX – 2 Youth Distribution Table *

APPENDIX – 3 Civilian Capabilities, Capacity, and Comparative Cost *

APPENDIX – 4 The Power of Myth:

Dr. Joseph Campbell – Bill Moyers’ Interview – Parts 1-6

George Lucas – Bill Moyers’ Interview – Mythology of Star Wars

Missing Spiritual Dimension *

Myth Vacuum *

Radicalizers/Spiritual Sanctioners *

Narrative Is Key

Myth DNA – Narrative X Ritual X Symbols

APPENDIX – 5 Chaos Theory *

APPENDIX – 6 Noosphere & Global Consciousness *

APPENDIX – 7 Precedents – Force-Multiplying Engagement Strategies:

Pakistan – Religious – Dr. Douglas Johnston (CSIS – 2/3/09)

Nigeria – Secular – Dr. Patrick Okedinachi Utomi (CSIS – 7/28/08)

APPENDIX – 8 Participants/Working Group List *

APPENDIX – 9 Governors Island Profile

* - Under Construction

APPENDICES

Documents

Smart/Soft Power CT/COIN/Stability Strategy -> GlobalServiceAcademy@GovernorsIsland (Part3-of-3)