Tempos in Defence

Fernando Carvalho Rodrigues
Professor of Universidade Independente - Lisbon

POLITICS & DEBATE

Any man, no matter how feeble, can kill another man no matter how strong he appears.
This is central to the human armed conflict. The show of strength, the need to signal power, is a sure sign of fear.
The debate over defence and security has thus been as old as human kind. Because it is so very old it becomes so absolutely new for each and every generation.
The first record of political debate over defence; the first description of the excruciating pros and cons of human armed struggle, was registered in the epic tales of "Gilgamesh and Agga of Kish".
They are of special significance for the history of political institutions. They are the written records of the convening of man's first political assembly. A "bicameral congress", which met over four thousand years ago, to decide on the agonizing question of war and peace.

" The envoy of Agga, the son of Enmebaraggesi
Proceeded from Kish to Gilgamesh in Erech,,
The Lord Gilgamesh before the elders of his city
Put the matter, seeks out their word:
To complete the wells, to complete all the wells of the land.
To complete the wells, the small bowls of the land.
To dig the wells, to complete the fastening ropes
Let us not submit to the house of Kish,
let us smite it with weapons".

"The convened assembly of the elders of his city
Answer Gilgamesh:
"To complete the wells, to complete all the wells of the land,
To complete the wells, the small bowls of the land,
To dig the wells, to complete the fastening ropes
Let us submit to the house of Kish,
let us not smite it with weapons".

But,

"Gilgamesh, the Lord of Kullab,
Who performs heroic deeds for Inamma,
Took not the word of the elders of his city of heart".

" A second time Gilgamesh, the lord of Kullab,
Before the "people" of his city, put the matter, seek out their word".

"To complete the wells, to complete all the wells of the land,
To complete the wells, the small bowls of land,
To dig the wells, to complete the fastening ropes,
Do not submit to the house of Kish, let us smite it with weapons."

"Then, Gilgamesh, the lord of Kullab
At the words of the "men" of his city, his heart rejoiced,
his spirit brightened"

And smite them he did; till one day came when he was the vanquished and in turn run over by others. Others like him. Others, that were innovating.

INOVATION

A magic word: innovation. To most indefinable. Yet, readily recognizable.
I would like to give you a rule, even an algorithm for you to quantify and decide whether a new action is really an innovation.
Action as a measure of how efficient any system, any information system for that matter, has been discovered one hundred and fifty years ago. Yet, it is not cultural.
Action is according to the definition, the product of the energy required to do it times the amount of time taken to perform it. I will give you an example:
When terrestrial roads were the only basis for networking the information society of those days I would have spent 2x1017 joule second to come from the land of the Belgae to the land of the Lusitanian. I would not have come.
When seafaring became safe and reliable I would have spent for the same trip an order of magnitude less action. May I remind you that the planetary trade started there and then.
Today. I came on a plane over air routes. I spent 2.4x1013 joule second. And here we are.
Assume for a moment that all the promise of video conferencing was already a reality. How much action would it take to be here giving you a speech: Something like 10-25 joule second.
Such a radical drop in action is generating a major increase in the members of those adhering to the human society. All human societies are numbers information societies. The difference resides only in the fact that now we spend less action to be part of it. No wonder more and more of us are joining.
It is a major task of our profession to lessen the action (may I remind you: energy times time) required to perform human activities.
Our motto should be; "lower the action, be innovative". And, whenever anyone tells you that you are in the presence of an innovation you have a parameter to judge whether or not it is an innovation. Do not even be fooled.
Innovation can be quantified. But no matter how much we, in the profession of C4I, lower the action we still have humans to contend with.
Yes, humans at the end of a perfect C4I System will have to read whatever the sensors have conveyed to them.
Reading the signs. Transforming data into information within a context, rendering it into knowledge within a belief system, using it to take a decision.

INFORMATION & INTELIGENCE

Brain, mind, human societies become involved. To the flux of conscience of the sillicium beings that we use in C4I now comes the flux of conscience of the carbon beings. Again the difficulty arises before us.
Interpretation depends on the belief systems. Paragraph 131, of Book IV of the "Histories" by Herodotus of Halicarnassus tells us that:
… "Hereon the Scythian princes, understanding how matters stood, dispatched a herald to the Persian camp with presents for the King: There were, a bird, a mouse, a frog and five arrows. The Persians asked the bearer to tell them what these gifts might mean, but he answered that he had no orders except to deliver them, and return again with all speed. If the Persians were wise, he added, they would find out the meaning themselves. So, when they heard this, they held a council to consider the matter.
132 Darius gave it as his opinion, that the Scythian intended a surrender of themselves and their country, land and water, into his hands. This he conceived to be the meaning of the gifts, because the mouse is an inhabitant of the earth, and eats the same food as man, while the frog passes his life in the water; the bird bears a great resemblance to the horse, and the arrows might signify the surrender of all their power. To the explanation of Darius, Gobyas, one of the seven conspirators against the Magus, opposed another, which was as follows:
Unless, Persians, you can turn into birds and fly up into the sky, or become mice that could burrow under the ground, or make yourselves frogs, and take refuge in the ferns, you will never make escape from this land, but pierced by our arrows.
Such were the meanings which the Persians assigned to the gifts".

Quite contradictory… of course.

If the whole system is to perform well it has to do so with least effort (action). It has to give humans what they want and help them work, but they can not replace most of the trained knowledge within a community.
The knowledge and its Social and Psychological impacts; The role of C4I in both initiating and spreading unrest and war is of paramount importance.
Terrorism is utilizing it in an ever increasing manner.
Since we all like a paraphrase, let me tell you that it is our wisdom to consider that war is diplomacy by other means. It is for a fact that terrorism is psychological warfare by other means.
C4I central role will be the combat against the social and psychological effects of unrest. C4I in the new age is to contribute to lessening the impact of terrorism actions. They require a major interface between the machines loop and the human network.
I will give you an example. When organizing an event on the "Social and Psychological consequences of terroristic actions" we found out how much difference in response can exist between two groups of individuals. While in most NATO countries the role of C4I would be to stop the rush of the population, under a terrorist scare, to hospitals to avoid the complete collapse of the public health system, we found that, in other societies, the same C4I would have to be used to entice people to report their sickness to a health care centre.
The problem of interpretation of signs is certainly a great challenge to those engineering C4I systems that can cope with human diversity and ever increased easiness to build new weapons of terror.

TOXIC KNOWLEDGE

At one time, God forbade man to eat from the tree of knowledge. I never could understand it. For the record I may tell you I thought it was another Biblical metaphor. This was till I came to put to myself the following question: How many of us are needed to obliterate humankind? From the beginning till the seventeen, eighteenth centuries it would take all of us. With mechanization and information based on telegraphs the number had certainly lowered but not by any significant amount. Then with the nuclear bomb the number certainly decreased. Yet it takes the organization of a major state, the resources of a major economy to build it and deliver it reliably. With chemical weapons the number of those that would bring about doomsday has certainly become smaller. If we call the number of those required to annihilate humankind the extinction-coefficient, we are close to coming to one hundred. That is how many individuals are required to be organized for the production of a biological weapon.
The more knowledge we have, the more the extinction factor seems to decrease. If ever it comes to few individuals then the odds of survival are very slim indeed.
May I remind you that nowadays a recombination DNA Kit costs five hundred dollars and it is marketed, it is sold, and given by us as a present to our teenagers to improve their skills in the chemical language of life.
New Age information technologies are to counteract the toxic knowledge of our day and age. The toxic knowledge that we were warned about lurked in the tree of knowledge. The toxic knowledge that is bringing fear to our hearts, walls to our condominiums, barbed wire to our institutions, shields to our nations.
Goliath had a shield, so heavy that Goliath had a shield bearer. He would carry it for him. He moved it in front of him in battle. We are told that Goliath's shield bearer did not take much interest when an agile David faced his master. He was probably tired of his master. He was but a slave. We do not know his name but he was there.
New Age information technologies are the shield bearer of our day. They must remember to be agile. They must be without fatigue. They must bear the burden of helping human societies to deal with challenges of an excited brain, an alarmed mind and those of a manipulated society.
The message creators, their routers, their sensors, their intelligence have to take in themselves the countermeasures to the terror produced by toxic knowledge. By sharing thoughts through telecommunications we are becoming in a way telepaths. Toxic knowledge also flows. Criminal organizations used it and some are economically larger then most countries.
It takes a great many resources to be of the required scale and be active with very small reaction times. In fact it takes much more continued financial and human support than it ever did.

VALUES & BUDGET

To counter the threat that the toxic knowledge poses there is the necessity a major financial and human thrust.
Yet we observe that the amounts of money and humans dedicated to the fight against toxic knowledge threat are dwindling. I have asked myself many times why.
Again some three thousand years ago they had already raised the question and, yet again, Herodotus of Halicarnassus had recorded the answer. And, yes, yet again in Book IV of his "Histories":

125 … "The Melanchlaeni, the Androphagi, and the Neury, instead of defending themselves, when the Scythians and Persians overran their lands, they forgot thin threats and fled away in confusion to the deserts lying towards the north. The Scythians, when the Agathyrsi forbode them to enter their country, refrained; and led the Persians back from the Neurian district into their own land.
126 this had gone for so long, and seemed so interminable that Darius at last sent a horseman to Idanthyrsus, the Scythian King, with the following message: "Thou strange man, why dost thou keep on flying before me, when there are two things thou mightiest do easily? If thou deemest thyself able to resist my arms, cease thy wanderings and come, let us engage in battle. Or if thou art conscious that my strength in greater than thine - even so thou shouldest cease to run away - thou hast but to bring thy lord earth and water, and to come at once to a conference".
127 To this message Idanthyrsus, the Scythian King replied:
" This is my way, Persian. I never fear men or fly from them. I have not done so in time past, or do I now fly from thee. We Scythians have neither towns nor cultivated land which might induce us, through fear of their being taken or ravaged, to be in any hurry to fight with you".

In the limit when the perceived value of what is to be defended is nil the resources allocated to defence and security will be zero. There is nothing to defend.
Defence is not against an enemy. Defence is never for a negative cause. Defence does not depend on whether the enemy exists or not at a certain moment in time. Defence emerges from positive values. Defence depends on the value that is attributed to whatever. Defence has its root at the attribute of meaning to anything. Defence and security are not in reaction to. They are the action.
The story of Idanthyrsus, the Scythian King has a follow on to his reply to Darius:

"If, however, you must needs come to blows with us speedily, look you now, there are our father's tombs - seek them out, and attempt to meddle with them - then you should see whether or not we will fight you? Tell ye do this, be sure we shall not join battle, unless it pleases us. This is my answer to challenge to fight".

Whenever we attribute meaning to anything, we, humans, put a high value on it.
In non-religious societies as ours we say we value only what we see. We are paid in electrons that are transferred from account to account, from bank to bank. Nobody is going to see an electron, ever. Yet, since we give them meaning they are of great value to us. We are quite prepared to defend them. But, if it has no meaning it is not worth defending.

NEW AGE

In the age where we measure femtoseconds, and the quantum mechanical engineering is done in nanometers; in the age where we reach forward to thousands and millions of parsecs and reach back billions of light years, we are using every time and space scale to organize knowledge that can and will be used against humankind.
New Age information technologies already have some examples of space command on an equal level of hierarchy as the navy, army and air forces of former days. They will have commands for the language of physics and chemistry in biology on the very low scale of time and space. They will have equivalent commands of brain and mind. Maybe they can afford the means to forecast when and if a localized conflict will have global consequences
In the new age it maybe that the C4I community will have the ability to influence the understanding of communities on what are their belief systems.
Maybe the C4I community will have the courage to put in motion a new awareness to the meaning of our society. Maybe the C4I community will provide the education to raise meaningful communities where values worth securing and defending will spring.
Maybe society will recognize in the C4I community enough wisdom that it can be trusted with the defence against toxic knowledge.
But, then, maybe that out of so much confusion, out of such a lethargic society, out of such a heavy burden, the defence community will tire itself of holding the shield in front of such massive, motionless Goliath. But, then, nobody loves Goliath.
And …
A new David will emerge through information technologies into a new age.