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Year 2000 International Security Dimension Project Report

How This Project Started and Why

The Year 2000 International Security Dimension Project is the brainchild of Vice Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski, President of the U.S. Naval War College.   For those familiar with his career, this should come as no surprise, as he has long served as a leading thinker within the military regarding the intersection of technology and global change.  Admiral Cebrowski believes the Year 2000 Problem (hereafter Y2K) can have a significant historical impact on humanity's relationship with technology, if only to rapidly teach us all a great deal about what it means to live in an increasingly interdependent, interconnected, and information technology-driven globalized economy.

Soon after assuming his post at the War College in the summer of 1998, Admiral Cebrowski tasked the Center for Naval Warfare Studies' Decision Support Department, led by Dr. Lawrence Modisett, to engage in a year-long study of Y2K's potential to trigger significant scenarios of internal or transnational instability in the world outside the United States.  We've since defined "significant scenarios" to mean a crisis situation of significant magnitude to demand--under the potentially unprecedented global circumstances of Y2K--Defense Department (DoD) attention in terms of possible crisis response.  Such a response could range from anything as minor as the rapid insertion of a small "tiger team" to help foreign nationals repair a specific network facility to something on the order of a Complex Humanitarian Emergency mission to some country or region especially hard hit.  In short, it's a wide open playing field, with a key uncertainty being how the United States itself weathers the Y2K Event.

From the beginning of this project, we've stressed an "agnostic" approach on Y2K and its potential impact, meaning we seek neither to rally a broad social or governmental response to deal with this problem (e.g., the ongoing remediation effort) nor to present any sort of "official" government outlook on what is likely to happen.  Instead, we've approached the Y2K event as we would any other potentially destabilizing event of serious political-military impact--by employing a standard decision scenario approach.  By "decision scenario approach," we mean using credible scenarios to create awareness among relevant decision-makers regarding the sort of strategic issues and choices they are likely to face if the more stressing pathways envisioned come to pass.  Naturally, because we work for the military, we're more interested in the "darker" scenarios.  That doesn't mean we expect or predict really bad things will happen, only that we think it's essential the U.S. Military must consider the potential scope of the problem in advance so as to avoid both errors of omission and comission once the Y2K Event begins--with an emphasis on the latter.

How We View the "Whole Enchilada"

As you'll notice, we call our project the Year 2000 International Security Dimension Project--not the Y2K International Security Dimension Project.   Why?  It's our firm contention that DoD should view the Millennial Date Change Event as comprising a constellation of simultaneously unfolding elements, of which Y2K is clearly the most important.  Our draft list of globally significant pieces to this puzzle would begin as follows:

• Year 2000 computer problem (e.g., software and embedded chips) in and of itself
• Y2K--the global remediation effort and all that it entails
• Y2K as a global education process regarding the pervasiveness of "all this invisible technology"
• Y2K as a global crisis management challenge and economic threat
• Global economy just coming off a period of significant widespread turmoil (e.g., the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 and its subsequent spread to Russia and Brazil), resulting in significant reform efforts by many of the affected countries
• Millennial Event in its largely secular form, i.e., the "world's largest party ever"
• Millennial Event in its religious form, i.e., celebrating the onset of the Third Millennium since Christ's birth
• Millennial Event in its socio-political form, i.e., marking a milestone period in the planet's history during which political leaders, as well as ordinary citizens, engage in extraordinary debate regarding the status quo and what should logically follow
• Millennial Event is its extremist form, i.e., the strong assumption by some in society that the event will usher in profound and cataclysmic global change, typically associated with apocalytic visions involving a deity or supranatural force
• Tendency of humans to seek grand unifying theories for periods of human history that involve above-average levels of complexity, and utilize those theories as guides for self-perceived "strategic" action.

Looking at that list, you quickly come to the conclusion, as we did last fall, that this was not a subject one could handle in the typical BOGGSAT-style (Bunch Of Guys & Gals Sitting Around a Table).  No, we needed many bunches of guys and gals sitting around many tables, parsing out this huge puzzle from a variety of perspectives.  Since the Decision Support Department's greatest expertise comes in talking with experts and synthesizing their views for wider distribution, we soon settled on a workshop approach that would involve a very broad range of expertise outside the military.  [A complete list of our workshop participants can be found in Appendix Y.]

Looking over that list, we likewise came to the conclusion that, since the Millennial Date Change Event appears to have so much "baggage" and "fellow travelers," so to speak, our project risked expanding into a study about anything happening to anyone anywhere in the world come 1 January 2000.  While not shying from that challenge, for you'll see that comprehensiveness  is our calling card, we readily realized that ours would not be a technical approach of lists upon lists of things that could go wrong.  Rather, we decided that the most feasible approach for a small research unit such as ours would be to concentrate on the broad dynamics of the possible scenarios, to include not only the functioning of networks (broadly defined as any distributed system that moves material), but economic activity, societal responses, as well as the operations of government entities.

In a nutshell, then, our project became focused--despite the broad nature of the subject matter--on the possible scenario dynamics the Defense Department could face if it were tasked by the national leadership to engage in crisis response activities abroad during the Millennial Date Change Event and the subsequent unfolding of the Y2K Event.  Mind you, our assumption going in was that we would not uncover any new or unprecedented missions for the CINCs (Commanders in Chief) of DoD's various regional military commands (e.g., Southern Command covering Latin America, Central Command covering SouthWest Asia, European Command covering Europe and most of Africa, and Pacific Command covering most of Asia in addition to the Pacific island states)--and, to date, we have not found any.  Rather, our assumption has been all along that, while the CINCs are likely to engage in very familiar missions of crisis response, it is the internal or regional dynamics into which they may delve that will be unusual and worth preparing for in advance.

The Structure and Schedule of the Workshops

We conducted four workshops, starting in December 1998 and concluding in May 1999.

DECEMBER SCENARIO-BUILDING WORKSHOP

For our first workshop in December of last year, we invited about two dozen functional experts to help us construct and flesh out a series of generic onset models (presented later).  The experts invited fell into four rough categories of knowledge and experience (see Appendix Y for a complete list):

• Distribution/Service Networks (e.g., food, basic needs, oil/gasoline, air and mass transit, electric power, and telecom service)
• Business activity (e.g., major manufacturing, major retail, medical, insurance, and finance-banking)
• "Social communications" (e.g., mass media, government regulation of mass media, face-to-face and individual comms, the Internet)
• Government services (e.g., defense, police, basic services, and emergency services).

See Appendix 2 for the readahead package for the December Scenario-Building workshop held at the Decision Support Center of Sims Hall at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, RI.

The participants at this event provided us with a number of useful and imaginative inputs via a meeting facilitation software program known as GroupSystems (e.g., scenario pieces presented in the format of "newspaper headlines," possible warning indicators of events moving from one scenario to another, "bumper sticker" names for individual scenarios), in addition to their moderated participation in nine separate discussion sessions covering the following topics:

• Y2K as a series of discrete and periodic events
• Y2K as a widespread and sustained event
• What makes a country’s "networks" (broadly defined to include social networks) robust?
• What makes them vulnerable?
• Signposts indicating the nature of the Y2K event’s unfolding
• The best-case scenario (Y2K as discrete/periodic and systems are robust)
• The next-best-case scenario (Y2K as sustained/widespread and systems are robust)
• The next-worst-case scenario (Y2K as discrete/periodic and systems are vulnerable)
• The worst-case scenario (Y2K as sustained/widespread and systems are vulnerable)
• "You Make the Call!" on Y2K both within the US and around the world.

We were able to gather and edit several hundred ideas and scenario vignettes from the various GroupSystems sessions and subsequently published them on our web sites at the Naval War College and Geocities.   See Appendix K for the GroupSystems inputs from this workshop.

JANUARY SCENARIO-DYNAMICS WORKSHOP

At our second workshop in January of this year, we brought together about two dozen functional experts (see Appendix Y for a complete list) with a strong experience/knowledge base in networks, business activity, social issues and/or government in one of five world regions:

• Western Hemisphere outside of US
• Europe (to include Russia)
• Southwest Asia (to include Middle East, Central Asia, and Indian sub-continent)
• Asia
• Africa.

See Appendix 2 for the readahead package for the January Scenario-Dynamics workshop held at the Senator Claiborne Pell Center of Salve Regina University in Newport, RI.

Participants at this event provided the study team with a number of useful and imaginative inputs via the GroupSystems approach (e.g., advice-filled "e-mails" written to their "close personal friend" who serves as top policy adviser to the President of Country X), in addition to their moderated participation in eight separate discussion sessions covering the following topics:

• "Mania" phase of the Y2K event (see the section, The M Curve of Influence for details)
• "Countdown" phase
• "Onset" phase
• "Unfolding" phase
• "Peak" phase
• "Exit" phase
• Possible malevolent acts by those seeking to destabilize social order
• Region-by-region predictions as to how Y2K will impact nation-states.

We were able to gather and edit several hundred ideas and scenario vignettes from the various GroupSystems sessions and subsequently published them on our web sites.  See Appendix K for the GroupSystems inputs from this workshop.

MARCH SCENARIO-STRATEGIES WORKSHOP

At our third workshop in March, we explored the possible range of DoD policy measures and associated CINC regional strategies that might be pursued in response to the unfolding of the Y2K and associated Millennial Date Change Events along the phased scenario timeline developed and populated in the January workshop.  While we benefited by some CINC representation, our real focus was on tapping into the extant inside-the-Beltway knowledge base regarding Y2K contingency planning, with an eye toward blending that knowledge with our own for eventual provision to the individual CINCs as both they and the Joint Staff begin planning against the threat of Y2K-induced crises around the world.  The participants at this workshop came mainly from defense-related federal agencies and think tanks (see Appendix Y for a complete list).

See Appendix 2 for the readahead package for the March Scenario-Strategies workshop held at the headquarters of The CNA Corporation in Alexandria, VA.

Participants at this event provided the study team with a number of interesting and illuminating inputs via the GroupSystems approach, which in this instance involved providing us feedback on our proposed list of "policy do's and don'ts" for the governing authorities of a notional country as well as our list of possible CINC mission categories (see the readahead package for details).  For purposes of the one-day workshop, we reduced our six-phase scenario timeline to the following three groupings (which formed the basis for our three discussion sections):

• "Mania/Countdown" phases
• "Onset/Unfolding" phases
• "Peak/Exit" phases.

We were able to gather and edit several dozen ideas and commentaries from the various GroupSystems sessions and subsequently published them on our web sites.  See Appendix K for the GroupSystems inputs from this workshop.

MAY ECONOMIC SECURITY WORKSHOP

At our fourth and final workshop in May, we focused on how global financial markets would "process" and/or be impacted by the Y2K event.   Most specifically, we were interested in exploring how Y2K could trigger a "new rule set" for the international economy by further crystalizing some of the most pressing issues arising from the Global Financial Crisis of 1997-98 (e.g., push for more controls over international capital flows, calls to revamp/reform the IMF, more transparency in Emerging Markets and Hedge Funds, de facto dollarization of some economies).   The participants at this workshop came from a variety of Wall Street investment banks, brokerage firms, and related financial organizations (see Appendix Y for a complete list).

See Appendix 2 for the readahead package for the May Economic Security workshop hosted by Cantor Fitzgerald LP in the World Trade Center in Manhattan, New York.

Participants at this event provided the study team with a number of interesting and illuminating inputs via the GroupSystems approach, which in this instance involved providing us with arguments--both pro and con--as to Y2K's potentially negative impact--both short and long term--on global financial markets across the same three scenario-phase pairings employed in the March workshop.

We were able to gather and edit several dozen ideas and commentaries from the various GroupSystems sessions and subsequently published them on our web sites.  See Appendix K for the GroupSystems inputs from this workshop.

Some Caveats Before Proceeding

Understanding that there is a tremendous gap between the public face many corporations and governments put forward on this issue ("we will have it well in hand") and the private fears and concerns expressed by many information technology experts (ranging from "global recession" to "apocalypse 2000!"), we wanted to explore this topic in as systematic a fashion as possible. We've never pretended that we'll end up with all the answers, but merely a sensible read on what's possible, how governments and companies are likely to respond across a range of scenarios, and what the USG and DoD should be prepared to undertake in response to Y2K's global unfolding. In short, while we're not interested in unduly hyping the Y2K situation, we are interested in exploring the "dark side" potentials because, frankly, that's what we get paid to do as a research organization that serves the U.S. military.

So read on, understanding that all our "what-if?-ing" serves neither as prediction nor perception management by the U.S. Naval War College.  Like everyone else on this planet studying Y2K, we're groping for answers.  Yes, we've done our effort  in a rather comprehensive fashion, and yes, we are experts at thinking about future events.  But please don't approach this analysis  as "cookbook," but rather as "primer."  The confidence we seek to instill in readers--key decision-makers and average citizens alike--is one of comprehending the potential scope and complexity of the scenario, and not of reducing the Millennial Date Change Event into a crude or simplistic "one-to-ten scale" type of crisis management strategy.

There's nothing wrong with being deeply concerned about Y2K on a global scale after you've read our report, but if you're fearful or panicked, then you haven't really understood what we said.