Dateline: National Conservation Training Center, Shepherdstown West Virginia, 18 October 2004
Flew into BWI late last night and drove to DC. Up and at 'em this morning for a relatively short brief to an small audience of intell, Defense, and State players who work the analysis and implementation of economic development and reconstruction policies inside the Gap. Another one of these "transition-oriented" mini-conferences designed to get mid-level types in the mood for rethinking basic premises as we head into the every-four-years-turnover that is a new administration (whether truly new or reelected).
What was neat for me was having my material viewed fundamentally from the prism of development economics and finding so much basic agreement between my world view and those of experts in the field.
But the biggest treat by far was the presentation by Peter Schaefer, who is a senior player at the Institute for Liberty and Democracy headed by Hernando de Soto, the famous Latin American economist who just added the Milton Friedman Prize to his long list of accomplishments. De Soto is known for his theories regarding the "informal economy" and unrecognized property rights and asset wealth associated with those who live and work in that informal economy in Gap states. De Soto's point is a simple one: develop legal rule sets inside the Gap that recognize these squatters' rights (property and businesses) and you instantly liberate as much as $9 trillion in hidden wealth that could serve as a legitimate basis for both effective taxation by states as well as collateral for credit (by way of comparison, the cumulative flow of foreign direct investment around the planet since WWII is estimated to be $7 trillion).
I have read De Soto's books and thought I understood them, but there was something about hearing Schaefer's presentation that made something click in my mind right now.
Here is what it felt like:
What was so powerful about this presentation was that Schaefer's description of the incredible inefficiency of having to constantly defend your ownership of property and businesses in an informal economy: in short, if you have no legally recognized claim on your house and walk out of it one day, whoever walks in first can thereupon claim it. So you pretty much have to have somebody guarding your place all the time, fending off the competition unless you can arrange with your neighbors for some level of communal defense.
While I listened to this description, I realized what was so familar about it: it's like reading some first-person history of being a settler in the West prior to its incorporation into the United States. Frontier justice meant defending your own stake from all comers until that point in time when political governance arose locally to the extent of legally honoring your "claim," or ownership of said land/house/business. So how the West was "won" in a legal sense was essentially through the spread of what is known as principles of "preemption law", or the notion that if a squatter occupies some land and improves it, whoever is recognized as the extant owner of that land either must give up control of that parcel to the squatter or compensate him for the improvements rendered.
I know I'm giving a quick and dirty explanation of this process and rendering more than a few details in a sloppy fashion, but my point is this: the Gap is logically tamed by the extension from the Core of such legal and security rule sets that outlaw mass violence and progressively recognize property rights. That extension is logically achieved through the encouragement of the emergence of effective local national governments, who seek not to displace the extant "settlers," but simply to bring them into the legally-recognized fold by credentializing their hidden assets/wealth.
In short, we constantly underestimate the Gap's ability to pull itself up by its bootstraps--if only there were better rule sets operating there. Robust rule sets that connect people to the land, their homes, and their businesses in a firm legal sense must be a fundamental goal of our development efforts throughout the Gap--a way to leave any society more connected to a sustainable economic future than we found it (no matter what our interventionary mode).
In other words, the settlers are already abundantly numbered throughout the Gap. All we need to do to bring them out of the shadows of the informal economy is push the legal reforms necessary to credentialize their hidden wealth in the eyes of their national governments and--beyond them--the global economy itself. There is no colonialization or imperialism to be had, simply liberation from stultifyingly dysfunctional rule sets.
That's what I mean by "inviting" Gap societies "into the club" of secure rule sets in the same historical manner as "taming the Wild West."
As for the hyperbolic interpretation (by some) of my recent interview with T.M. Lutas . . . suggesting that I clearly advocated genocide within the Gap by offering that historical comparison, all I can say is (sigh) . . . pinhead is as pinhead does.
Now onto the more interesting story of the day. While I was in China in August, I was contacted by email by someone in the Intelligence Community's Chief Information Officer's . . . uh . . . office (I guess) who said he worked for an individual there known as the Lead Architect.
Now, first off, I thought it was a joke. I mean, there really isn't any place called the "intelligence community," right? Isn't that just a category or name for all the intelligence agencies as a whole?
No. Turns out I was wrong. Just Google IC if you think I'm making it up. There really is such an entity, located now under the Director of Central Intelligence, and as you might expect, it's main tasks tend to be coordination of information flows/networks/best practices among the 15 elements that make up the Intelligence Community. Go figure, the intell community has its own "sys admin" office! Duh!
Now you have to remember, I was sleep-deprived and pretty funky throughout the China trip, so I did what I usually do in such circumstances: I said yes immediately without knowing any better, hit the send button, and figured out I'd figure it out later on when I walked into the room and met the guy at some point down the road.
Well, I did meet the Lead Architect about a month ago, noting it somewhat cryptically on the blog because I wanted to get a sense of "what was what" with this office (i.e., the rule set of our interactions, to include things like my blog) before I mentioned the relationship publicly. Upon later investigation, I discovered this relatively obscure office was hardly a secret. Hell, it's basically the IC's official interface with Silicon Valley, holding conferences and whatnot to explain what the IC needs in terms of software, hardware, etc., just like any other defense-industry confab. You probably have heard about its relatively new venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel.
So who is the Lead Architect? He is the same sort of government "mid-level functionary" who has sought me out throughout my career (although he's a bit higher on the food chain than his self-deprecating description suggests). In effect, he is another Art Cebrowski, the former Naval War College president and current director of the Office of Force Transformation in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He is someone in search of new rules for a new era.
This guy's theories on the growth of networks are as fascinating and profound as anything Cebrowski and his acolytes have come up with regarding network-centric warfare. In fact, his notion of a "rule-set reset" that comes naturally through a dialectic process of evolution and change is very similar to my own, just based on his own decades-long experience in the growth of the Internet from its earliest origins.
So what does this Cebrowski-like figure want from me with regard to the IC? Same thing all the "Cebrowski's" within the foreign policy establishment want when they've called me up after reading PNM: he wants a structured dialogue on how to discern, describe, and codify those new rules, and he figures I might be able to help his community achieve that.
This is an historic period for the Intelligence Community, which up to now has been more a consortium of players than anything resembling a federation guided by an overarching rule set. But all that changes with 9/11 and the resulting 9/11 Commission's call for a National Intelligence Director with cabinet-level standing and budgetary oversight of the 15 elements that make up the IC. In short, the rule-set reset has begun in intelligence, with not only the Commission, but Congress and the White House all driving the process to varying degrees.
The Lead Architect's theory of network evolution is summed up simply in a series of phases he believes are repeated time and time again as networks proliferate in any environment--in effect, the "contradictory systemic anomaly" arises in a repeating pattern (to steal some dialogue from "Matrix Reloaded"), and thus a rule-set reset is triggered every so often.
There is nothing remarkable about this theory other than its brilliant elegance. You can use it not only to describe the growth of the Internet and the WWW over the past years, but likewise any substantial network of parts, thus it is truly a reproducible strategic concept. For example, you could describe the growth of the United States in this manner: it starts as 13 federated colonies with slavery as a systemic anomaly embedded within its original rule set (Constitution); it grows in numbers over time (the equal balancing of "free states" and "slave states"), the anomaly grows to the point of forcing a rule-set reset (the Civil War), and a new state of self-actualization must eventually be achieved ("these United States" become "the United States"--although full acceptance of the associated rule set takes roughly another century to reach full flowering in the civil rights movement of the 1960s). Frankly, you could describe the growth of my family in similar ways (having just experienced the rule-set reset known as Vonne Mei Ling!).
So a deal is struck between this "Neo" and this "Architect," and yes, I'm sure there have been many "anomalies" who walked in this office before me, my only distinction being my towering naive optimism ("Humph!" counters the Architect to Neo: "Hope, it is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness.")
Our shared goal is simply this, charting a process of dialogue by which the IC's new rules regarding information architecture can be uncovered.
As always, I will play the same role I play for all the other "Cebrowski's" I interact with: sort of bureaucratic psychoanalyst helping players first conceptualize and then articulate the rule sets they wish to codify and/or evangelize within their respective community.
How did I stumble into this role in my career? On that point, I am often reminded of the wisdom of the Oracle: ". . . you didn't come here to make the choice, you've already made it. You're here to try to understand why you made it."
Indeed.
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