Then an article was posted on the Deseret News site by the famous muckraking journalist Jack Anderson.◈ In “The Government’s Secret Y2K Plans,” Anderson and his fellow author identified me as the leader of the government’s “security project” that had been secretly “coaching every branch of the military” as they quietly planned “a sophisticated social-response network in case civil unrest should erupt.” My standing in the world of the X-Files aficionados shot up astronomically thanks to the article, and after a few close encounters with some of them following speeches at various conferences, I decided to buy a home security system.
Now, most ordinary people who visited my Web site came away relieved that at least someone in the U.S. Government was thinking about Y2K in a systematic fashion and being open about the security implications of the worst-case scenarios. In general, our scenario material, as scary as it might have seemed to some, was incredibly well received around the world. The U.S. Agency for International Development taped my PowerPoint presentation and made it available to all their missions around the world, and the U.S. Information Agency did something similar for select foreign audiences. I ended up giving the brief around a hundred times throughout the U.S. Government and to various industry conferences, and I consulted with Y2K officials of numerous foreign governments. By the time I was done traveling the world, I had briefed the President’s Special Adviser on Y2K, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and the Commander in Chief of the U.S. Special Operations Command.
Did this kind of scenario planning have any positive effect? One thing I did end up advocating widely as a result of many early conversations with Middle East experts such as Daniel Pipes was that the United States should expect terrorist strikes against symbolic targets in major cities during the millennium celebrations. The notion was that terrorist groups in general could be expected to take advantage of the whole-world-is-watching effect to shock the United States into realizing that the new millennium would feature a new world order not to our liking—a concept I labeled the “first-strike” dynamic. When I first started pushing this issue in late 1998, a lot of the defense community initially resisted the notion that preparations for Y2K should include a significant antiterrorism aspect, because after all, this was just a software issue, right? The Pentagon’s tendency was to worry first and foremost about some disastrous miscalculation occurring between the United States and Russia over strategic nuclear weapons.
Where this message was far better received was within the intelligence community, where senior leaders were already leaning in the direction of an aggressively offensive strategy vis-à-vis terrorist threats in the months leading up to Y2K. Was anything ever prevented from happening? In late 1999, the United States captured an al Qaeda operative coming across the border from Canada with the goal of bombing Los Angeles International Airport in the last few days of the millennium. At his trial, Ahmed Ressam detailed al Qaeda’s plot to strike against high-profile targets in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East as the new millennium dawned. In the end, plots to attack a U.S. warship in Yemen and Western tourists in Jordan were likewise discovered and derailed.◈
What was important about all Y2K preparations in general was that both the public and private sectors began moving toward a larger understanding of globalization’s connectivity and how it altered our definitions of crisis and instability. Outside of the U.S. Government, my material found a lot of receptivity from the banking, information technology, energy, and insurance industries. Inside the U.S. military, the biggest fans of the project were—by far—Special Operations Command in Tampa, through which I had the privilege of briefing every major “spec ops” command worldwide via video teleconference. At first glance, that is a strange collection of bedfellows, but looking back now through the lens of the global war on terrorism, I feel my project’s largely self-selected audience mix was perfectly logical.
Besides terrorist strikes timed for maximum value, I wrote about opportunists taking advantage of any chaos ensuing from Y2K to sow additional fear through acts of malicious mischief. The historical classic of this genre is to put poison down the well and then blame some ethnic group for doing it, thus misdirecting responsibility while inciting violence. Did we get this with Y2K? Nothing big. Did we get this with 9/11? In spades, through the subsequent anthrax attacks. In that “fellow traveler” situation, someone sought to generate follow-on panic and did so quite effectively. What accompanied the envelopes in several instances? Crudely written threat letters purported to be from Muslim terrorists.
In my worst-case scenario I posited the seemingly unbelievable notion that a major stock market could be disabled for days on end, triggering additional “market quakes” around the world and eventually pushing the global economy toward recession. The report described government efforts at “keeping up appearances,” even as extraordinary measures were taken to protect key leaders. I predicted a surge in people buying guns and private security services, and a rise in social stress. The scenario envisioned hate crimes against ethnic groups blamed for the problem, and warned that certain authoritarian states might take advantage of the tumult to crack-down on political subversives or separatists within their countries. My briefing warned about an “islanding” phenomenon within certain industries where business “backstabbing” would occur, such as insurance companies refusing customers certain basic coverage. This breakdown in business connectivity would also be expressed in supply-chain delays due to monstrous delays at critical network nodes, such as borders, ports, and airports.
None of this happened as the millennium dawned. In fact, my worst-case scenario (dubbed Y2 KO!) was off as far as Y2K and “millennium mania” were concerned. But all these predictions did come true in the days and weeks following 9/11. Stock markets did quake around the world. It was not just Vice President Dick Cheney but an entire “shadow government” that was sent away to “undisclosed locations.”◈ Americans did buy more guns.◈ Many people could not sleep, were afraid to open their mail, and sought psychiatric medication at significantly higher rates.◈ Civil rights groups reported a surge in hate crimes against Arabs and Muslims in both America and Europe.◈ Governments all over the world passed new laws to fight terrorists, and some used the global war on terrorism as an excuse to crack down on internal groups (e.g., China and its Uighur separatists) or cast old conflicts in a new light (Russia’s struggle with Chechnya’s rebels).◈ Insurance companies suddenly refused terrorism coverage, and many industries saw the return of warehouse inventories to guard against disruptions in supply chains—from just in time to just in case.◈ In all, an amazingly complex story that no one could have foreseen, unless they had spent some time seriously examining how globalization’s connectivity redefines the concept of a national security crisis.
One of the most interesting scenario lines presented in the report was the notion of a political backlash against the current political leadership for letting the disaster happen in the first place. The response of the leadership in return? They would appoint an “answer man,” preferably someone with a strong military background, to serve as a new source of authority within the government. This person would be armed with extraordinary legal powers, which might strike many citizens as threatening their basic civil rights. Here I think the report predicted the sorts of response America has seen in the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the immediate appointment to that position of Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, a decorated Vietnam War hero. But the real “answer man” is clearly Attorney General John Ashcroft, with his USA Patriot Act of 2002. All that remains now in that scenario line is the “legal deconstruction” by the judicial system, leading to the permanent enunciation of new political “rule sets” regarding what constitutes un-American activities in the age of global terrorism.◈
My point in citing all this is not to celebrate my foresight, because every time I feel that temptation I check my calendar to remind myself of my scheduled meeting for late September 2001, at
Cantor Fitzgerald, on the 105th floor of World Trade Center One. Rather, it is to point out the need for a new ordering principle for U.S. national security. Our now-old ordering principle—great-power war—has simply been overtaken by events. To truly transform the U.S. military, we will need a system-level definition of crisis and instability in the age of globalization. My phrase for such a new ordering principle is System Perturbations.
I worked this definition throughout the multiyear study I led on Y2K, then buried the concept while I plotted globalization’s great “flows” with Cantor Fitzgerald for two years. But when the Twin Towers fell on 9/11, I realized I had not found some new strategic concept: it had found me. Soon, I hope, it will find the Pentagon. But understanding that large organizations typically change only in response to significant repeated failures, I am confident that if the Pentagon cannot muster the institutional movement in this direction today, eventually it will have to. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 may have served as the first great “existence proof” for this concept, but there will be others. I guarantee it.
There will be other 9/11s until the entire U.S. Government—not just the Pentagon—adopts a new and broader definition of national security crisis and reorders our entire national defense establishment around it.◈ The Department of Homeland Security is not enough. The new Northern Command is not enough. The frightening USA Patriot Act is not enough.
The National Security Act of 1947 created the Defense Department we know today. Unfortunately, that national security establishment was built for a world long since passed, to wage a type of war no longer fought, and to manage crises one great power at a time.
Simply put, we need a new Pentagon to go along with this new map.
The Rise Of System Perturbations
There was a time during the buildup toward Y2K when I caught myself actually wishing something bad would happen, and I hated myself for doing that. One of the occupational hazards of working in this business is that you are constantly thinking about the worst possibilities, so you tend to discount any good outcomes as mere “luck” while citing all the negative projections as the “way things really work.” Of course, I generated a variety of scenarios for Y2K, ranging from that bad one I just described to a very positive one in which the world came together in new ways and learned all sorts of wonderful things about robustness and resiliency in the Information Age, and everything worked out just fine in the end. Naturally, no one in my audiences—either military or civilian—wanted to hear anything about that scenario, even though that was the one I predicted for the Core in general. Still, when that scenario did unfold, I could not help but feel a tinge of disappointment, I guess because when bad things really do happen, people in this business not only feel more validated, they simply feel more important and useful.
If predicting positive events in general is hard for most Pentagon strategists, then predicting positive downstream outcomes from negative events is even harder. In general, the rule is: Only bad outcomes follow bad events. Of course, life is not like that—ever. Any big event, good or bad, triggers all sorts of positive and negative downstream outcomes, because crisis always equals opportunity for someone. In the Y2K scenarios, I called this the “dinosaur effect.” In the land before time, the dinosaurs ruled all. Then the meteor hit and the dinosaurs could not adapt to the weather change—it got colder. But mammals came through the resulting cold period quite well. So the meteor was a very bad event for dinosaurs, but just fine for mammals, because they could handle the rule-set change in weather while the dinosaurs could not. So one of the questions I liked to ask in all the Y2K scenarios was, Who are the dinosaurs and who are the mammals?
In the end, Y2K was not a good test for the concept of System Perturbations, because history was kind enough to schedule the event in advance, giving us loads of preparation time. That means we settled on a host of new rule sets in advance, working things laboriously by committee effort, and we were prepared.
But 9/11 was a real shock—one that separated dinosaurs from mammals. One of the most amazing stories about Cantor Fitzgerald following 9/11 is that the firm was able to get its electronic global bond markets back up and running within forty-eight hours of the terrorist strikes. How so? They had backup facilities and plans in place, so the London office took over by start of business Thursday morning, September 13.◈ As Cantor CEO Howard Lutnick told me as the company was preparing for Y2K, he realized that life had already changed dramatically from when the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993 by al Qaeda. At that point, when all the computers went down, Cantor had people around who could “still do it with pencil and paper.” But by 1999, those people were all gone, meaning electronic backups were their only route.
But here is the most amazing part about Cantor’s resurrection following 9/11: they actually turned a profit in the fourth quarter of 2001. Amid all that human loss and suffering, Lutnick, Flanagan, Ginsberg, and a host of others kept that company alive and functioning. How, you ask? Cantor created its own worst nightmare competitor in 1999, and they called it eSpeed. It was set up as an electronic clone of the traditional Cantor firm, meaning if a competitor was going to create the perfect online version of Cantor in order to steal its market away, it would have looked an awful lot like eSpeed. It was—in effect—a “cannibalizing agent” within the company, designed to steal business from the traditional company and migrate employees along with that business to the new version of the company.
When Cantor lost 685 employees in one fell swoop, the company as a whole could survive, in large part, because eSpeed and other entities like it within Cantor’s family of companies were able to shoulder more load. In short, Cantor had both mammals and dinosaurs in its stable of companies. The “meteor” that struck on 9/11 might have come close to wiping out many of the humans who worked in both companies at their New York headquarters, but eSpeed could weather the storm in a way that the traditional company could not have. Moreover, eSpeed’s innate distributedness, or connectedness, could be put to immediate use, bringing the electronic bond markets run by Cantor back up within two days of the attacks. Absolutely no luck was involved in Cantor’s survival. Those guys simply thought ahead like any good strategic planners.
When the strikes unfolded on 9/11, I can remember thinking, This is it. This is what we’ve been thinking about all these years: a huge warlike event occurring in peacetime, something so big that it forces us to rethink everything. It’s the meteor that will separate dinosaurs from mammals in defense. It will tell us what we need to know about war within the context of everything else. The impact on our community will unfold over years, but eventually this will change everything.
But it is in the security realm where the adjustment will be the hardest and take the longest, because it takes years—even decades—to raise new generations of military leaders and construct new force structures that match the perceived changes in the security environment. Unless, of course, you have a cannibalizing agent already in place, like a Special Operations Command. But cannibalizing agents do not become ascendant unless dramatically new rule sets are recognized as coming to the fore. When those new rule sets are recognized and given credence, we begin to understand the utility of defining system-level crises like 9/11 as something more than just as a gang of terrorists attacking three buildings in the United States. That “something more” is what I seek to organize in the strategic concept I call System Perturbations.
When the United States took down the Taliban in Afghanistan, we got some sense of the new rules of military engagement, if only because the Special Operations Forces were afforded unprecedented prominence.◈ But these changes did not stem from 9/11 per se, and reflected more the operational and tactical requirements of the situation in Afghanistan, not the world at large. It was not until President George W. Bush unveiled the strategy of preemption in June 2002 that our first serious understanding emerged of the changes in store for national security as a result of not just 9/11 the attack, but 9/11 the
new definition of a national security crisis.
This country did not have an avowed strategy of preemption prior to 9/11. That we have one now is not because almost 3,000 Americans died that day, or because important buildings were destroyed. We have a new strategy of preemption because 9/11 told us that we are living in a new world, a new international strategic environment. September 11 told us that although deterrence still holds in the Core’s Kantian peace, the reality of the Gap still being a Hobbesian world means deterrence is not enough. Deterrence is simply not enough in a world where the ability to wield weapons of mass destruction is becoming as globalized as everything else, because there are forces whose desire to achieve disconnectedness is so profound that they will ignore our security rule sets like Mutually Assured Destruction and will use WMD quite wantonly if given the chance. September 11, the System Perturbation, placed the world’s security rule set in flux and that development—at least in the mind of the world’s true military Leviathan—created a demand for new rules. Preemption is the big new rule. It was created by 9/11. By creating that new rule, 9/11 changed America forever and through that process altered global history. That is a System Perturbation, set in motion by one man with a vision—Osama bin Laden.
For a System Perturbation to be triggered, people’s worlds need to seem turned upside down, but that can be achieved in a variety of ways, not merely by blowing things up. When the Arab world saw Marines walking through the streets of Baghdad in the spring of 2003, their world was turned upside down.◈ Their sense of what is right and what is possible—their rules for how things change in the Arab world—was completely rearranged in one morning’s time. The same was true for the Western world watching the World Trade Center towers collapse in real time on TV. People were simply shocked by this image. It was perverse: the first live-broadcast mass snuff film in history. And we all experienced it together—by design.
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