[snipped from email]

From: Barnett, Thomas, Prof.
To:
Subject: A final note from the Year 2000 International Security Dimension Project
Date: Thursday, December 23, 1999 3:15 PM

One last email to wrap things up from our end.

We just wanted to thank one and all--both workshop participants and others who supported our work along the way--for the tremendous run we experienced with the project. And, as such, we just wanted to recap what we think we accomplished with this project.

Overall, we ended up giving the brief somewhere just short of 100 times when all was said and done, to an audience somewhere in the vicinity of 5,000 people, with well over a thousand of those being mid-level-and-above managers throughout the U.S. Military and Government. While we have no solid estimate of how many people read the Final Report, feedback from you all suggests the number is 4 to 5 times the amount of people who saw the brief.

We also feel--because we heard it so many times from so many people who would know--that we were the first research organization to package both Y2K and the millennial rollover event in a comprehensive and detailed manner, covering not only the possible network dynamics that so many others covered so much better than we, but also the economic dynamics (our May workshop hosted by Cantor Fitzgerald), the security dynamics (our March workshop hosted by the Center for Naval Analyses), and the social dynamics (our January workshop hosted by Salve Regina's Pell Center).

In this manner, I believe we were among the first to effectively place within a larger, global security framework such (now prominent) issues as potential terrorism ("Opportunists Abound"), computer hacking and viruses ("First Strike"), danger to Americans abroad ("Backlash"), potential violence by extremists ("Final Solutions"), and the ever present "law of unintended consequences" ("Iatrogenic Zone"). Make no mistake, we didn't come up with any of these ideas on our own, for they came from the workshops in which so many of you participated. All we did was organize them, providing a holistic framework from which decision strategies could be extracted--in short, no easy answers, but rather the "big picture" vision from which strategies for decision making could be constructed.

Some examples of how we "answered the mail" on this project:

* Within the Department of the Navy (DoN), Rear Admiral Jay Cohen, head of the Navy's Y2K program, said our report was a major underpinning of the service's ultimate consequence management plan. We heard the same from DoN's Chief Information Officer, Daniel Porter, who told us he passed out our report throughout the Navy Secretariat.

* Within OSD, our impact is best expressed by Assistant Secretary of Defense for C3I (and DoD's CIO) Art Money's decision to push the brief right up to Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre. And if you know anything about how busy that man is, you know that doesn't happen by fluke or on a whim.

* Within the Executive Branch, the same could be said by noting that we briefed John Koskinen, Chair of the President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion (who told me before the brief that he had already checked out our website thoroughly on several occasions), Gen. Peter Kind, Director of the USG's Information Coordination Center (Ground Zero for the rollover), and Jeffrey Hunker, National Security Council Senior Director for Infrastructure Protection.

* Within the national intelligence community, the best example of our impact is that Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Science and Technology Norm Green asked us in to CIA headquarters last spring to brief the National Intelligence Council's team that was beginning its work on the Y2K National Intelligence Estimate, stating that, in his opinion, we were doing the most cutting-edge big-picture security analysis on the subject.

* Within the U.S. Military, we were able to brief responsible parties from all of the warfighting and support regional commands, or CINCs, with highlights being command performances for the Deputy Commander in Chief of Central Command (Middle East) and the Commander in Chief of Special Operations Command, who called it the best 2-hour education he had ever received on the subject.

* Within the U.S. foreign policy establishment, our biggest achievement was the impact we had on the U.S. Agency for International Development's global consequence management plan via numerous briefs to top personnel and two influential planning workshops, leading Administrator Brady Anderson to commend us as the singlest most important analytic input to the agency's overall planning for post-rollover responses around the world.

* Internationally, we also had a fascinating and very fruitful interaction with the top Y2K government officials of the Government of Canada, and likewise learned that our report was read not only by the U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair himself, but that he had members of his cabinet read it as well.

* We also had a lot of positive interaction with a wide variety of business sectors (e.g., Wall Street firms, major U.S. and international banks, the North American electrical industry, the credit card industry, the airline industry, the insurance industry), not to mention an unprecedented (for the Naval War College, that is) amount of interaction with the public at large via our website.

To sum up, this effort surpassed our wildest dreams, and we have to thank each and every one of you for making that happen. While we were but one of a multitude working this problem for the U.S. Government, we know we "answered the mail" to the best of our ability, and we're very proud to have participated in what can rightfully be called the greatest global management task since World War II. To those of you who came to our workshops, gave us all that incredible feedback, or opened doors during our non-stop May-through-December international briefing tour, know this: we did everything we could to honor your effort, commitment, and trust--and your voices were most definitely heard.

Special thanks obviously go to Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, the man who thought this whole effort up in the first place. Without his original vision and support throughout, none of this would have been possible. Others who deserve special thanks include Rear Admiral Peter Long, Provost of the Naval War College, Drs. Robert Wood and Alberto Coll, former and current deans of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies, and my immediate superiors, Dr. Lawrence Modisett and Cdr. Carl Carlson, respectively Director and Deputy Director of the Decision Support Department. Likewise, I would like to thank my colleagues and fellow project-mates, Prof. Hank Kamradt, Prof. Bradd Hayes, Prof. Theo Gemelas, and Prof. Gregg Hoffmann for their efforts throughout. Finally, most special thanks to our department secretaries during this time span: Avon Teague and Lynda Miller.

A final version of the Final Report will be posted on the websites (http://www.nwc.navy.mil/y2k and http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Thinktank/6926/y2ksite.htm ) next week. Soon after, it will become available both in a PDF format on the web and in a hard-copy format via the Decision Support Department. If you would like a hard copy, please send a request directly to me by email with your mailing address printed out in full. We also hope to post an MPEG version of a video of the Project Summary brief, one I gave at USAID in early November, but be patient with us on that one (we are the government, after all). We definitely plan to keep all our material available on the web for the long run. Why? We expect many Ph.D. dissertations to be written on this subject, and we feel it only reasonable that we keep our stuff accessible to the widest research audience possible.

Other than those last loose ends to be tied up, this email will officially close out the Naval War College's Year 2000 International Security Dimension Project. While I could obviously stay on the Y2K conference junket for many months to come, my superiors and I have come to the conclusion that I and my colleagues need to move on to new things. As Kevin Kelly says, as soon as you reach one mountain peak, the best strategy you can have in today's New Economy is to "let go at the top" and move on to the next great challenge. So while we greatly value the learning experience Y2K has been for us, we feel that our period of unique, value-added contributions has come to an end.

Next up for me? A five-workshop series over the next two years with the Wall Street securities firm Cantor Fitzgerald to look at emerging "NewEconomy_RuleSets": an ambitious effort to draw new "maps" of power and influence in the world economy so as to expand the U.S. Military's--and specifically, the U.S. Navy's--vision of where and how it can wield maximum influence across the international security environment of the Era of Globalization.

I close out this email with two additional segments:

1) my recent submission to an East Coast newspaper looking for "last calls" on Y2K predictions; and
2) our final list of most significant briefs over the life of the project.

Again, thank you for your support. Feel free to contact me in the future if I can be of any help in this matter or others.

Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett

[addendum one--submission to Trenton Times in response to "last call" for Y2K expert opinions]

My personal sense is that not much will happen in the U.S., and that makes a lot of sense when you think about it. We're the richest society in the world, with the most distributed economy and infrastructure. We're also the leading edge of the so-called New Economy, meaning we've most mastered the sort of skills that allow us to deal with threats to our economic and network stability such as Y2K.

I am surprised that the Y2K mania hasn't seeped more into the collective consciousness of the U.S. public, because God knows we love to get overly-excited about potential threats, but I think a certain Y2K fatigue factor is to blame here--in short, we just got tired of hearing about it. What mania will occur seems destined to center around the "fellow travellers," meaning those potentially scary scenarios perpetrated by actors trying to take advantage of perceived social skittiness surrounding the rollover (e.g., terrorists, hackers, anarchists). But there again, you're talking about a country that's both fairly aggressive and fairly adept at surveilling and tracking down such characters, so that despite our open society, America remains a place where significant amounts of terrorism simply do not occur.

The places around the world where I think you might see the biggest problems with Y2K are those countries that aren't well integrated into the global economy, treat information technology as something separate from their overall economy, and tend to feature social, infrastructural, and/or economic chokepoints--meaning their systems tend to rely on one big thing and if that one big thing doesn't work, they don't have any alternatives. So if you rely on one key export (or one key import), or one political party, or one great source of social authority, and that one big thing is somehow challenged or embarrassed by network failures stemming from Y2K, then you have the potential for social disorder. It's the countries like the U.S., where there's always an alternative--be it a different sector of the economy, a new political leader, or some authority figure who can stand up and sufficiently reassure people (as John Koskinen has ably done)--that tend to do better in near-crisis situations like Y2K. It's the flexibility that is provided by always having alternatives, or back-ups, that allows a society like ours to take such potentially tumultuous experiences in stride, while more fragile/rigid societies may come apart under the strain.

The countries you need to watch out for, by the way, aren't that hard to figure out. They're the same ones who suffered most during the Global Financial Crisis of 1997-98. There the same ones who tend to suffer most when big PC viruses strike around the planet. Basically, there the same ones who tend to have a hard time dealing with unscripted events--or disasters in general. So again, you don't really need to worry about the U.S. per se, because, as I like to ask, "Can you name me a country other than the United States where you'd feel more comfortable experiencing a natural disaster?" And no one can. This year's Hurricane Floyd is now described as the biggest rescue of personal pets in human history! That means our dogs and cats come through natural disasters better than most people around the world do when fate strikes their neck of the woods. Think about that when you feel like getting scared about Y2K!

To be really blunt: the countries that are going to come through Y2K the best are the ones that look, act, and feel the most like the United States. Again, we are the most distributed economy in the world and the most "New Economy" economy in the world. That skill set makes us the most adept at handling potential system perturbations such as Y2K. So in a nutshell, the less like the U.S. your economic, social, political and network systems are, the more risk you face on Y2K.

So if the general call is "U.S.--okay, rest of the world--indeterminantly worse," then the only mystery left with Y2K is, How much worse could the rest of the world be? And how much should the U.S. care and seek to do something about it? These two questions really center on the potential for Y2K to damage certain sectors of the global economy outside the U.S., with the key uncertainty being, How much can that damage rebound back against the U.S. economy? We saw the Asian Flu of 1997 spread to both Russia and Brazil and then begin to lap up against our shores in the fall of 1998, only to have the Fed lower interest rates rapidly in succession and the whole danger seemed easily deflected. If Y2K caused serious economic repurcussions abroad, would our answer be as simple and neat, or would we have to do more? After all, our economy has been cruising at high speed for quite some time now, and unless we've repealed the business cycle for all eternity, at some point something's going to come along and derail us for a bit. Along those lines, many Wall Street observers are now saying that the recent run-up on stocks is due, in large part, to the expansion of the money supply by the Fed to allay liquidity concerns surrounding Y2K. I think it was a brilliant move, one that worked incredibly well. But you have to wonder if the unintended side-effect is that we've really over-inflated the stock markets as a result, and who knows where that takes us in early 2000--especially if Y2K slowly unfolds abroad and seems a more serious long-term threat to the U.S. economy than we had previously imagined.

So if I were to offer any last-minute warning, it would be not to assume that a quiet weekend surrounding 1 January means Y2K is over and done with. The impact of Y2K--both in terms of direct failures and unintended consequences from all the actions we've taken to date to prevent those failures and the related social and economic dynamics we feared those failures could trigger--probably won't become clear until many weeks into the year 2000. In short, Y2K will end up being a big lesson for us all regarding the interconnected nature of the global economy and what fragility and robustness has emerged in this era of unprecedented globalization of finance, trade, and communications.

--Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett, Professor, U.S. Naval War College, Newport RI (submitted 23 December 1999)

[/snip]

- got confidence?

-- Critt Jarvis (critt@critt.com), December 23, 1999

Answers

we are all in one boat

-- micky mouse (mickymouse@trap.com), December 23, 1999.

Kind of a funny mix of concepts requiring a new cataegory, the "pollydoomer". I was struck by the statement, "It's the flexibility that is provided by always having alternatives, or back-ups, that allows a society like ours to take such potentially tumultuous experiences in stride, while more fragile/rigid societies may come apart under the strain. Is that polly or doomer?

The final paragraphs on the stock market and the economy was interesting, yet also seemed out of place for a Naval War College document.

-- Dave (aaa@aaa.com), December 23, 1999.

Sounds like marketing to me. I find it interesting that the Govt has this all happily wrapped up now in a Polly-sounding wrapper and it is time to move on considering some of the "worst case" scenarios this effort offered. His boss said it was time to "move on"......hmmmm......was he encouraged to put on a happy face? or did he sell out?

-- somebody (someone@somewhere.com), December 23, 1999.

Go robustness!

-- Lars (lars@indy.net), December 23, 1999.

Tell me, does Dr. Barnett also believe in the Tooth Farie, the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus?

Excuse me, I have to dash off to the Emerald City and see what the Wizzard of Oz says about this.

-- Richard (Astral-Acres@webtv.net), December 23, 1999.

The Professor is patting himself on the back. He seems correct enough in his general discussion but it is not deep enough. This is probably in part due to his apparent desire not to spook the herd. We will not be able to prop up Korea or Indonesia this time around if their infrastructure goes down. That will have a direct impact upon Japan, Hong Kong, and China. Those will have an impact on India and Pakistan. At or near that point, someone somewhere is going to wonder if NOW is not a good time to take back S. Korea or to squash Pakistan or to move more forcefully into Tibet or Viet Nam. That is the first ten or twelve hours...

In addition to all of that the U.S. Market is clearly overvalued. Probably on the order of twenty percent. That correction is going to come sooner or later. I am of the opinion that the big boys will hold the market up to the bitter end -- when they take huge profits and the day traders get slammed for their retirements. My guess and that is all it is worth is the correction will start soon. Real soon. The big guys know that New Years day is going to reveal a hell of a lot of little countries that are not going to meet their contractual quotas next year. They will take their profits and run.

But hey! I am an idiot. So nothing to worry about, right?

-- (...@.......), December 23, 1999.

Critt,

Got confidence in what? Bubba's administration? The military? What? NATO? Tony Blaire? What, this guy what's his name? I think not!

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

All I read was a bunch of patting on the back and ego massaging and when it came down to predictions there was nothing exact and lots of escape routes. I'm nobody and I can do the same thing. But the big difference between you and me is, I think he's full of self-importance and you think he's a great guy. Sorry to be so cynical, however, being lied to all the time tends to make a person that way.

Look, I served in the military for 4 years under Robert McNamera and Johnson and they lied. The current military lied about Kosovo. The President lied. The State Department lied. Hillary lied. And when they aren't lying they are parsing words, misleading and miss-directing. You know who I believe? Me, just me. And you want to know what I believe? I believe these people, the government boys, wouldn't recognize the truth if they saw it. They are so used to doing CYA they can't just tell the truth.

-- UR2Blame (nofool@lives.here.), December 23, 1999.

Personally, I'd like to spend about 15/20 minutes asking this fella a few questions. He admits we're inter-connected yet doesn't get the connection? One fails, all suffer, many fail, we suffer deeply. The only thing that comes to mind is "dominoes", try it sometime, very amusing, unfortunately this isn't a game. Our lifes are now dependent on a vast, and I mean "VAST" number of other things working correctly. Somehow, I'm doubtful they will work the same in a few short weeks. As I've said before, nothing would make me happier than to be wrong.

-- Michael (michaelteever@buffalo.com), December 23, 1999.

Short sighted and narrow minded propoganda, as would be expected from an official US government agency.

-- (@ .), December 23, 1999.

Thomas mentioned;

I am surprised that the Y2K mania hasn't seeped more into the collective consciousness of the U.S. public, because God knows we love to get overly-excited about potential threats, but I think a certain Y2K fatigue factor is to blame here--in short, we just got tired of hearing about it.

HA!

Not bloody likely, the reason Y2K never took off is the lack of an education that the public should have had. That and the fact Y2K is an alien topic to the work and family type lifestyle that folks engage in. They just don't have the time to commit to understanding the complexity of the issue.

Folks aren't bored of the issue, they just don't truly understand it.

-- Brian (imager@home.com), December 23, 1999.