A Seminar to clarify points in
Lectures I-II
‘RETHINKING AUTOCRACY PREVENTION
STRATEGY’
by Vladimir Lukov, The Russian Soft Power School,
Summary
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The Munich Security Conference-2018 has ignored a set
of very important issues. The participants presented anything, but the role of
citizens with Soft Power tools in Global Security issues.
My concept of All-People Self-Defense
vs. Autocracy (ASVA) is a vital dimension of Global War against Terrorism
(GWAT), bearing in mind Terror from Above as a trigger for Terror from Below
(Streets); ASVA deals with modeling & applying citizen-agents inside Internet-Networking
into national acting systems of Counter-Terrorism. This Counter-Terrorism
modeling uses clear mathematic approaches and common computing languages that can not be altered with a ‘Human
Factor’ (falsified, in plain English);
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Though, there are vague perspectives for Soft Power in
Russia, because of inertia of Terror from Above and Below;
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ASVA could be developed through monitoring and
evaluation of mass data from citizens to create unified math indicators
(indexes) to integrate Russia-NATO effort in the GWAT;
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Reducing Terror from Above leads to lessening
responsive Terror from Below. It is a long-term strategy for Free Enterprise
and investments in Russia;
-
Autocratic pressure on businesses makes them escape
into ‘grey zones of criminals and corruption’ and terrorist ‘harbors & heavens’
to be described in roadmaps for investors.
Issues for discussions and
re-thinking
In the Soviet times, all international and domestic problems
for the Kremlin power were considered as constant threats of the Capitalism to
the Communist State Bureaucracy in the ‘sieged castle’ paradigm. The latter has
been revived under Putin’s autocracy with the same fake-values of National
Defense of Soviet & Post-Soviet types, but under heavier financial burden.
The public
opinion in Russia is filled with Mass Media myths about threats to Putin’s Autocracy from Global & Domestic
Terrorism, meaning All-Human and democratic values.
The same criminal torture of facts about the NATO and
the USA in the GWAT has been widely spread inside the Military, federal and regional
elites in Russia and the CIS.
Only a few dozens, not hundreds (!) of experts on
Counter-Terrorism are available for talks and decision-making measures in
All-People Self-Defense vs. Autocracy prevention strategy. The existing
so-called ‘Anti-Terrorism’ serves as a façade of the Kremlin’s Autocracy.
The urgent need to ruin such a façade appeared after
ugly events in Beslan, Dagestan (2004). That Terror from Above was under pseudo-investigations
by the Autocratic Kremlin itself. The same model of ‘Anti-Terrorism’ was
applied against Ukraine and Syria.
The time for rethinking Autocratic prevention strategy
has come with threatening signs of future regional wars in the Caucasus and
Central Asia.
After heavy casualties in ‘hybrid wars’ in Donbas,
Syria and Kurdish Iraq the Kremlin’s ‘Anti-Corruption Anti-Terrorism’ in
Dagestan
is to get a new foot-stand against democratic changes in the NIS and a tool of
pressure on the NATO-Iran-Israel-Arabs conflicts.
Growing danger of Terror from Above after the
‘election-2018’ is to safeguard Putin’s autocratic power.
That is why Autocracy Prevention Strategy has ripened as
the Russian National Security’s necessity. For this purpose the term of Soft
Power in Public Security seems to become a new educational agenda in Russia during/after
Putin’s rule.
The distrust of Society to the Military, Police and
Special Services as ‘bosses in the country’ is overwhelming. The recent surfing
on the Internet has shown: 89% distrusted
and only 11% trusted in glory, competence and dignity of Putin’s Law
enforcement and his Military.
Towards a multi-dimensional Public
Security paradigm
For recent decades, NATO countries were focused mainly
on nuclear threats prevention of Russia in the paradigm of the coming
Armageddon a la Ruse.
But after the 9/11 events, nuclear and radiological threats have become far
more prioritized items of national security issue than before in the USA and
other NATO countries, unluckily not in Russia herself.
In the USA there is probably no more important
foreign policy goal than keeping nuclear weapons, their ingredients
and know-how to make them out of the hands of terrorists.
As to Russia, technically, nobody in the Street and in the Kremlin (the office people) - old
and new bureaucracy circles - knows much about dirty-bombs or chemical/biological
weaponry.
It’s a result of inertia of the Cold War when attacks
were expected from hostile states, not from non-governmental actors like
Al-Kaida and the ISIS.
The Soviet State bureaucracy could not cope even with
threats and panics among the population while the Chernobyl radiation
contamination events. Now, there is, practically, the same level of Federal or
regional “preparedness” to combat nuclear or/and radiological threat, if any.
In the past, Russians considered themselves to be
ready to combat nuclear threats from Americans and their allies. Today, the
population of Russia is more afraid of growing poverty and manipulated
“justice” by the Kremlin as Terror from Above.
These two threatening factors are, willy-nilly, to unite
modern terrorists with concerned and irritated citizens who wish to avoid
Putin’s murderous schemes in the so-called “The United Russian World”.
The recent destruction of the private military company
‘Wagner’ in Syria with highly effective strikes by the USA was a cold shower on
hot heads in the Kremlin.
Anti-terrorism methods of the Russian Siloviki or the
Power Sector are still at the basis of the Kremlin’s Counter-Terrorism
policies. They have proved to be quite inadequate to declared tasks of the
Global War on Terrorism (GWOT).
A more comprehensive, proactive, and
intelligence-based Counter-Terrorism approach is required. We are talking about
Public Security matters that could be more effective and preventive, but not reactive in the GWOT.
It is more and more evident that the “only and lonely”
Putin’s Power Sector against Terrorism does not work.
After recent shootings in he US schools (2018)
President Trump is about to replace his non-effective law enforcement forces
with First Responders from NGOs of concerned citizens.
Math
& Software Counter-Terrorism
A new concept of Russia-NATO Security planning and
operations is needed, as well. It could be used against any terrorist threat at
hand or/and in a distance.
We should believe that social abnormalities definitely produce “fuel”
for Terrorism. Threats must be measured, calculated and formatted in a set of
software programs in advance.
The era of Internet has transformed Public and
National Security. Now they should be looked at as a widening network of the so-called
preventive “Software Counter-Terrorism”.
But, first of all, there must be common computer languages
that make the very calculation of facts and files about Terror easy and
correct. These data are to come from NGOs, which might form a monitoring &
evaluation network over terrorists’ minds and intentions. Thus, we may track down particular courses of actions
to which NGO members as agents of Public Security infrastructures have
committed in order to signal about certain terrorist threats and corresponding
events in advance.
Each intention is a set of plans. Events may
start off the execution of plans that have relevant triggering events. We
should predict social and/or economic environment (Social Counter-Terrorism),
as well as terrorists’ sets of mind based on perception of some external/domestic
events.
Multi-agents’ signals on the Internet generate the
agent's own execution of a plan (i.e., a sub-goal in a plan that generates an
event in “addition to achievement goal”). In the latter case, the event is
accompanied with the intention, which generated it. Certain software programs might
screen this event that will be pushed on top of terrorists’ intentions to
intercept in time.
External events create new intentions, representing
separate focuses of attention for the agent's acting on the environment. Prearrangement
exists for internal events corresponding to controlled and updated terrorist dogmas
to create active Soft Power forms of Counter-Terrorism.
So we may rely on the functioning AgentSpeak (L)
computing interpreter, which is clearly described below. The link
will lead you to the picture with sets of beliefs, events, plans, and
intentions of dealers/advocates of Terror from Above/Below. They are
represented as rectangles. Diamonds represent selection (of one
element from a set). Circles represent
some of the processing involved in the interpretation of AgentSpeak (L)
programs.
At every interpretation cycle of an agent program, the
interpreter updates a list of events, which may be generated from perception of
the environment, or from the execution of intentions (when sub-goals are
specified in the body of plans). Beliefs
are either updated from
perception or from plan controlled operations (the latter is shown in the link below)
and whenever there are changes in the agent's beliefs, this implies the
insertion of an event in the set of events. This belief revision function is
also supposed to be agent specific.
After the Program has
selected an event/case, the interpreter has to unify that event/case with
triggering events in the minds of terrorists. This generates a set of all their
relevant plans. By checking whether the context part of the plans in
that set follow from the agent's beliefs, the interpreter determines a set of applicable
plans (plans that can actually be used at that moment for handling the
chosen event). Then it chooses a single
applicable plan from that set, which becomes the intended plan for
handling that event, and either pushes that plan on the top of an existing
intention (if the event was an internal one), or creates a new intention in the
set of intentions (if the event was external, i.e., generated from a perception
of the environment).
All that remains to be done at this stage is to select a single intention to be executed
in that cycle. The chosen Program function
selects one of the agent's intentions (i.e., one of the independent stacks of
partially instantiated plans within the set of intentions). On the top of that
stack there is a plan, and the formula in the beginning of its body is taken
for execution. This implies that a basic action is performed by the agent on
its environment, an internal event is generated (in the case that the selected
formula is an achievement goal), and a test goal is performed to get the set of
beliefs in “useful Terror” checked.
In the case where a basic Counter-Terrorist action is
selected, the necessary updating of the set of terrorists’ intentions is simply
to remove that action from the intention (the interpreter informs to the agent
effectors what action is required).
When all formula in the body of a plan have been
removed (i.e., have been executed), the whole plan is removed from the
intention, and so is the achievement goal that generated it. This ends a cycle
of execution, and everything is repeated all over again, initially checking the
state of the environment after agents have acted upon it, then generating the
relevant events, and so forth.
Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) with unified
indicators (indexes) of Public Security can integrate further Russia-NATO
effort in the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT).
Russian Internet-integrated M&E
in the GWOT
Agents-based
Public Security programs may and should replace traditional network-centric
Anti-Terrorist warfare with “decisive” operations against the population.
Military strikes are provocative to many social strata, which may form additional
support to terrorist organizations, as we can see now and we’ll see in future.
The present day outcomes of old Arab-Palestinian-Israel conflicts and military
confrontations of the NATO-USA-Iran are vivid examples of provocative and responsive
‘Anti-Terrorism’ with its sheer military tools.
In the New
Global War on Terrorism the aim is to develop non-military capabilities that can rapidly break terrorists’ will to
fight and undermine their asymmetric striking capabilities.
The new
concept of Public Security Strategy in GWOT can be called Agents-based
operations (ABO). If it’s adopted by decision-makers in Russia and NATO, it
will encompass processes, tools, and organizations that focus on planning,
executing, and assessing counter-terrorist activities for the effects produced
rather than merely scoring the number of terrorists and innocent civilians
destroyed in Anti-Terrorism actions.
ABO
practitioners draw on the full range of instruments of nation-wide power to
anticipate, track, and understand the indirect
as well as direct effects of the future Russia-NATO cooperation throughout
the Global Counter-Terrorism social, political, military, and economic systems.
We prefer to concentrate only on education issues here.
The ABO
concept requires deep knowledge not of Terrorism alone but also of its friendly
social capabilities and structures in and out the country. The current suite of
analytic tools employed by the so-called Power Ministries (the Siloviki) cannot
support this approach to counter-terrorist operations. These tools were not
designed to determine how the use of military force affects adversary strategic
will, to model adaptive behavior, to represent unintended consequences, or to
evaluate alternative courses of action that include other instruments of
national power beyond military force.
After the
Cold War, Russia-NATO’s “romantic” relations, the dominant principle of present
Anti-Terrorism planning has lead to the ability to employ mass law-enforcement forces at “key points” while preventing the
terrorist adversary from doing the same.
Sheer
military, not socio-economic success in the battle for the people confidence to
a ruling power was understood to depend on the ability to dominate the enemy in
an extended attrition campaign (like in Chechnya and Syria). However, the
anti-terrorist operations that the Russian Military has been called on to
execute have changed in character.
Social
anomaly, not notorious “clashes of civilizations” or religious rivalry feeds
terrorist activity from Below and enlarges popular support of Terrorism not the
GWOT’s advocates.
Late NATO
military involvements behind traditional boundaries in Europe are typically
against Global Terrorism. In theory, global terror advocates have been nowhere
near the military might of the Russia-NATO “virtual joint” forces. But even in
this theoretical format these capabilities seem to be useless. Why so?
In
future, Global Terrorism are not about to become limited to the classic
cross-border invasion that leads to defined battle lines, with success measured
by territory defended or gained. As demonstrated by all military operations of
the 1990-s – up today, considerations of military superiority at strategic or
operational levels are inappropriate when compared with other factors, such as
the Global Terrorism's will to fight and local considerations of mini-tools of
violence vs. military force. It allows asymmetric capabilities of terrorist
organizations to be better employed, as we can see in fighting of the ISIS.
The new
concept of Agents-Based Operations (ABO) is an effort to leverage (in the
future) Russia-NATO military, science and technical might with advantages in
computation, information, and analysis to achieve not only political-military,
but socio-economic outcomes.
Making the
ABO a reality will depend on developing and using appropriate analytic
frameworks for Counter-Terrorism problems. These frameworks and associated
methodologies will enable politicians and NGOs leaders to plan more effectively
for joint GWOT actions in advance and then adapt those plans and rehearsed
operations as terrorist threats situations unfold.
Future
operations that reflect the principles of the ABO will require a joint Russia-NATO
political-military leadership to understand the consequences of what may occur
in the nearest future beyond immediate anti-terrorist (military) activities.
Political and military decision-makers need a modeling framework that
integrates old and new National & Public Security strategies. They include
concepts such as the explicit linking of military actions to national strategy,
the continual assessment of operational outcomes and unintended consequences,
the coordination of interagency efforts, and the appropriate utilization of
emerging Counter-Terrorism concepts. The ABO is one of them. Its core presents
many variants of network-agents warning systems to prevent “decisive”
operations with strikes at different strata of the population that only
multiply potential supporters of Terror from Above and Below.
Conclusion
A central
concern of this 1-st Seminar at the Soft Power School (The SPS) is that the
current suite of analytic tools cannot represent all the aspects that interest
Russia-NATO leaders and corresponding NGOs. The SPS strives to make their
actions to remain mutually supportive.
The
current tools of Hard Power can generate logistical and targeting plans for
Terrorism from Below. The non-military schemes of Soft Power will influence the
will of any terrorist organization adversary or the emergence of post-Counter-Terrorism
situations.
Using
differing mixtures of population support through NGOs and private funds,
enforcement potentials as a New Public Security paradigm is a pioneering set of
analytical tools to learn at the Soft Power School.
Thus
monitoring and evaluation with shared indexes of Public Security can
serve as a basic element of:
1.
Joint efforts of NGOs in Public Security, Foreign &
Military policy of Russia and NATO countries;
2.
Public demands for stronger integration of
Counter-Terrorism efforts could be satisfied far beyond traditional security
and defense policy of the NATO, USA, EU and Russia;
3.
There seem to be possible chances for a newly-born All-People Self-Defense vs. Autocracy
Movement of NGOs to become active and attractive in Public Diplomacy and
National Security after Putin who banned independent NGOs. But no one can ban
education on the Internet vs. Tyranny and Autocracy.
A New Era for real Defenders of Russia is coming! Hurrah!
Vladimir Lukov (PhD), President and CEO of the
Russian Soft Power School, 9524414@gmail.com
P.S. Your
donations are more than welcome to the Sberbank card # 2202 2003 7037 5873, and PayPal to Vladimir Lukov (vlukov@dol.ru).
