Building Real Security

Building Real Security:
Harnessing Resource Efficiency to Create Freedom from Fear of Privation or Attack



Moderator:
    Christine Loh, Founder and CEO of Civic Exchange

Panelists:
    Clare Lockhart, Cofounder and CEO of the Institute for State Effectiveness
    Amory Lovins, Chairman, and Chief Scientist at Rocky Mountain Institute
    Dr. Eric Rasmussen, Commander, Medical Corps, United States Navy
    Lin Wells, Distinguished Research Professor at the National Defense University
    R. James Woolsey, Vice President of Booz Allen Hamilton

Date: August 10, 2007

Location: Aspen, Colorado

Description:
This panel discussion is titled "Building Real Security: Harnessing Resource Efficiency to Create Freedom from Fear of Privation or Attack." The group discusses how can we feel safe, and be safe, without the use of violence. A positive approach of using resource efficiency to turn scarcity into abundance, thus saving resources and creating a safer world. One panel mentions that stability — in the most fragile parts of the world — will come when citizens are embedded in relationships of trust with their governments and with the market.

Running Time: 1 hour, 27 minutes

Building Real Security:
Harnessing Resource Efficiency to Create Freedom from Fear of Privation or Attack

After listening to this panel discussion, real security, it seemed to me, is a no-brainer — a no-brainer in the fact that we need to achieve it in the developed and the developing world, and that achieving it is not rocket science.

In fact, I'd argue that real security cascades easily and straightforwardly from several other things. These other things include communication, empowerment, trust (and note that trust typically comes from either communication or empowerment, or both), resource efficiency, and an open mind (here we are talking about mindsets again!) about how to do things. And these things are all very closely related.

Moderator Christine Loh was joined by Lin Wells, Amory Lovins, R. James Woolsey, Eric Rasmussen, and Clare Lockhart.

Amory introduced the concept of security ("Freedom From Fear Of Privation Or Attack"): "How can we be safe and feel safe in ways that work better and cost less than [the] present arrangement?" he asked. "And how can this condition be built from the bottom up, not the top down, in ways that they're the province of every citizen not the monopoly of national governments, that don't rely on the threat of violence, that make others more secure not less, whether on the scale of the village or the globe, and also save enough money to pay for other needs and help to advance other overarching goals?"

Amory's pitch to the group was that at the core of achieving real security is resource efficiency because it reduces conflict over resources, it makes a decent life attainable, it can make infrastructure invulnerable, and it also can unmask and penalize proliferators of weapons of mass destruction.

"In those different ways saved resources do create a safer world and help us to achieve freedom from fear of attack through a combination of preventing or avoiding conflict, resolving it peacefully where it does arise, and defeating aggression through non-provocative defense if the first two measures fail," he said.

With Amory's thesis about resource efficiency on the table, we launched into a series of brutally powerful anecdotes about security. But first, what are we really up against?

Jim Woolsey (the self-described "environmentalist spy") did the best job of describing to (or, perhaps, scaring the heck out of) the audience by detailing the two huge threats the United States and other developed nations face: malignant threats and malevolent threats. (Much of what Jim described is detailed in depth in Brittle Power (RMI publication #S82-03), my favorite of Amory's books, which Jim wrote the preface to.)

Global warming is a malignant threat, he said. And there's a malignant aspect to our infrastructure. He described the 2003 outage in the Northeast and explained how it was caused by a falling tree branch. Terrorism is the malevolent threat. And terrorists are a lot smarter than tree branches. Thus, oil is our big problem because it funds terrorism.

Oil represents, Jim said, "the only war where we fund both sides."

"We are facing a theocratic totalitarian enemy and if you read their fatwas — and that's the only thing to read, not what they say in English to the west, what they say in Arabic to one another — the movement, particularly the Wahhabi movement in Saudi Arabia, is theocratic, totalitarian, and genocidal," Jim said. "Genocidal with respect to Jews, Shiites, homosexuals, and apostates, and horribly repressive with respect to everyone else, including, particularly, women. We have a big job on our hands in dealing with that kind of threat."

Thanks, Jim. That made me fell better. You have three sons. I have two daughters.

Clare Lockhart, who's done a variety of development and intellectual work in developing and war-torn nations, said stability comes when citizens trust their governments and the market.

She described being in Afghanistan with a Canadian military leader who quickly realized that security didn't come from the number of tanks he had on the ground. It came, he learned, through the existence of credible institutions, namely governance and finance systems. Clare pointed out that some of the approaches we take in places like Afghanistan don't work. She called them "nega-approaches." Dropping bombs, she pointed out, simply doesn't work most of the time.

(I have to wonder if that last sentence seemed completely unnecessary to most attendees. Of course dropping bombs is a bad approach — to anything, even hunting insurgents. But we're still doing it.)

But getting back to the governance and finance systems: these types of institutions brought out additional anecdotes — about trust and respect — from others.

Lin Wells, from the Pentagon, told an interesting story from southern Philippines where the U.S. military is helping the Filipino armed forces and the government with an insurgency by the Abu Sayyaf group. Lin said the U.S. forces worked in small units with the Filipino armed forces and government in addressing infrastructure problems in the area.

Part of the approach for the military personnel was, Lin said, along the lines of "what would it take for you to be neutral in the fight? You don't have to love us, but what would it take for you just to be neutral?"

As Lin described it, the approach was to deliver money to local Filipino NGOs for rebuilding projects "so that at the end of the time you didn't have a big American flag flying over something." Local residents developed trust and confidence in their own governance, as well as that of their military and their government. (See "A Helping Hand Fighting Philippines Terror" and "Officials Say Philippine Fight Much Different Than in Iraq, Afghanistan" for a couple of articles on the situation; Stars and Stripes, March 2007).

Late in the conversation, Dr. Eric Rasmussen made a great observation that made me ponder the very perception of trust. He pointed out that to us, in the West, Hamas is one thing. But to the Lebanese, Hamas is the organization that delivers medicines and takes care of old people. Clearly, there's a lot of trust there….

Trust, respect…powerful stuff. Now how about empowerment?

Much of the cascading effects of security come through empowerment. Panelists told numerous stories about the success of decentralized infrastructure (for power, water, etc.) and how people with their own water, light, heat, and ability to cook were much better off, happier, and more productive — and less likely to fight in order to get those things.

"In order to move toward sensible electrification we need to move toward distributed generation, probably almost all with renewables because that is what will empower a village to be able to stand up to a central authority," Jim said. "If it has its own energy, and can probably purify its own water because it has its own energy, it will do a great deal for local empowerment."

Clare described a program in which villages in Afghanistan were given $20,000 as long as they elected their own leadership. She found the villagers liked the money, but they really took pride in being able to govern themselves.

She also described a group of villages in Nepal that got together and implemented a micro-hydro program. They taught each other how to use the equipment, it worked, and they had power, "in spite of the government and the fact there was a full-scale insurgency going on," Clare noted.

Meanwhile, when she went to the UN to pitch the same kind of thing elsewhere, "They said, 'no, alternative energy. It's really not practical. We went to the World Bank and they said 'not cost effective. Big power stations are the solution.'…we just need to get these ideas across."

Amory said that was basically nuts.

He described the growth of micropower and the investments in it (which were $56 billion of private risk capital last year) because micropower is cheap, reliable, easy to use, scalable, clean, and non-disruptive.

"What's going on here?" Amory asked. "It's very simple. Distributed power has lower costs and lower financial risks so investors tend to put their money there. And it is only our energy institutions that fail to understand this. The revolution already happened but they missed it."

This is a pretty sad anecdote.

When she was in Afghanistan a group of Afghan villagers told Clare they'd figured out how the aid system works.

Clare told the tale thus: "They said, 'let us tell you the story of $150 million going up in smoke.' I said, 'Tell me more.' They said, 'Well there's a $150 million UN aid program for shelter. We've worked out what really happens. Twenty percent goes to Geneva for those fancy head offices. The project gets subcontracted to CARE so another 20 percent goes to Washington. It gets subcontracted again to Oxfam, so 20 percent goes to Oxford. Eventually, a little bit of money is left at the bottom. This is used to buy wooden beams from Iran. The wooden beams eventually reach our villages. They're the wrong size for our mud walls, so we cut them up and use them for firewood'."

"Now that's the aid system at the moment," Clare added.

Clare called for a whole-system examination of how the processes are carried out, and pointed out that there are currently forty to sixty nations that are "blank slates" in terms of development, meaning that we have the opportunity to do things like distributed energy systems.

Dr. Eric Rasmussen has spent considerable time deployed in the Middle East and last time he was in Baghdad he sat down and made a diagram of the people involved in the reconstruction of the country that need to communicate with each other in order to make things work. He ended up with, as he described it, a spider web with dozens of cut strands.

Without good communication you can't build trust, he said. He also observed that civilian and military realms need to communicate and collaborate.

An even better Communication Breakdown anecdote came at the end of the session when Tom Friedman pointed out the lack of any 2008 U.S. Presidential candidate proposing a gasoline tax.

Being from east Asia, Christine asked about it.

Lin Wells explained to her that a gas tax is a "third-rail-type" issue.

"The point is there's no forum for the political, or the legal, or the ethical, or the philosophical discussion in the United States today, just like we don't touch the third rail," he said. "[There is] a whole batch of issues that affect the life liberty and pursuit of happiness of the American people that are just off the table."

"This sounds deeply disappointing to me coming from the other side of the world," Christine responded. "That, if in America, during critical political times when you're having [an] important election and that people like yourselves are saying that important discussions are just not on the table, or can't be on the table, that's deeply depressing."

Distressing, disheartening, and dissatisfying….

—Cam Burns, RMI