A Navy Admirals thoughts on global security James Stavridis

I’m gonna talk a little bit about open

source security because we’ve got to get

better at security in this 21st century

let me start by saying let’s look back

to the 20th century and kind of get a

sense of how that style of security work

for us

this is Verdun a battlefield in France

just north of the NATO headquarters in

Belgium at Verdun in 1916 over a three

hundred day period seven hundred

thousand people were killed it’s about

2,000 a day if you roll it forward 20th

century security into the Second World

War you see the Battle of Stalingrad 300

days 2 million people killed we go into

the Cold War and we continue to try and

build walls we go from the trench

warfare of the First World War to the

Maginot Line of the Second World War and

then we go into the Cold War the Iron

Curtain the Berlin Wall walls don’t work

my thesis for us today is instead of

building walls to create security we

need to build bridges this is a famous

bridge in Europe it’s in

bosnia-herzegovina

it’s the bridge over the Drina River

subject of a novel by Evo and ‘rich and

it talks about how in that very troubled

part of Europe and the Balkans over time

there’s been enormous building of walls

more recently in the last decade we

begin to see these communities start

hesitatingly to come together I would

argue again open-source security is

about connecting the international the

inner agency the private public and

lashing it together with strategic

communication largely in social networks

so let me talk a little bit about why we

need to do that because our glue

Commons is under attack in a variety of

ways and none of the sources of threat

to the global Commons will be solved by

building walls now I’m a sailor

obviously this is a ship a liner

clipping through the Indian Ocean what’s

wrong with this picture

it’s got concertina wire along the sides

of it that’s to prevent pirates from

attacking it piracy is a very active

threat today around the world this is in

the Indian Ocean

piracy is also very active in the Strait

of Malacca it’s active in the Gulf of

Guinea we see it in the Caribbean it’s a

ten billion dollar a year discontinuity

in the global transport system last year

at this time there were 20 vessels 500

Mariners held hostage this is an attack

on the global Commons we need to think

about how to address it let’s shift to a

different kind of see the cyber see here

are photographs of two young men at the

moment they’re incarcerated they

conducted a credit card fraud that

netted them over 10 billion dollars this

is part of cybercrime which is a two

trillion dollar a year discontinuity in

the global economy two trillion a year

that’s just under the GDP of Great

Britain

so this cyber sea which we know

endlessly is the fundamental piece of

radical openness is very much under

threat as well another thing I worry

about in the global Commons is the

threat posed by trafficking by the

movement of narcotics opium here coming

out of Afghanistan through Europe over

to the United States we worry about

cocaine coming from the andean ridge

north we worry about the movement of

illegal weapons in trafficking above all

perhaps we worry about human trafficking

and the awful cost of it

trafficking moves largely at sea but in

other parts of the global Commons this

is a photograph and I wish I could tell

you that this is a very high-tech piece

of US Navy gear that we’re using to stop

the trafficking the bad news is this is

a semi submersible run by drug cartels

it was built in the jungles of South

America we caught it with that low-tech

raft and it was carrying six tons of

cocaine crew of four sophisticated

communication suite this kind of

trafficking in narcotics in humans in

weapons god-forbid

in weapons of mass destruction is part

of the threat to the global Commons and

let’s pull it together in Afghanistan

today this is a field of poppies in

Afghanistan eighty to ninety percent of

the world’s papa

are one comes out of Afghanistan we also

see there of course terrorism this is

where al-qaeda’s staged from we also see

a very strong insurgency embedded there

so this terrorism concern is also part

of the global Commons and what we must

address so here we are

21st century we know our 20th century

tools are not going to work what should

we do I would argue that we will not

deliver security solely from the barrel

of a gun

we will not deliver security solely from

the barrel of a gun

we will need the application of military

force when we do it we must do it well

and competently but my thesis is

open-source security is about

international interagency private-public

connection pulled together by this idea

of strategic communication on the

Internet’s let me give you a couple

examples of how this works in a positive

way

this is Afghanistan these are Afghan

soldiers they are all holding books you

should say that’s odd

I thought I read that this demographic

young men and women in their 20s and 30s

is largely illiterate in Afghanistan you

would be correct 85 percent cannot read

when they enter the security forces of

Afghanistan why because the Taliban

withheld education during the period of

time in which these men and women would

have learned to read so the question is

so why are they all standing there

holding books the answer is we are

teaching them to read in literacy

courses by NATO in partnership with

private sector entities in partnership

with development agencies we’ve taught

well over two hundred thousand Afghan

security forces to read and write at a

basic level when you can read and write

in Afghanistan you will typically put a

pen in your pocket at the ceremonies

when these young men and women graduate

they take that pen with great pride and

put it in their pocket this is bringing

together international there are 50

nations involved in this mission

interagency these development agencies

and private public to take on this kind

of security now we are also teaching

them combat skills of course but I would

argue open-source security means

connecting in ways that create longer

lasting security effect here’s another

example this is a US Navy warship it’s

called the comfort it was a sister ship

called the mercy they are hospital ships

this one the comfort operates throughout

the Caribbean and the coast of South

America conducting patient treatments on

a typical cruise they’ll do 400,000

patient treatments it is crude not

strictly by military but by a

combination of humanitarian

organizations

Operation Hope project smile other

organizations send volunteers

interagency physicians come out they are

all part of this to give you one example

of the impact this can have this little

boy eight years old walked with his

mother two days to come to the eye

clinic put on by the comfort when he was

fitted over his extremely myopic eyes he

suddenly looked up and said mama veo el

mundo mom I see the world multiply this

by four hundred thousand patient

treatments this private-public

collaboration with security forces and

you begin to see the power of creating

security in a very different way

here you see baseball players can you

pick out the two US Army soldiers in

this photograph they are the two young

men on either side of these young boys

this is part of the series of baseball

clinics where we have explored

collaboration between Major League

Baseball the Department of State who

sets up the diplomatic piece of this

military baseball players who are real

soldiers with real skills but

participate in this mission and they put

on clinics throughout latin america and

the caribbean in honduras in nicaragua

in all of the Central American and

Caribbean nations where baseball is so

popular and it creates security it shows

role models to young men and women about

fitness and about life that I would

argue helped create security for us

another aspect of this partnership is in

disaster relief this is a US Air Force

helicopter participating after the

tsunami in 2004 which killed 250,000

people in each of these major disasters

the tsunami in 2004 250

dad the Kashmir earthquake in Pakistan

2005 85,000 dead the Haitian earthquake

about 300 thousand dead

more recently the awful earthquake

tsunami combination which struck Japan

and its nuclear industry in all of these

instances we see partnerships between

international actors interagency

private-public working with security

forces to respond to this kind of

natural disaster so these are examples

of this idea of open source security we

tie it together increasingly by doing

things like this now you’re looking at

this thinking ah Admiral these must be

sea lanes of communication or these

might be fiber optic cables no this is a

graphic of the world according to

Twitter purple are tweets green they’re

geolocation white is the synthesis it’s

a perfect Eve occasion of that great

population survey the six largest

nations in the world in descending order

China India Facebook the United States

Twitter and Indonesia why do we want to

get in these nets why do we want to be

involved we talked earlier about the

Arab Spring and the power of all this

I’ll give you another example and it’s

how you move this message I gave a talk

like this in London a while back about

this point I said as I say to all of you

I’m on facebook friend me got a little

got a little laugh in the audience there

was a an article which was run by AP on

the wire got picked up in two places in

the world Finland and Indonesia the

headline was NATO Admiral needs friends

thank

which I did and the story was a catalyst

in the next morning I had hundreds of

Facebook friend requests from

Indonesians and Finn’s mostly saying

Admiral we heard you need a friend and

oh by the way what is NATO so yeah we

laughed but this is how we move the

message and moving that message is how

we connect international interagency

private-public and these social nets to

help create security now let me hit a

somber note this is a photograph of a

brave British soldier he’s in the Scots

Guards he’s standing to watch and

Helmand in southern Afghanistan I put

him here to remind us I would not want

anyone to leave the room thinking that

we do not need capable competent

militaries who can create real military

effect that is the core of who we are

and what we do and we do it to protect

freedom freedom of speech all the things

we treasure in our societies but you

know life is not an on and off switch

you don’t have to have a military that

is either in hard combat or is in the

barracks I would argue life is a

rheostat you have to dial it in and as I

think about how we create security in

this 21st century there will be times

when we will apply hard power in true

war and crisis but there will be many

instances as we’ve talked about today

where our militaries can be part of

creating 21st century security

international interagency private-public

connected with competent communication I

would close by saying that we heard

earlier today about Wikipedia I use

Wikipedia all the time to look up facts

and as all of you appreciate Wikipedia

is not created by 12 brilliant

people locked in a room writing articles

Wikipedia everyday is tens of thousands

of people inputting information and

every day millions of people withdrawing

that information it’s a perfect image

for the fundamental point that no one of

us is as smart as all of us thinking

together no one person no one Alliance

no one nation no one of us is as smart

as all of us thinking together the

vision statement of Wikipedia is very

simple a world in which every human

being can freely share in the sum of all

knowledge my thesis for you is that by

combining international interagency

private-public strategic communication

together in this 21st century we can

create the sum of all security thank you