Memorandum from Morgan Aquila
THE ROLE
OF INDUSTRY
IN THE
NEW ANTI-TERRORISM
ERA
As the fight against terrorism takes central
stage as a new globalised conflict paradigm emerges, there needs
to be a careful re-assessment of how an effective division of
effort between universities, national laboratories, industry and
the military can be developed to deal with critical new challenges.
What, for instance, are the real incentives for government, the
science and technology community and private industry to co-operate,
more than these different stakeholders have done in the past?
How can these incentives be harmonised with dramatically differing
strategic objectives for each of them, and how can any disincentives,
for there must be some in any change in strategy, be overcome?
From the industrial perspective, one of the
key principles of a healthy business outlook, and the business
plans that are triggered by it, is that there needs to be a vision
of where future revenue streams will come from and the business
stream's long-term viability. The aiming point needs to be a clear
definition of what the "market space" is, and how it
will develop. So far, in this shift in the threat paradigm since
the mid 1990s, this has been a conundrum. The tactic of terrorism
has been with modern Western societies for some considerable time,
but not on the scale represented by the attack on the United States,
or the more recent Madrid or London attacks and many others worldwide.
Former terrorist attacks were also not brought to the public instantly,
and in such dramatic style, by the ubiquitous 24-hour visual media.
An important consideration is whether we have
seen a strategic swing away from accepted modern forms of conflict
and security on a scale which will force an overall change in
the relations between society and security, and in which industry
will be a key stakeholder. In the Counter Terrorism/Homeland Security
environment, is there now a requirement to conduct a critical
review of industry's strategic vision of the future, and of the
capabilities it will be required to bring into being? The National
Security Strategy is disappointingly "light" on the
future trajectory of the industrial aspects of the anti-terrorism
era and certainly does not provide a sufficient motive to catalyse
an equivalent of the Defence Industrial Strategy. Such a review,
if properly conducted with the right level of effort and the right
safeguards, can perhaps initiate a debate on whether the new security
threats present significant market opportunities to explore. If
there is a market, then industry will surely address it.
Even if there is no such review, it is important
that there is an underpinning and generally held view on how the
world has changed to act as the catalyst that will trigger a united
response across the defence and security stakeholder spectrum.
Although a trigger such as this may indeed be only a high-level
vision, it can provide a framework which will give the stakeholder
set a common idea of the required changes in responses to threats,
and a picture of the overall effect. As a corollary, it is interesting
to note that there is currently no accepted international definition
of what a terrorist is, although everyone knows what a terrorist
does.
The nature of the new terrorist threat, and
its new brand of terror, including its desire to obtain and use
weapons of mass destruction, means that society is facing once
again an example of asymmetrical warfare whereby the adversary
ignores his enemy's strengths and instead targets his weaknesses.
Interestingly, the 11 September terrorists seem to have chanced
upon (or was this by design?) a way to combine, two "Western
strengths" (procedure-free air travel, and a propensity to
build very tall builds to convey success), to bring disaster of
unanticipated style and proportion, using the catalyst of suicide
tactics.
Care has to be exercised when investigating
the answer to the new anti-terrorist rebalancing conundrum, as
a concept of Homeland Security, which tends to imply a "whole
society" response (because the scene of action has moved
away from battlefields, into the anonymity of a mass population),
cannot be treated in isolation from other security related policies
which accompany it. These may be military policies designed for
traditional war, or the policies of law enforcement and other
public safety communities, along with the legal frameworks that
allow all of the responding communities to perform their duties.
The NSS goes some way to reaching across the conflict spectrum
(and probably further than any policy has gone before), and has
sought to engender a big umbrella approach to national security
using some sensible expedients, such as the sharing of the National
Risk Register (in some variety) with the public.
A conflict analysis to accompany the new strategy
therefore needs to span the entire threat spectrum, of not only
armed conflict but also address that part termed as public safety.
Although not all of such threats to the citizen imply mortal danger,
they are still threats, and are part of a wider environment of
security that allows citizens to carry on with their lawful purposes.
Once we have established society's current readiness to respond
to these threats, we can look to how to increase readiness in
a more coherent fashion against all threats, without the adoption
of inappropriate processes, without undue risk of technological
failure, or the use of human resource in an improper way.
The requirement therefore is a capability model
that (from one end of the scale) starts with pickpocketing, proceeds
through serious crime, terrorism and insurgency, through traditional
deployed military operations, to (at the other extreme of the
scale) the recovery from a nuclear exchange, and a curve that
shows how ready the nation is to respond to those threats.
Figure 1 is a view of what a Utopian secure
society may look like, with an x-axis that shows Threat—from
pickpocketing through to a nuclear exchange between nation states—and
a y-axis that shows society's readiness to combat those threats.
With "perfect security" if a citizen was pickpocketed
then the full weight of the law, and its criminal justice apparatus,
would be levied against detecting and prosecuting the perpetrator.
At the other end of the scale, we would have a society that was
fully prepared for nuclear exchange.
However, Figure 2 is a model that shows what
a typical national threat/readiness posture might look like taking
into account the resources required to combat the threats—figuratively
in the post Cold War, pre al-Qaeda period.
Public safety readiness, particularly law enforcement,
can be seen to be peaking at serious offences against the person
such as murder and kidnap (after all, is a full police response
normally deployed after a pickpocketing incident?). Readiness
declines at a point where combating the threat would be outside
the capability of the civil agencies, or where generation of this
capability would be too costly to contemplate taking into account
its unlikely nature. There is an overlap here, where, under police/military
arrangements, a military response might be deployed to assist
the civilian agencies, classically in counter terrorism operations
such as bomb disposal or specialist operations against terrorist
current operations (as in Iranian Embassy at Princes Gate in London
in 1980), or in the event of a crisis (floods, fuel tankers, fire
strikes et al). Military readiness then has a corresponding
curve where maximum capability is generated for counter insurgency,
peace keeping or peace enforcement operations with reduction of
capability as the threat heads towards high intensity conflict
(where this diminution would be addressed by urgent operational
requirements as a particular conflict approaches), tailing to
a limited capability to survive a nuclear exchange where there
would be a long warning period to re-generate capability—of
course, at some financial cost.
In Figure 3 we can observe the effects of the
emergence of an asymmetric al-Qaeda type threat, based within
a society, that is essentially "at peace". The readiness
required curve from the public safety capability has to rise to
cater for the new threat conditions, purely because the over-committed
military has limited resource to bulge backwards—and anyway,
in simple terms, the new order of terrorism is still viewed (certainly
in UK eyes) as only a crime.
This leads to two phenomena shown at Figure
4; the first being a pull-through of military technology and processes
into the capability area now required from the public safety agencies.
Examples of this could include gas masks, Chemical/Biological
suits and specialist chemical agent detectors for the police and
fire brigades. The second phenomena is seen in the area under
the curve that has no previous "owner" which now represents
the new capabilities required to increase capability against the
new order of threat. Examples of the latter might include the
amalgamation of responding agencies, introduction of better border
controls, ID cards, integration of stove-piped intelligence data
bases, an exponential growth of biometric-related identity projects,
computer network defence initiatives, and recruitment of more
security agency personnel (all combinations of people, processes
and technologies). And, in the UK, to finance some Government
initiatives there has been some extra funding for counter terrorism
capability for the public safety agencies, supported by the formation
of new organisations to make strategic response to the threat
more coherent—such as the new Health Protection Agency and
the Borders Agency to name but two—and the enactment of
enabling legislative instruments (variously Terrorist and Civil
Contingencies Acts).
What is certain is that any resource will always
be finite, so the question is how do we extend that national resilience/homeland
security curve, either in real or virtual terms, to minimise the
area where there is no current capability?
There has to be a strategy for those in the
preparation and response fields to make assessments on how to
absorb the first blow, then recover from, those disasters (whether
man-made or natural) that are either beyond normal comprehension,
or are beyond the limits of resource to prepare against. What,
for example, would be the key issues in the mass evacuation of
an urban centre, such as London or Paris? What would the effects
be of a terrorist smallpox "mule" targeting a travel
hub, such as a city railway station at commuter time? In the latter,
how does one assess the spread of the disease? How soon will supermarkets
and chemists run out of analgesics? When will the first presentations
be made to doctors' surgeries? How soon will patients self-present
at Accident and Emergency rooms? When will these be overwhelmed?
How soon will non-urgent patients in hospitals be returned home,
and how, and who will care for them? When will the hospitals be
overwhelmed, and which institutions could be used to offload the
non-critical cases? How many casualties will die, and how will
the bodies be disposed of? When will normality return, and how
much will it all cost?
Clearly the modelling required to make some
of these calculations will need to be sophisticated, but the current
growing sophistication in synthetic environments may soon provide
the route, firstly to provide the preparatory analysis, but then
to act as a decision support tool when a real emergency arises.
Synthesis and modelling thus manages to help
close the gap between the "peaks of capability" at the
centre of the readiness vs threat graph, and directs us to a coordinated
strategy to develop the response, as shown at Figure 5, in that:
1. In the capability that exists already,
capability needs to be reviewed, gaps need to be identified and
then repaired (for example within the dislocations in the UK police
intelligence infrastructure highlighted by the Bichard Inquiry
and the still evident symptom of retention of intelligence within
stovepipes at Department level).
2. Within the resource limitations of the
response, there needs to be a process of capability growth, and
integration.
3. Where resource constraints impose themselves
limitations on physical preparation of a response, then modelling
and exploration provide the optimum, cost effective route to enhanced
capability—through better readiness.
With a coherent capability now defined, total
resource available will now define the outer limits of the new
response curve, as shown in Figure 6.
This Figure also demonstrates the principle
of addressing deficits in capability for immediate and specific
theatres through urgent operational procurement. However, it also
shows, critically, those capabilities which could now be considered
to be superfluous to the Response in the light of the shift in
conflict paradigm, and within a resource limited society.
The requirement to get the greatest return on
investment will determine how Government makes its cost/benefit
judgements, but from the outset a few principles can be clearly
identified:
Firstly, there is no prospect of solving new
capability requirements through brute force provided by manpower
alone, as this would be prohibitively expensive. The penalties
on resource budgets that would be required for the physical guarding
of critical national infrastructure, or to "hire in"
sufficient intelligence analysts to sift the volumes of data extracted
from global intelligence sources would be simply too enormous.
So physical security has to evolve from the Cold War structures
of the defence of static sites, and take the established models
of threat, vulnerability and risk forward to a wider environment
of the security of the societal base that the likes of al-Qaeda
seem to be targeting and within which it operates, and from where
its people are recruited, that is, to raise resilience across
society.
So can process and technology be the cost effective
force multipliers in the public safety arena to compensate for
the lack of people? They can be, but only if accurately focused
on helping provide what the public safety agencies need in terms
of time. Characteristically, arrest or disruption of terrorist
cells happens only shortly before their operations are planned
to "go" or indeed have happened already. To give society
a greater margin of safety, public safety agencies are forced
to put in place the technologies and processes to help the right
people lengthen this critical time, by providing the instruments
to gain more certain intelligence—that is, evidence—that
allows an arrest or interdiction operation to occur many days
or weeks before the planned terrorist event. Deterrence needs
to increase, in order to deflect the threat, by making life so
uncomfortable for the terrorist that either he goes elsewhere,
or is forced into procedural errors that will make him show his
hand earlier that would have formerly been the case.
Secondly, the new solutions in security need
a systems-of-systems approach. There is no single programme that
will solve all a nation's new security needs, but the scope of
the challenge—the depth and breadth of the new terror threat—dictates
that it is not a matter of buying the right bit of kit. Point
solutions—single programmes or pieces of equipment, no matter
how capable in isolation—will not annul those deficiencies
in capability, or fill the gaps between various capabilities,
that the terrorist will seek to exploit. A system-of-systems approach
will also demand interoperability between responding agencies,
in designing from the outset capability for people, processes
and technologies that co-operate with each other, that allow the
sharing of information, that deliver synergies in information
acquisition and analysis, and coordinate decisive action based
on what arises. And to do that any new capabilities need to be
based on common standards in infrastructure, applications, process
and people, so that they can be easily integrated to raise security
across the piece without excessive time or financial penalties.
This is where stronger central governance has a real role to play
in demanding absolute standards to enable the long-term acquisition
of coherent capability.
And yet it is also the case that the pace of
technology presents challenges as well as opportunities. If technology
is to be harnessed as a tool against disruptive challenges it
needs to be developed incrementally, so that today's solution
is open to tomorrow's improvements. In other words, spiral development
is a key in that coherence is needed to ensure that the terrorist
organisation cannot find the weaknesses he needs to exploit to
retain his only winning strategy, which is through asymmetry.
And so the long-term nature of the current militant
Islamic threat requires adequate capability now, but better capability
later. Near term solutions obviously need to be effective, but
still should be designed with the long-term solution in mind.
Solutions will need to be compatible with two things; first, the
trajectory of technological advances as we currently know them,
and second, with the need to adapt or evolve if the threat makes
an unexpected deviation from established assumptions. Security
architectures need to be truly upgradeable, and based on open
architectures that can rapidly cater for the unexpected. To complement
this, we need ever more effective ways of scanning the threat
horizon to be able to guide our decisions, on where to focus our
research effort and develop our technological countermeasures
to emerging disruptive challenges. In our Homeland Security capability
graphs, as above, this is represented by the "model and explore"
field, where in addition to using experts, academia and history
(people and process), technology can provide a vehicle in this
voyage of exploration. For example, "virtual" toolsets
can help focus our thoughts and plans on how to address a variety
of disasters, whether man-made or natural—and to investigate
the possible outcomes, and even, during consequence management
following a real incident, to act as a decision aid in developing
appropriate responses.
An example of such a tool could be a large-scale
synthetic environment, that replicates the core functions of a
nation, and that characterises the function of the Critical National
Infrastructure, both in physical and virtual domains, that would
help scope the boundaries of what must be protected to preserve
life, the machinery of government and national infrastructure,
which at the moment remain less than fully charted across society
as a whole. By extension, it could also have an enabling role
in better early warning, through systematic horizon scanning and
the early identification of issues, key pillars of a capability-building
programme and which the NSS seems sensibly to demand. The various
technologies to achieve this are already in existence, but in
piecemeal, although for specific natures of risk permit a role
in the response (three infectivity models were used in the UK
Foot and Mouth epidemic of 2001). On a national or even an international
scale all that remains to be done is to carry out a programme
of development and system integration to bind a number of models
together (such as those that already exist in many individual
components of the CNI).
The real benefit of a synthetic approach to
the unknown/unaffordable/incomprehensible is that no matter how
far the response security agencies are funded to fill the strategic
gap, the unaffordable void can still be filled with tools to allow
decision makers to plan for, and react to, a wide variety of threats
that simply cannot be exercised in a representative way, simply
because of the scale of the event. The effects of a pandemic disease,
of an improvised nuclear device, of a chemical attack on a mass
transit system—how, apart from simulation, can these disasters
be exercised on sufficient scale to replicate the challenges that
a true life incident of this nature will present—particularly
at strategic (eg COBR) decision making level?
The need to get the counter terrorism capability
balance right has now, in many nations' instance, been tackled
by the highest echelons of Government, and the evidence needed
by industry to confirm the emergence of a new commercial market
(in Homeland Security capability) is now beginning to emerge.
Primarily this evidence manifests itself by re-organisation of
the security response, but also through the introduction of primary
legislation that enables more fundamental changes to national
security. This evidence is now the key for strategic industry
to engage the machinery of business planning.
Having identified the strategic capability gap,
and associated with it a customer set, industry now has the vital
headmark that allows it to make sense of the potential market,
and to trigger off the drafting of the corresponding business
case that will shape its long term approach to the security market.
The capability gap is now scoped, and so whether through identification
programmes, border control, computer network defence systems or
whatever, it can anticipate the release of (particularly financial)
resource by the top level customer set to bring new capabilities
into existence. In some cases industry achieves increased confidence
when it sees new primary legislation, or through organisational
response by the formation of new instruments of State, such as,
in the UK, the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, or perhaps
by the brigading of a number of smaller agencies such as the Health
Protection Agency, to bring greater operational efficiencies.
The rebalancing of people (and their organisations) and process
(and the business change required to address security issues)
will inevitably be followed by the procurement of the third component
in the triumvirate—technology. And the delivery of technology
is where the interest of private sector industry primarily resides.
So can industry lay down any rules, or preferences,
on how it would like to see the development of the global and
systemic response to the new threat paradigm—given that
Governments are willing and able to accept that a new paradigm
exists?
Firstly, there should be a system-of-systems
approach, conceived at the highest level. A scattergun approach,
a project here and a bit of kit there, is an unattractive business
environment for the larger scale commercial enterprises that inevitably
command some of the richest intellectual capital (partly because
of the wages it can afford to pay). This is because the cost of
capturing business revenues (per dollar/euro/pound sterling) becomes
higher, and therefore the return on sales-and-marketing investment
decreases. This is a key factor in deciding whether to commit
to the process of capturing business, which is an overhead, and
industry tends to dislike disproportionate overhead. Identifiable
large-scale end-to-end programmes, which have sensible milestones,
which are led by governments with clear strategic and coherent
intent makes good sense to industry. The certainty provided in
this environment makes it easier to commit critical investments,
such as research and development resources, that underpin the
evolution of appropriate technologies in advance of the competition.
The issue of fixed financial milestones is a much underrated key,
as a commercial venture's chief financial concern is to generate
the cash ("Cash is King!") which allows employees to
be paid, allows re-investment to improve product and performance,
and allows the servicing of debt. Unless cash rich already, a
commercial organisation may find that the risks associated with
an environment of poor cash flow is a prohibitive bar to market
entry when it makes its assessment of a strategic business case.
Secondly, intended capability needs to be compatible
with the trajectory of technology as we know it, but with acknowledgement
that the systems of tomorrow may well have to adapt to combat
as yet unknown threats. In this early stage of this complex and
multi-generational effort against pan-national terrorism, it is
difficult to predict the course of events and how terrorist tactics
will evolve. It is significant that, in the few years since 2001,
al-Qaeda has transformed from a relatively tightly knit, closely
controlled organisation into what is now an international brand
name in terrorism, and whose tactics have become less centrally
controlled, in which the movement's outrages are limited only
by the imagination of the followers. So when an unexpected event
or tactic is encountered at some time in the future (including
the emergence of new globalised groups such as "eco-terrorists"
and others), the need to develop a new response from a completely
different technological departure point would involve time (society's
enemy) and the waste of considerable invested resources. Therefore,
there is a decision to be made to commit some investment, payable
at the front end of a programme, to future-proof the systems and
processes—by designing in truly open architectures that
make them adaptable to future deviations from the anticipated.
From an "old school" industrial perspective,
this is not an optimum path. It is not in industry's basic financial
interest to encourage this open systems approach because ultimately
"there is less money in it", compared to a closed systems
approach which involves severe penalties on the overall response,
in time and materials, when new capability is needed from, or
added to, existing systems and software. The nature of the development
of the asymmetric threat is markedly different from the classical,
and more ponderous, Cold War industrial/military philosophy, in
which strategic military intelligence provides an assessment of
enemy military capability, which industry is then tasked to provide
the means to defeat. The old forms of procurement, of concept
studies, scoping studies, feasibility studies, prototyping, and
then production will be simply too slow to react to an adversary
relatively unencumbered by bureaucracy. The former systems are
simply "too slow to market". Within the asymmetric environment
capability development has to move with speed, driven by a "can-do"
attitude and where commercial risk is effectively underwritten
by Government. The requirement to observe an opponent's, to then
orientate, decide and then act (a Boyd Cycle of conflict) will
now be measured in terms of weeks or months rather than in the
years which was formerly the case.
But there is a financial downside in this. Centres
of excellence in technological developments, which will be needed
to rapidly bring capability into the hands of the operational
response, may have to be retained as discreet units, even in the
absence of identified projects, as the mutations in terrorist
modus operandi may be unpredictable in terms of an overall "programme
timeline". The retention of these expert cadres of people,
waiting, "on the books" for new terrorist tactics to
suddenly and unpredictably emerge, will constitute higher overhead
(bad news for the "bottom line") and either must be
absorbed by industry or underwritten by the customer-in-waiting.
If the financial resource is not found from somewhere, then there
will be compelling financial reasons for companies to disperse
these centres of excellence, which will probably have delivered
brilliantly during a crisis. This dispersion will then lead to
a diminution of cohesive technical expertise, to the detriment
of the overall counter terrorist effort, as when a new threat
emerges and teams are formed again into properly organised development
entities, they will do this at the expense of all-important time.
The possibility of higher overhead, and how
to manage this, may only be one of a number of changes to previously
strict financial regimes, and it is increasingly important that
those in Government with limited experience in industrial imperatives
have some view of the traditional motivators in commerce, which
in their fundamental nature must remain, no matter the exterior
catalysts.
INDUSTRY HAS
THREE IMPORTANT
STAKEHOLDERS TO
BALANCE
Firstly, there is the shareholder, who has invested
in the company and wishes to see a return on that investment through
growth in earnings per share. Industry will do this by identifying
the market, by winning the business (probably against competition)
and then will aim for increasing its reputation by superior programme
execution. If it can achieve this, it will be reflected in good
financial results in terms of profit, cash flow and backlog, and
a growth in the future business pipeline. This is symptomatic
of a well run, competitive and ambitious organisation which will
be looked upon favourably by appropriate analysts on the financial
markets, who will make good reports which in turn drive up the
share price.
Along with this there is that difficult area
of profit, which has classically provided a bone of contention
in any supplier/customer relationship. But a balance needs to
be struck between realisation of short term profit, and the ability
to generate profit over a number of years. Compare the following
and make the business decision:
1. "We are in programme `x' for 20
years although the margins are a bit thin" against,
2. "We've got the business and the
profit is good, but we have to re-compete after five years".
Secondly, a commercial organisation needs to
execute its responsibility to wider society in terms of legal,
cultural, environmental and ethical norms, and make sound judgements
on where it can provide sociological stimulus to create wider
employment, attract investment to a geographical area leading
to the creation of well-being within a community.
And finally, a good industrial organisation
bears a heavy responsibility to the employees in its care—its
workforce—through development of its people, providing stable
employment by fostering employees' welfare, and by apportioning
due reward for performance. The uncertainties of asymmetric warfare
demand that the brightest and most innovative responses are given
the greatest opportunity to prosper, and be given the tools and
environment to maximise their potential.
So, as long as these relatively simple needs
are taken into account, strategic industry will be able to fully
commit, along with its partners in government and the Science
and Technology (S&T) community, to any business stream, not
least that of anti-terrorist capability development.
However, in the new conflict model, there may
be no need for a set-in-stone 15-year programme on the model of
the aircraft carrier, new type of armoured fighting vehicle or
new fighter-bomber. This is not good news for the traditional
defence industrial construct favoured by the big Prime Systems
Integrators that rely on the stability of long term revenues underpinned
by commensurately long term defence programmes.
Therefore, it can be argued, to de-risk the
more uncertain nature of the long term market, that within a counter-terrorist
capability development programme it will make better sense for
government, with its industrial, scientific and technological
communities to establish concomitantly longer term partnerships.
These need to be managed on trust, rather than have the more formal
(or even adversarial) customer/supplier arrangements in former
models (in which a succession of projects are re-competed time
after time). The growing together of the stakeholder community
in an environment of common endeavour reduces the penalties, on
all, of having to survive the difficult and disruptive process
of forming new relationships and programme consortia at regular
intervals. A repetitive bidding regime is expensive, and makes
for less certain financial projections, although as a moderating
influence, industry needs always to aver to competition and benchmarking
where this really does make sense, or where it is demanded from
customers or regulatory authorities driving for value for money.
But this is not about the micro-management of
that development. There will always be a plethora of Small to
Medium Enterprises simply delighted to market their "kit"
to resolve point deficiencies in capability, and this should not
be discouraged. Many of these smaller enterprises will also be
the very source of invention and innovation required to feed the
systems integrators that lie above them in the industrial pecking
order, assuming, of course, that the Big Hitters are still engaged
with the market and have not diversified elsewhere, or demerged,
because they cannot sense the long term revenue stream. Currently,
this is a significant risk, and there is a case that the industrial
response may be led, certainly in the early phases, by second
tier industry, simply because the Prime Systems Integrators are
finding it difficult to engage.
The optimum path on the long and complicated
road ahead needs engagement by the whole of the industrial stack,
just as during previous disruptive challenges, such as the Second
World War. Resolution of the conflict imbalance certainly needs
to attract the interest of the big systems integration houses
that can provide the critical top level programme management skills
to make sure that there are no residual vulnerabilities when the
capability is rolled out. If there are vulnerabilities, then the
terrorist will find them, and exploit them.
Overall, some critical enablers that will encourage
the engagement of industrial capability can thus be identified:
1. The willingness of government to develop,
commit to and foster long term relationships. Although there has
been a movement towards this, such as through the Security and
Resilience Industries Council, the path has not been easy. A chief
failing has been the lack of an instinctive understanding of industry
by government, and also of how to harness the development of capability
with the need of an organisation that has commercial, social and
human resource responsibilities.
2. Clarity in strategic vision, and the
willingness of government to trust industry to help form part
of that vision as part of an integrated team (that must also involve
academia and the S&T community). It is interesting to note
that industry is not specifically mentioned as a potential stakeholder
in the proposed National Security Forum. With defence and security
structures still in place that have actually changed little over
the years, there has yet to be a true change to a blended spectrum
of response which incorporates all elements of society addressing
threats, from pickpockets through to a nuclear exchange of Cold
War proportions. In this there is no doubt that government must
take the lead and show an understanding of how the principle of
security needs to be transformed, and the NSS is a good first
step in broadening the security envelope.
3. The generation of relatively stable,
coherent and adequately funded capability development programmes
that allow industry to conduct strategic business planning, which
will include self-funded research and development, with confidence.
Although there will be cyclical periods of activity when a new
terrorist tactic comes to light, and lulls as the threat reduces,
ways need to be found to provide long term stability. This will
inevitably require an element of central procurement, strategically
managed by a singular agency that has its hands on the counter
terrorism tiller.
4. The requirement for programmes to have
fixed and identifiable milestones which can enable good cash flow.
There is no avoiding this fundamental commercial enabler to successfully
managed finance. "Cash is King" is the phrase heard
often at business schools and every other school of finance that
knows its subject.
5. A collective environment of gainshare,
in which industry and other stakeholders can exploit technologies
and processes into wider markets. This will reduce the financial
burdens placed on the government customer and will make industry
more willing to engage with the counter terrorism market. The
promise of success in adjacent markets is yet another factor which
can help underwrite a business plan.
6. Open and honest data sharing within the
government/industrial/academic and scientific team, with a reduction
in the privacy and secrecy barriers that have traditionally hindered
the exchange of information between national security stakeholders.
7. The appropriate sharing of risk, where
innovation is encouraged, and where superior performance is duly
recognised.
8. The acknowledgement that, in terms of
liability, industry cannot be expected to expose itself to punitive
damages should, despite everyone's best efforts, "the bomber
get through". It does not make sense for a commercial enterprise
to risk suffering crippling damages, awarded through the courts,
for the sake of financial rewards that could be relatively small.
The solution to the emerging asymmetrical threat
lies in the thrust of the security rapier, and not in the blow
of the traditional defence axe, although counter insurgency campaigns
designed to throttle the terrorist infrastructure overseas will
be a continuing military and civic action requirement. The change
in conflict paradigm from its last manifestation, that of the
industrialisation of armaments, to that of global irregularity,
demands a new behaviour from industry and the stakeholders allied
to it, based on rapidity, flexibility and innovation. The challenge
is new, complex, and multi generational, and demands change from
the former days of relative industrial stability. Those industries
that have the vision to respond by changing their mindsets are
more likely to succeed than those that hark to the salad days
of Cold War stability, and those changes in mindsets need to be
fostered by the wider national security stakeholder set.
24 April 2008
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