Abstract
This report certainly has its limitations—some of which are discretionary, and others attributable to the unique fact that it is a product of the U.S. intelligence community. I will give particular attention to this aspect because it is part of the National Intelligence Council’s (NIC) “DNA,” rather than a reflection of managerial preference. My main point, however, has less to do with any faults in the report itself, but rather with faults in the way it is applied to policy: something that is far more the responsibility of “consumers” in the policy world than of “producers” in the Intelligence Community (IC). The U.S. government badly needs a systematic process for applying foresight to long-range policy, and in my opinion, the NIC’s 2030 edition qualifies as a major source of input to that process. I certainly do not have it in mind that the NIC foresight process should become the sole such source of foresight for an integrated policy process but as part of a blended feedstock. As for how to accomplish such a blend, given the many possible sources, I will also have some observations.
Keywords
Political power entails the ability to set up an agenda for action and to execute it through the agency of others. One would think that the possibility of using foresight to discover and test multiple propositions about the future would be attractive to leaders. The need for greater capacity to address the long range (out for several decades as in the National Intelligence Council [NIC] Series) is manifest. Major events are appearing at an accelerated rate. The old separations between near and long term are no longer valid. Similarly, the separations between domestic and international policy have blurred, as have the once-clear distinctions between classical policy “domains” such as science, economics, and defense. Above all, we must overcome the tendency to isolate short- and long-term policy-making as if it were possible to ignore the evidence that they are “entangled.” Increasingly, what we think of as national security is a synthesis of national resources, which need to be cultivated, rather than a set of military programs (Forging a New Shield 2008, 381). Typically, national security is studied in terms of its military dimensions. In my opinion, however, national security has become a far broader subject involving such areas as economic growth, environmental stability, and other factors that are highly interactive and must be understood and managed as part of a complex continuum.
The world that policy-makers must deal with is not departmentalized: it is complex and unstable. To deal with the challenges that present themselves in this kind of world, policy-makers need streams of information and analyses that synthesize conclusions across boundaries, instead of reinforcing them. Some foreign governments have been working at this for considerable periods of time. Among them are Canada, China, Finland, France, Singapore (arguably the most advanced of the group), South Korea, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, in addition to multinational organizations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the EU, but not the United States.
To be sure, there are foresight processes distributed at random across the government, but these are at the service of specific agencies and cabinet departments. Nothing of the sort exists at the whole-of-government level. On the contrary, repeated efforts by foresight researchers and policy leaders to build durable institutional linkages have all failed. Various reasons are cited: some of these are essentially leadership issues, while others are more substantive. In the first category:
Certitude wins elections: Contests for political office are won on the basis of certitude about policy. Voters will support personalities who appear to have what it takes to prevail, and policy debates are a form of trial by combat: facts are only part of the weaponry. The result is that the winners of elections will often have had to pay for it in advance by sacrificing their flexibility in the future.
Adjustment to superior ideas: Foresight can be problematic for political leaders. To begin with, the very idea of alternative futures suggests that leaders are always uncertain to a greater or lesser degree. This is difficult for political leaders to admit, particularly once they have committed to fundamental positions, which they cannot then modify without exposing themselves to heightened risk of criticism and loss of influence.
The tyranny of now over later: This one comes in two forms. First is the most obvious—the tremendous pressure of exigency on the time of decision-makers. The second is more subtle—a “hard-wired” tendency to devote more attention and allocate more resources to what is near rather than distant in time (aka “discounting the future”).
The tendency to wrongly assign foresight to crisis management, rather than crisis avoidance: Policy-makers must respond to the crises of the day, and they are, therefore, prone to demand that foresight proves its worth by helping them deal with these challenges. Foresight can be useful in evaluating the long-term consequences of actions taken—especially under urgent conditions. Its ultimate value, however, is to help detect crises in the making, as part of a policy process that seeks to avoid crisis in the first place.
Focus on foresight for anticipating risk: Policy-makers tend to accept foresight as a means for detecting risk, but consider the detection of opportunity as something appropriate for the entrepreneurial-minded, largely outside of government. Risk is where the government “market” for foresight can be found, and this strongly influences foresight research.
In the more substantive second category are the flaws endemic to any foresight system that is located within the government, as opposed to systems operated in the academic world, among think tanks, or by commercial foresight vendors. This is especially true for organizations like the NIC that not only function within government but also within the unique constraints of the intelligence community:
“Macular” blind spots: Intelligence analysis is supposed to maintain a safe distance from policy. This protects its reputation for objectivity and helps to deflect any temptation among policy-makers to “shop” for biased intelligence support. But the price paid for this restraint is that we often have blind spots that obscure ways in which domestic and international policies interact.
Culture wars: Experts and elected officials do not tend to think the same way, and often do not understand critical factors that influence each other’s judgments.
Documentation versus inspiration: Both are essential, but government tends to strongly favor the former over the latter. The result is a tendency to discount vision, insight, and inspiration as the basis for adjustments to policy (unless these are handed down from the top). The foresight process begins to resemble academic work, where arguments are fought with massed batteries of citation-based footnotes. It is, however, impossible to prove a case about the future on the basis of citations, which are inherently fixated on precedent.
In any event, it is insufficient to have valid insights about the future, in the absence of a capacity for effective response. Both are needed to support what I call “strategic behavior,” or what others term “the whole of governance.” The Center for the Study of the Presidency was an early pioneer in this area. Another major effort was carried out by the Project on National Security Reform (PNSR), which was legally mandated and funded by the 109th Congress. Before PNSR was defunded by political opponents in 2008, it produced a complete proposal for renovating the national security functions of the executive branch (Forging a New Shield 2008).
A contrasting approach is my own recently completed report on Anticipatory Governance (Fuerth and Faber 2012, 2013), which recommends a combination of three interlocking systems: integration of long-range policy and systematic foresight, networked government operations for maximum impact, and the use of feedback systems to promote rapid response to new information.
PNSR required congressional action, while Anticipatory Governance relies on existing legal and customary presidential authorities. PNSR was, therefore, vulnerable to political hostility, but even Anticipatory Governance would be vulnerable to executive preoccupation with unrelenting crisis. The fundamental area of agreement between Anticipatory Governance, and other like-minded approaches, is a belief in the essential role of rigorous foresight analysis as an indispensible part of the process of making and managing policy under complexity and profound change.
What matters most about the NIC’s work at this juncture is that it can serve as a portal for decision-makers who otherwise have had only intermittent access to sources of foresight. As to whether the NIC should be put in the position of gatekeeper, that, I believe would be unnecessary and a serious mistake. The NIC—like the Intelligence Community (IC) in general—can be conservative about what constitutes American security and slow to recognize the need for change. It has been a long process, for example, to establish that environmental issues—particularly those that relate to climate change—are true national security issues. On the other hand, the NIC—while continuing its own efforts—might operate as an honest broker to make sure that competing approaches were each fairly represented as part of an organized stream of foresight products, serving the basic needs of policy-makers for accurate overall information about what is available, including awareness of the broad context of opinion among futurists. An intelligence document, by the way, would certainly not talk about what is “preferable” because that would clearly transform the document from analysis into policy advocacy. That may require a revision to the system so as to make sure that its “set point” for assigning relevance consistently includes a range of topics, points of view, and participants.
Finally, there is the issue of foresight and Congress. To this point, it is not a hopeful narrative. Two of the most important and respected ventures of this type were the Office of Technological Assessment (1972–1995) and the Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future (1976–1994). Newt Gingrich and Al Gore were early leaders of the Clearinghouse. Gingrich, however, ultimately became a key actor in the disestablishment of both organizations. Gore, on the other hand, remained an increasingly important voice for the integration of foresight and policy, continuing to publish on foresight issues including The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change (Gore 2013). It is hard to imagine circumstances that would cause the Congress to authorize a true successor to OTA, 1 short of a major loss to the nation attributable to its absence. Unfortunately, such a loss may not be that long in coming. Moreover, times have changed since OTA existed. Science, technology, economics, social development, and so on, are parts of a complex, highly interactive whole system. A successor organization should not be thought of in terms of a replica of OTA but as something more broadly based, and designed to increase appreciation of the whole, as opposed to just one of its components.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.