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5:33 PM – 24 Feb 2012

Components of Security

by
Ron Alexander Ph.D.

In an effort to develop a further understanding of the effects that thoughtful preparedness renders on society, given, in human relationships, we recognize that there exists three components of the criminal justice system: law enforcement, judicial review and a combination of institutionalized rehabilitation and corrections (LEJRIRC). We also recognize human relationships in the broader context of world affairs and employ a system of International Relations (IR) that discusses and acts on similar strands of thought. Each pursues an argument that provides solutions to evolving situations, instabilities and conflicts.

The old worldview

From this, we can know that democracy reaches the individual in open and safe societies. Whatever information which remains with that person interconnects the individual to others. We call this condition – society. To provide safety for this condition, International Relationist (IRs) reference the subject of “Security”.

Guaranteeing the safety of a particular society from multidimensional threat regimes, whether domestic or foreign, remains an elevated priority. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the government of the United States of America has ratified oaths and affirmations instituted by international treaties (IT), based on “… the supreme Law of the Land”.

At the same time, older, less effective ideas regarding power and security had circulated for many decades. Following the debacle of World War I, IRs identified the causes of militarism but monitoring agencies remained empty, having no movement, solidarity or safety forces equipped to prevent the establishment of threatening regimes, especially in the industrialized twentieth century, from developing.

The havoc wrought by decades of power seeking, cascading armament levels, ill equipped national constitutions, revengeful leadership, romanticization of restricted citizenship cast strategically minded nation-states into conceptual issues that turned their incidence for psychopathy into actualized, organized horror. This holistic failure crossed international borders, both real and contrived.

It indicated the failure in international idealism and its purpose of muting the proclivities toward war. In the purpose of monitoring systems and treaties, specifically the League of Nations German-Soviet Pact, vacant authority to prevent the drive of materialistic states established significant, overlapping, premorbid risk factors.

A more complex, multifaceted analysis tests IR conditions and results. Scholars who inform from the constructivist, liberalist and realist schools (CLR), reverberate these mid-century outcomes. The drive for power continues to present chronic, specific behaviors, as in the current IR models described by the following sets.

The Constructivist School describes a more organically controlled network. Representative groups construct various mosaics to fit the immediate foreign policy needs of supporters and potential contributors. The nation-state’s intent, as perceived by other entities with similar properties, will wont to cooperate and invigorate open dialogue. Advocates restrict self-interests, rather deliberating strength and power through identity and social context.

The Liberal School considers the progressive intentions of states as basis for cooperation and as a limiting factor over security and strengthening elements. When threatened by adversary nation-states, more tangible self-interests, as expressed by commercial and non-state institutions, provide the critique for liaising conflict avoidance institutions that seek cooperative behaviors.

Zimmerman note. National Archives

The Realist School discusses how the nation-state differentiates between self-interests and common interests. When threatened by adversary nation-states, self-interests provide the rational answer to build security institutions, unless others perceive the threat as global, then common interests provision for a cooperative construct. Since the state’s objectives of strength and power remain entrenched, so does the methodology of securing political and social power, based upon real and/or perceived threats.

Each model points to a nation-state’s assuming an ideological justification for its position from its decision-camps, guaranteeing systemic forethought and planning. Arguments for specific policies often depend on external or internal criticisms of opposing proposals and strategies.

External criticism may stress the effectiveness of certain factors, things that have brought achievements and can produce duplication. Internal criticism may stress the false narrative of an argument after indicating the branching of an idea has no coherency, reliability or accuracy and thus cannot receive support.

Validity and reliability each add to source criticism, criticism designed to find the knowledge that supports information management. Therefore, IR sets perform as part of a nation-state’s decision-making process. These components of security support and guide a nation-state’s worldview. In other words, national leaders perform functions that affect specific and general missions. However, knowledge requires these leaders not to operate involuntarily and reflexively.

Often, ideological factors have hidden designs, even when arranged to include several nation-states in an alliance or coalition in preventing an obvious interloper from using threats and violence. Towards the close of the twentieth century, cooperation between Allied powers led to the dismemberment of Axis strategies in World War II. At the same time, strategies, based upon overt and perceived injury, quickly led to future threats and confrontations.

In the period following the world wars, the United States and its allies: opposed cultural and ideological thrusts upon established economic and military prerogatives, whether state or non-state sponsored; monitored and deployed forces to assist and oppose less advantaged nation-states that struggled to reach historic goals formulated prior to and during the twentieth-century; and, employed the military-industrial-entertainment establishment to counter a combination of both contingencies and capabilities.

In September 1964, the fascinating image of a child counting petals pulled form a daisy and the inserted video of a nuclear explosion imposed on her visual pupil, described the geo-political situation in the United States before its national elections. Mainly, the opened eye of debate wrapped entire nations into the “Cold War Era” of threats of nuclear war, multiple-warhead missiles, fear of military strikes and subversive influences.

Between the years 1985 to 1988, President Ronald Reagan used the Russian proverb “Doveryai, no proveryai!” – “Trust but verify!” – illustrates a combination of purposes during the maturation point of his political group. In establishing beneficial steps toward nuclear disarmament with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, peaceful co-existence outdistanced any specified IR school of thought. The main caveat determined function pointers to mutual inspections and the collection of data.

Historical charting agrees that the concept of security does not contrast with the idea of state responsibility to its population, based on legal constructs, in securing complex methodologies adequate for holistic-multidisciplinary progress. The United States government must monitor IR in order to: 1) sustain peace consolidation; 2) minimize armed conflict in a multi-stable context; 3) ensure liberty for future generations; and, 4) explain reactionary IR regimes.

The new world view

In a Post-Pattern Era, with the completion of United States operations in Southwest Asia in the mid-nineteen-seventies, fast emerging and complex schemata requires IRs to relate new principles to a persistent and linked continuum. Finding similarities and differences with standing-operation procedures will lead to a predictive, legal organization of collected data. Professionals can then transform information, only after reflection, analysis, evaluation. Synthesizing the results for further organization and distribution will provision quality IR products to invested principals, including government and non-government agencies.

Moving forward with a forceful, directed response against armed, ground based drivers of violent conflict requires popular participation and support. The aware community gains a broadened consciousness of their political will and knows the speakable objectives planned by their government and demands changes to weak decision points. Never again can governments rely on variable thinking, leaving partitioned segments of the world politic suspended from rehabilitating responses.

One can generally categorize a response in five sectors. The response must contain a legal structure, manifest active elements of force readiness, guarantee lethal force tied to a flexible risk assessment and a methodology of appropriate escalation, and provide a strategical cost management plan.

Now, valid planning includes agency-coordinated assessments of known and assumed objectives of opponents and their potential allies. Opposition activities, either internal or external, shape the security choices of all demographic groups. No one receives immunity from entities that invest in destructive actions, mercenary networks, foreign aggression or non-state terrorist organizations.

Mercenary networks, often connected to transnational criminal organizations (TCO), favor the spread of addiction and the sinking of high-risk neighborhoods into worrying levels of co-morbidity, decrepitude and imprisonment. The high, negative correlation of severe police monitoring, lack of protective adult role models, reduced social and physical conditions, dominated by lower-income environments and small arms caches, receive the attention of criminal organizations and mercenary groups.

Without a broadening of cohesive planning and protection of trustworthy institutions, shifting levels of social responsibility and instability will restrict collective efficacy and neighborhood action. A step towards treating domestic situations, following extensive observation of public perceptions, requires leaders, holding both legal and community authorization to influence opinion, to build effective operational and deployable efficacy grids. In utilizing the capabilities of digital forensics, in managing social, political and economic data, an efficacy grid will lead to the reduction of tension and insecurity and gains in community-specific, fundamental domains.

Other entities, within and outside of a nation’s territorial borders, can evidence tactical and strategical cooperation, which can cause the decline of international peace and national sovereignty. When internal causes form into violent reactions and revolutions, cultivation of persons and groups of interests by foreign and non-state entities often metastasizes the situation by delivering logistical aid.

Moreover, when the “authorities” deemed someone a threat, a new and more reactionary, social aspect of security frequents populations into a new construct, that of “securitizing” threats. Means, once out of the age of hate speech bolstered by defense spending and into the new age of drastic economic unrest, religious over-reaching, weak states supporting chaotic military schemes and the convergence of unconditional warfare by unconventional groups, national leaders developed a more managed, although not a more linear, assessment of the political purpose(s) of individuals and groups.

As the United States and its allies turned toward a new century, and when industry brought more electronic gadgets, analytical machines and medicines to the world economy, accomplishing geo-political connectivity remained strategically important. Some national leaders have stated that the new approach was an “epistemological methodology” – break down the features in order to gain evidence of its deeper functions. When using Barry Buzan’s ideas, it meant deriving a concept of security based on a Gestalt form of analysis. The structural formation of national security experts adjustment based on the tendency of its parts.¹

This security platform’s three parts included individuals, states and international systems. This meant that, in order to have safer international relationships, when identifying a system for maintaining and broadening security, as represented by a holistic approach, the United States departed from the realist approach, an approach that forms the basis of days-gone-by in IR.

Eventually, security did not mean the realist mind-set held sway over all, emphasizing a realm where all nations saw IR as a projection of the self to control the benefits of progress. Now, those properties present as a “been there, done that, got the tee-shirt” rule of careful consideration, clearing the reasons for justifiable anarchy.

The organizational view

Enter the organizational mindset. Dissecting the “nature of the state” brought about a transformation of how groups and governments assess information. Although this type of judgment has depths in neurobiological research, it repeats the constructivists’ pursuit.

So, from this approach emerges the coherent model of detailed, connective attributes of the modern state. In continuing the facilities of individuals, states and international systems, apply another set containing Political, Military, Economic, Societal, and Environmental attributes.² Similar to the arachnoid layer of the meninges, a protective layer of fiber surrounding the spinal cord, each link to one and all link to the other.

This mosaic of integrating communities of interest (COIs) invites the security analyst or IRs to cross-examine these nodules of information or centers of gravity (COG). More screening of the entity’s root of power and capability prioritizes information responses and activates specific components of security.

The U.S. Government has broadened this layering of attributes. In the Department of Defense and other agencies, leadership has consolidated military and IR concepts into a simplified format. This management approach builds eight elements – Political, Military, Economic, Social (Societal), Infrastructure, Information, Physical Environment (Ecosystem) and Time – into a constructive arrangement, attaining the acronym PMESII-PT.³
Furthermore, new knowledge brings about newer attribution. National Leaders “must consider the roles of military, intelligence, diplomatic, law enforcement, information, finance, and economic elements (MIDLIFE) in counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency is those militaries, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to defeat the insurgency. It is an offensive approach involving all elements of national power.”⁴

Actionable items – immediate past

The extrapolation of these components of security, labeled “full-spectrum”, occurred in Baghdad, Iraq in 2005 under the command of Major General Pete Chiarelli. As Commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, Fort Hood, Texas, he managed the deployment of America’s First Team to serve as part of the Multi-National Division Baghdad (MND-B) in Baghdad for Operation Iraqi Freedom II (OIF) from March 2004 until March 2005.

“Task Force Baghdad conducted full-spectrum effects-based operations (EBO) in a city of 200 square miles packed with six to seven million people. Its mission was to conduct full-spectrum operations focused on stability and support operations and to secure key terrain in and around Baghdad, supported by focused and fully integrated information [IO] and civil-military operations, in order to enable the progressive transfer of authority to the Iraqi people, their institutions and a legitimate Iraqi national government.”⁵

Managing regional and international security conditions develops from employing full-spectrum operations and a dynamic unity of effort (DUE) among the partners. Modernizing a national power continuum (NPC), which includes full-spectrum resources to determine contingency responses, requires the mapping of advanced and functional democracies besides weak and failing states. Addressing the causes of internal instability also focuses on evolving, complex problems that, if not immediately known, do lead to terrorism and insurgencies.

Furthermore, in order to secure the operational environment (OE), a DUE with the host nation (HN) means achieving the integration and synchronization of the components of security to coordinate foreign internal defense (FID). Installing and monitoring police in order to protect the population; re-establishing local commercial controls, traditions and political institutions. Rehabilitated local governments will produce beneficial capabilities that can accelerate the decline of terrorist and insurgent capabilities. One major reason for employing these elements resolves the problem of how components of security can positively influence HN populations. The HN population will determine the end state.

Actionable items – immediate future

In conclusion, international and regional security depends upon structural interplay of the components. The decisions of every national government, and often segments of that same government, frame problems that, over time, can condition others to perceive immediate strategies and tactics, “linking national strategic aims to tactical combat and noncombat operations that must be executed to accomplish these aims.”⁶

Besides the approaches of IR theory already visited, I have collected the names of six nations and listed recent, violent attacks against their internal political systems. Although these six nations have tried to control the outcomes, no international system or non-governmental organization (NGO) has succeeded in gathering representatives to participate in discussions focusing on violence directed at educational institutions. The following cases give reasons for this discovery.

Since the incident in Russia in 2004 to the attacks in Kenya in 2015, influential leaders should have brought these six nations together to broaden the concern over separatist attacks upon institutes of learning, in support of both internal and international security. The U.S. suffered attacks in 2001, but the disasters in other nations exhibit historical trends, offering evidence as to the motivations and conclusions of extreme and hybrid separatist. It is not too late to do so. 

Even then, having sustained attacks on April 16, 2007 at the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, Virginia and on December 14, 2012 at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the U.S. Government can position itself as a leader in consulting this unique group of nations. Teachers, students, parents and the world require leadership on this mission, at this time.

Russia: 1 September 2004 – The Beslan, School Number One, operation in which an estimated 385 deaths occurred, including 186 school aged children.

Sweden: 22 July 2011 – The Utøya, Workers’ Youth League summer camp, operation in which 77 deaths occurred, including school aged boys and girls.

Nigeria: 14–15 April 2014 – The Chibok, Government Girls Secondary School, operation in which an armed force kidnapped an estimated 300 school aged girls. (Multiple attacks within the nation)

Mexico: 26 September 2014 – The Iguala, Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College of Ayotzinapa, kidnapping of 43 male students.

Pakistan: 16 December 2014 – The Peshawar, Army Public School, operation in which 185 deaths occurred, including 132 school aged children.

Kenya: 2 April 2015 – The Garissa, University College, operation in which an estimated 150 student deaths occurred.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Buzan, Barry. New Patterns of Global Security in the Twenty-first Century,International Affairs, 67,    no. 3 (1991): 431-451.

Chiarelli, Maj. Gen. (USA) Peter W. “The 1st Cav in Baghdad: Counterinsurgency EBO [Effects Based Operations] in Dense Urban Terrain.” Interview by Patricia Slayden Hollis. Field Artillery Magazine, September-October 2005, 3-8.

Stone, Marianne. Security According to Buzan: A Comprehensive Security Analysis. Sciences Po – Paris, France (Columbia University, School of International and Public Affairs – New York, USA).

U.S. Department of the Army.Counterinsurgency OperationsFMI 3-07.22. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Army, October 1, 2004. Expires October 1, 2006

U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. Joint Operation Planning. Joint Publication 5-0. Director for Operational Plans and Joint Force Development. Washington, DC: U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, August 11, 2011.

Readers will find more nuanced approaches to IR theory by reviewing the following: Neo-liberalism; the realist school also includes neo-realist, classical-realist and neo-classical-realist; Realist Constructivists and Liberal Constructivists; International Organization; International Political Economy (Economic Liberalism, Mercantilism and Marxism); and, Feminism.