21 - 2020

Why We Believe: Disinformation, Misinformation, and Neuroscience

By |2020-10-14T11:08:28-10:00October 14th, 2020|

This article states how disinformation, particularly in social media, may have devastating effects during crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Excerpt Critically, the algorithms that underlie social media platforms exacerbate the different realities that we each see. Social media sites are designed to track what their users each individually see, click on, and listen to, and then to provide them with more information of a similar nature; this is their core, and the basis on which they create profit.  By the way in which they were designed, these algorithms thus tend to create ‘bubbles’ around people, wherein they see and [...]

Perceptions of U.S. Posture in Papua New Guinea

By |2020-10-14T10:59:37-10:00October 14th, 2020|

This article compares the effects of U.S. posture on the relationship with Papua New Guinea, to that of the People’s Republic of China, along with other influences. Excerpt In Papua New Guinea (PNG), activities by the United States were highly visible in World War II, but have steadily declined ever since. This decay in international relations has been more obvious since the early 2000s when it is contrasted with the rise of Chinese-PNG relations on a political level and on a person-to-person level through infrastructure development and overseas education. The 2011-2012 Obama era Pivot and Rebalance to the Pacific produced [...]

Strategic Competition, National Security and the Need for ‘Competitive Intelligence’

By |2020-10-14T10:53:48-10:00October 14th, 2020|

This article illustrates how Competitive intelligence lies at the center of any strategy to maintain political, economic and security posture in the Indo-Pacific region. Excerpt We live in an age in which technology is rapidly transforming every aspect of our lives. Since these advances bestow upon nations considerable advantages, they are coveted and sought after with increasing criminally-motivated avarice. This has increased tensions and competition between the great powers, which forces us to analyze how to compete in the present and the coming future. In this age of significant cooperation and competition, we all need a competitive edge to survive [...]

Maritime Domain Awareness and Maritime Fusion Centers

By |2020-10-01T16:35:16-10:00October 1st, 2020|

This article emphasizes the importance of maritime domain awareness (MDA) and the coordinating efforts of maritime fusion centers (MFC) to support those efforts. Excerpt The essential mission of a MFC is to strengthen MDA by gathering and analyzing data from multiple sources, fusing it into meaningful information, and disseminating actionable intelligence to operational commanders to directly improve national security, safety, economy, and environment. Not all maritime centers source data broadly enough to make fusion meaningful, and not all attempt to adequately fuse data to extrapolate new intelligence. Some of these agencies only focus on internal monitoring and have little to [...]

Achieving Effective Herd Protection with SARS-CoV-2: A strategy to prevent public health and economic collapse

By |2020-09-24T11:27:25-10:00September 24th, 2020|

This article discusses strategies to harness the collective utility of proven tools and approaches in achieving effective herd protection with SARS-CoV-2. Excerpt The main intention of lockdown, known in the Philippines as Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ), is to reduce the reproductive rate of SARS-CoV-2 transmission to a point near virus elimination, as demonstrated in the lockdown in Wuhan, China, and in other relatively successful countries. Beyond the direct public health goal, strict lockdown measures towards total stamping out of the virus ultimately aspires to prevent public health and economic collapse, or prolonged societal devastation, which this pandemic is capable of [...]

Ideological Necrophilia

By |2020-09-24T10:43:15-10:00September 24th, 2020|

This paper cites how the refusal of new ideas, evolution or change may be considered to be a form of “ideological” necrophilia, an atypical fixation for dead ideas, and includes several examples. Excerpt For those who suffer from ideological necrophilia, it is always easy to find reasons to ridicule, criticize, or reject when something is new and revolutionary.  Ideological necrophilia is a devastating condition that can affect people, organizations, companies and nations. It can manifest symptoms of blindness by success, need to eliminate any prophet, fear of change, and rationalization in order to love, refurbish, and justify the application of dead [...]

Tarrant’s Last Laugh? The Spectre of White Supremacist Penetration of Western Security Forces

By |2020-09-22T11:31:37-10:00September 22nd, 2020|

This paper brings White supremacist extremism to reality with citations and points to “Western militaries” as organizations already infiltrated with this ideology. Abstract White supremacist extremism, also known as “right-wing” and “far right” extremism, is a broad label of convenience that lumps together, amongst others, white nationalist, neo-Nazi, anti-immigrant, anti-gun control, anti-LGBTQ and increasingly even misogynistic grievances. While its key tropes have gestated for decades, an underlying theme that has come to the fore in recent times has been the notion of what the French philosopher Reynaud Camus in 2012 called Le Grand Remplacement (The Great Replacement). This argument holds [...]

Gaming Major Power Rivalry and Climate Disasters Using Systems Tools

By |2020-09-04T10:20:25-10:00September 4th, 2020|

This paper documents a methodology for creating crisis-games that are designed to explore possible futures in the medium and long-term. It describes a four-step process in which security practitioners work on understanding threat systems, delve into the related underlying driving forces of the threats, create future scenarios in which these forces interact and play out, and explore these scenarios using adversarial crisis-games. According to the authors, “While they have their limitations and are not an exact replica of reality, situational, role-playing crisis-games foster the application of creative and innovative thinking on challenges that cannot be analyzed using conventional statistical methods [...]

Advancing a Free and Open Indo-Pacific

By |2020-09-02T16:48:27-10:00September 2nd, 2020|

Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies 25th Anniversary Speaker Event “Hindsight, Insight, Foresight:  Celebrating a Legacy to Educate, Connect, and Empower” Aug 26, 2020 - 05:30 PM Hawaii Combined with a moderated question and answer session. Transcription has been edited for readability. View/Download Document

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