Warning Analysis for the Information Age - Higgins Counterterrorism ...

ecause they’re not always shooting at you. No simple “If X then Y” Newtonianrules are possible when party goers at a wedding will shoot guns in the air thatappear at first glance like Taliban gunfire. One needs to model the decisionmakersto know which state they’re in before firing: the “shooting in the air at a wedding”state, or the “shooting at incoming aircraft” state—and that kind ofknowledge requires history. In the Information Age, proportional and logicalresponse must be the norm.Intelligence analysts are expected to predict future events and trends based onobservations of the world. Biological systems—be they individual organisms likebacteria or humans or collections of organisms like countries or even the toolsconstructed by human organisms—make decisions and control their own behaviorin response to their environment. In our simple example, we require at leastthree control cycles worth of data (dependent on today’s outdoor temperature)plus two additional photographs to confidently assess whether the air conditioneris ON or OFF. And that is for a single thermostat, which can only turn ON or OFFin response to a single-input temperature sensor.The take-home message here is that decisionmaking systems—as simple asthermostats or as complex as states building WMD—are multi-state and cannotbe calculated in the Newtonian paradigm unless they are far enough away fromthe particular set of conditions that will trigger the decision. The New Sciencemust, therefore, account for systems that can exist in different states under differentconditions. One cannot predict what a system will do unless one knows whatit did in the past. And once again—History Matters! The New Science must beable to model the decisionmaking process.Industrial-Age intelligence was based on Newtonian models that totallyignored decisionmaking. Therefore, there was only one best strategy—preemptivestrike—for any adversary because the adversary’s decisionmaking processwas not even considered in defining policy, and winning was only dependenton our own decisions and actions.Information-Age intelligence must be based on quantum models that canaccount for the adversary’s decisionmaking process. Since an adversary’s “state”depends not only on what he is trying to accomplish but also where he is in thatdecision loop; the Information-Age analyst must be able to provide differentoptions that depend on the adversary’s different “states” as well as an estimate ofwhich “state” he is currently in—and hopefully an estimate of which state wewould like to push him into.37