Geopolitical Defenders

7. Massively Parallel Roles & Tasks

Geopolitical Defenders have the biggest and the most difficult job — defending democracy from geopolitical rivals who seek to undermine and destabilize Western democracies and who, if the opportunity arises, may engage in covert and sometimes overt acts of aggression. These defenders need to protect us at a time when rapidly advancing military technologies are radically altering the global balance of military power adding new vulnerabilities to the long-standing risks associated with conventional and nuclear conflict. Media technologies and AI also are posing a complex array of ever-expanding threats.

While geopolitical defenders certainly employ the collective defense strategies outlined above, their work is much, much broader than that. In addition to defending against conventional "kinetic" threats, they are charged with protecting democracies from hybrid or gray zone warfare tactics including efforts to use today's open, high-tech information systems to inflame tensions and undermine public support for democratic institutions. Examples of people working in these roles include, obviously, the military services, defense contractors, strategic think tanks, as well as the many critics of the "military industrial complex." These critics help us understand why the United States goes to war, how endless wars start, why military interventions often fail, and mistakes the US has made in past wars. They help build support for appropriate defensive and deterrence measures by highlighting the dangers of isolationism, the capabilities of our adversaries, the consequences of letting tensions rise into a some new kind of 21st-century war involving some combination of conventional, cyber, or, worse, a nuclear war. More hopefully, they illuminate and encourage us to take advantage of opportunities for reducing risks, through negotiation of arms control agreements and utilizing social media wisely. In short, they defend us so that we can work in all of the other MPP areas to build a better society.