Read document "scenario 3 political turmoil. docx" and answer the questions on document " inms 610 intelligence sharing. docx" based on the SCENARIO 3 POLITICAL TURMOIL

Read document “scenario 3 political turmoil. docx” and answer the questions on document ” inms 610 intelligence sharing. docx” based on the SCENARIO 3 POLITICAL TURMOIL
Scenario 3. Political Turmoil
From the Millennium Project, “Global Energy Scenarios,” accessed at http://www.millennium-project.org/millennium/scenarios/energy-scenarios.html
The failure of nation-states and international organizations to make serious decisions is making them irrelevant. Political conflicts over oil are increasing. Transnational organized crime syndicates—with nearly three times more money than that of all the 2020 military budgets combined—play out their power struggles through governments, corporations, and even NGOs. Systems of all kinds—from medical records to financial transfers—have become so complex that individuals are bewildered and even “experts” are lost. Media empires have unwittingly countered much of the moral underpinnings of society with an “anything the market wants” attitude. The health and retirement costs of the aging populations around the world have forced many governments to cut benefits for all ages, which has led to increasing protests and general strikes. Selfish individualism seems to be replacing communal values, making international law meaningless. Global climate change continues. Terrorism has increased because too many see the governing systems as unjust, and international cooperation is breaking down. Migrations of the poor to the rich areas spark riots and expose the horrific income gaps. There is a real fear that the world is slowly being taken over by high-tech warlords, as growing numbers of economic and environmental refugees roam Earth.
The most dramatic of the recent migrations are the Afro-Indo-China water migrations into Europe and North America, which have triggered a series of ethnic and racial conflicts with no end in sight. The EU and NATO create political stability in Europe only for short periods of time until the next eruption occurs. The U.S. economy was so weakened by the costs of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and generally against terrorism that it was difficult for it to play a role in reducing conflicts around the world. The EU was not able to reach agreements on strategies to replace the U.S. roles. UN peacekeeping forces were overstretched and underfunded. Conflicts in Saudi Arabia, China, Iraq, Angola, the Caucasus, China, and Nigeria over the past two decades have made oil supply irregular and kept oil prices above $150 per barrel for the past several years. As a result the world seems to be in a perpetual state of stagflation.
Terror Version 2.0
Prior to the multiweapon world attack on September 11, 2011, terrorists used only one medium at a time. The combination of conventional explosives, dirty bombs, and bioweapons changed the world forever. This was a well-planned, fully coordinated, and expertly executed simultaneous attack on oil systems, airports, and cities. The world is still stunned and bewildered by the events and consequences of Terror2, as it came to be known. Three twinned dirty bombs were detonated, one each in Europe, Asia, and North America. Twenty-six of the world’s major oil extraction sites, 13 refineries, 100 supply depots, and three shipping lane choke-points were hit with conventional explosives within several minutes of each other around the world. This reduced oil supplies by 20% for almost a year. On the same day, 19 terrorist-martyrs, who had previously ingested individual disease packages, infected passengers in the busiest airports of Europe, Asia, and North America. The price of gasoline quintupled overnight, spot prices were never more volatile, long-term contracts for oil were abrogated, trading in carbon rights was suspended, electricity and gas disruptions multiplied, many banks closed, and transportation-dependent supplies were missing, closing factories and causing food shortages around the world, which was now in the grip of fear and suspicion.
Terror2 brought many of the world’s airlines, medical systems, and tourist industries to their knees and the global economy to a depression, from which we have now recovered—but only to a series of recessions and periods of hyper-inflation. Economies have turned inward, politics have become more nationalistic, and religion less ecumenical. Ad hoc demonstrations against incompetent governments erupted around the world, which went into the depression with increased poverty. Within six months the increased inflation caused some banking systems to collapse, unemployment rates to double, and businesses to migrate from emerging markets to advanced countries. Many who were accustomed to relatively high standards of living had to suddenly return to the conditions they had only heard about from their grandparents or seen in movies of poorer countries.
There could be no mistake about the sophistication of the planning behind this shocking multicontinent, multiweapon set of attacks. The failure to distinguish between modernization and westernization kept militants unwilling to seek alternatives to wiping out the “forces of cultural hegemony.” Rumors persist that an alliance of political Islamist militants, environmental terrorists, and several organized crime groups made it happen. With the manipulation of media by many players for many purposes, people did not know whom to trust about these events and they have increasingly withdrawn to more local identities and loyalties. There is an unsettled feeling among some people that some governments must have known in advance about such a large set of attacks. Transnational organized crime and terrorist groups could not have grown to have such sophistication and coordination by 2011 without several major governments becoming aware. Or is it that the organized crime groups and enough government personnel and computer systems are so interlinked that it was indeed possible?
In any case, the disruption of the Pan European pipeline that delivered oil to Europe from the Caspian Sea area and Russia placed Europe in a very tight supply situation for about six months. During this time gasoline rationing was instituted. There were frequent electricity brownouts across Europe as a result of the shutdown of the natural gas pipeline that ran from Turkmenistan to Europe through Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline was designed to make Europe independent of Russian oil supply and the threat of a Russian oil monopoly, but cutting this pipeline made Europe once again reliant on Russia’s oil. Russia would have been glad to fill the gap, but its oil and natural gas production was also disrupted.
The major OPEC countries were having troubles of their own. The Red Sea export port of Yanbu in western Saudi Arabia was closed as a result of an effectively placed bomb, and in Iraq, Basra’s oil terminal suffered huge damage from a waterborne attack by suicide bombers. In Canada, bombs shut down the Alberta production of oil from tar sands and oil exports to the U.S. from Canada essentially stopped. Oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico also came under waterborne suicide attacks, and 15 of them were shut down. In Iran, the North Sea, and Alaska the story was the same. Other targets were the Chunnel that connects the UK and France; Saudi Arabian export facilities at Ras Tanura, Abqaiq, and Jubail; and several nuclear power plants, although these suffered no damage due to their heavy reinforcement.
The situation was incredibly difficult because of the simultaneous need for repair crews, firefighting equipment, replacement pipeline sections, and—most of all—energy, which was now in short supply, to make repairs on the damaged facilities. Many industries shut down completely, countries were paralyzed, economies faltered, travel came to a virtual halt, and security intensified. But of course the new security measures guarded against the last, not the next, threat. What really needed to be done was to restore a certain minimum of social order in the short term and to have a serious and worldwide reflection on the root causes. Previous efforts to do so did not work.
A worldwide social contract was signed, which brought into being the emergency international and transinstitutional plan to respond to collapses due to future Terror2-type attacks, which included ubiquitous sensors, computers, satellites, and a massive worldwide intelligence campaign to determine intentions, at the individual level, to enable preemption. NGOs, universities, and religious organizations tried to improve civility by reinforcing the familiar vows, training teachers in teaching tolerance, and producing media campaigns that highlighted the common values that underlie peace in all cultures and religions. However, the root causes are still not addressed seriously enough to this day to make the world better than before Terror2.
The world seems to have been in a daze for the past nine years. Even before Terror2, however, world leaders knew there was increasing political alienation, widening income gaps, a growing number of failed states, falling water tables, spreading new diseases, rationing of commodities, and skyrocketing energy prices. Yet they failed to act to make a difference. In energy, for example, there were many early wake-up calls about impending political turmoil: the fluctuating price of oil since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the reduced discovery rate of new reserves, the pleas for rejecting the world’s addiction to oil, the wars in the Middle Eastern oil-rich countries, the growing concern that the world had passed “peak oil,” and the sharp increases in energy demand in China and India, to mention just a few of the signals that were well above the horizon long before 2011.
Oil Problems Created Political Flash Points
Oil-related political hot spots occurred in the Caucasus, China, Japan, the Arctic, Nigeria, the Persian/Arab Gulf, Russia, Venezuela, and Antarctica, where demand had finally shattered any semblance of accord on preserving the natural heritage. Here’s a brief overview on what happened in some of these areas.
The Caucasus
Following years of tensions between the Russian Federation and the Republic of Georgia, the situation finally came to a head in 2009 (two years before Terror2) over domestic terrorism and irredentism. This was a preview of the turmoil to come. An undeclared war erupted, causing interruption of the flow of oil and gas in the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Pipeline and the South Caucasus Pipeline. As a result, Azerbaijan’s economy collapsed under the strain and civil unrest erupted. Armenia took advantage of the civil war by igniting a conflict over the Armenian ethnic enclave in Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan. Armenia annexed the enclave as well as vast portions of western Azerbaijan, including sections that contained important portions of the two pipelines. Turkey’s economy suffered due to problems with the energy flow, and the formerly moderate ruling party of Turkey, the Islamic Justice and Development Party, began to lean further right in order to deal with an angry constituency and to avoid defections to more religious parties.

Figure 10. The Caucasus Region
Source: Energy Information Administration
This in turn caused stress between the Turkish government and the Kurdistan Workers Party, which declared autonomy in the southeast. The Turkish government, assisted by the Shi’a factions of the new Iraqi government, who were afraid of strengthening the Kurdish parties in the Iraqi government, sent troops, effectively ending a five-year truce with the Workers Party.
The EU froze Turkey’s accession talks, which pushed Turkey further into the Middle Eastern orbit. Iran’s power and influence grew in the region, and its overt support for the Shi’ites in Iraq effectively ended the tenuous Iraqi national cohesion. Tensions and undeclared wars increased, while alliances formed among terrorist groups of Iran and Iraq and the variety of warlords across the region that we see today.
Northwest China
The largest oil reserves in China are in Xinjiang in northwest China, where a pan-Islamic or pan-Turkic separatist movement has been growing for years among the Uighur people. Conflicts between the Xinjiang Liberation Organization/Uighur Liberation Organization and police have increased support from the Uighur diaspora and widespread sympathy from the Uighur population, including the induction of new recruits who were trained in guerrilla tactics. The Xinjiang-Shanghai Pipeline was a key target for several separatists’ attacks, making the delivery of oil and gas to the Chinese coastal cities no longer reliable. These cities were important to the success of the Chinese Communist Party, and people began to lose faith in the government’s ability to manage the energy price fluctuations. Anti-government demonstrations began. Nothing changed. The government blamed the ULO for fluctuations in energy prices.

Figure 11. China
Source: Magellan Geographix, Santa Barbara, CA
In counter-demonstrations in the richer cities in the coastal regions, people expressed anger toward the Muslim Uighur. There were racial and anti-Islamic overtones. A new wave of protests by the Uighur broke out in Xinjiang, which in turn were met by police violence. Most in China supported the crackdown on the Uighur and the imposition of martial law in areas of Xinjiang where ULO activities were the strongest. This incited the more moderate Uighurs, who called on the Islamic insurgents from the Central Asian republics and the Middle East to assist their new pan-Islamic Uighur state. This led to the current state of civil war in northwestern China and quickly reduced China’s oil production, further accelerating its efforts for increased international oil access beyond the 8 million barrels of oil per day it was consuming.
China was able to leverage its vast holdings of U.S. debt to prevent U.S. criticism of its civil wars and tactics. As a result, the uprisings were suppressed with a very heavy hand in an effort not to lose territorial coherence. When the U.S. complained, China switched from the dollar to the euro as its international monetary standard and began to foreclose on some of the U.S. debt. China’s increasing power within the UN Security Council prevented any discussion of Chinese internal actions. Nevertheless, the separatist groups were strong enough that oil from Western China was no longer reliable, forcing China to increase pipeline access to Russian oil. It did, however, stimulate Chinese alternative energy efforts in solar-powered fuel cell technology, biofuels from the coastal seawater agriculture regions, and wind energy, while increasing its import of Australian liquid natural gas.
China and Japan
Tensions between China and Japan had been growing for two decades over the control of oil and gas fields in the East China Sea. They flared up when Japan accused China of siphoning oil from the Japanese exclusive economic zone. China and Japan began to draw from the same reserves as rapidly as possible.

Figure 12. East China Sea
Source: BBC
Japan accelerated its effort when Russia agreed to provide its oil pipeline access to China instead of Japan. This made it politically impossible for Japan to make any compromise on the gas fields in the East China Sea. Further complications were conflicting treaties. Japan claimed the area under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea that allows coastal countries to claim an economic zone extending up to 370 kilometers from their shorelines. Both Japan and China are parties to this agreement. China claims the area under the 1958 Geneva Convention on the Continental Shelf that allows coastal countries to extend their borders to the edges of their undersea continental shelves.
Although weakened politically and economically by the costs of past wars and the current need for energy, the U.S. was able to send its Seventh Fleet on naval maneuvers near the disputed area, and then China and Japan agreed to take the issue to the World Court in The Hague. Tensions still remain high while the oil and gas pumps are on hold, and Japan increased its competition with China for Australia’s liquid natural gas, while playing different elements in China against each other and accelerating its efforts to extract ocean-bed methane hydrates, for which environmentally safe technologies do not yet exist.
The Arctic
Climate change continues to melt the polar ice. Huge resources have become more and more accessible in the Arctic, where a quarter of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas are estimated to reside. Norway, Denmark (through Greenland), Russia, Canada, and the United States are competing for access. The dispute revolves around the different methods of determining maritime frontiers. The median line method, supported by Canada and Denmark, would divide the Arctic Sea between countries according to their length of nearest coastline. This would give Denmark the Pole itself but Canada would gain as well. The sector method would take the North Pole as the center and draw lines south along longitudes. This would penalize Canada, but Norway and, to a lesser extent, Russia would gain.
The United States and Canada argue over rights in the Northwest Passage, Norway and Russia disagree over the Barents Sea, Canada and Denmark are competing over a small island off Greenland, the Russian parliament is refusing to ratify an agreement with the United States over the Bering Sea, and Denmark is seeking to trump everyone by claiming the North Pole for itself. The United States has yet to sign the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea. If the World Court does not resolve these issues or takes a long time, or if one or more parties do not accept its ruling, then private capital insured by governments and backed by gunboats will invest in hopes of gaining oil and gas, while preparing to pay retroactive penalties. To keep this from becoming a hot spot for confrontation between former allies, quiet face-saving deals are in preparation to pay royalties to those who cede access.

Figure 13. The Arctic Region
Source: BBC News
Nigeria
Nigeria should and could be a key player in the development of Africa and new sources of oil, but political turmoil keeps preventing sufficient investments to achieve that potential. Rightly or wrongly, oil companies operating there have been severely criticized because of their environmentally unfriendly extraction practices and their failure to condemn human rights violations. Pipeline vandalism has long been a problem in Nigeria. Pipeline fires, dynamiting of Shell’s pipeline in the Opobo Channel, attacks made on the Forcados terminal, attacks on the Escravos pipeline, kidnappings of expatriate oil workers in the Niger Delta region: all of these prove the depth of the resentment felt by the Ijaw people who live on the river Niger.
Ijaw leaders have been associated with the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force. In recent decades the resentment among the Ijaws has grown since they have seen little of the rich returns from the oil resources in their region.
Organizational cohesion and arms procurement of the NDPVF rose significantly with funds extracted from the widespread sale of stolen oil and from support of the Ijaw diaspora in the United States and elsewhere. Over time, the NDPVF became a serious threat to government security forces. Contrary to its original guerrilla hit-and-run tactics, for the first time militiamen seized and held oil-sensitive territory and a refinery. Most likely they were players in the September 11, 2011, actions in Nigeria. When diplomatic negotiations failed and Nigeria labeled the NDPVF a terrorist organization, heavy arms became available to the militiamen in the occupied territory. The NDPVF has become a serious threat to the Nigerian federal authorities, with the group spearheading a secessionist movement that keeps Nigeria in a state of instability. Although it still has one vote in the United Nations, Nigeria is really broken along religious and ethnic lines, with organized crime controlling oil exports, which remain too low for it to be a key player in oil supply.
The Persian/Arab Gulf
As a result of these conflicts and falling reserves around the world, the importance of the Gulf Region has increased. As oil supplies dried up around the world, small Gulf States have become increasingly nervous about big power conflicts. There is an old African saying, “When great bulls fight, only the grass underneath gets hurt.” The Gulf States did not want to get trampled by the competitions among China, India, and the United States.
Saudi Arabia had been modernizing and beginning to hold democratic elections when Terror2 hit the world in 2011. It empowered the extremists within the political Islamist movements to claim their time was at hand. Religious campaigns in the streets, political sermons in mosques, and scathing articles in newspapers condemned corruption and advocated the need for change. The extremists surprised the world and won the first national election, selecting their Prime Minister for Saudi Arabia. However, the victory was short-lived. With about 3,500 princes and countless informal deals with power brokers around the world for several generations, the royal family was strong and deeply embedded in all aspects of Saudi government and society. Old debts were called in from governments, corporations, and individuals. Civil war broke out between different factions within the country, resulting in Saudi Arabia being broken into several parts, with an uneasy truce holding today.
The future of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Region seems to depend, more than ever, on western powers to protect sea lanes and pipelines while the region develops democratic forms of government under an Islamic framework, making distinctions between modernization and westernization.

Figure 14. The Middle East
Source: Center for Defence Information, 2002
Other Factors Making the World More Unstable
The daily struggle of 30 million AIDS orphans without love or mercy turned so many in Africa to crime networks that roving gangs eventually made political stability impossible in many countries. Water shortages across much of India and China had induced migrations of people in unsettled conditions, and migrations of the poor to the richer areas have caused civil strife around the world, which continued the political turmoil.
Meanwhile, Russia, Europe, and New Nuclear Plants
Russia had no fuel supply concerns that would have led it to use nuclear rather than fossil power plants. As possessor of a huge nuclear arsenal, Russia had no need for a commercial nuclear sector to disguise weapons work. Yet the government decided to pursue the nuclear route for domestic electricity and to export its fossil fuels. Absent the regulations and litigious NGOs of the West, this strategy allows it to export the hydrocarbons that it would otherwise use internally.
Russia built dozens of nuclear reactors for several reasons. By building these plants, the country further developed a technology that it thought might someday be exportable. In addition, excess electricity production would allow Russia to supply nations previously in the Soviet Union, bringing them further into Russia’s economic orbit. The Russian plan, now largely accomplished, was to build about 40 new nuclear reactors in order to increase the share of nuclear energy in the nation’s energy balance to 25%. Although many experts forecast that a means for safe storage of nuclear waste is likely by 2030, the increasing opportunities to hijack radioactive waste during transport are still a worry. It was during transport that such radioactive wastes found their way into the “dirty bombs” of September 11, 2011. Nevertheless, the designs for the new Russian nuclear plants were a step forward. They were specifically designed to be secure from terrorist attacks and, based on the Chernobyl experience, to be as free as possible from human or mechanical malfunction.
One of Russia’s most important energy exports was and still is natural gas. In a series of power moves between 2005 and 2008, private ownership of energy resources was replaced again by state ownership, clearly a step back toward the old days. This shift was evident when the Yukos natural gas venture was terminated and Gazprom (the state-owned company) became the natural gas monopoly. Natural gas is delivered from Russia to Europe in a 1,200-kilometer, $5-billion pipeline along the Baltic seabed. It was almost destroyed in the 2011 attacks but now is repaired. It provides Gazprom with a direct route to the European markets and bypasses Poland and the Baltic states.
Europe still relies heavily on the exported Russian gas and hence has a interest in trying to keep Russia politically stable, which may not be possible. Therefore, the EU sought to diversify its energy supply by developing coal gasification technology, wind, solar, and other forms of renewable energy sources. Nevertheless, the importance of the Russian gas led the EU to political compromises in the UN and in trade agreements that might not have been necessary in other circumstances. Europe is still trying to formulate a common energy policy that will help assure continuing and stable supply.
Unstable Oil Supply Forces the U.S. and Canada Closer Together
Canada has joined the ranks of major energy exporters with its development of tar sands, bitumen, and heavy oils. As a result, its relationship with the United States has become much closer, since it is now a supplier of a strategic energy commodity. Canada has the luxury of selling part of its energy resources to maintain good relations with China and India. To make sure that enough of Canada’s energy resources flowed south rather that west, the US fostered many joint endeavors with Canada to develop technological breakthroughs for stretching the amount of oil extracted from any one well, conservation techniques that improve efficiency, cleaner uses of coal, and conversion of bitumen to synthetic crude oil with measures for carbon dioxide capture and storage. With an all but dead environmental movement, even the development of shale oil is now pursued.
North American R&D funding has tripled and some progress has been made in the development of solar cells, water-energy efficient agriculture, and new organisms that use life processes to produce crops that can be converted to fuels. There is also some experimentation with “synthetic” organisms that will permit the extraction of residual petroleum from wells previously thought to be depleted. The development of large-scale portable generators by the U.S. military has led to an acceleration of diffusion of points of generation. Military technology also provided new kinds of batteries for a range of battery-powered devices, including the electric car. These batteries have now become a major North American export.
Other investments focused on high-efficiency water purification processes, in the hope that the region might at some future time export water in trade deals for oil. The R&D program also concentrated on the development of new catalysts to lower the energy requirements of electrolysis, a step toward a hydrogen economy. Some Arab countries have also been investing in similar water technologies, taking advantage of their oil profits and worrying about the future of their own water supplies.
Brazil and much of Latin America have become primary exporters of ethanol, and researchers in North America are attempting to design a crop and process that will improve the output of alcohol. If this work is successful, not only will these countries have a new fuel or fuel additive, but these investors are hoping that they may be able to export some of this product in competition with Brazil. India followed China in entering this biotechnology race for new energy sources. European environmentalists have blocked the use of genetically modified organisms that can create new energy supplies, arguing about the consequences if the synthetic organisms escape and evolve in nature. Nevertheless, the long-term future stability of energy supply could well come from the merger of natural and artificial systems.
* * * *
Efforts to create serious international governance structures that require compromise and give-and-take negotiations have largely failed over the past 20 years. Ethnic groups and countries are looking out for their own interests. The global economy has not yet grown back to its pre-2011 size. Many have turned inward, focusing more on local affairs and with increasing reliance on religion for security. Some believe humanity is in a time of religious revival. It is unfortunate that the international community ignored for so long the grievances of radical Muslims living in regions of oil supply.
An electronic iron curtain has come down between the knowledge-able and the knowledge-less. The decay of family and social values, corruption, and transnational crime seem to have become the governing elements in the system. Many people have withdrawn into the personal, private, cyberspace world. Not enough seem to care about the environment or their neighbors. One wonders if the world has entered a new kind of World War III.

 

ASSIGNMENT – Intelligence Sharing Paper

You previously prepared two assignments on future collection for a scenario that you chose. For that same scenario, assume that you are the US Director of National Intelligence, and answer these four questions:

Question # 1: Based on the scenario with what countries, companies, or non-governmental organizations (NGOs) will you share intelligence? Sharing with private companies, though not done today, may be very appropriate for some scenarios.

Question # 2: Based on the scenario what types of intelligence will you share? Don’t provide general topics like “COMINT”. Give me the targets of the COMINT, and the collection platforms where possible. Be specific, e.g., “COMINT about funds laundering by Argentine investors”; “UAV imagery of the Asian subcontinent.”**

Question # 3: Based on the scenario on what topics will you share? Again, give the broad topics but try to give a few specific examples to illustrate. Identify countries or regions, NGO targets, and subjects for collection. Some hypothetical specific examples are: ballistic missile tests from Israeli test centers; locations of Al’ Shaitan recruitment centers; banks in the Caribbean that are laundering narcotics funds.

Question # 4: Based on the scenario what do you expect your partner countries/companies/NGOs to provide in return? Use your imagination here; the return can be intelligence that the partner is uniquely positioned to collect, but it does not have to be. If you are stuck for ideas, go back in history for examples of trades that governments have made for information or other favorable treatment.

For each of your answers, provide a brief explanation for your reasoning.

Be concise; longer papers do not fare better (they fare worse if they contain irrelevant material). As with most intelligence writing, shorter is better.

 

 

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