I didn't see this assessment posted anywhere, so I wondered if anyone had any comments on it.

Y2K Project Findings U.S. Naval War College Dr. Thomas Barnett http://www.nwc.navy.mil/y2k Part Two

As we discussed in part one of our coverage of Dr. Thomas Barnett, the main question to be resolved is "will Y2K problems be discrete and episodic, or widespread and sustained?"

Dr. Barnett came up with four modes of expected failure and graphed them on Cartesian co-ordinates where the X-axis is the degree of failure and the Y-axis is our systems. The top of the Y (vertical) axis is "Robust systems" and the bottom is "vulnerable systems." The left side of the X-axis is "discrete and episodic failures" and the right side is "widespread failures." He reminded the audience that the word "systems" here means more than your computers. It means the political, social and economic systems as well. If a lot of people get mad or afraid or confused at the same time it can strain all three of the above. Different countries have different social systems. He pointed out that in Brazil there is a perpetual party atmosphere that could probably take a lot of stress. In contrast, Japan didn't respond well to the Kobe earthquake because they had no plan for damage that massive. They didn't do a good job of handling unscripted events.

The four modes of failure sit in each one of the four regions of the co-ordinates. The failure mode for discreet failures in robust systems, the upper left region, is a tornado, which is of short duration and small area with known problems and solutions. Your house is toast but your neighbor's is just fine.

The next level of failure is in the upper right region (robust systems and widespread failures) and would be characterized as a flood - more widespread with the key question being "Where are the low-lying areas?"

The next level of the problem is the lower left (weak and vulnerable systems with discrete and episodic failures) which could be characterized as the effects of a hurricane and Dr. Barnett called it "Houston, we have a problem." It could be serious.

The fourth quadrant (lower right) is the worst possible outcome (widespread failures in weak systems) and would be characterized as an ice storm with both widespread and systemic problems. This would be a Y2K knockout. Dr. Barnett sees this mode of failure as a bunch of Y2K direct failures that have a cascading effect which is made worse by iatrogenesis, (the idiot factor). The main question here is how long will it take to recover?

Opinions on the effect of pervasiveness and the possible effects of Y2K have been all over the map, with many otherwise relatively intelligent people loudly accusing those with different opinions as fools. Dr. Barnett showed one aspect of this with a slide of the conventional wisdom of Y2K just over a year ago. At that time, it was thought that the most IT developed countries had the most to lose. There is only one ultra modern country, the United States, although the UK, Canada and Australia are close behind. Everyone else has lesser IT development. The Modern countries are Germany, France, Japan, Singapore and others followed by the modernizing countries of the big 10 and Russia, with the pre-modern countries last. It was thought the US would have the hardest time, followed by the other countries in the same order.

Now the conventional wisdom is just the opposite with the pre-modern and modernizing countries having the worst of the problems and the US having the least. Both of these conceptions are straight lines on the graph from low to high. The reason for this sea-change is that the modern countries handled the Asian financial crises and the Chernobyl virus better than anyone else. They got on the problem quickly and acted decisively and they will probably deal with Y2K problems in the same way.

A more probable scenario is of the pre-modern and ultra- modern countries doing fairly well, and the most trouble being felt by the modernizing countries, who have just enough IT to get into trouble if Y2K turns out to be serious, and not enough coping mechanisms to deal with the problems as they come up.

The fact that you can have a 180 degree shift in conventional wisdom during a single year shows what a difficult issue this has been and will continue to be. Try to remember that just because someone doesn't agree with your position on the effects of year 2000 doesn't mean they are stupid. They might just be using last year's conventional wisdom.

But some countries could have a very hard time because of human aspects of the problem. Several countries in sub- Sahara Africa get a quarter to a third of their GDP from tourism. Most of those tourists come from Europe and most of them come between December and March. Indications are that reservations are way down. If Y2K turns out to be mild will they re-book?

There will be scapegoating. He related that in Indonesia during the financial crises, the people went into the mountains to find the "ninja witch." They always do this whenever there is a problem. They find the witch and kill them and show their body in the square, then they feel better. He said that in the United States we have a slightly higher tech form of retribution called Senate hearings.

The next part of Dr. Barnett's presentation covered scenarios for networks (anything that moves anything), business (retail, manufacturing banking and finance), social (everything from face-to-face to the internet) and government (services, internal and external security). These scenarios have the phases of mania, countdown, onset, unfolding problems, peak of difficulties and how it would all turn out. Dr. Barnett is fairly sure of his findings for the first three columns of mania, count down and onset. Beyond that it is still speculation. He pointed out that many of the problems he foresees can happen whether there are any computer problems or not. Many people think something momentous is going to happen around the millennium and some of them want to help it along. The most likely places for incidents are in Jerusalem and Rome.

As you can imagine there is a lot of information here and you can see it at http://www.nwc.navy.mil/y2k/y2krep.html .

He shed some light on the government credibility gab on Y2K, telling just how the Jim Lord disclosure of the Navy report actually happened. The Navy was doing a planning document on possible Y2K problems and used a classic crisis management approach. They chose every major city near a military base and assumed that all of the cities rated a zero for compliance. Then they told the researchers to go to those cities and ask questions and have them prove that they should be moved up the scale. Jim Lord got a hold of the report before anyone had been to New York yet so it was still all zeros. The next day the New York Times had the headline that the Navy was predicting chaos in NY.

The war college has kept its ears open and listened to all the experts they can find and the majority of people and organizations don't think there will be panic. The majority also think there won't be a crash, and there is a good chance for an economic boom coming instead of a downturn. In the final analysis, he thinks the ones who do the best with Y2K will be the ones with more rules, more transparency, more "New Economy," and more IT savvy. These are the countries who learned from the 97-98 crisis. The losers are apt to be those with fewer rules, less openness, less "New Economy," less IT-savvy and those still learning the lessons of 97-98.

But even victory is a difficult role. Do we party on while some countries have severe problems? We have enough trouble as it is. Dr. Barnett said that many countries contingency plans are: 1. If you have trouble, try to handle it yourself; 2. If you have trouble and you don't think you can handle it, call the government; and 3. If you have bad trouble and you really can't handle it, blame the Americans.

-- Pete Keber (pkeber@island.net), December 21, 1999

Answers

It has already been stated, by the navy(to the San Diego citizen action group), that the responses of those cities surveyed and rated WERE, in fact, IN HAND, BEFORE the assessments were made. The simple truth has ceased to be relevant.

-- Get Real (gaf@mindspring.com), December 21, 1999.

The above is Part Two. Here is Part One:

December 17, 1999

This is part six of our special coverage of the BrainStorm Year 2000 National Symposium Series that took place in New York October 26-28, 1999.

Y2K Project Findings, U.S. Naval War College

Dr. Thomas Barnett

Part One

Dr. Barnett is a Senior Strategic Researcher in the Decision Support Department of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies at the U.S. Naval War College, Newport, RI. His biography and his presentation is at the NWC web site at http://www.nwc.navy.mil/y2k .

His credentials and his presentation were very impressive. This guy is so good he has even had his own existence debated at length on the Internet. He related he once jumped into a chat room where he was being discussed and identified himself to the disbelief of the participants. Some think he is either a CIA front to scare people (or put them to sleep- he gets both sides) and he should fear for his life. Whenever his web server goes down he gets frantic e-mails assuming he has been "taken care of." He said some of his friends won't shake hands with him.

The actual title of Dr. Thomas Barnett's talk was "Year 2000 International Security Dimension Project." He began his talk by saying that the following material is not what will happen but what might happen, based on his and others' strategic thinking. His directive was to come up with a scenario for Y2k and any other "fellow travelers" that will alter the international security environment. He considers this presentation a full disclosure, and used the example of what a surgeon would do when he talks to you the night before mentioning there is a small chance of coma or death but have a good night's sleep and we'll see you in the morning.

The purpose of his talk and the thrust of his presentation was to orient and show decision makers just what kind of possibilities they might have to deal with. He said the military is big on planning, and wants to get all the issues and probables out on the table beforehand. His goal is to make sure that after 01/01/00 there is no decision-maker who will turn to a colleague and say, "I had no idea.....", and promised the audience that after this briefing they should have every idea.

He used a process view, which he displayed as a chart with dates on the bottom from 1998 to 2001. Up the left side of the graph is network instability/failure with low at the bottom and high at the top. "Network" was defined as any system that moved stuff, whether data or material. Network failures will rise as we approach and go through 2000. Just how much they will rise, we don't know. But if there are many failures, at some point they will come to an "Unknown Threshold," a line across the graph that is the level of failure that has not been experienced before and cannot be handled by the regular staff. Above this line the old rules no longer work and new rules need to be created. After the crisis the old rules may be gone forever.

Dr. Barnett said that he and his colleges were "very agnostic" about Y2K, using the word to mean "impartial." In an e-mail, he told me:

"We sought, so to speak, to be "all knowing" on range of Y2K impact on global security environment. But we likewise sought to be non-partial to any outcome, meaning we sought to avoid laying any norms on top of our analysis. So no finger pointing, no criticism of public officials, etc. We made a point of not having any axe to grind, so no matter how it turns out, we "win" if our analysis was good, rather than if it seemed a better "prediction" than others. In short, I strove to make sure I'd never get up any morning and read anything in the papers that would make me wince about what we wrote or what I said in briefings, and amazingly, I think we pulled it off."

But he cautioned that little of his presentation actually is based on fear that there will be a lot of serious network damage. Rather the US Naval War College sees Y2K as an example of a:

"...system perturbation that we will feel increasingly as we become ever more interconnected, interdependent, in a global IT driven new economy. We think this (Y2K) is a model of how things are going to happen increasingly in the future."

And you thought you could forget about Y2K after the first quarter of next year!

In describing the focus of his project, Dr. Barnett used a concrete object of a military base, but said that the same model works for any organization. Up until a short time ago, the bases were only concerned with what was "inside the wire" meaning the internal systems of the base. He called these the "intranet" or the "known knowns." As they began to feel secure with their own systems, they began thinking of the "crosswire" connections: those places where the base and the outside world interacted such as plumbing, electric and network connections.

One of the goads for this concern was the realization that the main air base in Italy has to shut down if they are without electricity for more than 70 hours. And this air base is in charge of everything we are doing in the Balkans. Cross wire problems are called the "extranet" or the "known unknowns." Only in the last quarter of this year have they begun looking at issues "outside the wire." These are the "Internet" or the "unknown unknowns," which is the litany you have been hearing for some time now of, "We are going to be OK but we don't have any idea about ......", where you can fill in the blank with whatever you are afraid of. Often this has to do with how people are going to react to unknown scenarios. Giving us a little insight into US policy, he said that there are usually 20 crisis situations going on in the world at any given time. We pick five and declare them real crises. Why are they the most serious? Because we show up, he said. So what will Y2K do to the normal load? Will we have the usual 20 or will it be 25 and pick 5, or 35 and pick X?

Then he brought up "Millennial Mania" and mentioned the Center for Millennial Studies at http://www.mille.org/ run by Richard Landis of Boston University. Richard says the main Y2K story will be with the people and not with the machines, and that a lot of people are date and history obsessed, pointing out that the Oklahoma City bombing was two years after Waco to the day, and Littleton, Colorado was on Hitler's birthday. Having all the zeros line up is like rocket fuel to these people. There are some interesting corollaries here. There were many heretics before Martin Luther but no movement resulted from them. The reason Luther was successful was that the printing press had been invented shortly before, and his views were widely disseminated. And now we have the Internet. Can you hear the theme of "The Twilight Zone" playing in the background? Check out Richard's site.

Dr. Barnett used an unfamiliar word to describe the effects to come from the year 2000 problem. The word is "iatrogenic," and means the unexpected side effects that result from treatment by a physician. He said another definition would be "ordinary people doing stupid things under stressful conditions," and pointed out that when all the numbers come up zeros, it is important because lots of people THINK it is important. The CIA has counted over 100,000 web sites for Y2K survival with a religious angle. One hundred books are coming out on the apocalypse this fall! He thinks as much as a quarter of the population is in a continual state of crisis characterized by an extreme attraction to an exogenous event that will come down and make everything all better in one fell swoop.

Most people react well in a crisis, as long as it doesn't go on for a long time. If it lasts too long or if there is a perceived differential recovery where some are getting more help faster than others, people stop putting others first. He mentioned Gary North's site and Jerry Falwell's video and said that people are giving lots of advice about what to do when society breaks down and other people will act on this advice and will do stupid and illogical things by our standards and create all sorts of problems we have never even considered.

The main question is will Y2K problems be discrete and episodic, or widespread and sustained? Stay tuned for part 2 of Dr. Barnett's presentation in our next mailing.

Best practices,

Jon Huntress

-- (here's@part.one), December 21, 1999.

IT'S ALL TRUE EXCEPT THE FACTS.

-- SH (squirrel@huntr.com), December 21, 1999.

He is informative regarding the relative impact on various parts of the world. I also expect the modernizing nations to be impacted the most; and that those that did not yet learn the lessons of the Asian financial crisis, and that are the least transparent, and have the fewest rules being applied will be the ones hit the hardest.

In some nations they think it will be worst in the most developed nations. I think otherwise.

-- Rick (rick7@postmark.net), December 21, 1999.

HAHAHAHA! SENATE HEARINGS! I GET IT! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Y2K-(snicker)-ook

-- Y2Kook (Y2Kook@usa.net), December 21, 1999.