Military Review English Edition March-April 2016 | Page 45

EMERGING COMPLEXITY

to our shores. We stand at the cusp of sweeping global
change that will forever affect the nature of our culture
and, perhaps, the fiber and character of our people.
In the contemporary national security environment, there are many complex dynamic pressures and
conditions to consider and overcome. These pressures
will intensify as the world becomes increasingly interconnected. The dynamics of convergence, the coming
together of many conditions and events, and emergence,
the development of continuing concerns and new challenges out of the entirety of the circumstances we face,
give rise to a difficult collective security context.
New challenges require new solutions. Our goal must be
to find new strategies to effectively deal with this problematic situation and implement whatever modifications or
outright changes are required to meet future challenges. We
ignore the reality of this new condition at our peril.

Challenges of the Information
Environment
A large amount of information, in numerous forms,
comes into our “organizational–cognitive–decision management” sphere in a constant flow of ever-changing qualities and substance. Timelines are short, geospatial interests are global, speed and tempo are rapid, and operational
context is conditional and circumstantial. Intent is often
hidden, and meaning is not clear. Deception is in play.
In this complex, contemporary information environment, unless we can somehow achieve selective understanding and parsing of the dynamic parts and engender
complete fusion of all sources, methods, and processes of
information, we are very likely to experience cognitive
and operational uncertainty—and failure. We cannot
hope to succeed without focused and deliberate efforts
to improve our information processes, including analysis
and synthesis required to achieve knowledge and understanding that can empower coherent action, out of the
chaos of the information tornado.
The many interacting (converging and emerging)
elements of information, including all sources, hazards,
enemies, and conditions, require a much broader and
more dense body of data and, at the same time, a more
specific approach to building a viable national security
knowledge base than we have had before.
In the past, a variety of events and actions were often
viewed discretely—in the context of time, space (area),
speed and tempo, topical impact, and other related
MILITARY REVIEW  March-April 2016

conditions. In some cases, we may not have known
when intentions or events were formed or when they
occurred, and their interrelationships were not apparent.
Thus, our approach to dealing with them was dispersed
and divergent. We may also have misperceived them or
wrongly assessed them because of faulty information,
time lag, dissimilarity, or even flawed preconceptions or
biases. We may not have perceived any convergence. We
focused on what we could cognitively manage.
Inadvertent change sometimes occurred through
selective disregard of some events—either because
they were assessed to be unimportant, or because they
seemed less urgent than other events—and so their management was left to a later time. In some cases, events
were wrongly assessed as positive and constructive and
placed in a different context, not dealt with as problems
or threats. The resulting effects changed the contextual perception and the substantial form of the point of
convergence and resulting confluence. This change was
sometimes very rapid and so dramatic that both the perception and the actual form or condition of those events
changed as a direct result.
We sought a “logic thread” (links and connections)
between and among the various forces of change and
the events that were manifest of those forces, attempting
to understand them and their relationships in order to
better control and respond to conditions and, where
possible, to preclude an event through anticipatory (predictive) acti on. We seldom succeeded, and we often told
ourselves that we failed because of the complexity of the
challenges we faced.

Convergence
The “new” premise is that, in the contemporary
and anticipated future environment, there are many
near-concurrent forces (intentions and events) at work
that affect ambient conditions. These forces collectively
converge at some political, economic, military, diplomatic, intelligence, law enforcement, public safety, security,
and societal point. At this point of convergence, the
collective effect, the synergy of these forces, is greater—
much greater in some cases—than the mere sum of their
singular effects. The figure below provides a real-world
example of convergence.
Convergence is a nonlinear dynamic event, and the
point of convergence is very complex and concentrated. One can postulate that the nature of the resulting
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