Canadian Proteus Network

In June 2001, Jack Smith, Leader of the Office of Technology Foresight for the National Research Council of Canada attended a briefing on Proteus led by the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) of the National Security Agency.

In December 2002, David Harries of the Royal Military College and Jack Smith visited the NRO and met with the Proteus Team as part of the international scoping effort for the NRC’s interdepartmental pilot project on S&T foresight.

In March 2003, Pamela Krause, the Proteus Leader visited NRC to participate in the Canada@2025 Scenarios Workshop. The NRO reported that the Canadian scenarios were very useful in helping them to refine their forward views about the nature of threats and conflicts looking ahead toward 2025.

In September 2003, Jack Smith was invited to attend a three-day Proteus II development symposium at the U.S. Navy Postgraduate School in the company of the key U.S. intelligence and military organizations involved with Proteus II development, as well as the formulation of intelligence strategy for Iraq and subsequent threat environments in a post 9/11 world. …

The U.S. agencies are presently intensifying their search for funding for Proteus development under the aegis of various mechanisms that are being aligned for the purpose of advancing the Proteus approach: Forces Transformation, CIA Analysis and Production, U.S. Military War Colleges curricula, and National Science Foundation and National Security Agency cooperation on advanced S&T projects. …

The Proteus approach is based on several aligned elements:

·     Ongoing R&D under the leadership of NGA, NRO, NPS and the AWC, with NSF and DARPA potential sources of funding

·     Strategic feedback and regular interaction with Pentagon, CIA and NSA senior strategists and operations leaders

·     Migration of the Proteus approach gradually into U.S. training curricula for officers and agents

·     Interaction with key defense and intel contractors who can provide agile deployment and adaptive updates to the methodologies

·     A network of several layers of expertise and insights derivation that reaches across all of the stakeholder organizations, with intersections at many levels

·     A tested set of tools for projecting challenges of future environments, and in motivating simulated, adaptive or anticipatory behaviour

·     An initial software media project …

·     A plan to engage senior military and intelligence leaders, generals, and advisors in working through the learning, insights and application tools of Proteus

·     …

Proteus is a largely informal and voluntary association of strategic foresight practitioners concerned with the challenges of anticipating and understanding global change, and exploring the related implications for intelligence and global security.

The vision of Proteus is to build a network that can make practical and innovative contributions to a safer and more stable world through the development and sharing of advanced knowledge applications derived from insight and foresight.

Proteus Network members are affiliated by a mutual recognition of collaborative opportunity and the prospective benefits and new vantage points offered by the leverage their diversity brings in terms of awareness, capabilities and elaboration and exploration of new ideas, technologies and methodologies for strategic foresight.

Their common ground and shared developmental commitment is based on the Proteus perspective. It is an innovative system of foresight forces, insights and global scenarios developed by the Proteus Project Team at the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office in 1999–2000.

The Proteus Network will undertake follow-on research based on the original work. The work will further develop and improve the power and efficacy of the approach so that it can be used as a strategic mechanism to support global stability and positive development pathways and adaptation to global change.

As an integrated approach, Proteus creates innovative potential in the following ways:

·     Elaborates strategic knowledge that positions global change forces within a dynamic and interactive context that can reveal unintended consequences of actions being adopted by factions within a complex environment of uncertainty and conflict.

·     Builds new media to carry Proteus knowledge of strategic choice structure, interactions and implications in the form of a complex cognitive representation. This will enable human-driven autonomous actors to simulate and interpret irregular warfare and prospective terrorist conditions and strategies. This representation could also evolve into the production of one or more innovative products that could have commercial potential.

·     Advances the technology of multidimensional scenario construction and contingency planning, and connects affiliated players for collaborative learning applied to real challenge situations.

·     Develops the base for a multilateral stakeholder foresight network starting with the bilateral U.S.–Canada strategic relationship. …

This proposal is directed toward building a more extensive institutional and methodological network to guide the next adaptation of Proteus as a complex adaptive system for anticipating change in global society. In particular, the urgent realms of national security and global intelligence about nontraditional adversaries are demanding new and more robust structures for forward strategy.

Proteus as a strategic concept is derived from Greek mythology. Proteus, the son of Oceanus and Tethys was endowed with a capacity to assume different forms and to prophesy. Proteus originated as an advanced concepts research initiative at the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office employing commercially proven scenario-based methodology provided by The Futures Strategy Group, LLC. In the course of exploring alternate future scenarios and considering possible national security issues, the project team (Pamela Krause, National Imagery and Mapping Agency; Charles W. (Tom) Thomas, The Futures Strategy Group, LLC; Michael S. Loescher, The Copernicus Group Inc.; Christopher Schroeder and Thomas Simpson, Northrop Grumman Information Technology TASC; Thomas Witherell, Veridian General Dynamics) published unclassified interim results of the work in a book: “Proteus: Insights from 2020.” The book has been used as a basis to enable further strategic research and has inspired the initiative of the Proteus Network and the Proteus Media Project described below.

The Proteus Perspective
Proteus explores strategic capacities and collaborative learning tools for anticipating and understanding global change. As a foresight facilitator it comprises a set of structural insights or perspectives — i.e. lenses — about the nature and directions of global change. The focus is on threats, opportunities and technological innovations. It can be used to construct complex scenarios of how societies and institutions are adapting. The ten insights or perspectives summarized below were identified in the initial phase of Proteus that took place 1999–2003. Additional ones are likely to emerge as the network evolves in the context of the Proteus Media project.

The Proteus approach offers a context for and an elaborative description of the uncertainties and the resulting implications and environments that are being shaped by the emerging new challenges and realities.

Central to Proteus are ten original perspectives about the propensity of threats to the stability and resilience of 21^st century global culture and societies:

·     Starlight: Most current intelligence is derived from retrospective insights, however real predictive foresight capacity is turning toward the recognition of need for strategic information from a confluence of multiple planes of influence in time, space, meaning and cyber systems.

·     Sanctuary: They can run and they can hide. Information about movements may be more valuable than secrets tied to stable locations, and luminosity may be more important than stature.

·     Small Stuff: From biotech to nanotech to Internet supported infotech appliances and cognitive systems, technologies are converging to create distributed and diverse threats. The world of the small (including cellular or networked organizations) and the relatively autonomous is creating ambiguity and potential threat.

·     Veracity: Truth and knowledge are not as absolute and fixable as previously believed. Empiricism, authentication and revelation may be relative and difficult to determine when viewed in the context of their creation in the dynamic environments able to be modeled by Proteus.

·     Herds: People and ideas are on the move — affecting loyalties and affinities in complex space–time and idea–belief situations. Herds have inherent capacity for malevolence or benevolence, and Proteus can elaborate the distinctions.

·     Wealth: It’s not just money — nontraditional currencies are entering the influence planes and creating substantial shifts in global value. New currencies expressed as capacities for influence can alter strategic positions and create vulnerabilities. Proteus creates perspective upon these complex interactions and transactions and examines prospective impacts.

·     Power: As values change, the distribution and instruments of power can shift. Power is temporal, dimensional and erodable in the emerging cellular environment.

·     Bedfellows: The significance of teaming increases as global complexity is accelerating even where the U.S. is disengaging. Intelligence and security demand agility and new partners internationally in diversified arenas of information, access and alliance.

·     Parallel Universe: From networks to cyber realities and avatars, the flows of information capability and configurations of prospective threats are becoming more extensive as cyberspace assumes new and highly strategic relevance in all domains.

·     Threat–Opportunity: Watchfulness in all venues is necessary because every threat is someone else’s opportunity; a win sets in motion the opportunity for new loss. Anticipation of threat requires understanding the ecology of the continuum — accounting for both the preconditions and the manifestation of threat in terms of capacity and technology in context. More simply put, threats and opportunities arise out of specific “ecosystems” — understand the ecology, and you'll see threats and opportunities before they arise.

These perspectives were derived from a set of general scenarios for plausible, prospective global change situations that imply significant challenges for global leadership and civilized development in the 21^st century.

A key task for the Proteus Network is to further develop, adapt and formulate new scenarios appropriate to the shifts that can be seen or anticipated using the vantage points of the Proteus perspective. Work has already begun on elaborating the next generation of Proteus perspectives and scenarios. As detailed below, the Proteus Media project is directed toward capturing these new abilities in an advanced cognitive representation. …

The Proteus Network will initially pursue the Proteus Media project as described in the attachment.

Proteus Media: A new media for revealing and capturing unintended consequences of factions and security actors in a dynamic, interactive environment using the Proteus perspective.

In sum, the Proteus Network will position itself as a flexible, rapid and innovative source of strategic perspective and foresight for the benefit of the members and their affiliates and stakeholders.