Security challengesGlobal Security Trends

The National Intelligence Council (NIC) on Thursday released the seventh edition of its quadrennial Global Trends report. Global Trends 2040: A More Contested World is an unclassified assessment of the forces and dynamics that the NIC anticipates are likely to shape the national security environment over the next twenty years.

Global Trends 2040 identifies four structural forces that will shape the future – demographics, the environment, economics, and technology – and assesses how they affect decisions and outcomes. It further describes five potential scenarios for the world in 2040, based on different combinations of the structural forces, emerging dynamics, and key uncertainties. It ends with a series of graphics displaying key demographic trends in nine geographic regions.

The full report is available here, along with a five-year strategic outlook for each geographic region. A wide variety of experts, domestically and internationally, were consulted by the NIC as it conducted its analysis. The final report represents the views of the NIC.

The NIC notes that it has delivered Global Trends to each incoming or returning U.S. presidential administration since 1997 as an unclassified assessment of the strategic environment, reflecting a broad range of expert opinion in the United States and abroad. The report is intended to help policymakers and citizens anticipate and prepare for a range of possible futures.

Key Highlights
·  The report says that in the course of the next twenty years, nation-states will experience an increase in targeted offensive cyberoperations and disinformation in an increasingly “volatile and confrontational” global security landscape.

·  Nation-states will likely increasingly favor tools that allow them to operate below the level of armed conflict.

·  Countries will more and more employ proxies such as hackers or military contractors to disrupt their adversaries. “Proxies and private companies can reduce the cost of training, equipping, and retaining specialized units and provide manpower for countries with declining populations,” the document states. “Some groups can more quickly achieve objectives with smaller footprints and asymmetric techniques.”

·  Many of the forthcoming s offensive cyberoperations will likely target civilian and military infrastructure.

·  The U.S. government will face even greater difficulties finding effective deterrence policies to dissuade nations from employing attack and disruption methods which fall below the level of armed conflict.

·  Russia, China, and Iran will intensify their information operations in their broad effort to offer negative narratives about U.S. democracy amid the fallout of the storming of the Capitol. These influence operations aim to persuade American voters that democracy cannot be trusted, that elections are rigged, and that winners of elections have their victories stolen from them. These influence campaigns exploit political divisions in the U.S., using both human and online conduits.

·  Americans will find it more difficult in the years ahead to tell truth from fiction, as “people are likely to gravitate to information silos of people who share similar views, reinforcing beliefs and understanding of the truth,” the report notes.

·  There will be a dramatic increase in the use of synthetic media, or deepfake content, of manipulated videos, audio, images or text, contributing to truth decay and further weakening the shared collective understanding of truth.

·  Global competition for influence will intensify. “During the next two decades, the intensity of competition for global influence is likely to reach its highest level since the Cold War,” the report notes. “No single state is likely to be positioned to dominate across all regions or domains, and a broader range of actors will compete to advance their ideologies, goals, and interests.”

·  Privacy may face growing challenges. “Privacy and anonymity may effectively disappear by choice or government mandate, as all aspects of personal and professional lives are tracked by global networks,” the report says.

·  “Authoritarian governments are likely to exploit increased data to monitor and even control their populations,” the assessment notes, going on to predict they “will exercise unprecedented surveillance capabilities to enforce laws and provide security while tracking and de-anonymizing citizens and potentially targeting individuals.”