Thread by @paul_scharre

I’ve seen a lot of these “the pandemic was not a black swan” takes lately. Here’s why I don’t think they’re very helpful.

[THREAD]

https://twitter.com/EvansRyan202/status/1248247272699117571

(which, judging by the amount of people “liking” @EvansRyan202’s tweet, a lot of you will not like but here we go … )

(BTW, I’m not picking on @EvansRyan202, who I adore and who has a beautiful beard and anyway he’s an adult and can take it. :-) But I have seen this take a lot and I think it’s worth examining.)

@WonkVJ @mchorowitz @DEricSayers @LorenRaeDeJ

Is it true? Without getting into pedantic arguments about how Taleb defines a “black swan,” it certainly is true that there were plenty of people warning about the risk of a pandemic.

Is it helpful? … What action does “they warned us” imply we should take in the future?

The implication of “experts warned” is that we should listen next time. Listen to the experts! Well, let me tell you something. Experts warn about *everything*. It’s their job!

Obviously public health experts are going to warn about public health calamities. But other experts warn about other kinds of dangers.

As just one example, here’s some experts warning about cataclysmic solar superstorms which, according to this article “is an inevitability in the near future, likely causing blackouts, satellite failures, and more.”

scientificamerican.com/article/new-st…

Are geomagnetic storms something we should be worried about? Should we spent vast amounts of money rewiring our electrical grid to harden it against geomagnetic storms? (I have no idea.)

In the United States of America, we actually spend a huge amount of taxpayer money on a whole industry of folks whose job it is to warn us of dangers. We call them the intelligence community. Did they warn about the risk of a pandemic? You bet they did. We were warned.

In 2019, the unclassified Intel Community Worldwide Threat Assessment warned about the risk of pandemics. It said (p. 21): "We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic ..." dni.gov/files/ODNI/doc…

"... or largescale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support."

But it’s all too easy to pick out pandemics in retrospect as something we should have been better prepared for. And it’s true. We should have been better prepared! (And we will be next time.) But hindsight is not a helpful rubric for protecting against future risk.

Because you see, the 2019 IC Worldwide Threat Assessment also covered the following risks (*before* getting to pandemics):

China, Russia, the Middle East, competition over norms and values, mil-tech superiority, cyber, WMD proliferation, space and counter-space, terrorism ...

… migration, drugs, transnational organization crime, Iran, North Korea, election interference, political turbulence, Afghanistan, the rise of nationalism, espionage, influence operations, ballistic missiles, nuclear escalation dynamics, homegrown violent extremists ...

... counterintelligence, economic competitiveness, intellectual property theft, advanced technologies, global trade tensions, energy supply disruption ... it’s a lot of stuff to be worried about.

How should policymakers balance these risks?

Now, I’m not picking on the IC. I’m not even saying they were wrong necessarily.

What I am saying is that what we need is a better framework for thinking systematically about risk to the health and safety of the nation.

Ask yourself honestly, if you had been given $100 billion 6 months ago and told to spend it to buy down risk to the health and safety of the nation, where would pandemics been at the top of your agenda?

Because it’s not like the U.S. national security community has been jumping up and down screaming about pandemics prior to this. Not true. I’ve been hearing a lot about great power competition these past few years. Not so much pandemics.

So for those of us in the business of assessing national security risk, it’s time for an honest assessment of our performance. Were we wrong? If so, why? Was the risk of a pandemic much higher than many people estimated? If so, why was that?

Do we have a blind spot in how we think about national security risk that led the nation to under-invest in pandemic preparedness? If so, what is the shape of that blind spot (and what else is lurking inside it)?

Instead of saying “we were warned,” we should be asking, “what national security decision-making process would have led us to prioritize preparing for this kind of risk?” (without knowing specifically that a pandemic was coming)

To return to the geomagnetic storms example, here’s a 2011 government report warning: “The Federal government lacks comprehensive national-level geomagnetic storm risk management assessments and strategies ..."
dhs.gov/xlibrary/asset…

"... and no standing entity exists to coordinate cross-Federal government geomagnetic storm risk analysis.”

There’s more: A detailed 2011 report for the OECD analyzing risk and mitigation efforts.
oecd.org/gov/risk/46891…

… a DHS program (from 2015) to make the electrical grid more robust
dhs.gov/sites/default/…

… and a 2018 GAO report
gao.gov/assets/700/696…

So if there’s a bad geomagnetic storm sometime in the next 20-30 years, we’ll likely be having this same conversation with people saying, “This was not a black swan. Experts warned.”

So should we take [geomagnetic storm] risk seriously today? How much should we spend to mitigate this risk? And balanced against what other priorities?

We should be asking: Why did we fail to prepare for a pandemic?

And what other kinds of threats are subject to the same failure modes that we are also at risk of being unprepared for in the future?