The NewRuleSets.Project began in the spring of 2000 as a
multi-year, five workshop effort designed to explore how the spread
of globalization alters the basic "rules of the road" in the
international security environment, with special reference to how
these changes redefine the U.S. Military's historic role as
"security enabler" of America's commercial network ties with the
world.
The project was hosted by the Wall Street broker-dealer firm Cantor
Fitzgerald, which participated in the design of the three workshops
held atop World Trade Center 1 at the Windows on the World
conference facility (May 2000, October 2000, June 2001). That
particular workshop series ended with the tragedy of 9/11, as did
Cantor's participation in the research.
From the beginning of this project, we've
stressed an "agnostic" approach on Y2K and its potential impact,
meaning we seek neither to rally a broad social or governmental
response to deal with this problem (e.g., the ongoing remediation
effort) nor to present any sort of "official" government outlook on
what is likely to happen. Instead, we've approached the Y2K event
as we would any other potentially destabilizing event of serious
political-military impact--by employing a standard decision scenario
approach. By "decision scenario approach," we mean using credible
scenarios to create awareness among relevant decision-makers
regarding the sort of strategic issues and choices they are likely
to face if the more stressing pathways envisioned come to pass.
Naturally, because we work for the military, we're more interested
in the "darker" scenarios. That doesn't mean we expect or predict
really bad things will happen, only that we think it's essential the
U.S. Military must consider the potential scope of the problem in
advance so as to avoid both errors of omission and comission once
the Y2K Event begins--with an emphasis on the latter.
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