The Proteus 2020 Futures Study and the Corona Pandemic

Kenneth Daniel

Twenty years ago, the U.S. Intelligence Community visualized a world in 2020 living under an enduring global pandemic.

Proteus: Mythical sea god, son of Oceanus and Tethys, noted for his ability to assume different forms and prophesy.

It took twenty years, but a US Intelligence Community futures study published in 2000 about the year 2020 is proving at least partially prophetic. The Proteus Project: Insights from 2020, sponsored by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), examined five potential scenarios that might impact the world of 2020. One Proteus future was a series of global pandemics, each more lethal than today’s Corona virus. There are lessons to be learned from a retrospective look at the Proteus futures in the context of today’s unfolding Corona pandemic.The participants in the Proteus study were drawn not only from the high security world of the Intelligence, Reconnaissance and Surveillance (ISR) community (involving dozens of participants in a series of three workshops conducted by Deloitte Consulting), but also from an eclectic group ranging from futurists to poets.

Why would the intelligence community, with the NRO as the lead, undertake a future study that would include a pandemic scenario? The NRO is the lead agency for procuring the nation’s “overhead reconnaissance” capabilities. Needing to make decisions about billions of dollars in satellite technology, the nature of the world the U.S. would be remotely observing would define the nature of those sensors. The types of observables could include, in the case of satellite resources, photographic, full-motion video, infrared and multi-spectral, radar, or more esoteric classified sensors. Future communications and signal intercept requirements would need to be defined for the National Security Agency (NSA). On the ground, unattended ground sensors such as seismic, acoustic, and biosensors would be important to such agencies as the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Clearly the human activities across the globe would be of concern to the CIA. The Air Force, along with the CIA, had staffed up the NRO as a joint venture during its early years as a “black” organization, a spy agency whose very existence was classified until the mid-90s. The state of the world twenty years in the future would clearly be of high interest to the entire Intelligence Community.

The final report was unclassified, and publicly published as a book by the Copernicus Institute. TASC, a private consulting firm, oversaw the study under contract to the NRO. The final report references only “open source” literature, and many of the participating experts were from the broader world of “futurist” experts outside the national security establishment. Copies of Proteus are available in limited numbers from used book sources.

This essay examines the Proteus Project for lessons learned for todays geopolitics, with a focus on the current Corona scare. The Proteus pandemic prediction was envisioned to start in 2010, and by 2020 to have achieved a global dystopian level of intensity. The manner in which the technical intelligence experts of the years leading up to 2000 imagined the year 2020 offers insights of its own, even as those experts were unencumbered by subsequent developments: the proliferation of smart-phone technology and social media, for example.

For readers unfamiliar with the National Security establishment or the Intelligence Community, a short appendix is provided describing the players in this large community.

Proteus was an example of a form of futurist analysis called “scenario-based forecasting.” In this mode of analysis a number of independent examinations envision a future dominated by a particular “business driver” playing out in a case study heavily influenced by it. The Proteus project envisioned five Scenarios, each given a name suggesting the nature of the scenario. The five are listed below.

The Proteus Future Scenarios

• Amazon.Plague
• The Enemy Within
• Militant Shangri-la
• New Camelot
• Yankee Going Home

Our Corona-driven interest will be with the first scenario, cleverly named “Amazon.Plague,” a global pandemic started by a virus originating in South America. The other four scenarios each are worthy of separate attention on their own. In summary, Enemy Within sees a world in which a hyper-polarized U.S. society has essentially unraveled. Militant Shangri-la envisions a world with troublesome new geopolitical alliances. New Camelot is an optimistic future, at least for the “Haves” of the world. Finally, in Yankee Going Home a new isolation has come to ascendancy as the U.S. withdraws from global responsibility, from its various alliances and overseas military presence. We can see elements of The Enemy Within in our present polarized society, and Yankee Going Home does not look far fetched under the present administration.

We now turn to the scenario called Amazon.Plague.

Amazon.Plague

“The world of 2020 looks bleak. Since 2010, the globe has been swept by highly contagious, deadly viruses that flare, die down and return in mutated form. The World economy has declined sharply as trade and commerce have dried up, and is now mired in a serious, long-term recession. Many nations have become either authoritarian, ruled by demagogic strongmen, or simply succumbed to chaos. The U.S. is among a handful of countries fortunate enough to have resilient political structures and relatively low fatality rates.” — Proteus Appendix B

So opens Appendix B of the Proteus study. A fictional narrative follows a young woman navigating the changing landscape, traveling between sterile enclaves in her self-driving transport, swiping her medical ID before entering her home base via an “AntiViro” chamber after being robotically scanned for evidence of infection.

From their vantage point prior to 2000, without foreknowledge of the real events experienced since, the Proteus futurists describe a landscape of 2020 which has followed three pandemic waves. Direct quotes from the Proteus Study are indicated as such.

The Landscape in 2020, After the Pandemics

The world is divided in States that are “Viable” and those that are not. The Viable States have signed a mutual assistance treaty to find a cure for the viruses and protect national security. They have sealed their borders, but are constantly threatened by mass migration attempts from less fortunate neighbors. They have turned inward, not doing much to help the poorer nations, many hardly nation-states still, except for a few that have a degree of functionality under authoritarianism.

In the U.S., the traditional political parties have morphed into two camps: the “Techs” and the “Greens.” The Greens have retreated to nature-communities and believe that everything that has gone bad can be traced to the imposition of technology itself, that industrialization has become the bane of the planet. The Techs live in sterile enclaves functioning by means of e-commerce.

Setting the Stage 2000–2010

The much anticipated Y2K threat proved less than feared, but did have a noticeable impact, causing a mild global recession in early 2000. E-business takes off in the early 2000s, leading to new tech investment and demand for wider bandwidth and faster service.

Emerging market development impacts natural resources in developing world, resulting in increased pollution and related fatalities. A conservative US government with weakened environmental laws encouraged more business development in emerging foreign economies, with unintended consequences: “Rapacious demand for raw materials in those markets increased industrial forays into rainforests, river deltas, and other resource-rich areas”

After recessions in 2003 and 2008, the economy rebounded. New scientific evidence that the world was becoming warmer and wetter led to political debates about the causes and degree of warming. Increases in rodent and insect populations, along with appearance of new strains of drug-resistant infectious diseases in Latin America, Africa and SE Asia were observed. Increased wealth in emerging markets did little to curb infections and diseases such as dengue fever and malaria.

Virus 2010: The First Wave — The Brazilian Branco Virus

A new virus emerged, called Branco Virus after the Brazilian river near which it likely originated. It was thought to be a “new Ebola”, and “too virulent” to spread beyond a limited population if reasonable public health measures were taken. Computer models were temporarily reassuring, but the strain proved to be much more deadly than expected.

“By 2010 a viral pandemic of unprecedented scale arose. Thousands died without apparent contact with vectors of bodily fluids of the infected. Unlike most other deadly viruses, such as Ebola and Hanta, this new virus was highly contagious and could be spread human to human through airborne and/or aerosol contact…. It also had a much longer dormancy period than other viral hemorrhagic fevers (VHFs); victims of the virus often did not show symptoms for two or three weeks after infection. Thus, it was much easier to spread the virus unknowingly through travel and daily contact with others.”

“The symptoms of the new Virus were horrible and confusing. For the first 3–5 days, like those of a bad cold or flu, but then worsening to include violent coughing, difficult breathing and extremely high fever. Some patients bled in to the skin and other organs, a symptom often associated with septicemic plague. Patients usually died within 10 days of first symptoms, a period long enough to infect others and health care workers.”

“During 2010 alone, over 150 million people died worldwide as a direct result of the virus, most in emerging markets, but one million died in the U.S. In addition, another 100 million who did not die from the virus directly were so weakened that they died of pneumonia, TB, flu or other normally not life-threatening diseases.”

Impact: 2010–2015

The urban poor in the world’s megacities bore the brunt of fatalities. In the U.S. the elderly and unhealthy were the main victims. Healthcare systems were pushed to the limit. After 2015 society gradually became accustomed to the impact of the disease. In the developing countries, social interaction often devolved into chaos, and routine distrust. Conspiracy theories abounded, including claims of bio warfare, inflaming long standing ethnic and religious tensions and associated international conflicts. In the developing countries, civil society degenerated and saw the rise of demagogues and the choice between authoritarian leaders or anarchy. Developed countries struggled with civil libertarian issues.

In the U.S. historical political categories such as liberal and conservative were displaced as people moved into the Tech and Greens camps. By 2012 the virus had run its course, but societies were exhausted, with fear and mistrust embedded in the new status. The world economy continued in decline.

The U.S. and Europe closed borders as large population groups sought refuge. The disease fatality rate in Mexico was 8%, much higher than in the U.S., so people in Mexico became desperate. The U.S. built new border barriers and walls.

In the recovering economy Techs and Greens remained in conflict. There was a general unease about the future.

Second Wave: Re-emergence in 2015 — The Asian Branco Virus

A deadly and multi-strained version of the Branco virus emerged in Asia. This “Asian Branco” demonstrated the same highly contagious airborne infection transmittal as the original Amazon virus. This second cycle of disease was even more devastating than the first wave. Spreading worldwide, by 2016 over 250 million had died, including 9 million in the U.S. A new generation of alternative medicine cures emerged, many marketed by questionable sources.

Geopolitics during the Second Wave

Ultra fundamentalist Iranian Islamists take over Iraq and Afghanistan as part of a greater “Democratic Republic of Islam”, or DRI, and accuse Israel of bio warfare against muslims. Israel resorts to martial law and installs new border barriers along the Jordan. Japan and Taiwan come under siege from Southeast Asian refugees of countries whose leaders attempt to shift blame away from themselves by conspiracy theories about countries cooking up the disease.

The Techs narrowly defeat the Greens in the U.S. presidential election. The Greens offered a brand of populism that blamed technology for the “plagues.” The Greens proposed radical cuts in industrial activity, calling out “technological oppression of the planet, and demanded the government parcel out land to the healthy populace to start their lives over again in an agrarian setting. Techs ramped up internet technology and connectivity, and proposed net connectivity with no physical contact as the solution to the pandemic.

Third Wave: 2018 — The Java Virus

Another round of disease erupts in 2018: the “Java Virus.” Java was a variant strain of the Asian/Indonesian Virus (the “Indo Virus”) which mutated so rapidly that very few remained immune. 25 million more died in 2018.

End State 2020

The United States remains one of the major Viable States, but U.S. Society is highly divisive and fragmented. This divisiveness is mirrored by the Tech and Green movements. People live in “Enclaves” which are mostly run by Techs and professional technocrats. There are corresponding Ultra-Green counter-cultural enclaves, from which radical anti-technology violence sometimes emerges. Border security has become a large issue, with mass migration attempts from less fortunate neighbors outside of the Viable States.

The US economy continues downward; trade and commerce are down with economic metrics similar to the Great Depression. The only true global economy is between the Viable States. Physical trade is restricted to essential goods, including disinfected agricultural products, technology products and medical supplies. The agriculture sector is one of the few that flourishes, based on high-yield genetically modified foods. The Virtual marketplace is the only other principal economic bright spot.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is the biggest global power center; it certifies factories and facilities as disease free. The United Nations coordinates military security efforts with WHO programs.

The pandemic years have seen a shift in popular buying patterns from high consumption, luxury-loving lifestyles to the basics: adequate, essential, good-quality items.

People have become adjusted to fewer personal freedoms (as especially noticed by the Greens). Individuals carry a “MedID” used to enter anywhere, even one’s own home, and it is necessary to walk through an “AntiViro chamber” to go out of the house, or to pass in and out of enclaves. There is extensive security camera surveillance in high risk areas.

Social Ramifications

In general, people have chosen security over risk of disease. There is proliferation of personal weapon ownership. Organized crime in Latin America and Asia is weaker than before the pandemics, but localized crime has increased. The desperate poor engages in survival crime, even in the Viable States. Informal black markets for essential goods proliferate.

In the non-Treaty world of “non-Viable” countries, life is bleak: there are tribal wars and pockets of anarchy. The Mideast has not been hit as hard by disease, but now Islamists are on the rise. Eastern Europe and Balkans are under authoritarian rule. There has been military conflict between China and a unified Korea.

Retrospective: What the Proteus participants did not anticipate

Things have happened during these past twenty years that were not on their horizon prior to 2000: September 11, 2001 was still in their future, as were many high tech innovations. Steve Jobs was on the scene in the 90’s, but the iPhone was not. The dominance of social media on society was still to emerge. Although environmental issues were appreciated as contributors to the rise of pandemic, the specific topic of global warming and climate change was not fully anticipated as to its scale. Political opposition to genetically modified agriculture was not fully factored in, and such agriculture was forecast to be a mitigating factor in the post-pandemic economy.

The 24 hour cable news cycle had not achieved its dominant influence. The coming petroleum independence of the U.S. did not play into post pandemic global commerce. The scale of China’s impact on the global industrial supply chain had not yet been fully predicted. This author attended a Technology Surprise Conference at DIA in 2005, and was surprised by revelations of the competitive threat posed by the growing Chinese economy; this awareness was not commonly appreciated throughout the Intelligence community.

The Missing Religious Dimension

The Proteus contributors made only a passing reference to the impact of the pandemic upon the world’s faith communities. An aggressive reaction from militant Islamists, directed against Israel, was the single mention. Since both Christianity and Islam contain apocalyptic elements and “End Times” prophesies of wars, plagues and messianic figures, an attention to the impact of such prophetic traditions would be in order. Cataclysms over the centuries, from the plagues of the Middle Ages to the great Lisbon earthquake of 1775 have brought forth large scale social coping behaviors, from religiously motivated comforting charity to heightened eschatological expectations and interpretations of events.

We would not expect much attention of religious movements to be given by the technical collection intelligence agencies. However, the human intelligence collected by the CIA and DIA should certainly encompass these motivational and behavioral factors. And one expects that the Israeli Intelligence Community is well aware of the messianic dimensions of Islamic prophesy, as well as of “Second Coming” anticipations of Christians, who have been a source of political support to Israel.

The Middle East thriller novels of Joel C. Rosenberg often interweave themes from biblical prophesy as well as counterparts from Islamic tradition. The Mahdi, an eschatological redeemer of Islam, is predicted to appear in the future and establish an Islamic State. There have been Mahdi claimants down through the centuries, including the messianic warrior who fought the British at Khartoum in the 19th century. Most recently, the Black Flag flown by ISIS has been taken as heralding the advent of the Mahdi.

Religious eschatology will rear its head whenever a cataclysm occurs.

Retrospective: How things might be different, knowing what we now know

How might the Proteus workshop participants have structured their futures narratives if they had been able to factor in things now familiar to us? Such factors include:

• The proliferation of popular information sharing via social media and potentially positive results from this.
• Improvements in personal medical monitoring and diagnosis using smart phone technologies
• Additional stress on the Viable States due to organized terror post-911 emanating from the “non-Viable States”

Finally, Lessons Learned for today and the future follow.

Lessons for Today: Corona in 2020

U.S. intelligence reports from January and February warned about a likely pandemic… Washington Post, March 20, 2020

Lesson 1: a lesson learned from Proteus during the present Corona pandemic involves recognizing the difference between danger of contagion and risk of fatality. The fictional Proteus viruses all were highly lethal, at the level of Ebola.

As of this writing, the lethality of the Covid-19 strain of Corona is yet to be determined. We do not yet know one important number: the denominator in the ratio of fatalities to infections. Since many infections are thought to be unrecognized and unreported, we do not know whether this number is 2%, 3%, or perhaps much lower. With reported deaths mostly occurring to the elderly or unhealthy in the Corona pandemic, we seem to be dealing with a virus that is extremely contagious, but tentatively, perhaps, not extremely dangerous in a life-threatening sense to the average healthy person. However, the rapid spread of infection during the relatively long symptom-free has fed the exponential rate of increase of infection and the demand on healthcare facilities once serious symptoms emerge. Yet even with this degree of severity, nothing like the lethality of historical plagues is being seen. The Plagues of the 1300’s and 1500’s had lethality levels of 30 to 80%, without modern treatments. In the modern era Ebola also demonstrates a very high lethality, although its very virulence and short incubation causes it to spread less rapidly than this coronavirus. If the current level of actual lethality is maintained, the Corona outbreak of 2020 could serve as “a warning shot over the bow” to society, the opportunity for a “dry run” for responses to possible future and more lethal pandemics.

Lesson 2: the Proteus viruses flared up, died down, and returned repeatedly after mutations. Avoid complacency after the eventual Corona subsidence. Anticipate surprise. The next strain could come from anywhere.

Lesson 3: The 24 hour news cycle may inflame fears beyond the actual lethal danger.

Lesson 4: Climate Change and Pollution challenges are about more than the first order effects of temperature and sea levels. There is an impact on disease carrying insects and rodent populations.

Lesson 5: Even with much more rudimentary online technology, the Proteus researchers recognized the mitigating effect of telework strategies and e-commerce. There has been continued progress and acceptability in the workplace today, so we can expect this to soften further the economic impact of future more lethal pandemics.

Lesson 6: Business should appreciate the role of Resilience along with Efficiency, especially in supply chain implementation, “just-in-time” inventories. Maintaining larger inventories may be less efficient, but provide durability and protection from surprise pandemics.

Lesson 7: The impact of (and upon) religious faith communities from pandemic should not be minimized, but rather incorporated into understanding of the state of society. There are both practical, charitable and world view dimensions to be considered.

Other lessons may come out of public policy discussions in today’s version of the Greens vs Techs; the issues are more than just about energy supplies and natural resources. Just what are the ingredients of a resilient society that can remain a “Viable State” in the face of future pandemic challenges? We should also add that two of the other Proteus scenarios have been coming into play recently: the rise in sentiment for the U.S. to pull back from Afghanistan, the Mideast, and even our long-standing treaty relationships are what Yankee Going Home is about, and the rising polarization in our body politic, so evident in the current political campaign, feeds directly into The Enemy Within, another Proteus Scenario. We may be stirring up a real social “witches brew” when these factors are mixed with the Corona pandemic.

Part Two of our Proteus review, forthcoming, will extend these remarks, including observations on the other Proteus scenarios.

Summary

We can gain a better perspective of a present crisis when we examine how researchers in the past predicted how the future might play out. Unencumbered by “heat-of-the-moment” events, futurists have the advantage of a leisurely analysis of possibilities. On the other hand, such “armchair prognostications” have obvious temporal limits, but retrospective review of the difference between actual and predicted events can usefully inform how we plan for the future, both immediate and long term.

Epilogue

This Proteus future with its prophetic similarity to today’s Coronavirus pandemic was initiated in the late 1990s by the National Reconnaissance Office, which is responsible for the nation’s reconnaissance satellite programs. The first NRO satellite program, launched in the early 1960s, was begun after the U2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union.

Ironically, the name of that first spy satellite program was Corona.

Appendix A: The Intelligence Community

For readers unfamiliar with the National Security establishment, the Intelligence Community (referred to as the IC) includes not only the well known “three-letter” agencies (CIA, NSA, NRO, DIA, FBI, NGA) but other components of agencies such as the intelligence portions of the Department of Energy (DOE), and the State Department’s INR (Intelligence and Research) component. Overall coordination of these activities is done by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI)

As described on it’s website (nro.gov), the National Reconnaissance Office, or NRO “ is the Intelligence Community element and Department of Defense agency responsible of developing, acquiring, launching and operating America’s intelligence satellites to meet the national security needs of our nation.”

The National Security Agency (NSA) has the responsibility for securing U.S. government sensitive telecommunications using modern cryptographic tools, and for the intelligence exploitation of foreign threat communications. The latter is termed SIGINT (for Signals Intelligence), which includes communications intelligence (COMINT), and Electronic Intelligence (ELINT), the exploitation of threat non-communications emitters such as radars. The NSA is a component of the Defense Department, and is supported by the individual military service intelligence and cryptologic components.

Overall military intelligence is coordinated by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and executed by the individual services intelligence components such as the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). The defense exploitation of reconnaissance imagery is conducted by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). Much of this high level and unclassified information can be seen in the official web sites of these agencies.

These government entities are supported by an entire network of private contractors, non-profits, and university laboratories and centers. Proteus drew from this universe of experts.

Appendix B: The Proteus Insights

The Scenarios such as Amazon.Plague are actually presented as Appendices to the main Proteus report which, as a scenario-based forecasting example, started with Futures Scenario workshops and derived “Insights” relevant to the process. These Insights then informed the overall project, as well as iteratively cross-fertilized the different futures scenarios development. In the main Proteus report body, nine such Insights are presented which form the basis of general lessons learned and implications for the Intelligence Community.

The nine Insights are listed and annotated below:

Starlight: — the role and nature of time in analysis

Sanctuary: — the propensity to hide in an open world

Small Stuff: — software, biotechnology, and nanotechnology

Veracity: — the challenge of truth and knowledge

Herds: — people and ideas on the move

Wealth: — moving past money

Power: — clout and who or what has it

Bedfellows: — the significance of teaming.

A Parallel Universe: — from networks to cyber life:

As an example, the Starlight Insight notes the manner in which time appears to be “flattened” as we observe the celestial sky, even though it is composed of stars at vastly different distances whose light events are ages apart. But these light events appears to us today as a unified two dimensional spatial pattern. In a similar fashion, one could collapse time events in history into our present time and observe relationships not evident were we trapped into the temporal nature of the events as they occurred.

Another example: the Herds Insight notes the manner in which people and ideas cluster as they move across space and history.

In this paper, we can only list these insight descriptors, but looking at the pandemic component of the Proteus Futures through our present Corona lens, the applicability of these insights, or “future factors” may emerge. A longer review of the entire Proteus Study would be required to tease these out.

About the Author

Ken Daniel is an electrical engineer, retired from the MITRE Corporation after more than 40 years supporting various components of the U.S. technical intelligence community. He started his career at NSA as a Navy Cryptologic Officer, and participated in Submarine Special Operations and other Naval deployments. At MITRE and earlier at ERIM (the Environmental Research Institute of Michigan — a remote sensing laboratory), he supported technical intelligence projects across numerous agencies. These included the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), National Security Space Architect (NSSA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and other intelligence components of the U.S. Government. He led Strategic R&D Plan and Technical Roadmap developments across various technical disciplines. He received Bachelors and Masters degrees from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and after completing doctoral studies at George Washington University received the Professional Degree of Engineer. He lives with his wife Jane in Arlington, Virginia. He has written essays on Technology, Religion and Society for the Washington Post and other newspapers and magazines.