How to keep citizens safe and secure

By Tony Peake, Global Leader, Government & Public Sector + Defence Lead Partner at PwC Australia

The imperative of any government has always been to keep its citizens safe and secure. In the past that has meant having the appropriate defensive and preventative forces to ward off invasion (including, in some cases, nuclear deterrents). In the post–World War Two globalised environment, multilateral defence alliances have led to decades of peace and a strengthening of traditional collaborations, despite recurring proxy wars.

‘Westlessness’, the theme of the Munich Security Conference (this week) encapsulates this powershift. Today’s multipolar world with its new alignments, the pace of technological change and the presence of borderless threats, such as climate change and cyberattacks, has altered this dynamic. That the conference will also focus on the race to dominate space, not simply for exploration, is also a significant sign of the times.

All this is taking place as alliances are under threat and against a backdrop of growing nationalism, which only goes to underscore the significance of the new aggressive isolationism. You only have to look at the rhetoric surrounding the 5G debate and the differing views that western governments are having to see how this is playing out in real time.

We would argue that the only way to ensure citizens’ safety and security in this new world is through greater — not less — collaboration, but collaboration at a more technically enabled and granular level. In our latest report on global security, Achieving safety and security in an age of disruption and distrust, we outline overlapping domains of physical, economic, social and digital security and identify players. For this to work will require both a restructuring of traditional defence priorities and of strategic leadership, too. New, important players — from big tech firms and control systems manufacturers to telecoms providers and even pharmaceutical and chemical companies — will have to be encouraged to be part of the defence and safety solution for citizens, and this may not be comfortable for everyone.

Most defence forces work with an organisational blueprint based on conventional warfare at a time when many non-state actors (and states) increasingly employ hybrid, asymmetric tactics to destabilise governments and society. This creates what might be called ‘agility gaps’. To cover these gaps, governments will need to employ new ways of working at the international, national and local levels that forge alliances among different public and private sector actors.

We encourage world leaders meeting in Munich to work hard on fostering and building the kinds of networks and alliances that will be needed to create a security ecosystem fit for modern purposes. This starts with recognising the need for cooperation between entities that may never have communicated in the past and designating a network of leaders to make this happen.

There are blueprints for this. If you recognise that security today comprises the domains of physical, digital, economic and social, and that these intersect at very basic levels — from the companies that provide clean water to the intelligence agencies that monitor terrorist activity both on the ground and in the cloud — you begin to see how a framework of interconnected entities can be mapped.

It starts with identifying the key players and the touch points between all the different components of the security systems. This helps identify where there are weaknesses. Policy and cultural barriers and institutional silos create seams — the touch points in the system that are vulnerable. For example, there may be intelligence agencies that fail to communicate or a failure to recognise the cyber vulnerabilities of critical infrastructure.

Take jihadis returning from Syria. There were roughly 300 Dutch foreign fighters attached to extremist groups, and the Dutch participated in the anti-ISIS coalition, making the Netherlands a target for terror. Dutch municipalities must now deal with some local youth who are at risk of radicalisation from either returning fighters or their home-based sponsors. It takes a well-thought-out communications framework linking local government and local services, like health centres and schools, with the intelligence forces to ensure that the National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism has the information it needs to keep citizens safe. (PwC helped develop that framework.)

Rather than focus on the divisions that make the headlines and weaken security, national leaders must not forget the value of collaboration and work on the frameworks necessary to build a viable defence and security ecosystem. Some of the players will be new and unfamiliar and perhaps even reluctant to change their traditional ways of working. There will be thorny debates between public and private organisations — and citizens, too. Think about the challenges in getting data from mobile phones and the policy and privacy dilemmas of CCTV and facial-recognition technologies.

And there are bound to be trade-offs in this brave new world. But we would argue that to deliver on a government’s primary obligation, the safety and security of its citizens, developing these frameworks across all dimensions of security is a solution that is likely to work.