By Lukas Milevski

What is, and is not, unthinkable in defence and security depends upon the culture of the group doing the thinking. Culture is a web of narrative threads on issues, topics and themes relevant to a particular group. In terms of defence and security these narratives concern history, geography, the roles of force and law in society, and so on. Indeed, behaviour generally cannot be isolated from the culture of the acting group without making that behaviour random and meaningless. It is culture that gives meaning to thought and action. Culture is therefore in practice the sovereign context in which not just thinking and judgment take place, but also decision-making and doing. No analyst or decision-maker is autonomous of culture.

In practice, no state is a unitary political or strategic actor. A government is made up of a number of different ministries, occasionally conflicting, each with its own culture, and thus its own priorities, value judgments and methods of decision-making. At lower levels of granularity still, each ministry is itself comprised of discrete offices, each again with its own culture, occasionally conflicting with others, and so on. The holistic strategic culture of a state is therefore essentially an amalgam of a myriad of different tribal mentalities and cultures with the admixture of a sense of greater purpose not typically found within a single tribe itself. This does not just complicate decision-making, but also complicates the lesser task of consensus, due to the inevitable conflicts which will spring up in both discussion and action.

Within this context, friction is inevitable within a strategic culture among the various tribes of the defence and security community. Cracks appear in the façade and cannot be papered over, because disagreements are significant and the respective positions are too far apart to be reconciled among the various defence tribes. Such cracks represent issues dear to one or more of these tribes. These cracks thus represent 'unthinkables,' or issues for which certain outcomes are unthinkable for certain tribes.

By Rachel Miller-Sprafke

The modern security environment presents an unprecedented challenge. Throughout history security requirements and the defence policies initiated therein have been subject to change, yet never before have the concepts themselves been so completely revolutionized. An unprecedented level of risk has compelled people of every stratum in society, from members of the public to those responsible for their defence, to do the impossible: to prepare for threats that have not yet materialized.

Previous changes in security and defence have not been conceptual, but practical. Technological developments and budget increases altered the potential of defensive policies. Political, economic, and social changes affected state relations, and therefore who and what was to be perceived as a security threat. What society faces now, however, is a complete revolution in the concept of security. It is an expansion necessitated by the increasing number of potential risks, which are no longer limited to traditional military notions of security. Threats are emerging from fields that were never previously included in the remit of defence, covering a spectrum from energy shortages to economic recession to climate change to global disease pandemic. The security sector is growing to include these new types of risks, but its expansion does not stop at these borders. Beyond these risks that are quantifiable lies the vast realm of the unknown. Here belong the dangers that have no name, where threats that do not yet exist lie in wait. The definition of security is evolving to include protection from the unpredictable, and thus defence policy must now do the seemingly impossible: to account for dangers that do not exist, to think the unthinkable.