Garden, who has advised the British Ministry of Defense and U.S. Department of Defense on military affairs, delivers his assessment of the current and looming problems threatening global security and how best to approach them.

In the third and final installment, Garden discusses the threats to global security posed by climate change, disease, poverty and access to energy supplies. He also assesses how well the international community is working to combat these threats and whether Western approaches to defense and security will need to be revised in the coming decades.

Garden: There is a growing realization that the long-term problem that affects everybody in the world is climate change. In our heart of hearts we know theoretically we can do something about it but the likelihood is that it will be too little, too late. And it will cause conflicts as well as a reduction in quality of life, and is therefore a long term security problem in a military sense as well as an environmental sense.

There are also security issues with other aspects of globalization, such as the transmission of disease. We're worried at the moment about avian flu, we were worried about SARS before, TB is on the rise while Aids is a great problem in Africa. There is also the potential here for a military dimension: biological warfare through genetic engineering could produce artificial pandemics in the future.

Africa is the worst problem of all, not in the sense that it currently represents a threat to the interests of the rich countries in the world, but because it will in future. When we talk about what is the cause of terrorism or Islamic extremism, I have no doubt that its anger about injustices and unfairness. If people in the Middle East feel that now, eventually people in Africa are going to feel that too, with some justification.

Many of these challenges also have an energy dimension. Oil and gas producers are also in areas of instability. If Iran gets a nuclear capability, it will awaken the interest of Saudi Arabia. The stability of Saudi Arabia is a concern in the longer term given the strength of Islamic extremism within the country. Iraq remains a long term problem.

Elsewhere, Nigeria is not without its troubles but also has important energy supplies. South America, from a U.S. perspective, is not looking as secure as it was with Venezuela, a significant oil supplier, and other states in the region becoming less co-operative with US policy.

UPI: The British defense secretary warned last week that due to global warming, over the next few decades we are going to see an increasing number of conflicts over the world's shrinking water resources. Do you see that as genuine threat to future security?

Garden: A couple of years ago I worked on an analysis with DfID (Britain's Department for International Development) on conflicts over access to fresh water, and we were not convinced that it was an insoluble problem. There are some areas where it can be a source of friction but they can be solved relatively easily by non-military means.

I think it's an easy soundbite to talk about fresh water shortage being a cause for wars in future. One thing which will cause conflict is rising sea levels - climate change is going to shrink the available land. I would argue that climate change is already causing conflict in some respects.

In Africa, one of the sources of conflict is that communities are moving off the traditional grazing land which is no longer viable and they've got to move to new land to follow the harvest, the location of which is changing with the changing temperatures. And the fact that they're moving to where other communities already are leads to fighting.

There is no doubt that the fertile areas will change. Even if they don't shrink but simply move, that has the potential for conflict.

But if the land itself shrinks, and the population peaks - it's forecast to peak in 2070 at 9 billion, from 6.5 billion at present-- you've got more people, less land and moving farming areas, which all gives potential for conflicts of a rather nasty kind which don't involve drones and bombers but machetes and small arms, and kill large numbers of people, and are very difficult for western countries to stop.

UPI: What is your assessment of how well the transatlantic alliance is working together to combat both current and looming challenges to global security?

Garden: Iraq still makes life very difficult between the U.S. and much of Europe. Our views on the best approach to the Middle East problem differ, our views on Iran are likely to differ as the situation progresses.

They've been reasonably aligned up until now but we're getting towards the hard stage and we'll probably start diverging there. Our views on climate change differ, although in practice probably not as much as in rhetoric, since all governments are fairly unwilling to take the painful practical steps.

So in all these different ways we're not actually working well in a partnership together, and that makes us less effective.

UPI: Are our military apparatuses currently equipped to deal with the conflicts that we are dealing with at the moment, and the looming threats we face in the future?

Garden: The real question is, have we got militaries that are appropriate to the sort of tasks we're facing? I think there's a growing feeling that we're still organized for old style attrition warfare, in the mode of World War One or World War Two, when actually the wars we fight now are wars of the people.

We're not trying to win territory in the old imperial style or take ground, we're trying to shape the political agenda to get the desired outcome, to influence people to do things in particular ways, which is a rather strange military task but is actually what we are primarily focused on nowadays.

If you look at the operations western militaries are involved in most of the time, they're all about having fairly specialized sets of people on the ground. They have to act like rather hard-nosed NGO workers. If it was a more benign environment then NGOs could do the work, or DfID or USAID could go in and provide the economic support and rebuild the infrastructure of civil society.

If the place has lost any form of government, or has a repressive government or is in the middle of a low level conflict, then you have to impose the rule of law, you have to make people feel that they will get justice as will their neighbor regardless of religion, race or where they live.

You have to start rebuilding the various strands, the physical infrastructure but also the justice system, and police force, you have got to teach people how to be judges, prison officers, sanitation engineers, all these specialized tasks in an environment which is hostile. You therefore need a large number of specialists, who need to be willing to risk their lives, who need to be able to defend themselves and the people they are looking after, , but they also have to be people who can develop good relations with the people they're trying to help . They need to be able to win hearts and minds.

In terms of the equipment they need, they obviously have to have weapons which can match the sort of enemy they are dealing with, criminals by and large who don't have much apart from rocket propelled grenades, they don't have tanks, for example. They need to be able to get around easily, so they probably need helicopters. They need to be able to bring in supplies, so they need transport aircraft, ships and supply lines.

But because the enemy doesn't have a great airforce, navy or modern army, there is less need for fighters, bombers or aircraft carriers. There's less need for tanks - though we may use armored personnel carriers in really difficult circumstances - so we are actually operating at the low end of military technology but with large numbers of people.

That is just as expensive as operating at the high end of military technology with few forces, which is the direction taken by most western forces. This is (U.S. Secretary of Defense) Donald Rumsfeld's view, it's the British defense view as well. And it's quite difficult to switch from high technology warfare to this new sustained post conflict reconstruction work.

The military actually don't want to go down this route because it's not as exciting and modern, the defense industries don't want to go down this route for financial reasons, and governments by and large still equate their sovereignty and standing to how impressive their military equipment is. So this is a real problem that is now developing. We in Western defense worry about asymmetric warfare, but in fact we make it asymmetric because we buy the equipment that is not useful for the kinds of tasks we're performing.

There is the other argument: that we do from time to time fight real wars, for example the first Gulf War and Iraq 2003. But we always fight them alongside the Americans because we don't have the capability to do it alone anyway, so that begs the question whether the Europeans would be better specializing in the types of tasks that we perform most of the time, rather than trying to emulate the Americans

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