Human conflict is a given.
It requires a special kind of truculent stupidity to imagine we could ever remove it from human existence. It’s why we have the military. Experience in the military tends to affect the way one thinks for the rest of life. Such an influence tends to spread across all sorts of institutions as soon as they are forced to consider the existence of human threats.
One of the borrowed terms you often see in OPSEC — Operational Security. The basic idea is doing things in a way that minimizes risk to the actual work everyone is doing. Most of it has to do with avoiding giving your enemy an open door to hindering you. You learn to move quietly, provide mutual cover for elements of your operating forces, avoid giving away your intentions too soon, etc. OPSEC rests on basic habits plus analysis of the known threats.
Nothing we do as humans is risk free. The concept of OPSEC is as old as human conflict itself. We might change the calculus based on cultural assumptions and mythology, but most of us are instinctively aware that we can’t just blunder through life and expect everyone to go along with our decisions. Friction is a fact of life.
A critical element in OPSEC is expecting internal threats, too. More so, your biggest threat is not espionage, but the all too natural internal feuding. I note in passing the US military has by far the worst record for dealing with this. This is largely because the US military is almost completely abstracted from Prussian military traditions, a foul mythology. The entire frame of reference in US military psychology is hatefully anti-human. You have to be a complete sonuvabitch to advance. The entire institution asserts this is not a problem, that humans don’t actually exist as humans. The greatest operational threat to the US military is its own leadership. Thus, the US military is being steered down the drain by the growing entropy of failure to connect with reality.
Just as OPSEC as a concept bleeds over into other facets of human life, so the signal failures of OPSEC tend to stain the work of those who bring their military mythology into other areas of life. Churches are perhaps the worst at considering the very real threats to their operations. That’s because, like the US military, they focus on a mission that has nothing to do with their fundamental reason for existing. Someone making the decisions at the top is deluded and the whole thing will someday grind to a halt.
There isn’t much any of us can do. The primary failure of the Western Church is the same failure pervading all things Western. The individual trooper struggles against a crushing systemic failure, as does the individual believer, even when they understand the problem clearly. To imagine that this is not properly an OPSEC issue is itself a blind spot.
If you prefer to bind yourself totally to the institution in which you serve, then you can play the role of cogwheel in the machine. If you profess to follow Christ, that is not an option. The Kingdom of Heaven has its own organization and OPSEC considerations. Failure to recognize that can easily destroy your divine calling. In the Spirit Realm, your greatest threat is yourself — that is, your fleshly nature is your biggest problem. It wants things that will render you morally powerless.
One of the biggest problems I face in teaching is the failure to grasp that there are Two Realms, that Aristotle’s assumption of a unitary universe is a lie from Satan. The second problem is closely related, in that folks seldom grasp the nature of the moral sphere of consideration, as well. I envision a working model that posits a Spirit Realm, a Flesh Realm (under the Fall), and that the intersection between them is God’s divine justice, AKA moral law. The moral realm of consideration is invisible to the intellect alone. You cannot possibly reason your way to moral truth. But it surely exists within the reach of fallen human intellect if intellect recognizes revelation as a valid source of moral truth. However, to absorb truly the moral sphere requires spiritual awareness, a faculty totally separate from the intellect.
OPSEC is adherence to divine moral justice.
The mission of human life for us is to bring God glory. Without that, we have no reason to live on this plane of existence. His glory is tied up in our obedience to His moral justice. We use the record of His Law Covenants to inform our understanding of what moral justice looks like in certain contexts, then we extrapolate through our convictions what it looks like in our context moment by moment.
Now grasp this: Good moral OPSEC is, by definition, good OPSEC in every sphere of human concern.
