Posted on 12/29/2004 3:07:26 PM PST by AndyJackson
Naval War College Professor Thomas Barnett has been one of the leading thinkers behind the Revolution in Military Affairs and the transformation of the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld. He is the author of the bestselling book "The Pentagon's New Map," which is a clear exposition of our new post-war political/military environmnet. He has appeared on CSPAN and in many other prominent forums.
Of course, Dr. Barnett has attracted some of the hatred directed at Donald Rumsfeld. While some of this is from liberals a lot of the enmity against Rumsfeld derives from Pentagon insiders who cannot figure out that we actually won the cold war. Nevertheless, I was angered and appalled to read that Dr. Barnett is being forced out of his position at the Naval War College because of those vested interests routed in past force structures. This is wrong. We cannot afford to suppress the debate over the future of our armed forces in this manner.
I quote from his weblog below.
Facing unemployment on Christmas Eve
Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 24 December 2004
I know, I know. Yesterday's cryptically poetic sign-off was supposed to hold until Sunday. But you should know by now that I never keep those promises. If I'm near a PC and there's access, I will write. [Then there's the small pile of six articles I'm really dying to blog.]
I woke up this morning realizing I don't have a job anymore, I'm not exactly rolling in cash (understatement), I've got four kids and two car payments and a good-size mortgage, and it's Christmas Eve, which now means I get to watch everybody open presents tonight and tomorrow morning wondering how I'm going to pay for it all (okay, an overstatement there).
I guess I'm in a little bit of a shock. I mean, I knew, in a long-term sense looking ahead, that the path I was on would make it hard for me to stay at the college. I knew that.
But looking back in a long-term sense, as one is wont to do at the end of a year (it's all that "year-end" and "year in review" stuff), I guess I'm stunned to realize that PNM's success meant I had to leave the college. That just wasn't a decision point that I could accurately spot, even as the logic of its emergence was stunningly clear.
The choice is basically this: don't write the second book and stay, or write the second book and go. I understand the college's position, but let's be very clear here: if I had written a book that no one read and sold the usual academic total of about 500-1,000 volumes, then the question of the second book would have never been raised. And frankly, even if it had, the money involved would have been so small that it wouldn't have mattered. In that instance, the choice between a steady paycheck and the lack of one would have been easy. There would have been a barrel, and I would have been straddling it uncomfortably.
So, in reality, it's all about the money for both sides—at least when the choice is put to me in terms of write-book-versus-keep-your-job. Did it have to come down to that choice for the college? I understand the notion of better safe than sorry, and I watched Anonymous score on his book and he had to go, so I guess I understand than when I score decently on mine, I have to go too. It is a weird territory to be both a government analyst and a successful author. I know that. No matter how honest you are in that process, people are going to wonder about you, and some are going to think the worst simply because they can't imagine anything else.
I know I've done nothing wrong to date, and I've got a tall stack of legal documents (God, it's good sometimes to be so anal) reflecting a huge number of decision-points all along the way where superiors and lawyers signed to that effect (not to mention six and a half years of personnel reviews that make it sound like I walk on water). But no one is willing to sign to that effect regarding the future, and that's why this relationship no longer works. Again, I understand the reticence on the college's side: it's one thing when it's an academic book and it's another thing when it's a New York Times bestseller that everyone's talking about inside the Pentagon. It's simply a different standard. All of us can claim we had no idea about how big the first book would be, but none of us can claim that about the second. It doesn't matter how honest you've been up to now, the danger is simply the appearance from here on out, and I can't control nor prevent suspicions driven by personal enmity. I've changed some in this process, but how I'm treated by everyone has changed dramatically, and to deny that change is to pretend the success of the first book didn't happen. So even if I wanted to do research at the college in the way I've done in the past, how others would treat me in this process likely makes that goal an impossibility. I can't go back to what I was before PNM. I simply have to move on.
So as time passes and the sense of shock and anger over the decision point fades, there won't be any hard feelings on my part toward the institution. It did well for me and it certainly did well by me. But in the end, their definition and my definition of "did well by me" started to diverge dramatically. What I saw as demand from the rest of the Defense Department, military commands, the rest of the U.S. Government, media, the private-sector, the college began to see as a diversion of my talents. I assumed the college would welcome the PR, the stature, the reputation of being home to someone in such demand, and it did to a certain extent. But that demand creates fissures that eventually overcame that sense of shared pride, and that process was fundamentally driven by the success of the book.
It's the oldest story in the book, and it reflects a fundamental reality that I've preached about for years: failure is easy to handle (especially for a nice Irish Catholic boy like myself), success is hard. Failure you trust, because you just know you deserve it! Success, that's what creates doubt.
And that's what's inescapable here. The book changed everything. A modest book doesn't, but PNM does. It creates opportunities, exposure, demands, requests, and pressures, and eventually that culmination of events changes the conversation with your employer. They want certain things, you want certain things, and then you're told you have to choose.
Fair enough, I chose the second book.
I've got ten days to reconsider. The college, in the personage of one senior leader, is wise enough—and kind enough—to demand that interregnum. And I will think about it long and hard.
But I think all that thinking will lead me to the same conclusion: the second book is something I feel very strongly about, and the feeling I get from that beats the feeling I get from the college about my future there. And that's the real sign here. That's when you're supposed to leave one job situation and take up the challenge of another: you feel like the old place just doesn't do it for you anymore and that something else that's possible will do it for you much better.
So I try not to kid myself. The college forced the choice but I forced the college to enunciate that choice, through PNM's success and the sense that the second book could expand things even further. I'm certainly not some passive rider on this train of events. I set the whole damn thing in motion simply by wanting to reach the larger audience with a message I felt compelled to craft.
Why work through the emotions?
First, it pays to be as clear and honest with yourself as possible. Self-delusion is always dangerous, but especially so at big decision points like this.
Second, to walk away from any job situation always takes getting your blood up on some level: you have to hate the old in order to embrace the new. But being self-aware in the process means you should be able to get past that point as quickly as possible. I don't hate the college. I loved working there. It changed me dramatically from what I was when I came here to what I am now as I leave, and I'm very grateful for that. The circumstances of detachment could have been better, but the timing and the outcome is essentially good: it worked until it stopped working. You can't ask for anything more—except of course, no hard feelings and a sense of mutual respect. And I trust both are there, just waiting to be recognized.
Third, I need my head clear of this sort of turmoil to write the second book. Having my status in doubt at the college was stressful—for both sides. This break will be clean and simple—again, it worked until both sides found that it could no longer work. The college had things to protect, and so do I—something I will be thinking about as I watch my kids open presents over the next 24 hours.
Fourth, I do like a sense of drama in my life. Just before I wrote PNM I had throat surgery that was simply horrendous in terms of the recovery: unbelievable pain with swallowing and a very hard time with the pain killers (which tend to depress me emotionally the older I get). When I came out of the far side of that experience, I was scared, but I was also about as clear-headed as I could be. I had thought long and hard about mortality, in part because of the terrible two-weeks of recovery and in part because I knew my father was engaged in the long slow process of death at age 80. So when I came out of that emotional journey, I was more than ready to write the book. In many ways, I fundamentally sought out the surgery at that point in time to have that experience at that point in time. I was watching my Dad suffer horrifically from sleep apnea (it contributed mightily to his death spiral), and the surgery was designed to head off that possibility decades in advance. In my mind, having the surgery was detaching me from that scenario pathway, and in that sense allowed me to process my Dad's coming death so that my head would be clear to write the book. I just needed a break from all that dread and fear and sense of impending loss. I needed to fence off a creative space in which I both ignored those emotions and yet somehow tapped into them to say the things I knew I wanted and needed to say in the book. PNM was to be my book for the ages, the book that defined my sense of legacy, the statement that would allow me to face death knowing I had had my say. And in some ways, I wanted it to be my Father's statement as well—through me. I wanted him to feel that sense of accomplishment through me as he faced death, which I knew scared him terribly as it scares anyone—even when armed with tremendous faith in God.
JesusMaryJoseph!
You start a paragraph like that thinking you're writing one thing and then you realize something so much more profound by the time you manage to hit the return key.
But that, in a nutshell, is why I choose the second book over the college. Writing like that, where the mix of personal and professional is willingly blurred, not only pleases me, it grows me as a person.
I can't write any more impersonal government reports. I simply can't express myself anymore in the third person. I knew that on 9/11. As I sat down to my PC that afternoon, just before they closed the base, I stared into my screen at the draft final report of the third workshop of the New Rule Sets Project, held just weeks before on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center, and I could not type a single word. I tried time and time again over the subsequent weeks, and each time my fingers got on the keyboard they simply froze. I felt the report would be so meaningless. I felt I had so much more I needed to say and history needed to hear—spoken in the first person.
That's why I leapt at Mark Warren's suggestion in that Greek restaurant in NYC the week before I started writing PNM; he said, "you have to make this book an autobiography of your vision." After the process of the surgery and the mental journey of processing my Father's impending death, I was ready to hear that message—and act on it.
By both passively and actively setting in motion the various trajectories that led to yesterday's culminating meeting about my future at the college, I created not only a similar turning point in my life, I made a profound choice about who I am going to be and what I am going to say and how I am going to say it.
And as scared as I felt this morning when I woke up, I feel very much at peace now for having written this.
He is making this choice even though he would prefer to stay at the college and write the second book.
I cannot, as I would have expected that he is a civil servant like everyone else employed by the US Government. Of course, the problem is that his work activities are somewhat under the control of his superiors and so they can instruct him what not to do with his work time. I would have thought that the Naval War College and the defense of the US were not threatened by another book like PNM.
Hmmm?? Would that free him up to take a position within the Pentagon ..??
Just like when Ashcroft lost his election - Bush appointed him as Attorney General.
It looks like a pretty good list to me, in fact. You might quibble with a couple. And of course it is a provocative list which many might choose to argue at length. But what is wrong with a NWC professor providing a list of national security issues which instills vigorous debate. That is why we have a war college. Otherwise we would just have indoctrination courses run by NCOs.
A tape might be available from the C-SPAN archives. Do a bit of searching on their website.
I saw his "lecture" and the first thing that came to mind was that he had a bit more than a touch of arrogance. I'm not well enough versed to determine if he is right.
Perhaps only time will tell.
Interesting point, but look, the job of assistant secretaries is to run things. I don't know whether department administration is either what Barentt's strength is or whether it is something he would want to do. In terms of contribution to the national security debate, he is much more valuable where he is.
Well I guess those of us who were impressed by PNM and Barnett are also shallow navel gazers. Well, writing to the unmashed masses has its uses.
You have 100% agreement here. The list is interesting, thought-provoking, and useful as a discussion starter to say the least. Also, plurality in ideas (at least where value for American democracy is consistently kept as a unifying factor) is one of our strengths.
bump
"Well I guess those of us who were impressed by PNM and Barnett are also shallow navel gazers."
That may be or maybe you just have a different take on the book than I have.
I particularly found his lumping of sub-Saharan Africa with the Middle East in the Gap to be rather silly. While sub-Saharan Africa is as backwards as they come, I doubt that it is or will be in the foreseeable future a source of anti-American terrorism and I would not spend a nickel of tax payer money or a single American troop to try and bring sub-Saharan Africa into the Core.
We could spend the entire American GDP on sub-Saharan Africa and it would no more become part of the core than is Camden, NJ at present.
Barnett would rather deal in overarching theories than with harsh realities. They sound good, but the devil is in the details.
Ping
The author is obviously a sharp guy, but he should've paid better attention to an old professor of his Richard Pipes. Pipes never assumed away inconvenient facts or scenarios, as Barnett seems to do on every page.
To cite one example, Barnett plainly holds in utter contempt those Pentagon thinkers who believe the PRC will pose a strategic problem for the US. He assumes that an improved standard of living for tens of millions of coastal Chinese will inevitably lead to China's integration into the "Core functional" group of states. But did the fact that the UK and France were Imperial Germany's largest trading partners prevent WWI? And what happens when China's bubble bursts and all those hundreds of millions of poor rural folk get restive? A diversionary war, perhaps? Wouldn't be the first time a failing state tried that tactic.
Now, to postulate a threat from the PRC in the medium-to-long term isn't the same as saying the Pentagon should plan solely for a Great Power conflict with China at the expense of attending to other force structure needs. But, in Barnett's world, his in-house rivals at the Puzzle Palace who worry China might move on Taiwan are simply trapped in a Cold War mindset.
Further, Barnett totally ignores the EU. Will it collapse? I think so, but he refrains from comment. If it doesn't, will it ever build a legit military force? Again, no comment. And what about South America? Sure, the larger economies are becoming more integrated into global capital markets. But nationalism is on the upswing, and, frankly, even the healthier economies there aren't doing too well.
Another blithe assumption Barnett makes is that migration from Gap (3rd World) states to Core states is inevitable and the US should just lie back and enjoy it. To that, I say, consult Sam Huntington's latest work.
He's correct on the primacy of the Indo-American relationship. And does bother to address Columbia's problems (albeit briefly).
Overall, though, this tome is unworthy of its author's esteemed credentials. It is little more than simplistic economic determinism coated with a thin veneer of legalistic happy-talk. Barnett often castigates his intellectual opponents in the defense establishment (to whom this book seems to be addressed, and which probably accounts for its snarky, know-it-all tone) as the irredeemable pessimists, but his "trade & modem" elixir will no more cure deep-seated cultural, geographic, religious, nationalistic, and power rivalries than two Tylenol will cure a brain tumor.
Thanks for the ping...
Damn.
As Barnett would say, "and then there is AIDS." No one is arguing that we need to send forces to Sub-saharan Africa, least of all Barnett. But, one of the characteristics of "gap" countries is that they bread and spread diseases that affect all of us. While not identified as a "gap" country, China made the mistake of thinking that it could ignore SARS. Boy were they wrong.
Barnett presents a model which a lot of people find a useful substitute for the model that we had in the Cold War. But that is not a substitute for thinking and you are encouraged to try it.
I found this review on Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/0399151753/ref=cm_cr_dp_2_1/002-5052602-7384821?%5Fencoding=UTF8&customer-reviews.sort%5Fby=-SubmissionDate&n=283155
which I agree with:
"A Galaxy Wide and An Inch Deep, December 23, 2004
Reviewer: Analyst (Carlisle, Pennsylvania)
There are nuggets here but most of the meat of the book consists of broad, unsubstantiated assertions. And only about half is "meat"--the rest is nauseating, narcissistic self-praise with a smattering of "defense 101" level information. Dr. Barnett takes credit for inventing many ideas that other strategic thinkers developed first and with much more rigor. In general, the book is like a pop song--its "hooks" stick in the mind but it's no symphony built on development, depth, and nuance. As a result, the important arguments in it aren't made convincingly, but are simply asserted or suggested."
A large number of whom, including yourself forget that we won the cold war. Try for once thinking, if you are capable. Barnett does not say that the PRC does not pose challenges. We still have a nuclear stockpile and MAD for those problems, lest bloomin idiots like yourself forget it.
Have you even read his book? I mean read it carefully and critically? I doubt it. Oh, and thanks for the update. Didn't know we won the Cold War.
Here is another Amazon review that I think hits the mark:
needles for thought in a wind-bag haystack, June 9, 2004
Reviewer: A reader
The good thing about this book is that the author has some exciting and insightful ideas about the future of the world (nothing trivial here!) and what America needs to do to cope, especially the Pentagon. There are some fascinating data on world economics and demographics as well as entertaining insights on the world of government operations and bureaucracy.
Unfortunately, these nuggets are almost buried in a turgid writing style, relentless self-promotion and bragging, and almost limitless mountains of jargon. Fundamentally, I decided this book is really about the author and how right he is about things; this almost swamps the enjoyable parts of the book, which have to be looked for and dug out of the verbiage. Overall: save your money and read the lengthy reviews here on Amazon.
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