Posted on 02/15/2006 7:19:02 PM PST by K-oneTexas
The Chinese Are Our Friends
By Thomas P. M. Barnett | Nov 1, 2005 | 4988
The greatest threat to America's success in its war on terrorism sits inside the Pentagon. The proponents of Big War (that cold-war gift that keeps on giving), found overwhelmingly in the Air Force and Navy, will go to any length to demonize China in their quest to justify high-tech weaponry (space wars for the flyboys) and super- expensive platforms (submarines and ships for the admirals, and bomber jets for both) in the budget struggles triggered by our costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
With China cast as America's inevitable enemy in war, the Air Force and Navy will hold off the surging demands of the Army and Marines for their labor-intensive efforts in Southwest Asia, keeping a slew of established defense contractors ecstatic in the process. How much money are we talking about? Adding up various reports of the Government Accountability Office, we're talking about $1.3 trillion that the Pentagon is locked into spending on close to a hundred major programs. So if China can't be sold to Congress and the American people as the next Red menace, then we're looking at a lot of expensive military systems being cut in favor of giving our troops on the ground the simple and relatively cheap gear they so desperately need not only to stay alive but also to win these ongoing conflicts.
You'd think the great search for the replacement for the Soviet threat would have finally ended after 9/11, but sadly that's not the case. Too many profits on the line. Army generals are fed up with being told that the global war on terrorism is the Pentagon's number-one priority, because if it were, they and their Marine Corps brethren would be getting a bigger slice of the pie instead of so much being set aside for some distant, abstract threat. It's bodies versus bucks, folks, and that's a presidential call if ever there was one. So it's time for George W. Bush to make up his mind whether or not he's committed to transforming the Middle East and spreading liberty to those Third World hellholes where terrorists now breed in abundance. If he is, the president will put an end to this rising tide of Pentagon propaganda on the Chinese "threat" and tell Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in no uncertain terms that our trigger pullers on the ground today deserve everything they need to conduct the counterinsurgency operations and nation building that will secure America's lasting victory in his self-declared global war on terrorism. If not, then Bush should just admit that the defense-industrial complex—or maybe just Dick Cheney—is in charge of determining who America's "real enemies" are.
The most important thing you need to know about the Pentagon is that it is not in charge of today's wars but rather tomorrow's wars. Today's wars are conducted by America's combatant commanders, those four-star admirals and generals who sit atop the regional commands such as Central Command, which watches over the Middle East and Central Asia, and Pacific Command, which manages our security interests in Asia from its perch in Honolulu.
Central Command has gotten all the attention since the Soviets went away, and as a result of all those boots being on the ground in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, the Tampa-based command is clearly dominated by a ground-forces mentality. Ask CENTCOM about the military's future needs and you'll get a long laundry list of requirements focused on the warfighter who's forced to walk the beat in some of the world's scariest neighborhoods, playing bad cop in nightly shoot-outs with insurgents and good cop by day as he oversees sewer-line repairs or doles out aid to the locals.
Nothing fancy here, as most of these unconventional operations are decidedly low-tech and cheap. It's what the Marines like to call Fourth Generation Warfare, or counterinsurgency operations designed to win over civilians while slowly strangling stubborn insurgencies. Completely unsexy, 4GW typically drags on for decades, generating real-time operational costs that inevitably pinch long-term acquisition programs—and therein lies the rub for the Pentagon's Big War clientele.
During the cold war, it was easy for the Pentagon to justify its budget, as the Soviets essentially sized our forces for us. We simply counted up their stuff and either bought more of the same or upgraded our technology.
When the Soviets went away, the Pentagon's strategists started fishing around for a replacement, deciding on "rising China" in the mid-1990s, thanks to a showy standoff between Pacific Command and China's military over Taiwan. Since then, the Taiwan Strait scenario has served as the standard of the Pentagon's Big War planning and, by extension, fueled all budgetary justifications for big-ticket weapons systems and delivery platforms—everything from space-based infrared surveillance systems to the next generation of superexpensive strike fighter aircraft.
A key but rather anonymous player in this strategic debate has been Andrew Marshall, legendary Yoda of the superinfluential Office of Net Assessment, which reports directly to the secretary of defense. Marshall's main claim to fame was convincing the Pentagon in the 1980s that the Soviet Union's Red army was hell-bent on pursuing a revolution in military affairs that would—unless countered—send it leapfrogging ahead of us in high-tech weaponry. It never happened, but never mind, because as the neocons brag, it was Ronald Reagan's massive military buildup that bankrupted the Soviets. Now, apparently, we need to do the same thing to "communist" China because its rapid rise as a freewheeling capitalist economy will inevitably close the gap between their military and ours.
Do the Chinese have a trillion-plus dollars locked up in huge acquisition programs like we do? Are you kidding? We spend more to buy new stuff each year than the Chinese spend in total on their entire military. In fact, we spend more on operations in the Middle East each year than China spends on its entire military. Prior to the September 11, 2001, terrorist strikes, the China threat was being successfully employed to win congressional support for all manner of Big War toys that logically had no real application in the 4GW scenarios that U. S. ground forces routinely found themselves in in the post-cold-war world. (Think dirt-poor Haiti or Black Hawk Down Somalia.) But 9/11 changed all that, and the Bush administration's global war on terrorism and resulting Big Bang strategy of transforming the Middle East inadvertently shifted the budgetary argument from the capital-intensive Navy and Air Force to the labor-intensive Army and Marines.
And when did that worm really turn? When Army and Marine officers began their second tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan last year. Program Budget Decision 753, signed by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz at the end of 2004, was the budgetary shot across the bow to the Big War crowd, as it announced a substantial shift of more than $25 billion to the Army's coffers. That "war tax," as it became known within the Defense Department, swept through the defense community like the Christmas tsunami, as basically every budget program was forced to give it up to the ground-pounders.
This shift was long overdue. During the cold war, the American military used to engage in nation building every decade or so, but since then it's more like once every two years, with a clear concentration on backward Muslim states. All these operations cost money, and as most drag on for years, either the Pentagon forgoes some of its Big War systems in budget battles, or soldiers and marines on the ground inevitably get shortchanged. Star Wars, say hello to hillbilly armor.
Want to know why it's taken so unbearably long for our loved ones currently serving in Iraq to receive the body armor and armored Humvees they so desperately need? Because budget battle after budget battle, year in and year out, the Big War crowd inside the Pentagon has consistently defeated the Small War constituency found in the Army and Marines. And China has been the hammer the Big War strategists of the Navy and Air Force have used to beat back the Fourth Generation Warfare arguments of the ground-pounders, going all the way back to General Tony Zinni's complaints about all the things his CENTCOM troops were lacking in Somalia in the mid-1990s.
But Zinni's advice was routinely ignored by the Pentagon in the years that ensued, yielding the U. S. military that we have today: a first-half team that plays in a league that insists on keeping score until the end of the game. And of course this all culminated last December when Donald Rumsfeld was asked by an Army specialist on his way to Iraq why the soldiers there had to scrounge up scrap armor in garbage dumps to fortify their thin-skinned Humvees, and he responded that "you go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have.”
Well, the Army that the Pentagon's Big War machine has been wanting for the past ten years is one that's not properly equipped for such second-half efforts as peacekeeping or nation building. None of that mattered so long as the Powell Doctrine reigned supreme and America couldn't give a rat's ass about what came after the wars it waged (because our troops were already home by then, celebrating their "decisive" victory). But the war on terrorism gives the lie to the notion that drive-by regime change has any lasting impact other than making countries safe for terrorist networks. And so now the Defense Department is faced with a new rule set: Don't plan to win the war unless you plan to win the peace.
The Pentagon's own Defense Science Board noted this profound shortcoming in its recent seminal report on postconflict nation-building efforts in the post-cold-war era, "Transition To and From Hostilities," recommending Rumsfeld "direct the services to reshape and rebalance their forces to provide a stabilization and reconstruction capability," one that will require "substantially more resources" if America is going to become more successful in our overseas military interventions.
How so? Doesn't the fact that America fields the most awesome war-fighting force on the planet ensure that we'll win any wars we wage? Wars yes, but not the peace that must inevitably follow. As the DSB report noted, our enemies in this global war on terrorism have already cracked our operational code: Don't fight the Americans in the first-half war; simply wait until the second-half "peace" and then go on the offensive—insurgency-style—against a follow-on U. S. force that's poorly equipped and poorly trained for the job of securing the original victory.
How many $2 billion attack subs did it recently take to recapture Fallujah—yet again!—from the Iraqi insurgents? None, which is not enough as far as the Big War crowd is concerned—not nearly enough.
But how many of our soldiers and marines give up their lives each and every time our ground forces are forced to engage in such desperate urban warfare because the neocons screwed up the Iraq occupation?
Ouch . Let's not go there, because if we do, the Pentagon's Big War propaganda machinery might be exposed for what it really is: an unprincipled scheme to put the long-term profitability of major defense contractors ahead of the equally long-term needs of our troops in the field.
So tell me, which scenario do you think is more likely in the future? More inescapable? That our sons and daughters will get stuck patrolling urban shooting galleries in Africa and the Middle East, or that America will fight some fabulous high-tech war with Wal-Mart's main subsidiary, China, Inc.? And which scenario do you think has more relevance to a global war on terrorism? Met any good Chinese terrorists lately?
Atlantic Monthly writer Robert Kaplan is probably more identified with Fourth Generation Warfare thinking than any other journalist working today. His steady stream of articles and books on the Mad Max battlefields of failed states, where drug-crazed teenage mercenaries rule the day, have done more to popularize the 4GW arguments of Army and Marine strategists than anything else. And boy, do the ground-pounders love him for it.
Which makes his recent conversion to the China hawks' camp all the more stunning. Writing in the June issue of The Atlantic , the widely respected journalist performed the equivalent of a strategic lap dance for Pacific Command by outlining "how we would fight China," which is the title of the article. Not why , mind you, just how . Kaplan takes such an indirect route because the "why" argument on China frankly sucks. I mean, we're going to fight China to prevent it from becoming our biggest trade partner? To punish it for generating such a huge trade deficit, already our largest with any country in the world? To stop Beijing from funneling all those trade dollars back into U. S. Treasury bonds and secondary mortgage markets, thus keeping our interest rates low? Because China's cheap labor exerts deflationary pressure on global prices? Because China's rapid embrace of globalization has lifted hundreds of millions of Asians out of poverty in the last twenty years?
No, Kaplan avoids all such arguments for just that reason—they defy logic. Instead, he simply flips the Taiwan card on the table and then he's off to the races, or, should I say, the many wars—both hot and cold—that he imagines America must inevitably wage against China in the coming decades. Why? Let Kaplan tell you himself in what constitutes the stunning thesis of his argument: "Pulsing with consumer and martial energy, and boasting a peasantry that, unlike others in history, is overwhelmingly literate, China constitutes the principal conventional threat to America's liberal imperium."
Got that?
China's "pulsing" with "consumer energy," which apparently means those "literate peasants" want to buy stuff left and right, and since consumerism and literacy go hand in hand with "martial" tendencies (what the Chinese can't buy, they'll wage war to acquire, yes?), obviously America must go to war with them. I mean, a billion-plus Chinese consumers must represent a threat to our "liberal imperium," right?
Having spent a long afternoon in a Wal-Mart in the Chinese city of Nanchang last year, I can personally attest to the horror that is the Chinese consumer: Pushy, demanding, and downright aggressive in their price haggling, these people are not to be trusted under any circumstances. And don't even get me started on their line jumping at the checkout!
But the Chinese threat, we are told, is almost always masterfully indirect, so Beijing's growing economic ties around the planet portend a clear diminution of American military power. Check out how our new Sinophobe cleverly ties "rising China" with the global war on terrorism: "While stateless terrorists fill security vacuums, the Chinese fill economic ones."
Notice that subtle linkage? China and Al Qaeda are basically two sides of the same coin! If there's a vacuum to be found (meaning any place not firmly under America's "liberal imperium," one imagines), we're looking at one of two outcomes: Either Al Qaeda or the Chinese will eventually take over. The former may be committed to killing Americans on sight the world over, but the latter—with their "literate consumerism”—most assuredly want to . . . I dunno . . . sell us low-priced furniture and cars?
Don't get me wrong. I do worry about China's yuan being still overly pegged to the U. S. dollar (despite the recent micro-revaluation), and no American shareholder in his right mind doesn't fear the amount of intellectual piracy currently occurring in China ("One for a dolla!" being the martial cry of Chinese street vendors hawking Hollywood DVDs the very day those movies open in theaters back home). And when pressed to describe what I consider to be the biggest threat to international security in the near term, I always cite the threat of a financial panic brewing inside China's far too rickety banking sector.
But how the Pentagon solves any of these economic "conflicts" with China is really beyond me. Our strategic exposure here is financial, not force-on-force war. And outside of the pure Taiwan scenario, upon which China's military buildup is clearly focused, it's not clear to me that U. S. and Chinese interests necessarily clash whatsoever. Here's another good example of this queer logic: The Wall Street Journal recently ran a front-page story that laid out—in rather breathless detail—China's "broad push into Africa." The Chinese are accused of courting African dictatorships to gain access to strategic resources, including—God forbid!—oil. Good thing America could never be accused of similar motivations and tactics.
But the Chinese aren't waging war in Africa, nor are they establishing military outposts like we are. No, China's "indirectness" comes in the form of building dams and laying roads and "cultivating desperately poor nations to serve as markets for its products decades down the road.”
My, that is scary, reflecting, as the Journal story points out, "Beijing's policy of actively encouraging its companies and citizens to set up shop in Africa at a record pace.”
Hmmm . China's investing and creating business and market opportunities in Africa, a continent long ravaged by civil wars and AIDS and America's complete indifference to a Holocaust's worth of preventable deaths in the last decade. And that's considered bad?
To listen to some fire-breathing congressmen, it sure as hell is, because China will secure long-term access to strategic raw materials, leaving our economy high and dry in the "resource wars" that must inevitably ensue.
This is zero-sum thinking at its worst, reflecting a strategic mind-set that declares a rise in any country's commercial influence around the world as necessarily signaling a decline in American power. If you had proposed in 1980 that the biggest threat to America's "liberal imperium" in 2005 was going to be a China whose rapacious style of capitalism surpassed even our own, you would have been drunk.
Donald Rumsfeld recently did some heavy lifting himself for the Big War crowd, signaling just how powerful it remains in the Bush administration. While in Asia in June for an annual regional security conference, he issued a "sharp rebuke," according to The New York Times , to China for its rising military spending. "Since no nation threatens China," Rumsfeld wondered out loud, "why this growing investment?”
Interesting question. Since no "nation" threatens the United States, but merely a transnational terrorist movement, perhaps the Chinese are wondering about America's skyrocketing defense budget of the last four years. Baseline defense spending is up 35 percent since 2001, not including the couple hundred billion extra in supplementals to pay for the wars. The U. S. routinely spends as much on research and development alone as China, according to the highest estimates, spends on its entire defense budget (approximately $70 billion). Meanwhile, the Rand Corporation's estimates of Chinese defense-spending increases, while routinely registering double-digit annual percentage growth, place China's military spending as a percentage of GDP at far less than that of America's defense burden—roughly 2.5 percent to America's almost 4 percent.
Using George Orwell's "newspeak" from 1984 , I guess you could call our defense hike doubleplusgood to China's merely plusgood . But who's counting?
The Pentagon is. Its latest annual projection of Chinese defense spending, titled "The Military Power of the People's Republic of China, "suggests that in two decades' time, China could, according to our highest estimates, be spending roughly half (as much as $250 billion) of what America's total defense bill was for 2005 (roughly $500 billion)—sort of a doublehalfbad prediction, if I may be so bold.
Do such wild projections matter? You bet. They will play heavily into the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review debate, which in recent months, according to a recent article by Greg Jaffe in The Wall Street Journal , has "intensified divisions among policy makers over how to approach China." Which means, of course, that the immediate tasks of the Army and Marines—fighting terrorists and insurgents in Iraq—will be balanced against the hypothetical threat of China, the "driver of U. S. military modernization," according to the Navy and Air Force.
With Rumsfeld—who has seemed committed to transforming the Pentagon from its leaden cold-war thinking—himself sounding the China hawks' alarm, you have to wonder just how committed the Bush administration remains to fighting this global war on terrorism. Prior to 9/11, the Republican neocons were firmly fixated on "rising China." With Saddam gone, has the Pentagon's preferred analysis of China simply resurfaced, suggesting that the war on terrorism was nothing more than an excuse to target Iraq? Trust me, Mr. President, you don't ever want to have that conversation with Cindy Sheehan.
If Rumsfeld's comments in Singapore were designed to test the waters for a redemonization of China, they failed dramatically with our allies there, who told the secretary in no uncertain terms that such fearmongering wasn't welcome. Somewhat chastened, Rumsfeld returned to the Pentagon and, according to department insiders, instructed that the Pentagon's annual assessment of China's military capabilities be rewritten to tone down the hype. The final draft that emerged weeks later certainly couldn't have satisfied the neocons or the Pacific Command's hawks, citing as it did only the long-term possibility that "if current trends persist, [the People's Liberation Army's] capabilities could prove a credible threat to other modern militaries operating in the region." Hardly the red meat the Big War crowd requires, and that alone may give the Army and Marines just enough bureaucratic breathing space to prevail in the QDR debates, which will be fought out—PowerPoint slide by PowerPoint slide—in Pentagon conference rooms throughout the fall and right up to the final report's unveiling to Congress in February 2006.
But don't harbor any illusions that anyone will give up the fight anytime soon. With Chinese companies buying up America's industrial-age crown jewels, like IBM's PC-production unit, and planning to build almost thirty nuclear power plants in coming years with the help of global giants like Westinghouse, rest assured that plenty of old men with military-industrial ties will be keeping a close watch on Beijing's so-called communists, hoping to spot some "disruptive" technology that justifies that trillion-and-a-half pipeline of Big War products. Check out the new "China caucus" in Congress and count the number of members who likewise sit on the House Armed Services Committee.
This game ain't over by a long shot.
The winning strategic construct that's likely to emerge in the Quadrennial Defense Review is described by Pentagon insiders as the "one-one-one" strategy of organizing our military's force structure around three main pillars, all seemingly equal: 1) homeland defense; 2) the war on terrorism (and all the nation-building efforts it inevitably triggers); and 3) deterrence, an old term now recast to mean, "China, we've got our eyes on you, so don't try anything . . . you know . . . disruptive!”
But let's be honest here. Homeland defense doesn't generate any force requirements beyond having enough National Guard to save lives in natural disasters and to baby-sit nuclear power plants on Code Red days. As the response to Hurricane Katrina demonstrated, homeland security requires an emphasis on the very same kind of low-tech, labor-intensive forces we've long neglected. No big programs are won or lost on that "pillar." And we know that the global war on terrorism tends to generate lots of Small War equipment needs, largely for the Army and Marines. That leaves "deterrence" as the long pole in the tent, and that means the Pentagon needs China like Red Sox fans need the Yankees.
Business executives who've worked China's increasingly open market over the past decade or so will tell you flat out: If possible, avoid working with older Chinese businesspeople, because that first generation of capitalists is simply too tainted by its socialist upbringing to get anything done according to what we would consider to be normal business standards and practices. Frankly, that crowd you bribe—a lot.
No, if you're smart, you deal with the generation of capitalists that followed, which puts almost all of them under age fifty. This crew came of age after Chairman Mao departed the scene, during the long-running economic boom that began with Deng Xiaoping's "four modernizations" campaign in the early 1980s. Moreover, an amazing number of them got some training or education in the U. S., so they get us—and our style of capitalism—in ways we tend to underestimate.
I got a good description of this dynamic when I sat down recently for dinner with a couple of big American distributors of high-end consumer products. This pair of old-school guys told me of their recent attempts to forge a strategic alliance with a Chinese company to import a large volume of Chinese-produced big-ticket goods. Their initial attempts at negotiations were complicated by a lot of previously proposed deals that reflected early Chinese capitalist sensibilities, meaning those deals set up by the original Marco Polos who raced into China in the 1990s. Not surprisingly, few of those deals have gotten off the ground, mired as they are in the usual back-scratching arrangements.
The American executives I spoke to were not willing to grease anyone's palms, and they won't be conned into any questionable investments. But they discovered that when they dealt with younger Chinese managers at the factory level, the attitude was entirely focused on "What do you need" to make a deal work in the American market. Chinese capitalism has matured to the point that the government is starting to back off and say, "Don't talk to us, talk to the factory.”
And it is the simple fact that American businessmen will be making billions of dollars either in China or partnered with Chinese businesses that leads us to a new twenty-first-century rule: If you're better off not trusting anyone over fifty in China on a business deal, you're also better off not listening to anyone over fifty in Washington on the "threat of rising China." The Cold Warrior crowd received its ideological imprinting on China decades ago, and no matter how smoothly they may talk about global affairs today (think Condi Rice), they are none of them to be trusted on China. Here's an easy way to spot them: If they ever quote Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski, tune them out completely. If they think Ronald Reagan defeated communism single-handedly, watch your wallet, but if they've ever worked under, or anywhere near, Dick Cheney, then watch your back.
It is no secret that in a generation's time China's influence over the global economy will rival America's, so it requires no great leap of logic for any strategist shy of fifty to realize that China and America are destined to enjoy a deep strategic partnership if globalization is to continue its historic expansion across the twenty-first century. This is probably the biggest strategic choice we've ever faced as a nation, because if we avoid this path, we'll most certainly prevent a future in which all of humanity can benefit from globalization's promise.
Few historic ends will ever come close to justifying such a wide array of means as the strategic alliance of the United States and China in coming decades. In this century, this partnership will define global stability just as much as the U. S.-British "special relationship" of the twentieth century did. It will be that important in its execution, that precious in its bond, that profound in its reach. The blueprint for global peace will be a joint Sino-American document. There is no alternative.
Too big of a paradigm shift for you? Check that birth certificate. If it's dated earlier than 1955, you're excused for the century, and here's why: Cold-war babies can't escape the logic that says, "If you resemble America politically, then you must be our friend." That was fine and dandy for the late-twentieth-century version of globalization, limited as it was to the narrowly defined West. But that's not the globalization we face today—much less tomorrow. No, that process is far more defined by the emergence of such new pillars as China, India, Brazil, and Russia than it is by that old-boys' club of North America, Western Europe, and industrialized Asia.
In the future, America will have more in common with China than with Japan, with India than with the UK, with Brazil than with Canada, and with Russia than either France or Germany. In general, if you're more like us economically, then you're logically America's strongest allies—despite whatever political differences appear to divide us. That's realism in the age of globalization—love it or leave it.
If you're an aging Boomer, take a seat, but if you're an Echo Boomer, the largest American age cohort in history (currently aged ten to twenty-five), then please stand up and be counted—now—because your future is on the line in this debate.
And if you're one of those Echo Boomers, like my two nephews, wearing a uniform in Iraq today, your life is on the line in this debate.
Today, more than ever, the question of U. S.-Chinese security relations depends on how the president of the United States chooses to define the global future worth creating. And China's continued emergence as a stable pillar of the global economy is crucial to that vision, whether the Pentagon's advocates of Big War planning realize it or not.
America will expend blood and treasure in coming years no matter which strategic path we take. But a whole lot less of each will be wasted if our leadership in Washington displays the moral courage and the strategic vision to realize that China is our natural strategic partner in any global war on terrorism, and not a strategic excuse to lowball that effort and—by doing so—needlessly sacrifice American lives in the process.
Americans need to demand more from our political leaders than an unimaginative strategy of just waiting around for the next "near-peer competitor" to arise—in effect, keeping our powder dry while the blood of our loved ones is spilled in Southwest Asia. America can't embrace its globalized future until it lets go of its cold-war past.
Get moving, Mr. President.
Copyright © 1997-2006 by the Hearst Corporation.
Find this article at: http://www.keepmedia.com/pubs/Esquire/2005/11/01/1037812
ChiPing
This is the strongest article yet by Barnett attacking the old school Pentagon.
So, by this fool's logic, we should have allied with and been friends with Nazi Germany. IMHO, this guy is an idiot.
Barnett is dumber than a post.
I am shaking my head too, the shear number of people who are supposed to be intelligent but can't see what is happening with China is just mind boggling to me.
What we have in China is a exact replay of Germany in the 1930s. Terrible economy after a previous war, economy reconvery accompanied under authoritarian regime and rising nationalism. China is a much larger country than Germany so the whole thing has played out over a longer timespan, but the parallels are almost staggering.
Taiwan is going to be their Austria and Mongolia is going to be their Poland. Japan/Korea will be France/Belgium.
Mr communist sympathizer Barnett, our powder was given away to the chinese by your treasonous bill and hillary clinton.
U S Congressional Record/Senate
106th Congress
June 23, 1999
pgs. S7483-S7486
The Clinton National Security Scandal and Coverup
Senator James Inhofe
(top right hand cornor)
* * *
Alamo-Girl.com
He's all mixed up.
Once China has sucked all the manufacturing out of the United States and sees that we can no longer make goods to protect ourselves, they will come. And all the business men, Congressman, and Senators that got rich outsourcing our manufacturing jobs will be the first to run.
You can say what you like, as I said agreement and disagreement does exist within his work. He does have the ear of the Pentagon and the Office of Force Transformation where Adm. Cebrowski was in charge.
Vice Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski, USN (his former boss at the US Naval War College and at the Office of the Secretary of Defense) statement on the works of Dr. Barnett:
"Dr. Barnett's work puts him in the same class as the great and powerful minds that crafted America's post-World War II strategy and created the institutions that brought stability and prosperity to the Free World. Like them, he develops a formulation crossing all sector boundaries: political, economic, cultural, religious, security. But unlike them, he leaves behind containment and offers instead a hopeful and eager embrace characteristic of America at her best. He has provided a useful strategic context for the continuing process of transforming our national security structures and capabilities. As a former president of the Naval War College, I feel confident is saying that policy makers who act on this work will not go far wrong."
Dr. Barnett's wok is more of a 'marriage' of globalization and war principles and philosophy. In the past they were treated seperately and the military was always played a sort of catch up game to the state departments lead. Now they are being looked at in combination.
We can suffer through dozens of little wars like what we are fighting in Iraq right now and although it's a terrible setback if we lose one, it's not the end of the world. When you fight the big war however, losing really is the end of the world, at least for us.
Articles and Books (http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/articles/index.htm)
The Monks of War. If official Washington has trouble learning from its mistakes, the generals fighting the war in Iraq have no such luxury. And there are many lessons to learn.
Esquire March 2006
Of all the lessons he's learned in this war, the most important one to marine lieutenant general James Mattis is this: winning this war is mostly about not losing friends along the way. In the run-up to the invasion of Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, General Mattis was charged with setting up an air base in Pakistan to make the movement of marines into the theater possible ...
Securing the Middle East with a Nuclear Iran? Excerpts from Blueprint for Action, The Globalist's Book of the Week
January 24, 2006
Even as the United States, the EU and others work to stop it, Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons seems inevitable. But is this such a bad outcome? In "Blueprint for Action," Thomas P.M. Barnett explores the security implications involved from a U.S. point of view of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons and why it may be the best thing for the United States and the wider Middle East.
Esquire November 2005
The greatest threat to America's success in its war on terrorism sits inside the Pentagon. The proponents of Big War (that cold-war gift that keeps on giving), found overwhelmingly in the Air Force and Navy, will go to any length to demonize China in their quest to justify high-tech weaponry (space wars for the flyboys) and super- expensive platforms (submarines and ships for the admirals, and bomber jets for both) in the budget struggles triggered by our costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Donald Rumsfeld: Old Man in a Hurry (The inside story of how Donald H. Rumsfeld transformed the Pentagon, in which we learn about wire-brushing, deep diving, and a secret society called the Slurg)
Esquire July 2005
THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE'S suite of offices in the Pentagon is on the third deck, outermost, or E-ring of the five-sided building, in the wedge between corridors eight and nine. It's one of the older wedges, on the far side of where the new ones are to be found or are being renovated, and on the opposite side of the building, one thousand feet away, from the section that was destroyed on September 11, 2001 ...
Esquire's "The Sound and the Fury" (This Month, Extra Fury!) letters to the editor
Dear Mr. President, Here's How to Make Sense of Your Second Term, Secure Your Legacy, and, oh yeah, Create a Future Worth Living
Esquire February 2005
So you say you have no concern for your legacy. That some historian eighty years from now will figure out if you were a good president or not. Fair enough, but let's review so far. Your big-bang strategy to reform the Middle East took down Saddam, which was good; you've completely screwed up the Iraq occupation, which is bad; and now you don't seem to know exactly where you're going, which is not so great. This brings me to the bad news. The two players with the greatest potential for hog-tying your second term and derailing your big-bang strategy don't even live in the Middle East. Instead, they're located on little islands of unreality much like Washington, D.C.: Taiwan and North Korea.
Esquire's "The Sound and the Fury" letters to the editor
The New Magnum Force: What Dirty Harry can teach the new Geneva conventions
Wired, February 2005
Ass kickers. Rule breakers. Lone riders. The United States may be founded on individual rights and the rule of law, but Americans love Dirty Harry and his literary and cinematic brethren. These hard-nosed heroes dispatch evildoers without remorse, going outside the law when necessary. The Man With No Name doesn't explain, he simply acts.
"The Pentagon's Debate Over What Iraq Means"
The Command Post, 22 January 2005
We've been linking to the work of Tom Barnett for some time, including his two Esquire articles, "The Pentagon's New Map" and "Mr. President, Here's How To Make Sense Of Our Iraq Strategy," and just yesterday, the CSPAN stream of his famous Defense Dept. brief on a grand military strategy for the United States. He's a heavy hitter. And here's the really great part: Tom has agreed to author an exclusive perspective piece for the Command Post's Op/Ed page, which you may find below. We're thrilled to have his contribution, and we hope you find the content enjoyable and provocative. --The Command Post
Not in America's Image
Baltimore Sun, 3 January 2005
Here's the good news: Within 10 years, no one on the planet will confuse globalization with Americanization. That's because several new superpowers are rising across the landscape, offering distinctively different faces to the often-demonized globalization process. Here's a quick preview.
Commission On Review Of Overseas Military Facility Structure Of The United States (pdf) [blog entry here]
Testimony delivered at Public Meeting held on 9 November 2004, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington DC
"First, let me thank the Commission on Overseas Basing for inviting me to testify here today. Second, let me emphasize right from the start that I'm not an expert per se on the U.S. military's global basing structure. I am essentially a grand strategist who spends his time contemplating the long-term objectives of U.S. foreign policy with a particular focus on how the employment of military force around the world can bring about not just increased security for our country, but improve the global security environment as a whole. I have written extensively on this subject, and I know that it is primarily on the basis of my recent book, The Pentagon's New Map, that I was asked to testify today, so many of my comments here will involve describing how I think this new map informs future planning for U.S. overseas basing realignment ..."
Does the U.S. Face a Future of Never-ending Subnational & Transnational Violence?
Conference Paper: National Intelligence Council 2020 Project (May 2004)
The short answer is yes. But the more important answers are that: 1) This future is worth pursuing because it represents genuine historical progress in the de-escalation of mass violence; 2) This problem-set is boundable and easily described as a grand historical arc of ever-retreating resistance to the spread of the global economy; and 3) The sequencing of the regional tasks involved is of our own choosing.
Gaming War in the Context of Everything Else
Fire and Movement, Issue 134 (2004)
Thomas P.M. Barnett wrote an article for Esquire magazine last year entitled "The Pentagon's New Map," in which he described what he believes is the new security environment that the U.S. finds itself in today. His recent book of the same title more deeply explores his thoughts on the matter. I asked Prof. Barnett what he thought the role of the commercial board wargame industry might be in the new world war in which we find ourselves. His response is included in this issue. It's definitely worth a close read.
Adam B. Ulam, Understanding the Cold War: A Historian's Personal Reflections, reviewed by Thomas P.M. Barnett, U.S. Naval War College
Journal of Cold War Studies, Summer 2004
There is only one really legitimate measure of an autobiography, and that is its ability to bring the author to life for the reader, giving a sense of who the person was and what it must have been like to have known him or her. On that score, Adam Ulam's "personal reflections" succeed on every level.
Mr. President, Here's How To Make Sense Of Our Iraq Strategy
Esquire, June 2004
One of the architects of the Pentagon's New Map of the world offers a most important guide to a) why the boys will never be coming home and b) why this is the first step toward a world without war.
Esquire's "The Sound and the Fury" letters to the editor (Sept)
Esquire's "The Sound and the Fury" letters to the editor (Aug)
The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2004)
A groundbreaking reexamination of U.S. and global security, certain to be one of the most talked about books of the year.
Since the end of the Cold War, America's national security establishment has been searching for a new operating theory to explain how this seemingly "chaotic" world actually works. Gone is the clash of blocs, but replaced by what?
Thomas Barnett has the answers. A senior military analyst with the U.S. Naval War College, he has given a constant stream of briefings over the past few years, and particularly since 9/11, to the highest of high-level civilian and military policymakers-and now he gives it to you. The Pentagon's New Map is a cutting-edge approach to globalization that combines security, economic, political, and cultural factors to do no less than predict and explain the nature of war and peace in the twenty-first century.
Building on the works of Friedman, Huntington, and Fukuyama, and then taking a leap beyond, Barnett crystallizes recent American military history and strategy, sets the parameters for where our forces will likely be headed in the future, outlines the unique role that America can and will play in establishing international stability-and provides much-needed hope at a crucial yet uncertain time in world history.
For anyone seeking to understand the Iraqs, Afghanistans, and Liberias of the present and future, the intimate new links between foreign policy and national security, and the operational realities of the world as it exists today, The Pentagon's New Map is a template, a Rosetta stone. Agree with it, disagree with it, argue with it-there is no book more essential for 2004 and beyond.
Targeting Terrorism
Forget Europe. How About These Allies?
The Washington Post, April 11, 2004
Terrorists buy a national election in Spain for the price of 10 backpack bombs and remove a "crucial" pillar of the Western coalition in Iraq. Predictably, op-ed columnists and talking heads raise the cry for the Bush administration to "save the Western alliance." This is a knee-jerk response that reflects historical habit more than strategic logic.
System Perturbation: Conflict in the Age of Globalization
With Bradd C. Hayes in Raymond W. Westphal Jr, ed, War and Virtual War: The Challenges to Communities (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2003), pp. 5-18.
Aperiodically, the international system reorders itself normally in the aftermath of a major conflict. This reordering is accompanied by the implementation of new rule sets in an attempt to firewall states from the causes of the conflict. Policymakers have openly enquired whether the end of the Cold War and the birth of the information age require a new firebreak and the implementation of a new set of rules. Because "great power war" has been the proximate cause of past restructuring, great power war has been the ordering the principle for international (and national) rules and institutions. Recent events (from so-called the Asian Economic Flu, to the Mexican peso crisis, to the Love Bug computer virus, to the heinous events of 11 September 2001) indicate that a new ordering principle is required (one in which great power war is but one possible outcome).
The Global Transaction Strategy
WITH HENRY H. GAFFNEY, JR.
Military Officer, May 2003
Operation Iraqi Freedom could be a first step toward a larger goal: true globalization.
No Retaliation at Home
Mary Suh, editor, of Week-in-Review expert roundtable "Strategy, With the Benefit of Hindsight"
New York Times, 30 March 2003
Given all the months of planning for and talking about the war in Iraq, it appeared that every possible contingency had been accounted for, if not by the military itself, then by the platoon of retired officers that seems to populate television news. But as with everything else, there is no substitute for hindsight. The Week in Review asked several prominent experts on war and on Iraq to explain what has surprised them, or not, about the war thus far.
The Pentagon's New Map (Russian translation) (German translation)
Esquire, March 2003
Since the end of the cold war, the United States has been trying to come up with an operating theory of the world--and a military strategy to accompany it. Now there's a leading contender. It involves identifying the problem parts of the world and aggressively shrinking them. Since September 11, 2001, the author, a professor of warfare analysis, has been advising the Office of the Secretary of Defense and giving this briefing continually at the Pentagon and in the intelligence community. Now he gives it to you.
Esquire's "The Sound and the Fury" letters to the editor (June)
Esquire's "The Sound and the Fury" letters to the editor (May)
The American Way of War
WITH ARTHUR K. CEBROWSKI
Proceedings [U.S. Naval Institute], January 2003
The ultimate attribute of the emerging American Way of War is the superempowerment of the war fighter--whether on the ground, in the air, or at sea.
Asia's Energy Future: The Military-Market Link
In Sam J. Tangredi, ed, Globalization and Maritime Power (National Defense University Press, 2003)
Continuing the Economic Issues and Maritime Strategy part, chapter 10 returns to the question of the economic impact (and necessity) of naval forward presence in a region of current concern, Asia-Pacific. The 2001 DOD Quadrennial Defense Review Report identifies a policy shift in American defense policy, from a Eurocentric focus to increased emphasis on potential security threats in Asia-Pacific. Chapter 10 explains the need for such a shift through its examination of the energy needs of the existing and emerging Asian economic powers notably China. According to forecasts, perhaps more than 50 percent of Mideast oil production will be directed to the Asia-Pacific region, much of it traveling by tankers through such chokepoints as the Strait of Hormuz (between Iran and Oman) and the Strait of Malacca (between Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore). This and the potential for interstate and intrastate conflict in an arc of crises running from the Middle East to Northwest Asia suggest a continuing and increasing role for the U.S. Navy the worlds last global navy and the U.S. Marine Corps and other maritime forces in maintaining the peace and stability if that region is to share in the benefits of economic globalization.
The 'Core' and 'Gap'
The Providence Journal, 7 November 2002
Defining rules in a dangerous world.
Asia: The Military-Market Link
Proceedings [U.S. Naval Institute], January 2002
China could be the world's largest auto market by 2020, increasing its oil needs by 40%. The Pentagon and Wall Street must understand their interrelationship: economic and political stability are crucial to reducing energy market risk.
Globalization Gets A Bodyguard
WITH HENRY H. GAFFNEY, JR.
Proceedings [U.S. Naval Institute], November 2001
Definitions of U.S. national security never will be the same after 11 September 2001. Americans now have a costly bodyguard in the form of a Homeland Security Council which could impact globalization on many fronts.
Globalization is Tested
Proceedings [U.S. Naval Institute], October 2001
Special: In Response to the Terrorist Attacks
Freedom Isn't Free.
India's 12 Steps to a World-Class Navy
Proceedings [U.S. Naval Institute], July 2001
The International Fleet Review in February showed off its impressive fleet;
now the Indian Navy must determine how it wants to use it.
Top Ten Post-Cold War Myths
WITH HENRY H. GAFFNEY, JR.
Proceedings [U.S. Naval Institute], February 2001
As a mobile, sea-based containment force, the U.S. Navy will continue to play an important role in the nation's foreign policy, but its missions will mirror the clustered responses in Iraq and Yugoslavia, not the obsolete two-major-theater-war standard.
Force Structure Will Change
WITH HENRY H. GAFFNEY, JR.
Proceedings [U.S. Naval Institute], October 2000
Each service stands to win--or lose--depending on what national security visions the new administration embraces. System visions favor air forces; nation-state visions favor naval forces; subnational visions favor ground forces.
Life After DODth or: How the Evernet Changes Everything
Proceedings [U.S. Naval Institute], May 2000
The relevance of DoD has declined steadily since the end of the Cold War. Coming to grips with its passing won't be easy, but the Navy is working through the five stages of grief and toward a future in cyberspace.
The Seven Deadly Sins of Network-Centric Warfare
Proceedings [U.S. Naval Institute], January 2000
They are not mortal sins; penance can be made.
It's Going to Be a Bumpy Ride
WITH HENRY H. GAFFNEY, JR.
Proceedings [U.S. Naval Institute], January 1993
The Navy is in for some heavy seas if its leaders fail to adopt a defense vision that gets them in the Washington game and positions them well with the star players--Senator Sam Nunn, Congressman Les Aspin, General Colin Powell, and President-elect Bill Clinton.
Romanian and East German Policies in the Third World: Comparing the Strategies of Ceausescu and Honecker (Westport CT: Praeger Publishers, 1992)
This book is a unique comparison of the Third World policies of the two East European regimes that were most active in the South during the 1970s and 1980s. The study examines why Romania's and East Germany's high activity levels in the South cannot be explained away as mere surrogacy for Moscow, and shows that those attempts represented the particular agendas of Honecker and Ceausescu in their efforts to alter their ties with the Soviet Union. Barnett concludes that Romania and East Germany saw opportunities in the Third World in the 1970s to forge strong diplomatic and security profiles within the Warsaw Pact's overall presence.
Gulf Pundits: An Op-Ed Scorecard
The Washington Post, 16 December 1990
Choosing up sides in our war of words over Iraq.
Why Ceausescu Fell
The Christian Science Monitor, 28 December 1989
His silent war against the Romanian people backfired.
Romania Domino Stays Upright
The Christian Science Monitor, 11 December 1989
Events in Eastern Europe may have caught the West unprepared, but Ceausescu has been ready for this upheaval for quite some time.
Hope for the best and plan for the worst. He seems myopic about China and disingenuous on body armor and humvees.
China is a threat, and one that cannot be ignored.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
What a friggin IDIOT.
It's worse than idiotic. IMHO, it is downright dangerous, because this guy will encourage our nation to make the same mistakes of the 30s today...except I believe Red China, if we continue supporting her economically, has the potantial of being a much greater threat to world-wide liberty than even Nazi Germany was.
What we ought to be doing is following the lead of a truly great American leader who recognized the near term nature of the threat and the long term consequences of not addressing it. I am speaking of Ronald Reagan and how he handled and defeated the Soviets. We should be doing the same with the Red Chinese because they are in the process of wholly breaking out of the failed marxist economic model and adopting and perfecting a more fascist model like that of Nazi Germany...again, in my own opinion.
Maybe not Mongolia, but rather Kazakhstan or Turkmenistan.
This article from Barnett is over the top. I guess he's angling for a top job in the next Democrat administration. It reminds me of James Fallows 1981 book, "National Defense."
Both share the same premise that high tech weaponry is too expensive, too exotic, and ultimately useless.
Fallows used bogus statistics from the Vietnamn War regarding the limited use of fighter aircraft - (guess what the NVA had no friggin air force). Gary Hart of course adioted this trendy analysis in 1984 and argued that we need a cheap efficient simple low tech military. The greater than 30:1 fighter kill ratios (Israel vs Syria in the 80's), cruise missiles, JDAMS, B-2's, etc wouldn't be available today if those turkeys ruled the roost.
Barnett doesn't take the Chinese potential threat seriously. It's not his job. Rumsfeld doesn't want this country blackmailed 10 years from now because he took the advice of academic pooftas claiming to know the future.
Why hasn't he been shot for treason yet?
(Yes, I read a number of his pieces. All the positive "developments" and "trends" tend to wishful thinking or misrepresentations, e.g. the crowd of haggling shoppers at the Chinese Wal-Mart. They aren't the ones making the decisions!)
I'm willing to bet H5N1 was one of their bio-warfare agents which got released accidentally and took out a bunch of Chicoms, and is now spreading.
Communist efficiency again: when your political boss can lie and then have you shot, you learn to say whatever he wants pretty quick, even if you have to lie to do it. Hence the poor controls on the bioengineering and the containment...
No, no proof, just suspicions from reading various sites over the past year about H5N1...
Interesting comments. I agree that communism in China has burnt out.
However, Chinese hyper-nationalism is ascendent. For example the citzenry is borderline irrational regarding Taiwan and don't seem to care that the Taiwanese, whom by in large do not belong to the same Han Chinese ethnic group, don't wish to be assimilated.
Nationalism was the drug that motivated entire classes at Oxford to die charging German machine guns in the first battle of the Somme WW1.
In addition, due to their one child policy and resulting dreadful female infanticide, there are literally millions of boys without any hope for brides coming of age. Young men without women and a future always spell trouble regardless of the culture.
Thanks for the mention of the DSL!
People make the mistake in thinking that since China is no longer communist, they aren't our enemies.
I know China is no longer communist, they're now fascists. Hence the comparison to Germany, and not the USSR. And no, I don't think they want open war with the US, at least not right now. But they will move militarily on Taiwan sooner or later.
I'd like to sit Barnett down on the wrong side of the Taiwan Strait -- with all them Chi missiles stuck up his you know what. Who does he think is double dealing us on North Korea? Or Iran? Or Cuba? Or Venezuela? Or Panama? Or even, Russia?
Also, never underestimate the deeply ingrained sense of burning humiliation by the Chinese over the "unequal treaties," the Opium Wars, "gun boat diplomacy" and so on.
Inside, the Chinese feel that the last 200 years were a period of national humiliation, when the West stomped on their face with muddy boots.
Payback time is coming, when the Chinese (as they see it) regain their natural status as the world's greatest power.
They will not forget those muddy Western boots stomping on their proud Oriental face.
Exactly. "Peace through collaboration."
So it took him nine years to pen this screed.
China is about as much fiend as friend. They can't control corruption among their people even though they do a lot of showy crackdowns. The best thing that can be said for trade with China is that it provides an incentive for them not to nuke us.
Would you say that again and louder. lol
Sounds like a Corporatist propaganda sheet in defense of the Chicoms to dumb down America. Pure trash. On the other hand, the admin would probably agree with it..
It will be a disaster for them, but they will try it.
China hasn't won a foreign war in many centuries, they will be humiliated again, but I don't doubt they will try it.
As I said when I posted this article he definitely causes discussion having readers and listeners at his lectures on one side or the other. Your comments are interesting. I didn't post mine initially as I wanted to see the discussion progress. I personally have agreement and disagreement on individual sentences and paragraphs within this article.
Overall, I understand what he is saying, based on economics and cultural indicators. And having been reading his various articles over the years I can see where he is attempting to lead us too. Then too, I guess that since my birth certificate is prior to 1955 I still have the "Cold War baby mentality" and still see the potential danger in China (Red China). China bears very close watching and scrutiny for quite a while to come. But I know the era is definitely over when we send in the Marines to save business's bacon. New thinking comes along very 40-50 years or so on how we (America) sees and does things.
The fact remains that Dr Barnett has center stage right now and won out over the 'China Threat' folks at the Pentagon and elsewhere. Through out the ages we have transitioned from one thinker to another. Such as Sun Tzu, Tactics, Julius Ceasar, Frederick the Great, Carl von Clausewitz and George Kennan (not all are military). On even into our age with the likes of John Boyd and his 'OODA Loop' and John Lind and other 4GW thinkers just to name a few (sorry if I left your favorite out). Each having their impact on the course and conduct of war and diplomacy and even reaching into other areas and endeavors.
It's all a matter of whose ear a person has that determines the weight his words, written or spoken, have. In the case of Dr Barnett he has the ears of the 'movers and the shakers' in the Defense Department and apparently the State Department based on their announcement this month of the realignment of their personnel, embassies and other offices worldwide. A transforming military and a transforming diplomatic corps.
I recommend all his works for your reading, you will not be disappointed and you'll have some lively discussions. Sometimes those discussions will be between yourself as you read and absorb what he is saying.
I agree 1000%
No. He is a disengenous nincompoop. One who has consistently failed to understand, or appreciate the scope and scale of China's very much military/industrial threat. And Russia's ongoing collaboration thereto.
You'll agree with him on somethings ad disagree on others.
I have yet to see a SINGLE thing he postulates that I find agreeable. I say without compunction that Barnett is totally and completely a left wing wack job...an Alger Hiss. He got fired finally after openly campaigning for John Kerry from his DOD job. A servile tool of Communist China apologetics. His misunderstanding of how devoted those 35-year old Chinese "factory" managers are to those aging political hadliners who have scripted the demise of the U.S. industrial position is complete. And we have done nothing to shake the Communist Party's foundations. If anything, with our own corporate complicity, and governmental strategic industry neglect and misfeasance, we have bolstered their communist control.
The "free-wheeling capitalist China" is not real. It is a front, tethered on a leash made of totalitarian steel cables...with the reigns strongly held by those monsters who still worship at Mao's feet.
And I am under Barnett's magical age limits. His age is, if I'm not mistaken, also over those same age limits not to listen to, BTW.
Fortunately, Barnett finally got his butt fired in '04 out of the hold-over post in the USN War College. A posting that Xlinton had appointed him to in what, August '98? From that post he spewed demented world views supportive of Strobe Talbott's, Madeline Allbrights and Bill Xlinton's.
That was a long time for a lying miscreant to demoralize and confuse our military... but we here at Free Republic are ready to roll up our sleeves and take this BS'ing idjit on.
Did you see the biting sarcasm of a like-minded reviewer of Barnett's book, The Pentagon's New Map? Here is a snippet:
Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) -
This is another of those books that started as an article and should have stayed there. The author, who appears to be either unfamiliar with or unwilling to credit works from earlier decades as well as more recently that present ideas similar to and often superior to his, has essentially three good ideas that can be summed up as follows:
Idea #1: World can be divided into a Functioning Core and a Non-Integrating Gap. The disconnected gap is bad for business (risky) and the US military can protect its budget by getting into the business of exporting security so that Wall Street can do more business safely.
Idea #2: Connectivity or disconnectedness are the essential means of defining and influencing which countries are able to move into the Functioning Core and which remain in the Non-Integrating Gap [too state-centric for my taste, but a good point--my 1990's call for Digital Marshal Plan remains valid.]
Idea #3: Economic relationships have replaced military power as the essential attribute of relations among nations--for example, we cannot deal with China as a military power without first having a comprehensive economic strategy and economic tools with which to influence them.
There are many points where I agree with the author, and I give him credit for thinking of all of this on his own, without much attention to decade's worth of scholarship and informed professional opinion in the military journals. He is absolutely correct to note that we cannot fence the Gap, we must stabilize it. Of course, Joe Nye and Max Manwaring and Mark Palmer and Bob Oakley and Jonathan Schell, to name just 5 of the 470+ national security authors have made important points along these lines, but their work is not integrated here. This is one massive Op-Ed that should have remained an article.
The author has irritated me with his low-key but obvious assumption that he is the first to break out of the box and "get it." On page 63 he goes on at length with the view that America has lacked visionaries, and the implication that he is the first to come forward. Not true. From John Boyd to Chuck Spinney to Bill Lind to GI Wilson to Mike Wylie we have had many visionaries, but the military-industrial complex has always seen them as threats. We tend to dismiss and shoot our visionaries, and I am truly glad that the author's personal relations with Cebrowski and a few others--as well as his fortunate association with a couple of naval think-forward endeavors--has given him some running room.
There is actually little of substance in this book. The article has been expanded, not with substance, but rather with very long descriptions of this young man's engagement in the process of the Pentagon and the process of strategic reflection. His discussions of the many forums that he found boring if not hostile to free thinking are excellent, and that aspect of the book takes it to four stars where it might normally have only received three.
Two weaknesses of the book, perhaps associated with the author's urgent need to "stay inside the wire" in order to keep his job:
1) All his brilliance leads to just two forces being recommended: the "big stick" force and the "baton-stick" (constabulary) force. In fact, were he more familiar with the literature, he would have understood that from diverse points we are all converging on four forces after next: Big War, Small War including White Hat/Police Ops, Peace War, and Cyber-Economic War. Inter-agency strategy, inter-agency budgeting, and inter-agency operations, with a joint inter-agency C4I corps under military direction, are the urgently needed next step.
2) The author is delusional when describing and praising our operational excellence in defeating well-armed enemies. Were he more familiar with the after action reports from Iraq, particularly those done by the Army War College (clearly on a different planet from the Navel War College), he would understand that Iraqi incompetence was the foremost factor in our success, especially when Rumsfeld insisted on throwing out the sequence of force plans and sending us in light and out of balance. He also ignores the vulnerability of complex systems and relies much too heavily on University of Maryland and CIA unclassified publications that are completely out of step with European conflict studies and other arduously collected ground truths about the extent of state and sub-state war and violence.
I disagree with his concluding recommendations that place Africa last on the list of those areas to be saved. His overall recommendations are simplistic, focusing on the standard litany for Pentagon go-alongs: Iraq, Korea, Iran, Colombia, Middle East, China, Asian NATO, Latin American NATO, Africa.
I note with interest his use of the term, "the military-market link." I believe this refers to an assumption, matured by the author in the course of his Wall Street wargames, and certainly acceptable to the neo-conservatives, to wit, that the U.S. military exists to export security so America can do business. I would draw the reader's attention to Marine Corps General Butler's book, "War as a Racket", and his strong objection to having spent his career as an "enforcer" for US corporations.
I do want to end with a note of deep sympathy for the author. On the one hand, he overcame a period of time when his sanity was questioned by ignorant Admirals and other "lesser included" Captains of limited intellect. On other he is trapped in a system that does not like iconoclasts but rewards those who innovate on the margins. His book is most useful in describing this environment, where people who rely on secrets are completely out of touch with reality, and service chiefs focus on protecting their budgets rather than accomplishing (or even defining) their mission. He appears to have discovered the Catholic mafia within the naval services, and his several references throughout the book lend weight to my belief that we need to do religious counter-intelligence within the government.
/Sarcasm OFF
(on behalf of Mr. Steele)
I think you're overstating how much the Chinese culture has to "offer".
Oh I agree, that the culture has some aesthetic value, but on the big stuff, like theology, philosphy, politics, ethics, economics, etc, it's mostly a barren wasteland.
Must be the reason Clinton kept selling them our classified technology.
Still think you're wrong.
Food & opera are part of the aesthetics that I was refering to.
Ancient Chinese philosophy had a few impressive things, but not on the same level of the Greeks like Aristotle, and even that basicaly came to a halt around 200 B.C. when the country was unified. Since then it has been a barren wasteland.
The entire culture is defined by it's obsession with obedience and comformity, and really they are code words for slavery. Every relationship between 2 people is defined by master and slave.
I'd like to know what other planet with entities with these names he might be referring too...he couldn't possibly be referring to Earth could he? I mean this guy is supposed to be "smart." What is it with our intellectuals and their obsequious love affair with the PRC?
The Japanese are our best ally and ace in the hole. There is nothing the PRC would fear more than a rearmed Japan with its own indigenous defense industry. I agree that this guy is an idiot...and if the comparisons to Keenan are justified...than that would seal the deal that he is a "useful idiot," of the variety so much favored by Lenin et al.
Well then we are in agreement, but it seems like that's because you've come around to my sdie.
If the goal is for the Chinese to adopt Christianity and Judeo/Christian morality, then it's really about China learning from the West, not the other way around.
Watch out for Russia. They want a piece of the action against the US.
They could move into Mongolia. However, it will be split between China and Russia.
I know, hence the comparison to Poland.
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