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Linked Already?
By Charlie
What a coincidence! My first post since my long break and I get linked by Thomas P.M. Barnett –whose books I just read. The first was Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating, As well as the Pentagon’s New Map.
For anyone who has been on an extensive military deployment, you are no doubt familiar with the fact that free time always seems to be either completely absent or horribly abundant. That being said, a good book is always something to keep in your assault pack for those longs lines at CIF, waiting for your firing order at the range, or just general barracks boredom. I’ve been reading quite a bit since I’ve been mob’d, and since I was linked, I think I’ll speak to some of the things Barnett mentions in his books. I thought they were good, pertinent, and thoughtful looks at today’s military, foreign policy, and place in the world today.
Our current, number one threat today is terrorism with international reach. That threat is compounded with the threat of WMD (or CRBNRE, or whatever they’re calling it this week). Terrorism, however, is a tactic, not an entity that can be attacked (imagine a war against individual movement techniques, or bounding over watch…). Terrorism is an outgrowth of a dysfunctional society, and while the short term solution may be to kill the terrorists, the long term solution needs to be a strategy that pulls the dysfunctional societies of the world into the “core” of “grown-up” countries.
Barnett groups the world into the “core” and the “gap”- those dysfunctional societies that lack “connectivity” with the outside world. Barnett defines “connectivity” as economic, social, cultural, and political. More connectivity is good (i.e., me being able to keep tabs on current new through the internet and talk to my family at home via call phone) less connectivity is bad (the poor family in Syria who knows only what the government tells them).
So Barnett’s grand strategy (his version of Kennan’s Long Telegram) is simple: use the full spectrum of American influence in the world to “shrink the gap.” The stuff I was interested in was how the military played a role in this. The author recommends splitting the force into a “Leviathan” and a “System Administrator” force. The Leviathan would be the Air Force, Army Armor, and the Blue Water Navy. Its job is (on order) to over through rouge regimes, and then to a battle-handover to the Sysadmin (Marines, Army Reserve Component, Civil Affairs-types). It’s interesting reading.
Institutionally, there are some major hurdles to get through in re-imagining the Army as a “stabilization” force instead of a war fighting/war winning force. Infantry/Armor/Cav/Artillery officers become 4-star generals, not MP, CA, and Reserve-Component officers. It takes an institutional sea-change to make that happen.
I’ve got one serious bone to pick with Barnett: Iran. He suggests we can make a “grand bargain” with Tehran, bringing lasting peace and stability to the Persian Gulf. A reckoning is coming between Iran and America, and it will be anything but lasting and peaceful. I do agree with his assessment that we will be at war in the gap for the foreseeable future, and there is no “exit strategy.” Broken countries need to get connected, and sometimes they have to be drug, kicking and screaming, into the current century.
Read the books, though. They are a refreshingly optimistic look at America’s role in the world today.
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Comments
I've read the Pentagon's New Map, I thought it was excellent.
Agreed on Iran though, how do you bargain with folks who have a religious devotion to killing?
Answer:
YOU DON'T.
LtCol P
bingo!
If you gave a simple internet connected computer to everyone in the world, you would have more 'connectivity', but terrorist would still be terrorist. Don't we have bad guys growing up in the UK for several generations and not yet assimilating or renouncing their culture in exchange for ours? Don't we here in the US have whole communities that are sick and dysfunctional? And then take your middle class kids who in exchange for a relationship with their parents and peers decide that it good to go out with a bang and kill their classmates?
My point is that there is evil in the world, here at home, and in each heart. Proposing to export solutions that don't acknowledge that, and that don't take into account the fact that the proposed solution is already found wanting withing out own boarders, seems to have missed the point.
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We had some leaders training last week where Barnett came up. I remember reading the essay that eventually became "The Pentagon's New Map."
It's certainly interesting--but yeah, on the mil side his prescription is that "two armies" approach. First send in the killers, then send in the administrators.
While I'm sympathetic to that in the context of nation-building type operations, i don't think we can assume that will be the only (or even prime) mission in the future.
I can think of at least one big Asian country where that approach might not be all that valuable.