Thomas P.M. Barnett

■"African Union Strives to End Deadly Cycle in Darfur," by Somini Sengupta, New York Times, 29 November 2004, p. A3.

Sudan is becoming a key proving ground for the African Union, and they certainly couldn't have picked a more difficult spot right now:

For the African Union, a nascent organization representing African governments and struggling to shake off the mantle of its largely ineffectual predecessor, the Organization of African Unity, Darfur represents a crucial test. If the union's mission succeeds in Darfur, it will score a major credibility victory. If it fails, the price will be dear.
"We will take a long time to recover our credibility toward our people and our partners," Jean-Baptiste Natama, a senior political officer in the African Union, said this week.

The African Union's success or failure will be measured, in part, by how it responds to incidents like the one in Tawila and whether it can prevent others like it. For now, its troop strength in Sudan, which may take until February or later to reach its full level of 3,400 peacekeepers, is grossly insufficient to deploy full-time to every fractious, violence-prone town like Tawila.

Privately, diplomats in Sudan have long worried that deploying so few troops would be a recipe for failure. Since the violence in Tawila, Jan Pronk, the top United Nations envoy for Sudan, suggested expanding the African Union force to more than twice the number.

To me, it's situations like this that speak to the compelling need for the Core as a whole to be able to put forth a SysAdmin force that would enable a regional entity like the AU to do more than just run around snapping photos and taking notes while the killing continues unabated. Everyone in the Core wants this situation to settle, but we don't have a transparent, non-zero-sum process for making it happen, and that process can't come into being until the military resources are pooled and coherently arranged in a larger whole, and that international military capability won't come about until the Pentagon shows it's serious of fielding its own version of a Sys Admin force.

How much force would that need to be?

Recently, Chet Richard's review of PNM ended with the following bit of logic:

If there are indeed two billion people in the Gap, one could envision the need for an international Core Sys Admin force of some 20 million members [applying Shinseki's ratio, which in light of recent events may be conservative] trained and funded to take control of failed societies and rebuild them not as Western, Christian democracies but as connecting members of the World Core in all its myriad forms, each respecting all the others as long as they continue to connect. Although a force this size may seem impractical, it is only marginally more than the 16 million Americans who served in WW II. The entire modern Core holds around 4 billion people, and eliminating the Gap is the most critical factor in their, that is, our continued well being and perhaps of our continuing to exist at all.

When I reviewed this review, some readers were unhappy I didn't deal with this cited figure of 20 million, which frankly, I viewed as bizarre in its logic of positing an occupation force for the entire Gap all at onceóand I still do.

Here now is how I would disaggregate that number down to something more realistic: Let's go with Mr. Richard's 20 million total, as extrapolated from Shinseki's calculations for Iraq. There are roughly 100 countries in the Core. As I recount in PNM, at any one time no more than about one-third are experiencing levels of mass violence of the sort likely to trigger outside interest. So if we need 20 million SysAdmin personnel for the entire population of the Gap (2 billion), then we can lower that estimate by two-thirds right off the bat. So let's go with 7 million troops to possibly cover upwards of three dozen Gap states at any one time. Then let's use the U.S. standard of the past 15 years, which is to try and deal with the toughest cases with the highest interest levels and best chances of success. That has equated, historically speaking, to roughly one-quarter of the extant mass violence situations, or roughly 8 region- or country-specific responses a year. If we talk about a large-scale long-term effort in one country, then that simply lowers our capacity for others so long as it continues.

That brings our proposed total down to something in the range of 1.8 million personnel. Taking cue from the Europeans' recent proposal regarding a Human Security Force, let's go with the notion that one-third of the force must be civilian (mostly cops, but also judges, administrators, medical, etc.). That takes us down to 1.2 million personnel in uniform. Now let's set a standard for how big a role the U.S. should play in this total force package, because we'll primarily play a hub-within-spokes function.

Keeping that goal in mind, I would propose the U.S. supply roughly one out of every ten bodies. How do I come by that number? When polled in the mid-1990s about proposed peacekeeping in the Balkans, Americans replied that the U.S. should supply roughly one out of every five peacekeepers for such overseas situations. That's because they assumed we provided roughly 40 percent and thus they wanted to see that share cut in half, because they thought it was too high.. Actually, cutting that assumed figure in half would have yielded a burden roughly 5 times what we supplied the UN effort in Yugoslavia, which was/is only 4 % of the total. On that basis, I'm willing to bet Americans would support a ten percent share.

Ten percent of 1.2 million troops would be 120,000 troops. We have 130,000 basically engaged in Iraq today. Does it strain us at the bit to do this given all our other responsibilities around the world? You bet. But it's do-able if we restructure our forces to rebalance the Army and Marines in this direction, a process that's already in motion.

To have 120,000 out in the field, you need a force roughly 4 times that size in active duty order to handle the rotation and nine times that size in reserve components (reserves and National Guard). The Army and Marines number about 400,000 in deployable troops today, yielding a rotation of 100,000 out in the field. We have 500,000 such troops in the Reserve Component, yielding another 50k or so. That gives us 150k out of the Army, Marines, and reserves in today's largely imbalanced force. Given further transformation of the warfighting side of the house and a general rebalancing of our troop strength across the various services, and I think this is a burden the Pentagon could easily adjust to.

Could the rest of the Core supply the almost 1.1 million men? India's army alone is home to roughly 1.1 million ground forces at this time. It is the third-largest force in the world. China has two million in ground forces, plus 2.5 million more in reserve militias and police-type forces. The numbers are there, and the money is there, when you add up the entire Core as a whole.

None of this is realistic until we decide to make it realistic. Then it all becomes possible overnight.