The White House: "Give us the Sys Admin Force!"

Datelineóabove the garage, Portsmouth RI, 19 April

Now, before you get all excited and start tracing cause-and-effect, let me assure you that the proposal known as the Global Peace Operations Initiative has been in the works inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense for several months. Again, all my material really does is provide the decoder ring for translating what seems like a mishmash of moves and initiative coming out of this administration as they struggle to adapt the national security establishment to the strategic security environment as they find it.

The plan, approved by Bush this month, calls for the U.S. to spend $660m over the next five years to help generate the capacity in Gap states to mount collective security, or peacekeeping efforts in response to failed states, civil wars, rehab efforts like Iraq, and so on. The short-term focus is Africa, because the fear is that the U.S., being so busy in the Middle East, can't manage squat in Africa in the meantime. But in reality, this proposal shows that this administration is warming up to the notion that a Sys Admin function is required to manage the Gap as a whole.

Like most things this administration tries, they want to do this on the cheap as much as possible, while retaining maximum freedom of action for the U.S. Such an approach may get the ball rolling, especially if you throw the better part of a billion at the problem (but that's really only peanuts over 5 years), but to really seed the beginnings of such a Gap-wide force, the U.S. has to not only admit its central role in enabling such a force on the ground (we are the hub, everyone else is the spokes, and when I say "hub," I mean command and control + logistics most of all), but realize that until we seed our own force in such a way as to constitute a serious Sys Admin contingent in its own right, other militaries will not be sufficiently attracted to the effort to really police the Gap in a comprehensive fashion.

Yes, a focus on African states is fine, but even getting a serious collective effort there isn't going to solve much on that continent. Getting New Core powers to pony up serious numbers, like I said in the Washington Post Outlook article of 11 April, is what will really get the ball rolling.

For now, this administration is only willing to throw some bucks at the general direction of Africa, in effect trying to outsource peacekeeping to the locals there. Not a bad start, but until DoD takes far more seriously the call of an Art Cebrowski and others that the U.S. military needs its own dedicated peacekeeping battalions, no one around the world is going to take such an initiative too seriously.

Yet, I cite this proposal (reference: "Bush Plans Aid to Build Foreign Peace Forces," by Bradley Graham, Washington Post, 19 April, p. A1) as yet further evidence that the system itself is groping in the direction of what I call the Sys Admin function in providing security across the Gap. Every step closer is one less step we need to take when the right disaster finally comes along to force the issue for good.