David Ignatius on the rise of the SysAdmin force (Washington Post column)

Dateline: in the loft at Nona's, Terre Haute IN, 18 May 2005

You know why Ignatius writes these sorts of interesting op-eds? The man really puts in the miles and the hours, going to things like the Highlands Forum where he was exposed to that impressive brief on the Defense Science Board report, which is probably (and I'm not the only one who thinks this) the single most important and best-researched report the DSB has ever produced.

Absent guys like Ignatius pushing these things out into the public's eye, no one would ever hear of these things. So like Greg Jaffe of the Journal, Ignatius becomes someone I always read because he's a rare journalist who's that plugged into the defense community that he serves as an effective bellweather of when a concept hits the public's radar. Life in my world is so amazingly insular, we need guideposts like this.

Here's the opening snippets of the piece, found at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/17/AR2005051701327.html, along with his nice plug for PNM:

A Quiet Transformation
By David Ignatius
Wednesday, May 18, 2005; Page A17

As the United States was struggling with the postwar reconstruction of Iraq, the historian Niall Ferguson published a book arguing that America needed the modern equivalent of the old British Colonial Office to build political stability in far-flung places . . .

. . . behind the scenes, the administration is debating a range of major policy changes that would move in that direction -- transforming the military services, the State Department and other agencies in ways that would help the United States do better what it botched so badly in Iraq . . .

The most creative analysis is a study that Rumsfeld requested last year from the elite Defense Science Board . . .

The first recommendation by the Defense Science Board was that the military apply its genius for logistics and management to peacemaking as well as war-fighting . . . "The military services need to reshape and rebalance their forces to provide a stabilization and reconstruction capability" . . .

The Defense Science Board study tracks arguments made by the most influential defense intellectual writing these days, Thomas P.M. Barnett. He argued last year in "The Pentagon's New Map" that the U.S. military should be divided into two forces that reflect its differing missions: a "Leviathan" force, centered around the Air Force and Navy, that could apply overwhelming power quickly anywhere in the world; and what he called a "System Administrator" force, based in the Army and Marines, that could win the decisive battle to stabilize and rebuild nations in the aftermath of conflict.

These radical post-Iraq ideas are beginning to take root. At the State Department, there's a new Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization under director Carlos Pascual . . .