From Deleted Scenes from The Pentagon's New Map.

Deleted Scene #1

Chapter One: New Rule Sets

Section: New Rules For a New Era

Commentary: This first "deleted scene" was something I ginned up in response to Mark Warren's concern that Chapter One really needed some firm explication of what I felt were the major rule-set shifts between the Cold War that ended years ago and the post-9/11 global security environment we find ourselves now inhabiting. We figured it would go in the second section entitled, "New Rules for a New Era." I cranked this out one afternoon after finishing some writing on Chapter Two. Mark liked the material and spent a lot of time trying to figure out where it might go in the first chapter, but in the end we decided not to use it because there was no easy place to put it and we feared it would slow down the pace with its intense summarizing qualities.

Deleted Scene: Rule-set Shifts From Cold War To Current Era

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Let me offer a dozen examples of the rule set shifts I think we have undergone since the end of the Cold War, but which were not apparent to us until 9/11.

First and most obviously, in the Cold War the old rule was that our homeland was an effective sanctuary thanks to our nuclear stand-off with the Soviets. They could not touch us at home and we did not dare touch them where they lived for fear of triggering global war. When the Cold War ended, the misalignment that emerged was our assumption that we could play a pure "away game" militarily (i.e., intervene overseas) with no incurred dangers back at home, and that simply was not true. What we learned on 9/11 is that if we took the fight to them, eventually they would bring it back to us, and since no relationship of strategic deterrence exists between the U.S. and these new bad actors (exactly which society do we hold at risk to deter Al Qaeda?), any "away game" we engage in from now on will necessarily trigger a "home game" heightening of security.

That leads to the rule set shift that says war is no longer something you plan for in isolation. In the Cold War, the old rule said that if we went to war, it would be total, so planning for war was -- in many ways -- fairly simple, because you would not need to account for any simultaneous peace. War planning, therefore, was conducted with almost no reference to the larger world outside -- or what I call planning for "war within the context of war." The misalignment that emerged in the 1990s was caused by globalization itself, which generated levels of worldwide economic connectivity that soon dwarfed the sorts of wars that still occur. In other words, the global economy no longer comes to a standstill for wars, so planning for wars now has to take into consideration the rest of the peace -- or what I call planning for "war within the context of everything else." Truth be told, the Pentagon is chocked full of people with great expertise at planning wars within the context of war, but almost none with any expertise at planning wars within the context of everything else.

The third rule-set change involves how we define the threat. The old rule set said the Pentagon should focus on the biggest threat to U.S. security emanating from the strategic environment. For most of Defense Department's existence, that threat was the Soviet Union. When the Soviets disappeared, the Pentagon spent the nineties searching for a peer, eventually settling on China as the next best thing -- a "near-peer." But that need for a nation-state as the biggest threat blinded the U.S. to the growing danger of transnational terrorism. After 9/11, the new rule set says the Pentagon should focus on the strategic environment that generates threats, not on any one specific threat.

A fourth rule-set change concerns how we define the major divisions in the international security environment. During the Cold War, it was the West versus the East. In the nineties, most assumed the dividing line would lie between the North (rich) and the South (poor), with the first Persian Gulf War signaling the beginning of resource-focused conflicts between advanced states which lacked key raw materials and developing economies that possessed them in abundance. But as globalization grows more pronounced and visible, the new rule set becomes the division between the connected or globalizing economies of the world (Core) and those which are largely disconnected from the global economy (Gap). In the past we asked, "Are you with us or against us?" From now on, the question becomes, "Are you in or are you out?"

A fifth rule set shift involves the difference in defining strategic success. In the Cold War, strategic success could be simply paraphrased as "hold that line." So long as the Soviet bloc was not expanding, we were winning, because it was our contention that the socialist states would weaken and collapse over time. The mistake assumption we made over the 1990s was to assume that the "bad stuff," or conflicts of the international security environment could be safely kept "outside, over there." That was, in fact, the unstated motto of ÖFrom the Sea: we wanted to "keep it over there" and -- by doing so -- keep America safe. After 9/11, we know how self-deluding that sort of security strategy really is. Because if there is enough pain "over there," eventually we will be made to feel it "over here." Therefore, "holding the line" between globalization's Core and Gap is not even an option. We cannot wait for the Gap to weaken and collapse; that is already happening and the major reason why security issues there abound. Now the status quo is our enemy and our motto becomes, "shrink the Gap."

A sixth rule set change emerges directly the previous: our definition of problem Third World states. During the Cold War we called them "client states," and they belonged either to our bloc or the other guy's. During the nineties, these largely fragile states typically failed to attract the generous sponsorship of any major power, and in many instances collapsed into endemic internal conflict, and so we called them "failed states." But after 9/11, the new rule set says that the states we tended to ignore over the nineties, or the ones that became increasingly disconnected from the global community, became havens for such dangerous transnational terrorist networks as Al Qaeda. So now we pay very close attention to these "disconnected states."

Our concerns about such disconnected states yields a rule-set shift in the area of weapons of mass destruction. The old Cold War rule set said arms control was the way to go in controlling a stand-off with an enemy we knew -- deep down -- we could deter. In the 1990s, a misalignment emerged thanks to our over-reliance on the instrument of sanctions to stem what we feared would be a "fire sale" of WMD from the collapsed Soviet Bloc states to rogue nations. As Al Qaeda proved on 9/11, mass deaths can be achieved without recourse to WMD, and yet, does anyone doubt Osama Bin Laden would have used WMD on 9/11 if he had had the capability? So now the new rule set says that, rather than hoping sanctions will be enough, America preempts in those special situations where we judge the "bad actors" in question are potentially undeterrable.

But as preemption is easily characterized by critics as a rash strategic response, the Pentagon is forced to reevaluate its focus on strategic speed -- or how fast we decide to go to war. During the Cold War, we maintained ourselves on a hair-trigger alert with the Soviets, a stance we relaxed in the 1990s. But our focus on rushing to respond to crisis situations remained strong in the 1990s, thanks in large part to our experience with Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. With the emergence of our new strategy of preemption, however, it is a "fast" U.S. military establishment that the advanced world fears most: reckless, trigger-happy, and prone to unilateralism. Thus the new rule set on strategic response is that Pentagon stresses the inevitability over speed.

A ninth rule-set shift involves our technological standing vis-a-vis potential foes. During the Cold War, we faced an enemy of roughly equal technology. When that "peer" disappeared, we spent the nineties preparing for less-advanced foes that would negate our military strengths "asymmetrically" by attacking our weak spots. But those fears have proved misplaced. As our recent military victories in Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrated, America has no problem overwhelming smaller foes in war. Instead, we discover that our military Achilles' heel is not our dependency on technology to wage war, but the lack of a sufficiently large, low-tech constabulary force to win the peace that follows.

A related rule-set shift concerns the long-vaunted requirement that America must always have an "exit strategy" in place prior to beginning any overseas intervention. In the waning years of the Cold War, the Pentagon sought to distance itself from the lingering effects of the Vietnam War, or the nation's profound reticence to jump into potential "quagmires." The Powell Doctrine, so named for then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell, sought to prevent such open-ended interventions by requiring both the application of "overwhelming force" and a pre-determined definition of a completed mission that was limited in scope. So, if the Cold War rule set stated that America could not leave without a victory, then the Powell Doctrine declared that there could be no victory without leaving. The new rule set of this global war on terrorism turns the Powell Doctrine completely on its head by saying--in effect--that military victories in war are meaningless unless they are followed by political victories in peace. But more importantly, the military's role does not end with war termination.

The death of the Powell Doctrine also marks the resurrection of the Army from its strategic deathbed. During the Cold War, strategic nuclear forces ruled the Pentagon roost, thanks to their dominant role in deterring the Soviet threat. Across the nineties, thanks to Desert Storm and the Kosovo campaign, air power was promoted as the heart and soul of a "transformed" military, while "antiquated" ground forces were slated for the dustbin of history. Now, thanks to the inescapable nation-building requirements triggered by preemptive wars, the Army shifts from transformation bad boy to "imperial" poster boy.

Finally, the global war on terrorism redirects the Pentagon from its decades-long focus on internal networking among the four services to a much-needed expansion of its external networking capacity. During the Cold War, the four services largely operated on their own, with their coordination primarily defined by "deconfliction," or the avoidance of friendly fire. In the post-Cold War era, inter-service coordination was expanded to the concept of "jointness," or the notion that individual services would seamlessly support one another on the battlefield. As such, the Pentagon spent the nineties wiring up the four services to one another to achieve what was called "network-centric operations." With the global war on terrorism, the past focus on "jointness" is overwhelmed by the need to improve "interagency" coordination between the Defense Department and the rest of the U.S. Government. In other words, "war within the context of war" meant you had to make sure every soldier could communicate with every other soldier, but "war within the context of everything else" means that same solider must also be able to communicate with a host of non-defense organizations -- both public and private-sector, both U.S. and foreign.

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