ARTICLE: “Sailors, airmen land new role: Training to help strained Army in combat zones,” by Tom Vanden Brook, USA Today, 8 May 2006, p. 1A.

ARTICLE: “With Jobs Scarce, U.S. Pilots Sign On At Foreign Airlines: Global Travel Boom Yields Tempting Pay for Expats; Concerns About Safety; A Captain’s New Life in Dubai,” by Susan Carey, Bruce Stanley and John Larkin, Wall Street Journal, 5 May 2006, p. A1.

So we’ve seen Army and Marines recruiting airmen and sailors coming out of their hitches, and now we just see the ground-pounders start borrowing people while they’re still wearing blue instead of green.

Army spokesman says this doesn’t reflect any stress or strain. Sure it does.

Krepenevich says so, and he’s right.

But in reality, this is just the Pentagon responding too slowly to long-building market changes. The Leviathan has cornered the war market, and now basically owns it. So the world and our enemies move to a new mountaintop, countering Net-Centric Warfare with Fourth Generation Warfare.

So we either master this new terrain or marketspace by building the SysAdmin force and function, or we find ourselves consistently beaten (politically, not militarily) by such “newcomers” to the market.

This sort of backfilling is the same as relying on private military corps to do more and more of the SysAdmin stuff, and pretending that, in the future, the Pentagon can outsource the GWOT to Special Ops Command.

Same basic thing’s happening in the airline industry: where our pilots are losing jobs and are increasingly turning to booming New Core (Asia) and Gap (Middle East) markets.

Wait until some foreign airline tries to take over an American one, like China Southern buying some ailing US giant and turning it into a discount airline. That’ll make the Dubai ports deal seem tame by comparison.

And yet, this scenario is inevitable, and it will happen much faster than we expect. The business world is like that, even if the Pentagon can live in denial about its own marketspace for years on end.