SUNDAY OPINION: "Anarchy on Land Means Piracy at Sea," by Robert D. Kaplan, New York Times, 12 April 2009.

Kaplan has imbibed deeply of the navy's strategic vibes of late, having spend a year at one of its higher education institutions.

His notion of three navies being required (stabilization, surge, blue-seas Leviathan and deterrent to rising naval powers) mirrors exactly the scenario work I did with Hank Gaffney at the Center for Naval Analyses in the early-mid 1990s (find a Jan 93 version here), where we constructed the Department of Navy's futures along three vectors: (Transitioneers' force (presence), Big Stick force (surge for major contingencies) and Cold Worriers' force (blue-water behemoth that scares off competition). The Transitioneers were about managing the world's messy situations (all small), the Big Stick force was all about dealing with regional rogues who popped-up in the "threat trough" created by the demise of the Soviet empire, and the Cold Worriers' force was about prepping for the downstream challenge of a near-peer competitor.

Our choices were pretty solid then (I based the whole thing off the famous Manthorpe Curve which I presented as the only PPT slide in Pentagon's New Map), and it's not surprising to see them rediscovered now by Kaplan, because the environment hasn't really changed that much as far as Navy is concerned (more change for Marines, obviously).

I agree with Kaplan's interpretation of Gates: he's basically stealing a bit from Peter (Cold Worriers or Leviathan force) to pay Paul (Transitioneers or SysAdmin force). When Hank and I did our original calculations, the correlation of forces within the Navy was far more weighted to the Leviathan (the submarine mafia ruled all in the latter years of the Cold War), but today, it's a surface commanders' world inside the Navy, so the tilt clearly shifts to the SysAdmin navy.

My bit with Gaffney, by the way, fits my usual penchant to put most things according to the Waltzian model of system (PNM)/state (BFA)/individual-leaders (GP): The Transitioneers force works the subnational most of all, while the Big Stick surge force is there for state-based wars, and the Cold Worriers force is primarily focused on system-level stability.

As always, Waltz's paradigm works nicely.