Brief Reminder: The beginnings of System Administration

Fairly self-explanatory slide I used in the original brief I delivered for the Office of Force Transformation.  Wasn't a cornerstone slide or anything like that, but I did have it in for certain audiences.

Basic notion is to show that the SysAdmin activity really started about the same time (mid-1980s) when Soviets were deep into their withdrawal from mischief-making in the Gap (curtailing or ending aid to Countries of Socialist Orientation) as part of the Gorbachev-led rethink of foreign policy and relations with the West.

The first great SysAdmin op, in my mind, was the escort ops during the "tanker war" between Iran and Iraq. It was rather purely designed to be a system-stabilizing effort and it worked magnificently.  After that, we're into the sheriff work:  arrest Noriega, oust Iraq from Kuwait, stabilize Somalia, the Balkans stuff, then Afghanistan-Iraq-and-associated-GWOT (as it was then known: global war on terror).  

Meanwhile, the Sovs fall off the map and the only thing capturing the Leviathan's long-term attention is the possibility of casting China as a semi-hostile threat of "near-peer" status (remember, this is before our growing financial connectivity with China took off or became widely recognized).  

I remember this chart as a 2002-2003 slide.

Comments

[David Emery]

I like this slide... It definitely provides a historical perspective on not just military strategy but also globalization/economic strategy (if such a term makes sense.)

But I'm still very concerned that the focus on COIN and SysAdmin will come at the expense of our ability to handle medium intensity conflicts. I guess I can accept that the era of big wars is over (but the historian in me says 'don't bet on it...') But we should not assume that our battles going forward will all resemble Iraq/Afghanistan. Hizbollah in Lebanon and the Balkans both argue for conflicts that are characterized by asynchronous battles in both physical and cyberspace, providing substantial challenges to The Leviathan that I'm not sure we're fully prepared for.

[louis Heberlein]

There was a type of SysAdmin orientation to US military, businesses and worker bear embassy folks during the period between the Spanish American War and WW I. Meanwhile continental European nations and Russia became involved in Leviathan colonial empire competition. When that triggered WW I and US had to help deal with consequences, our military and diplomatic folks decided that if we had to participate in globalization it should be a 'civilized' top down Leviathan type approach rather than the .... 'corrupt' pragmatic SysAdmin game previously played by our international business ventures with military guerrilla fighters and embassy worker bears. I saw that Pentagon mindset for decades, except during brief JFK time. I was surprised when I later started teaching and found a similar bias against pragmatic SysAdmin methods in the academic establishment.