The Evolution of the U.S. Military

U.S. plans to expand its military presence in Colombia have elicited predictable condemnations from anti-American elements in South America, but also concern from friends who see them as encroachment from our ongoing "war on drugs." Similarly, in another part of the world, Africa Command boss Gen. "Kip" Ward's repeated assurances that the United States isn't interested in setting up bases on the continent remains a tough sell, given the new regional combatant command's explicit mission to expand U.S. military cooperation there.

Continue reading this week's New Rules column at WPR.

Putting Resilience at the Heart of Nation-Building

These are nerve-racking times at the Pentagon. For "Big War" adherents, Iraq is not looking like the "one off" that many hoped it would be, as Afghanistan-Pakistan appears to be, if anything, an even harder slog. None of the dominant Big War scenarios are looking good, now that Iran is ever closer to nuclear deterrence, North Korea ever closer to collapse, and Taiwan ever closer to a peace deal with Beijing. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, meanwhile, is locking in a more balanced take on small wars versus large, and the serious Leviathan budget-cutting has begun.

Continue reading Tom's New Rules column for this week at WPR.

'Hard Lessons' from Iraq, for Afghanistan and Beyond

Last February, the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction published a comprehensive 456-page historical analysis of the Iraq reconstruction experience entitled, "Hard Lessons." The IG, Stuart Bowen -- who was there from the beginning, assuming the post actually before the invasion -- was kind enough to send me a copy this week. Having now read it, I must say it's an incredible piece of data collection and analysis, even if, in my opinion, its concluding optimism about the U.S. government's recent efforts to better prepare itself for the next "Iraq" -- already upon us in the form of Afghanistan -- is truly unwarranted.

Continue reading this week's New Rules column for WPR.

Clinton's Blueprint for a Multi-Partner World

Last week's major policy address by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was as noteworthy for the strategic concepts she dismissed as for the ones she embraced. Clinton provided Americans with a strong sense of how she plans to conduct U.S. foreign policy: not merely as "the indispensable nation" that assumes international leadership, but rather as the global rule-set convener that aggressively builds partnerships across a strategic landscape pulsating with rising players -- both state-based and transnational

Continue reading this week's New Rules column for WPR.

Urumqi is not Tiananmen, and Xinjiang is not Tibet

For those in the West eager to uncover another Tiananmen-like crackdown by Chinese authorities last week in the Xinjiang provincial capital of Urumqi, the true story disappoints, even as it points to a potentially far-more-destabilizing social phenomenon: the emergence of race riots inside allegedly homogenous China. Note that President Hu Jintao's embarrassingly rushed departure from the G-8 meeting in Italy was not provoked by Sunday's riots by angry Uighurs, but rather by Tuesday's even uglier revenge riots by even angrier -- and better-armed -- Han Chinese.

Continue reading this week's WPR column.

From Too Many to Too Few, Demographic Fears Exaggerated

As a kid, I was constantly subjected to fear-mongering on population growth, which was not only out of control, but certain to lead to widespread conflict, political repression, and freakish efforts at human survival. ("Soylent Green," anyone?) Now, in my middle years, I find myself increasingly assaulted with the opposite "dangers": too few babies, and a rapidly and unevenly aging world. Somehow the dire predictions of what the consequences will be have remained the same.

Continue Reading this week's New Rules column at WPR.

Pentagon Swaps 'Lesser Includeds' for 'Greater Inclusive'

Back before the Iraq surge, "military operations other than war" -- a now-antiquated term referring to non-traditional warfare -- were treated as "lesser includeds," filed deep under subsections of big-war plans, doctrine, and acquisition strategies. Today, by contrast, the U.S. national security establishment is increasingly embracing what I like to call the "greater inclusive" paradigm, which recognizes our military's rising quotient of such operations, not as some rare exception, but rather as the new rule.

Continue reading Tom's New Rules column for WPR this week.

Matching Up Priorities in a Globalized Age

China's global priorities might not match up that well with those of your average American policymaker. But they do match up quite well with President Obama's agenda. That's the sense I got after spending last week in Shanghai with a bevy of China's top foreign affairs academics. Although the workshop I attended was focused on U.S.-Chinese relations, there was no shortage of side conversation on the post-election meltdown unfolding in Iran. And nothing I heard in terms of the Chinese sense of priorities bore any resemblance to what you see these days in American newspaper headlines.

Continue reading Tom's New Rules column at WPR.

Drones and the Re-symmetricized Battlefield [link fixed]

The skyrocketing use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan has generated intense debate about how useful they are against insurgent/terrorist networks. Some prominent counterinsurgency experts have decried the "siege mentality" among non-combatant locals caused by collateral damage from the drone strikes. But despite the charge that drones represent a technology (i.e., a means) in search of a strategy (i.e., end goals), there's no question that: 1) drones are here to stay, and 2) they're truly re-symmetricizing the battlefield in a much-needed manner.

Continue reading Tom's New Rules post at WPR.

Redefining Catastrophe in a Globalized World

As the World Health Organization agonizes over whether or not to declare the H1N1 flu virus an official pandemic, I can't help but think of the American national security establishment's continuing struggle over the definition of threat in a post-9/11 world. In both instances, we see institutions with worldwide responsibilities coming to grips with an increasingly interconnected global landscape. And although that global landscape, according to all the available data, suffers less catastrophe, it nonetheless appears to present far greater potential for such catastrophes to unfold with seemingly uncontrollable consequences.

Continue to read Tom's The New Rules column for this week at WPR.

The Unflat World of Global Food Production

Last week's Economist carried a feature on a recent wave of farmland purchases in poorer parts of the world. The buyers? Cash-rich emerging markets and Arab oil states looking to insure themselves against future food shortages. And if you think that's just a reaction to last year's stunning spike in prices, think again. The new trend speaks to the impact global warming will have on where food will be produced in abundance in coming decades.

Continue reading Tom's 'The New Rules' column this week at WPR

The Good News on the Global Financial Downturn

When the global financial contagion kicked in last fall, the blogosphere was quick to predict that a sharp uptick in global instability would soon follow. While we're not out of the woods yet, it's interesting to note just how little instability -- and not yet a single war -- has actually resulted from the worst global economic downturn since the Great Depression.

Run a Google search for "global instability" and you'll get 23 million hits. But when it comes to actual conflicts, the world is humming along at a level that reflects the steady decline in wars -- by 60 percent -- that we've seen since the Cold War's end. As George Mason University's Center for Systemic Peace (CSP) notes, that trend applies within the Muslim world, too, so even America's "war on terror" has not quite lived up to the pessimists' expectations.

Read this week's column at WPR.

Navy Finally Embracing Role in Small Wars

Last week I gave a plenary address to the Joint Warfighting Conference 2009 -- the annual East Coast naval extravaganza co-sponsored by the U.S. Naval Institute (USNI) and the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA). This mega-conference opened my eyes to just how much things have changed inside our naval forces thanks to the ongoing long war against violent extremism.

To give you an idea of the ground covered, I have to take you back almost 17 years.

Navy Finally Embracing Role in Small Wars, this week's WPR column.

Tom's comment:

It was a lot of fun to speak at the conference and do the three stints of book signing (the Naval Inst. bookstore sold all 84 copies it had received from Putnam). Also a lot of fun to spend brief bits of time with Mattis and Wilkerson, so I wanted to work both into the piece because it really has been a journey of interaction and mutual aid over the years, with all of us now seeing the naval forces become that which we have long advocated they become.

You know, for most people, 17 years would constitute a sense of failure. But when you think in grand strategic terms, a couple of decades is nothing.

When Prevention Goes Viral

The world continues to hold its breath over a swine flu that, while perhaps slowing, is still likely to kill in the low hundreds and remains balanced on the edge of a true pandemic. Although only a mere 2-3,000 cases have -- so far -- been recorded worldwide (80 percent of them in co-sources Mexico and America), this variant of H1N1 influenza penetrated dozens of nations and all mass-populated regions of the globe in a matter of days -- a truly humbling reminder of how globalization enhances mankind's epidemiological interdependency.

My column is dubbed--by me-- "The New Rules."

This week's effort is entitled, "When Prevention Goes Viral."