I got yer Chinese threat . . . I got it right here!

REFERENCES:

(6) ìNewest Export Out of China: Inflation Fears,î by Keith Bradsher, New York Times, 16 April, p. A1.

(7) ìMeeker Opines on China: Former ëQueen of the Netí Sees Much Possibility for Internet Stocks,î by Geoffrey Fowler and Suzanne Craig, Wall Street Journal, 16 April, p. C16.

The Pentagonís preferred definition of future war is China invading Taiwan somewhere around 2025. That is the ìChinese threatî they understand. I have more problems with this myopic strategic vision than I can count, although my book goes out of its way to list as many of them as possible.

But my biggest gripe with that sort of ìabsurdly isolated point scenarioî approach (a subject I describe in the book) to thinking about how China might destabilize globalization over coming years is that it so dramatically ignores the range of far more likely destabilizing scenarios that can unfold between now and 2025óall of which would invariably segue into some security component of logical interest to the Pentagon. These two articles speak to the sort of triggers we should really be paying attention to, not just inside the Pentagon but throughout the entire U.S. Government.

On the issue of inflation, you might ask: just how influential is Chinaís economy anyway? No, China is not the dominating force within the global economy that some fear-meisters would have you believe. Itíll be decades before they really fight at a weight similar to the U.S. economy. But because China is a global manufacturing superpower on the low-cost end of the spectrum, they do wield an unusually influential sort of connectivity: their prices tend to set the low-cost prices for the planet.

So hereís the connectivity made real: rising energy prices means China has to raise the prices on its low-end exports, which in turn raise the price of low-end goods around the world. You want all those cheap goods at Walmart? Guess what! You can trace that price all the way back to stability and/or instability in the Middle East, and that connectivity runs through China, which is rapidly becoming, thanks to its increased marketization of its economy, a more rapid transmitter of ìboth pain and delightî (track that Star Trek reference, I dare you!) throughout the global economy.

As for the Internet boom currently raging in China, all that tells us is that China follows in our historical wake far faster than we might easily imagine, assuming it is simply a land of impoverished laborers. Remember, our Internet boom/bust in the stock markets was less than five years ago. So the current Internet stock craze in China is yet another good example of what-goes-around-comes-around in the global economy.

Deleted Scenes

As part of my effort to generate on this site a sort of deluxe, collector's edition, tricked-up "DVD package" of extras, I am generating a series of posts that I call Deleted Scenes -- material that didn't make it into "The Pentagon's New Map." Like Director's Commentary, this behind-the-scenes commentary on the making of the book is offered as additional background material for interested readers. To read all of this series' entries to date, click here.

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 #2

Chapter Two: The Rise of the 'Lesser Includeds'

Section: The Manthorpe Curve

Commentary: This second "deleted scene" constituted my first attempt at explaining what Mark Warren later called "the cult of the PowerPoint briefing" inside the Pentagon. As originally written, this was the intro to "The Manthorpe Curve" section in Chapter 2. Mark cut these paragraphs and started right with the one that followed: "In the early 1990s, William Manthorpe was Deputy Director Ö" [p. 63]. I include this deleted scene simply because I like it.

Deleted Scene #3

Chapter Two: The Rise of the 'Lesser Includeds'

Section: The Fracturing of the Security Market

Commentary: This third "deleted scene" was my effort to introduce the Waltzian three-tiered paradigm in all its glory. I have done this many times in reports over the years, feeling it is only right to give the man his due. Mark Warren cut this section because he felt it went on too long and because it came off as too academic. His point was that the reader really didn't need all this extra information for me to make the ensuing points in the text. Plus, because my use of this conceptual tool is unique enough, all I really needed to do was to give the man a good endnote, which I did.

A genuine blue-skying affair

Blue-Skying the Future of War in the 21st Century

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 15 April

Today I facilitated an afternoonís worth of workshop for the Office of Force Transformation (Office of the Secretary of Defense) at the Decision Support Center at the gaming facility at the Naval War College. Fun stuff with a substantial group of free thinkers specifically gathered to help Art Cebrowski think about what sort of naval force structure (mix of ships, aircraft, etc.) America needs in the future. Art being Art, it is a genuine blue-skying affair where people are instructed not only to get out of the box, but frankly, never to look back. Today, we spoke about the ìnew rulesî of warfare. The underlying theme? Providing the President with more options over time in this global war on terrorism and everything else DoD is on the hook for in the Era of Globalization.

What does blue-skying mean here? When you think of naval power in the future, donít assume itís all about ships. The only restriction on thought here is: stuff that moves over, on or through water.

In all a good workshop, I walk away from the afternoon with at least three big thoughts I can turn into articles that should turn heads.

BTW, Artís office has me ask Putnam for 8 copies of the book: one each for four chiefs of staff (Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines), a couple for the Vice and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and a couple for SECDEF and DEPSECDEF.

That is how much Art Cebrowski likes this book . . .

Hereís today catch, culled by me during breaks in the action:

REFERENCES:

(1) ìSharon Coup: U.S. Go-Ahead: Move by White House Bypasses Palestinians,î by James Bennett, New York Times, 15 April, p. A1.

(2) ìSyrians Test Limits Of Political Dissent: Assadís Government Talks of Reform,î by Daniel Williams, Washington Post, 11 April, p. A23.

(3) ìMarines Use Low-Tech Skill To Kill 100 in Urban Battle,î by Jeffrey Gettleman, New York Times, 15 April, p. A8.

(4) ìSouth Korea Is Wary but Firm on Iraq,î by Norimitsu Onishi, NYT, 15 April, p. A10.

(5) ìEurope, U.S. Diverge on How to Fight Terrorism,î by Glenn Frankel, Washington Post, 28 March, p. A15.

(6) ìU.S. Seeks New Global Force To Protect the U.N. in Iraq,î by Robin Wright, WP, 8 April, p. A12.

(7) ìArmy Spouses Expect Reenlistment Problems,î by Thomas Ricks, WP, 28 March, p. A1.

(8) ìChina Recruits Foreign Talent: State Enterprises Seek Infusion of New Blood in Management,î by Ben Dolven, Wall Street Journal, 15 April, p. A13.

(9) ìCheney Urges China to Press North Korea on A-Bombs,î by Joseph Kahn, NYT, 15 April, p. A3.

(10) ìLatin America Warms Up to EU in Trade Talks,î by Geraldo Samor and Scott Miller, WSJ, 15 April, p. A13.

Iíll do them all in four clumps.

"We know how to sit on walls."

After Iraq, Itís On to the New Berlin Wall

References:

(1) ìSharon Coup: U.S. Go-Ahead: Move by White House Bypasses Palestinians,î by James Bennett, New York Times, 15 April, p. A1.

(2) ìSyrians Test Limits Of Political Dissent: Assadís Government Talks of Reform,î by Daniel Williams, Washington Post, 11 April, p. A23.

The first article speaks to the reality that Americaóand ultimately the Coreówill invariably end up giving Israel what it wants: a clear definition of its secure borders. Beyond that recognition, if we hope to advance the security agenda in the region andóby doing soógive impetus to growing connectivity between the region and the outside world, America in particular and the Core in general will need to move in the direction of providing security for the walls now going up between Israel and the West Bank/Gaza. Beyond winning the war of connectedness v. disconnectedness in Iraq, this looms as the great security task in the region.

You will say this is a failure: to accept these walls as a moment in history where walls are falling everywhere and new bridges and connectivity are arising. You will say this is a contradiction to the larger goal of connecting the Middle East up with the world at large. Both criticisms are valid but are easily put aside, because until Israel is effectively taken off the table as the whipping boy for Muslim regimes in the region, serious movement toward security solutions for the region as a whole will remain impossible.

You will say this is beyond our means or our patience, and I will tell you that the Coreóand in particular the Old Coreóis well practiced at sitting on such walls for as long as needed. We have sat on a wall in the Koreas. We have sat on a wall in Berlin, and across a Europe as a whole. We have sat on a wall in Cyprus. We know how to sit on walls.

As for the length of time, that calculation is fairly easy: roughly a generation and a half, or until the current crop of adults dies off sufficiently to be replace wholesale by a new generation or two that have never known the past struggle. In the meantime, we buy off the masses with aid and hunt down the troublemakers with a vengeance. We emphasize the inevitability of our success and the failure of their attempts to enforce disconnectedness over those who, in the end, prefer connectivity.

You will also say that our effort will go unrewarded in the region as a whole, and that weíll end up as the target of all that anger, all that rage, and all that desire to retain group identity. And I will answer that we are in a race with history, but that time is on our side. So when we sit on an Israel/Palestinian Authority stalemate and deny a Syria that outlet or venue for diversions and mischief, then we leave Syria with little else to do but to examine itself and wonder why it canít do better. There is no coincidence: we go into an Iraq and within months we hear news of Syrian reforms and discussions of reform that would have seemed unbelievable just a couple of years ago.

You can say itís all because the son took over the father, but again, that only says time is on our side.

Basic point: deny Arab authoritarian regimes the diversion of the Arab-Israeli conflict and they will be left to their own devices, their own stagnation, and their own problems to solve. But it will take time.

So why in the hell should you?

Everyone is Looking for the Sys Admin Force

References:

(3) ìMarines Use Low-Tech Skill To Kill 100 in Urban Battle,î by Jeffrey Gettleman, NYT, 15 April, p. A8.

(4) ìSouth Korea Is Wary but Firm on Iraq,î by Norimitsu Onishi, NYT, 15 April, p. A10.

(5) ìEurope, U.S. Diverge on How to Fight Terrorism,î by Glenn Frankel, Washington Post, 28 March, p. A15.

(6) ìU.S. Seeks New Global Force To Protect the U.N. in Iraq,î by Robin Wright, WP, 8 April, p. A12.

(7) ìArmy Spouses Expect Reenlistment Problems,î by Thomas Ricks, WP, 28 March, p. A1.

The story of our Marines in Iraq is not exactly a Tom Clancy novel in terms of high-tech wizardry. The day-to-day operations of the Sys Admin force is fundamentally low-tech, boots-on-the-ground sort of stuff. This is not rocket science, but it is good soldiering through and throughóat the constant risk of death. The Sys Admin job is not one of glory, but one of persistence. If you donít believe me, ask the Brits about administering Northern Ireland all those years.

Participating in the Sys Admin force is not scary in the strategic sense that we associate with war between states or global conflict. Instead, itís about sending sons and daughters into harmís way. For many countries we seek to pull into this effort, like a South Korea, we are talking aboutóeven in these limited contingentsóthe biggest overseas military efforts most have engaged in for several decades. For South Korea, for example, this is bigger than anything theyíve done since Vietnam.

Don Rumsfeld was asked when recently visiting South Korea, ìHow do you explain to Korean parents why they should send their loved ones to far away lands to rescue some nation and reconnect it to the world?î His answer was simple (paraphrasing): ìSomehow we managed to convince our young people 50 years ago to come to the Korean peninsula and look what we got in return!î Can we convince a South Korean society of the same long-term wisdomómuch less the personal sacrificeówith regard to an Iraq today? Much depends on the stories we tell of a global future worth creating.

Are we convincing the rest of the Core on this score? Consider the story on how our vision of the future is diverging from that of Europeís. Hereís the key quote from Javier Solana, foreign policy chief for the EU: ìEurope is not at war. We have to energetically oppose terrorism, but we mustnít change the way we live.î Meanwhile, a George Bush pushes the notion that the GWOT is ìan inescapable calling of our generation.î

You might think that this gap in perception reflects the European love of peace and distaste of blood, but in reality, experts will tell you, it really reflects that Europe long ago became used to living with terrorism, so a 3/11 does not shock them into action the same way a 9/11 + anthrax scare mobilized the U.S. in the fall of 2001.

Yet again, the Europeans are described as being above it all and the Americans are described as being so easily whipped into a frenzy by events. But I fundamentally disagree with the view. Europe, as I said in the Outlook article last Sunday, is basically ready to accept bin Ladenís offer of civilizational apartheid (made explicit just today in his first taped message in seven months!) and America, without Europeís long history of class distinctions, has a harder time with accepting such firm divisions, plus we have the recent decades of thinking about global security as a whole to fall back upon, whereas that skill set has deteriorated within European states, having lived so long under the umbrella of U.S. strategic deterrence.

Simply put, Europe has forgotten what it is to wage waróand purposefully so. The only way we awake them from this historical stupor is to motivate them through the forceful enunciation of a mutually-beneficial global future worth creating.

What we offer instead is reference #6: instead of offering the vision of the future worth creating, or the end, we focus so much on generating the meansóhere, the U.S. call for a ìnew global forceî to protect the UN in Iraq. This pleaóin so many waysóis a call for the Sys Admin force, a force that America has yet to seed sufficiently within its own ranks to make it attractive to potential allies whoóquite franklyórespond solely to sure bets. Simply put, until the U.S. creates within DoD the Sys Admin force to the point where our forces alone could basically occupy an Iraq effectively, we wonít get the allied contribution that will generate the superabundance needed to demonstrate to the forces of disconnectedness within an Iraq (or anywhere else weíll end up going) that theirs is a lost cause.

Right now, the correlation of forces is on their side: our forces in the field are battling the depressing thought that ìwe simply canít kill them fast enough long enough to win in the endóthere are simply too many of them.î But if DoD fields a sufficiently impressive Sys Admin force that attracts the peacekeepers not just from Old Core Europe but New Core Asia, then the superabundance of Core forces fielded in an Iraq turns the tables on our enemies there, forcing them into the depressing realization that ìwe simply canít kill them fast enough long enough to win in the endóthere are simply too many of them.î

When America fields a U.S. military in Iraq that is overwhelming in its Leviathan function and underwhelming in its Sys Admin capabilities, it says to the world: we really donít take the back-half of regime change very seriously, so why in the hell should you?

My point is this: donít expect anyone to come rushing to our aid in this ìnew global forceî until we demonstrate that as far as the Sys Admin force goes within DoD, in the future there will be no such thing as the category currently known by the phrase ìlow density/high demand.î LDHD is simply a fancy way of saying we have too few of the resources we need to win the peace in Iraq.

To put it even more succinctly, LDHD reflects DoDís ADHD in this GWOT.

Howís that for jargon!

Why does this matter? This bureaucratic sloth in terms of rebalancing our force structure to deal with this GWOT?

Reference #7 tells you why this is important: we do a poor job of using our personnel in Iraq and our reenlistment rates will plummet. The basic bad news of this frightening article was that a recent poll of Army spouses indicates that the spouses of roughly three-quarters of currently serving personnel expect the pace of operations in this GWOT to negatively impact retention levels. Half the respondents expect a major retention problem, and a quarter see minor problems. Only one quarter of respondents say it will have no negative impact.

These are mostly the wives back home talking, and if you donít think that matters, then youíve never been married.

Win-Win: China and America

China and America Swapping Expertise?

References:

(8) ìChina Recruits Foreign Talent: State Enterprises Seek Infusion of New Blood in Management,î by Ben Dolven, Wall Street Journal, 15 April, p. A13.

(9) ìCheney Urges China to Press North Korea on A-Bombs,î by Joseph Kahn, New York Times, 15 April, p. A3.

The first reference is just yet another good example of Chinaís increasing integration with the outside world. In Chinaís hotel industry, firms are increasingly hiring American/foreign executives in an attempt to improve service and overall competitiveness in the global marketplace. This is a leading-edge indicator of China reaching out to the outside world: since tourism is defined primarily by visiting foreigners, you bring in foreigners to help you understand how to do a better job.

The second reference just warms my heart a bit: Vice President Cheney in China urging the leaders there to work more forcefully with us in pressing North Korean compliance with international sanctions on its nuclear programs. I donít believe weíll get anywhere doing this sort of thing with Pyongyang, I just like seeing the U.S. and China talking explicitly about possible solution sets. To me, getting China on board on how we eventually and inevitably topple Kim Jong Ilís regime is crucial to creating a follow-on security alliance in Asia that brings together a China, Japan, united Korea, and the United States. Alliances like a NATO come out of a successful war experience, and I canít think of any dictator who deserves one more now that Saddam is gone.

Unintended consequences

There goes my honey! There goes my baby! There goes my free trade zone!

REFERENCE: (10) ìLatin America Warms Up to EU in Trade Talks,î by Geraldo Samor and Scott Miller, WSJ, 15 April, p. A13.

To me, this is a scary article of sorts, like the one the Wall Street Jouranl ran a while back about how emigration flows coming out of Latin America are being redirected from the U.S. as a landing zone to Europe as a landing zone. In that example, the tighter U.S. borders resulting from the post-9/11 rule-set reset were cited, meaning bin Laden apparently has the power to attack the U.S. andóby doing soódeny us access to immigration patterns we hadóup to that pointóassumed would favor us over the Europeans.

What this article describes is a Latin America, tired of the lack of progress on trade negotiations for a Free Trade Area of the Americas, instead turning to an EU for similar-style negotiations. The negotiations in question concern the EU and Mercosur, or the economic trade alliance of more than 200 million citizens in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, with less integrated levels of association involving Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and Venezuela. You have to wonder, is this another unintended consequence not of 9/11 per se, but of Americaís response to 9/11?

If so, bin Ladenís ability to bend global history is far more than we realize, yes?

Terror.com: It's only business

"Crime Pays, Terrorists Find: Group in Europe Smuggles Immigrants and Forges Passports," by Glenn Simpson et. al, Wall Street Journal, 14 April, p. A13.

Since 9/11, the U.S. makes a huge effort on a global scale to shut down the funding mechanisms that support global terror. There is good evidence we are succeeding in many instances, but plenty more loopholes are still being exploited. But here's the even tougher reality of fighting a truly global, networked foe: while fighting the connectivity that globalization spreads they nonetheless exploit that connectivity to make ends meetósomething they can do almost ad infinitum.

So the Journal says "Terrorists have replacements for traditional systems of funding, like Islamic charities." Those replacements include the sort of seam-exploiting activities right on the edge of legitimate activities: would-be immigrants seeking new jobs likewise seek out the smuggling services and forged passports provided by terrorist networks. Being good at that for their own purposes means terrorist networks have a marketable skill set in the global economy. This is classic Mafia territory: they provide services and security for those who cannot go to legitimate authorities for same.

My point in raising this issue is not to dump on current efforts in this Global War on Terrorism, but simply to point out that we'll never dry up all their finances, nor kill enough of their soldiers. These are self-replicating forces that cannot be defeated by overwhelming mass. What we can do, however, is progressively constrict their operating domains: where they hang out, hide out, flourish, recruit, train andómost importantlyówhere they hope to effect real change. None of these groups really want to change life inside the Core, but only to get the Core to abandon particular regions or regimes in the Gap andófurtheróto accept the terrorists' goal of hijacking some particular society and isolating it under their rule.

In the end, the only real way we win this global terrorism is to deny terrorists the disconnected societies they seek to rule, and we do that by connecting those societies up to the global economy and letting the ensuing broadband economic, social, and political connectivity do the rest. Where we wage war is against any forces of disconnectedness: be they non-state actors hoping to hijack some society or some dictator currently keeping his population under his isolating control.

But if you think we can firewall this nation from this violence or hunt down the terrorist sufficiently fast enough to claim some long-term victory, you are kidding yourselfóor buying into Richard Clarke's vision of how to win the GWOT. We will never kill them fast enough nor put up enough walls between our good life and their pain and suffering. It simply will never happen.

Handicapping the Gap and Key Seam States

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 14 April

A quick tour around the dial before I get back to my Director's Commentary series on the book, which I am rushing to finish by Sunday. I can feel the crush of events getting ever closer WRT the release of the book on 27 April. Putnam is planning to run me as ragged as possible promoting the book in DC, NYC and Boston for roughly ten days, then it's a big conference down in the Big Easy, and right after that the Esquire article comes out on newsstands and I'm being told they want to push the hell out of that. So I am shoving all sorts of posts out the door in the direction of my webmaster, hoping to get everything on line that I want at this site before the deluge begins.

Today's references:

"Crime Pays, Terrorists Find: Group in Europe Smuggles Immigrants and Forges Passports," by Glenn Simpson et. al, Wall Street Journal, 14 April, p. A13.

"U.S. Squeezes Cuba Travelers: Castro Cited as Target, but Policy Seems Aimed at Florida Voters," by Neil King, Wall Street Journal, 14 April, p. A4.

"In South Africa, Democracy May Breed One-Party Rule," by Michael Wines, New York Times, 14 April, p. A3.

"Cruel Choices: We Can Save Tens of Thousands in Sudan," by Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, 14 April, p. A25.

"Indian Services Giant Hits $1 Billion Mark," by Saritha Rai, New York Times, 14 April, p. W1.

"In China, Troubling Signs Of an Overheating Economy," by Keith Bradsher, New York Times, 14 April, p. C1.

If No Threat, Connectivity is the Best Bet

"U.S. Squeezes Cuba Travelers: Castro Cited as Target, but Policy Seems Aimed at Florida Voters," by Neil King, Wall Street Journal, 14 April, p. A4.

Old argument about Castro: keep him under tight wraps and enforce as much disconnectedness as possible against his tyrannical and cruel regime, or open the floodgates and let the connectivity pervert his rule from within?

To keep the Cuban exiles/voters in Florida happy, administration after administration goes with the hard line notion of holding out against Castro. I don't really believe in this approach, because I think enforcing such disconnectedness only plays into the hands of dictators in general.

My rules are simple: if the dictator in question is a clear and present danger to own people or to world at large, then take him down and reconnect the society in the aftermath. Of course, we need a military that can do both the front- and back-halves of that game, and the Core as a whole needs an A-to-Z rule set that facilitates such processing. These are jobs to be completed.

Second rule: if the dictator is not the compelling clear and present danger, then you kill him with the kindness afforded by connectivity. If I were running the Cuba policy, I would flood that isolated system with as many American tourists as possible and open every floodgate I could find in terms of business connectivity. I would work through such rising connectivity to marginalize Castro as quickly as possible.

Then as soon as he fell away, completely irrelevant, I would begin floating the idea of Cuba as the 51st state. Tell me that wouldn't guarantee my party the exile vote in Florida from here on out!

And yes, I am being completely serious on that last point. America the closed club does not make sense in a world where the Core needs to open up to the Gap and the EU accepts new members in droves. Time to grow again.

The Africa holocaust mutates once again

"Cruel Choices: We Can Save Tens of Thousands in Sudan," by Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, 14 April, p. A25.

Nick Kristof of the NYTimes, to whom I gave the full-up brief back in 2002, has been waging a one-man campaign to get the West to give a rat's ass about the most recent example of mass violence and ethnic cleansing in Africaóthis time being Sudan. This is a classic clash between civilizations: where lighter-skinned Arab Janjaweed militias are systematically targeting darker-skinned tribal Africans for death and mass rape, all with the consent and support of Sudan's authoritarian government. While the war crimes pile up, what does the West do? Basically nothing. Sudan is so far inside the Gap as to fundamentally not matter. If there was more oil there, somebody might, but since there is so little and the security is so bad, these brutalities go unnoticed. No protests in Western capitals, no peace marchesónada.

The Core simply will not address the deepest Gap, or Africa, until we succeed in reconnecting the Middle East. I push for a firm course in Iraq because beyond all the effort we must make there, Africa waits in great painócompletely ignored.

Some of my best friends are one-party states

"In South Africa, Democracy May Breed One-Party Rule," by Michael Wines, New York Times, 14 April, p. A3.

No surprise here: the party that successfully navigated the nation from apartheid and white-rule to majority rule with a reasonably functioning democracy has come to dominate as a political force within the nation. The African National Congress, which frankly was an open client of the Soviet bloc for many years (so stupid were we that we refused to see the historical writing on the wall), is now the party without peer in South Africa, raising fears that a one-party state is brewing.

This is a misguided fear. One-party states are never the problem. Japan was one for decades, so was South Korea and Mexico and a host of other fine integrating economies of the New Core. So long as the ruling party rotates the leadership on a regular basis, that is not the problem. Real issue is whether or not the ruling party encourages growing economic, social and political connectivity with the outside world, orómore specificallyówith the global economy's Functioning Core. In my mind, the ANC has been doing this in spades, which is why no security experts are writing any more reports warning about the West "losing access" to precious metals in Africa. That was a huge subject when I was a student in the 1980s and we feared the Soviet bloc's relationships with the region's "countries of socialist orientation" would signal a new communist satellite camp in the making.

All of that fear is gone now, as is white-rule in South Africa. Meanwhile, the ANC does its best to act as a pillar for stability in the region, something Pretoria never did under the whites (mischief makers, they), so how we can complain about their success in election after election is beyond me. So long as the top rulers rotate with regularity, I say count your blessings.

"Chopped Liver" Getting More Expensive

óAnother India Success Story

"Indian Services Giant Hits $1 Billion Mark," by Saritha Rai, New York Times, 14 April, p. W1.

You read this great article about how Infosys Technologies, the "bellweather of the Indian software services industry," has just posted more than $1 billion in annual sales, and you say to yourself: this is why the U.S. and India are such firm security partners in global affairs, right? I mean, these guys are becoming huge in the global economy, connecting India as a whole to the Functioning Core of globalization like nobody's business. So much to offer, so much to exploit, so many business deals to be made.

We all know trade follows the flag, meaning our strongest security partners tend to be our strongest trade partners. But did you know that investment flows follow the flag even more? That's right, our strongest investment partners (we invest there and they invest over here) are overwhelmingly the same states with whom we have the strongest security relationships.

So what happens when New Core powers like China and India arise, sucking up our foreign direct investment (India far less so until recently, when their insourcing of foreign capital took off) and becoming significant trade and business partners? Does the flag follow all that trade and investment? Or does the U.S. chose to declare Pakistan a "major, non-NATO ally" instead (whole lotta trade there?) and reward China with a regional missile defense system aimed at them (ahem, I mean Pyongyang!)?

The Pentagon's New Map needs to be the negative of Wall Street's new map: where Wall Street is going is not where the Pentagon should be planning for war, and where the Pentagon is planning for war, rest assured that Wall Street has already opted out. Wall Street' map is about growing the Core, whereas the Pentagon's map is about shrinking the Gap, with the Core's help. India and China should be two of our strongest allies in coming years and decades as we wage this global war on terrorism and shrink the Gap. Simply put, our "flag" needs to look around and realize where all that trade and investment is going, cause we've got it backwards with these two New Core states.

Preparing for the inevitable in China

"In China, Troubling Signs Of an Overheating Economy," by Keith Bradsher, New York Times, 14 April, p. C1.

Yes, China's economy is overheating. Yes, the bubble will eventually be punctured and China will slow down or even contract a bit for some period. And yes, this will be a painful period for China that brings on a significant economic and political rule-set reset.

China is growing so fast and integrating with the global economy so quickly that all this must be expected. The question isn't: will it happen? The question is: how can we help move China down better pathways when the inevitable rule-set reset is triggered?

What we need to avoid most of all is scaring them needlessly down some path of withdrawal from the world or military confrontation with either Taiwan or the U.S. Are we doing enough in this regard? If you listen to U.S. Pacific Command (whose strategic planning documents routinely cite "Barnett's Gap"), I see a U.S. military keenly aware of its enabling role in China's progressive integration into the Functioning Core. But if you check out the Pentagon's long-range threat planning, it is all China! China! China!

There are actually intell analysts in my neck of the woods who openly voice the opinion that China "is looking ten-feet tall"ócode for "completely replacing the old Red Army threat!" This is complete nonsense, of course, but it shows how desperate some within Pentagon planning circles are to find the great power enemy worth plotting against.

Guess who will be yelling "I told you so" about the "scary situation" in China come the crash? Security experts hell-bent on building some fabulous and hugely expensive force to wage war with China in the Taiwan Straits somewhere around 2025. Most don't know their ass from their elbows on what China's really all about right now. They just know they like their "near-peer competitors" big, bad and communist.

I just hope more peopleósmarter peopleóinside the U.S. Government are planning better long-term strategies vis-‡-vis China. I fear this is not the case, because only the Pentagon really engages in such long-term strategizing, and that is a shame given their tendencies to myopically focus only on worst-case scenarios. It leaves us with a military that spends the vast majority of its resources betting on the complete failure of U.S. national security strategy instead of aggressively working to see that strategy succeed.

This is why the Pentagon needs a new map.

Director's Commentary

As part of my effort to generate on this site a sort of deluxe, collector's edition, tricked-up "DVD package" of extras, I am generating a series of posts that I call the Director's Commentary on "The Pentagon's New Map." This behind-the-scenes commentary on the making of the book is offered as additional background material for interested readers. To read all of this series' entries to date, click here.

The Jacket Cover

The Title Page

The Dedication

Table of Contents

Master Book Plan

Excel Map of Book

The Preface

The Early Bird Gets the Worm

Dateline: Portsmouth RI, 13 April

Reference: "The Inside Word: The Early Bird Gets Rumsfeld's Attention: Daily Digest of Military News Gets Lots of Notice, Often for What It Omits," by Christopher Cooper, Wall Street Journal, 13 April, p. A1.

Great article on Early Bird, the news clipping service inside the Pentagonósort of their official (and original) blogger of all the news that's fit to reprint. As one senior official says in the piece, "It has an agenda-setting capacity, that's a fact."

The material is available online at http://ebird.afis.osd.mil/. The site takes roughly one million hits a week. To peruse it is to see the world of news through the Pentagon's eyes, which is why journalists rely on it so much. Bob Woodward will tell you it is his bible on the security books he's written over the yearsólike the one coming up this week.

My Washington Post Outlook article ("Forget Europe. How About These Allies") appears today in the Early Birdónot the lesser-read Supplement but the main pub. Today's take is found at http://ebird.afis.osd.mil/ebfiles/e20040413aaindex.html, and my piece (#45) is reprinted at http://ebird.afis.osd.mil/ebfiles/e20040413275165.html.

Who's Gonna Die for Your Wars?

Got a lot of emails about the Washington Post article in Sunday's Outlook. Surprised that the Post now puts down the author's direct email for replies, vice having that material directed at the Post's server itself, but such is life today. My webmaster set up the tom@thomaspmbarnett.com address to send the material to my hotmail account, so I have been replying to readers' emails as they've come in.

I would say about 2/3rd are positive and about 1/3rd negative, which surprises me somewhat.

The negative 1/3rd often sound that note of "who's going to die in your wars?" "The poor you can't see from your ivory tower?"

Confession: I have family serving in the Gulf this very minute and I'm damn proud of that fact.

Here's my answer: This country has never had trouble finding young men and women who are willing to serve in the armed forces so long as the Pentagon has been up front and honest about the tasks they are likely to pursue and the White House has deployed them to wars/crises when the gain-to-pain ratio makes sense and progress can be seen.

More specifically, what I call the Leviathan portionóor warfighting portionóof the military has a fairly easy time of attracting enough youth to serve, and no, these are not simply poor kids with no education who are tricked into fighting overseas. This military is built around high school graduates who are generally well-motivated and quite patriotic in the broadest sense: they don't just want to protect America but do betteróon America's behalfófor the world.

The real problem we have today in terms of recruitment, I would argue, is with that portion of the military that really constitutes the Military Operations Other Than War portion, or what I call the Sys Admin force. Most of the Reserve Component is found here (National Guard and Reserves), as are the Jessica Lynch's of the militaryóbasically civilians serving in the military without really being "soldiers" in the warfighting sense. What's wrong with that part of the system right now is that we seem to be asking the Sys Admin-type forces to play Leviathan on an irregular basis, often on tours that get stretched out with little warning. That sort of on-the-fly dealmaking is unfair, because it amounts to renegotiating the contract midstream.

My goal in pushing for the Sys Admin force as a recognized and readily distinct portion of DoD is to bring out into the open the question of the contract or bargain the Pentagon should actually conclude with these servicemen and women, and the promises it needs to make about how they are going to be deployed around the world. I believe that America will have no trouble finding young people willing to serve in a Sys Admin force that focuses on peacekeeping, nation-building, disaster response and foreign aid, anymore than this country has a hard time finding people to be cops, firemen or EMR personnel. They don't do it for the money, but for the thrill, adventure and the innate desire to serve. If the Pentagon were more upfront about the deal being made, and stuck to those promises, the Sys Admin force would be easily staffed, as would the warfighting Leviathan force. In short, this is all about honesty.

Same would hold for allies working with both forces. No trouble finding the Special Ops guys from other countries who are eager to go into real battlesóevery good-sized nation has them. But for most countries militaries, the real desire is to see their own Sys Admin-like forces find real partnership with a similar DoD-derived and supported force on our end. Again, so long as we are honest and upfront about the roles for each type of force and stick to that rule set as we employ them, we will attract the needed people both from within and without.

And having both forces out there and available is the best gift the Pentagon can give global security right now, because having both the front-half and back-half forces for the Saddams of the world will give impetus to the global community's enunciation of the A-to-Z rule set for processing political bankrupt states that we all want to see toppled. In short, if DoD's transformation were to focus on the Sys Admin force, it would generate a huge asset for the international security community as a whole. Absent that effort, it is unlikely that such a rule set will emerge within the toothless UN.

We have it within out power, then, to build that future worth creatingóbut not all by ourselves. And yet, if we don't get that ball rolling, tell me, who will?

The Coming Rule Set Reset on Intelligence

Bifurcation of DoD model

As soon as 9/11 happened, I predicted the smoking memos would be found, the bipartisan investigation would blame the CIA and FBI primarily, and there would be an inevitable reorganization of the intelligence community.

Reference: "Bush Sees a Need For Reorganizing U.S. Intelligence: No Specific Plan Offered: His Remarks Come as 9/11 Panel Turns Attention to C.I.A. and F.B.I.," by David Johnston, New York Times, 13 Apr, p. A1.

None of these predictions were prescient or even extraordinary: this routine happens every time we suffer some stunning military defeatówhich 9/11 was even though the Pentagon feels it had nothing to do with it whatsoever.

Here's my new prediction: Louis Freeh and John Ashcroft collectively will be the favored scapegoats, and the result will be a new, special terrorism something or other that combines all these fabulous assets from a variety of agencies in this new special form/building/code/whatever. That new thing will invariably be isolated over time from the agencies from which those assets were originally drawn, as the mistrust and lack of cooperation among them resurfaces within months and all returns basically to what it was before (this scenario has already played out in one small form since 9/11, so this redux will simply be bigger and more public).

Keeping to my bifurcation of DoD model, here it what I believe should really happen: the clandestine and agent-oriented parts of CIA should move into a new and expanded Defense Intelligence Agency, along with the classified overhead (i.e., satellite) and listening (eavesdropping) agencies. All together, this still-classified organization should remain focused on warfighting issues (where we may fight), potential state-based threats (classic threats to include a hedging effort on China), and hunting down and killing terrorists and other dangerous non-state actors within the Gap (leaving the counter-terrorist stuff across the Core to law enforcement agencies like FBIówhich is wonderfully networked across the Core but completely absent from the Gap).

The analytical parts of CIA and the National Intelligence Council should be made completely unclassified in operation, greatly expanded and given more funding, and become the intell support agency to the emerging Sys Admin force, which is itself an unclassified force that moves progressively toward civilian law and under the purview of the International Criminal Court (unlike the Leviathan force).

That's my prescription: we make an unclassified version of CIA to support the Sys Admin force and we collect all the classified intelligence community assets and put them to work for the Leviathan force. That way we have an intelligence community that devoted to waging war and especially the global war on terrorism, but we also have an intelligence community that's devoted to waging peace.

And yes, I would keep a Chinese Wall (no pun intended) between the two communities, and I would enforce that firewall by making everything the Sys Admin-supporting intelligence agency does completely transparent, so all who interacted with it would know that if any info was passed onto the Leviathan intell community, everyone could be aware of that fact.

Good Signs of Growing Global Connectivity

References: "Slovakia No Longer a Laggard in Automaking," by Mark Landler, New York Times, 13 Apr, p. C1; and "In Mideast Aviation, Vying to Be New Global Hub," by Borzou Daragahi, New York Times, 13 Apr, p. W1; and "In Asia, Seaports Battle to Be King of Containers," by James Brooke, New York Times, 13 Apr, p. W1.

First article details all the global carmakers who have poured investments into East Central Europe (VW, Opel, Suzuki, Renault, Peugeot-Toyota, Peugeot Citroen, and Kiaóto name the biggest). Right now Slovakia is pulling ahead of the Czech Republic and Poland in terms of production capacity. Slovakia is becoming the "Detroit of Europe," crows one local automotive journal.

That is what real integration into the Core gets you: serious foreign direct investment that moves your economy and your workers up the production value chain.

Second article talks about competition among certain ambitious Mideast airlines to position themselves to capture rising numbers of tourists flying from and around Southwest and South Asia. Despite being 20% of the world population, the Middle East only accounts for about 5% of the global tourist/airline trade (that percentage basically matches the Middle East's share of global trade in generalóreflecting their generally disconnected status, as in they are underconnected given their numbers).

Which national airline is in the lead? Easy, the one associated with the most connected economy and society thereóEmirates Airline of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Another rising star is Qatar Airways, another non-surprise if you know anything about what's been happening in that country in recent years.

Third article is about race in Asia to own the biggest container-ship processing port. Shanghai of China and Pusan of South Korea, sister cities no less, are neck and neck in this race. This is connectivity personified: two countries racing to process the most bulk trade with outside world.

Why the U.S. isn't making a solution happening with China and South Korea regarding North Korea is simply beyond me. Instead we work toward a missile defense system in the region that South Korea refuses to participate in and China is purposefully excluded from (because it really targets them in the long run). Meanwhile, these two states compete to see who can process the most containers from North America and Europe.

Where is our strategic intelligence on that one I ask?

"Mr. President, ... "

Damn That Granger and his Headlines!

I told you before that my upcoming article in Esquire's June issue would be called, "The Leviathan." That was the original call from Mark Warren, my bud the Executive Editor.

David Granger, the Editor in Chief worked the piece over yesterday. Good news is: he liked it a lot. Better news is: he came up with a punchier, more hard-hitting title.

Piece is now entitled (absent further change): "Mr. President, Here's How to Make Sense of Our Iraq Strategy."

That's frank enough, you think?

I just hope Granger's ready to hire me full-time after the piece comes out . . ..