First the text of the review (a long one). I don't include his long sections exploring the other books, simply because it took me long enough to type in all the stuff about PNM. My commentary follows at the end.
The Absence of Strategic Thinking For the 21st Century: Myths and Realities, A Review Essay by Col. Anthony C. Cain, USAF, Ph.D., Defense Intelligence Journal, no. 1&2, 2005.
Barnett, Thomas P.M., The Pentagon's New Map, 2004.
Van Creveld, Martin, The Transformation of War, 1991.
Mearsheimer, John J., The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 2001.
Nye, Joseph S., Jr., The Paradox of American Power, 2002.
Blank, Stephen J., Lawrence, E. Grinter, Karl P. Magyar, Lewis B. Ware, and Bynum E. Weathers, Conflict, Culture, and History, 1993.
Magyar, Karl P., ed., Global Security Concerns, 1996.
Sometimes a book comes along that, at first reading, disturbs you and leaves you feeling certain that the author is dead wrong about nearly everything proposed in the text. Yet, something about the issues the author raises resonates with what you believe to be true in a troubling sort of way; something nags at the back of your brain and just won't let you stop trying to figure out what really bothers you. For me, Thomas P.M Barnett's The Pentagon's New Map is such a book. The book began life as a PowerPoint briefing the author developed as part of an initiative to help define 21st Century security requirements; it morphed into an Esquire article that earned him the label "The Strategist," and it now reaches a wider audience as a best seller. Barnett levies a wide range of accusations at American strategists who, he claims, have been asleep at the wheel for more than a decade-in Barnett's mind, the United States lost (and in some ways is still losing) the opportunity to build a better world.
His book and the presentation that spawned it have made him the national security equivalent of a rock star. In some ways he accomplished what in his mind seems to be the goal of a defense strategist's carrer-"As an analyst, you want nothing more than to produce the killer brief and run it up the chain, because, frankly, that is just about the only way you ever get into the offices of senior-most officials." (p. 66) Barnett alternatively compares himself to: a) Jack Ryan (p. 12)-Tom Clancy's historian, CIA analyst, spy, President, and all American hero; b) the "fire hose" (p. 191) that spews grand strategic vision to the strategically challenged within the U.S. Government; c) Fox Mulder (p. 253)-the rogue FBI agent from the hit television series The X Files who intuitively knows the truth is out there if he can just convince someone to join him on a crusade to expose it; d) Dr. Seuss's Horton the Elephant who is the only one who can hear the tiny residents of Whoville as they plaintively cry "WE ARE HERE" (p. 268)-Barnett seems to believe he is the only person who can hear the multitudes within the U.S. Government and elsewhere cry to the Department of Defense to expand its concept of national security strategy. Some-particularly in political science and international relations specialities-find the book shallow and disjointed.
As I thought more about Barnett's assertions, I realize that my conflict was not with his premise at all-my problem lies with Barnett's limited presentation of how various components of the national security strategy community attempted to grapple with the problems of grand strategy for most of the past decade. He tars "The Pentagon" with a broad brush, claiming that leaders (mostly Navy admirals-since he has worked most frequently with the Navy during his career) stubbornly hold on to Cold War assumptions for waging war. But the problem may be more serious than mere short-sightedness on the part of the generals and admirals. He reports from inside the Pentagon that "Ö as I learned each and every time I walked into a Pentagon briefing room, most of those policymakers are neck-deep in day-to-day management issues and are rarely able to step back from their never-ending schedule of fifteen-minute office calls to actually contemplate the big-picture question of Why?" (p. 20) Interestingly, it was the Navy that gave Barnett the charter and a paycheck to think and write about national security needs for the 21st Century. And it is "The Pentagon" that invites Barnett to present his message to future generals and admirals at the staff college and war colleges. If "The Pentagon" is as hidebound as Barnett claims, why would Defense Department leaders hire someone like him in the first place?
The basic argument in The Pentagon's New Map is that the world stands on the brink of a new strategic era. Just as U.S. leaders crafted the grand strategy of containment after World War II to focus foreign policy and defense activities, we now need a construct to guide the nation to build what Barnett calls "a future worth creating." This requires a clear understanding of the world of the future-a world in which globalization will increasingly characterize interaction among states. Barnett stakes his claim as a strategist on this observation because, in his opinion, "Pentagon strategists typically view war within the context of war. I view war within the context of everything else." (p. 7) In this context of everything else, he sees a globe divided into two categories-The Core composed of "connected" states with similarly functioning economic and political "rule sets," and The Non-Integrating Gap that is disconnected from the Core and is generally becoming more disconnected. "Disconnectedness allows bad actors to flourish by keeping entire societies detached from the global community and under their control. Eradicating disconnectedness, therefore, becomes the defining security task of our age." (p. 8) The grand strategy that Barnett proposes involves shrinking the Gap by recasting the rule sets that make life there brutal and Hobbesian.
Few will be surprised at where Barnett's Non-Integrating Gap lies. He draws a line that encompasses most of Asia, the Middle East, all of Africa, and a significant chunk of South America. "Knowing where globalization begins and ends essentially defines the U.S. military's expeditionary theater. It tells us where we will go and why. It tells us what we will find when we get there, and what we must do to achieve victory in warfare." (p. 121) The key to Barnett's grand strategy seems to lie in cobbling together a force that can project connectedness toward the Gap to protect those states poised to join the enlightened Core while simultaneously intervening in those states that persist in harboring non-integrative policies and behaviors. This requires tailoring U.S. military forces into a System Administrator force designed to equip and encourage progressive states and a Leviathan force designed to impose new rule sets on persistent evil-doers. The steps required to achieve Barnett's grand strategy range from making Iraq and North Korea viable connected societies, to helping China realize its potential to become an economic superpower, to expanding the number of U.S. states to include up to 12 new Western Hemisphere states in Latin America.
To help dispel some of my, perhaps understandable, cognitive dissonance regarding Barnett's book, I began looking at sources "The Pentagon" had used in the past decade to help frame a vision of future war. The first source, Martin van Creveld's The Transformation of War, appeared on several military college reading lists in the early 1990s . . .
Much like Barnett, van Creveld opened his book with the thesis that "contemporary strategic thought is . . . fundamentally flawed; and, in addition, is rooted in a 'Clausewitzian' world-picture that is either obsolete or wrong" . . .
Understanding that states do not control a monopoly on the use of force for political purposes is an important realization in the process of building a grand strategy for the 21st Century-one of the key objectives of The Pentagon's New Map. But states are still important players on the international scene. Two international relations perspectives-neo-realism and liberalism-have helped U.S. military staff colleges and war colleges examine a comprehensive view of the international environment for nearly 20 years. John J. Mearsheimer is an articulate proponent of the neo-realist perspective. His book, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, updated the principles of that theory and outlined the way its principles could apply to a national strategic perspective for the 21st Century . . .
Liberalists purport to enrich the descriptive quality of international relations theory. They find neo-realists' emphasis on states, to the detriment of all other potential actors within the international system, too constraining. Joseph Nye's The Paradox of Power is a recent re-articulation of liberalist theory. Like van Creveld and Mearsheimer, Nye's book also appears on the reading lists at the staff colleges and war colleges that educate the next generation of strategists for "The Pentagon" . . .
The liberalist grand strategy, according to Nye, requires responsible and aggressive engagement with the rest of the world after securing U.S. survival. This perspective resonates with many of the arguments found in Barnett's book . . .
"The Pentagon" has used a wide range of theories to help military leaders understand requirements for producing strategies and for developing the forces to secure the national interest. But military officers also contribute to their own education in tangible ways as well. Two notable examples from the mid-1990s, Conflict, Culture, and History and Global Security Concerns, stand out for the number of military analysts who contributed articles to book-length volumes and for the range of issues explored in the books. The chapters demonstrate that "The Pentagon" is able to develop a clear understanding of the security challenges it will likely face in an uncertain future. Many of these issues presented in the two books describe conditions that prevent Dr. Barnett's "Non-Integrating Gap" from integrating with the "Core."
In 1993, the Air University Press published Conflict, Culture, and History, a collection of essays written by five distinguished scholars intended to inform readers about the potential for and sources of conflict in the post-Cold War world . . .
Interestingly, The Pentagon's New Map shows China, Japan, and Korea within the Core (although part of Barnett's map acknowledges that China currently exhibits characteristics of both Core and Gap worlds), while Vietnam lies firmly entrenched in the Gap. Dr. Barnett hinges his argument for China's status as an emerging Core partner on the vast economic potential represented there. His grand strategy requires U.S. leaders to ensure that Chinese leaders somehow abandon their history of human rights abuses, their die-hard commitment to Communism, and their dogged pursuit of their own interests to become paragons of enlightened liberalism. While none of these things are impossible, the historical and cultural trends certainly make them improbable. And to be fair to Dr. Barnett, his point is that U.S. leaders cannot stand idely by waiting for China to adopt the Core's rule sets-our grand strategy should seek to entice China to come into the fold rather than waiting for Chinese leaders to abandon their history and their culture . . .
Obviously "The Pentagon," represented in the regional analyses conducted by these five scholars, understood the sources of conflict well before Dr. Barnett developed his "killer briefing" or drew his "new map." But just because professors on "The Pentagon's" payroll wrote about themes that were similar to Barnett's does not mean that serving officers got the message. To see how officers attempted to understand the strategic challenges of the emerging security environment requires looking at studies done by the officer corps. One could survey the professional journal published by the joint staff and each service throughout the 1990s to see how much attention the professional military devoted to understanding where and how it would be called to engage. Such a survey would reveal articles on a broad list of topics that range from the tactical to the strategic level of interest. Another way to sample the level of intellectual engagement of the officer corps would be to search the papers done at the staff colleges and war college each year to gauge whether those institutions allowed officers to research and write about grand strategic problems Dr. Barnett insists were not on "The Pentagon's" scope in the 1990s. Like the professional journals, the research papers written at the professional military education institutions cover many of the same themes encountered in The Pentagon's New Map.
Air University Press published a compendium of articles written by serving officers under the title Global Security Concerns: Anticipating the Twenty-First Century in 1996. The 17 articles in this volume covered sociopolitical, economic, and military-strategic issues-all major themes that characterize the potential for future conflict in The Pentagon's New Map. The authors has a clear appreciation of the need for new and more flexible strategic concepts that would allow U.S. leaders to cope with evolving problems across the globe. Like Dr. Barnett, they urged strategists and policy makers to seek a national consensus on how best to prepare military, non-military, and non-governmental actors to work together to improve social and economic conditions in areas where U.S. interests and forces would engage. While neither set of authors are the general and admirals that Barnett criticizes in his book, all played a role-and most continue to play a role in educating generations of senior officers about the security challenges and appropriate military responses to those challenges. Also, their works continue to find their way into research and lesson plans used by the various military education institutions because of their enduring contribution to understanding the boundaries of the strategic problems in a complex world.
So, to return to my original theme: The Pentagon's New Map succeeds in calling attention once again to areas where U.S. policy makers must act decisively to protect the national interest. I agree with Dr. Barnett's assertion that in many areas developed countries-the Core-should find much common ground with U.S. interests and agendas; this is not a new or particularly insightful realization. I disagree with his assertion that "The Pentagon" has stubbornly refused to understand or study the nature of the security challenges or opportunities presented by the 21st Century world. Globalization, religious and ethnic conflict, the emergence of terrorists with global reach, and the persistence of brutal state and non-state actos figured prominently on "The Pentagon's" radar scope since before the Soviet Union's collapse signaled the end of the Cold War. I also disagree with his assertion that a force structure shuffle that creates a "rock 'em, sock'em" Leviathan force to take down persistent evil doers and a System Administrator force to connect the disconnected world to globalization's marketplace will meet with approval on Main Street U.S. A. or any other country-Core or Gap.
One of the reasons that containment resonated as a grand strategy was the U.S. Government's understanding of Communism as a monolithic threat. To the extent that the Soviet Union's behavior supported that perspective there was enough evidence to sustain political and economic support for policies designed to counter the threat. Today, there is no analog to the Communist threat perceived by the policy makers who articulated the grand strategy that won the Cold War. Moreover, although consensus emerged rather quickly regarding the seriousness of the Soviet threat in the 1950s, it took nearly a decade to translate that consensus into a coherent force structure and set of policies designed to neutralize that threat.
Dr. Barnett does an excellent job of describing the sources of instability in dangerous and unstable areas of the world. As discussed in the brief survey of some of the sources used by "The Pentagon" to come to grips with the security environment of the 21st Century, he does not bring much that is new to understanding the litany of troubles that plague unfortunate areas of "The Gap." Defense Department personnel have researched, taught about, and discussed the same phenomena that Barnett outlined in The Pentagon's New Map for years. A cursory examination of the two Air University Press books clearly shows that Defense Department personnel not only view "war within the context of war," they seriously consider "war within the context of everything else" just as Barnett claims to do. I sincerely appreciated the way his book challenged me to examine my own preconceptions about the strategic environment. Upon closer examination, The Pentagon's New Map is more conventional that it appeared at first reading. But the success of the book lies more in the way that it motivated me to dig deeper than in its ability to break new ground. While his voice, his energy, his patriotism, and his seriousness mark him as a welcome and perceptive member of the national security strategy community, his persistent criticism of the equally energetic, patriotic, and seriously professional community, "The Pentagon," that has also labored to cast a vision of "a future worth creating" is inaccurate and diminishes the worth of what would be an otherwise useful explication of the world in which we find ourselves.
COMMENTARY: I have never seen a review that had less to do with the book's content than how its presentation made the reviewer feel about himself and his career as this review. It is such an amazingly naked display of professional jealously that I'm surprised this guy went to such pains to put into print.
The funny thing is-of course-that when I wrote "the Pentagon" throughout the book, I was actually talking about the Pentagon, where apparently this officer never served, otherwise I'm sure he would have cited his personal experience in that realm. Instead, other than his operational experience, this guy's entire career has been in the realm of professional military education, as a war college academic and editor of professional military academic journals. This is why he goes to such effort, throughout the review, to keep referring to "the Pentagon," as if my condemnation of the lack of strategic thinking there was somehow extended to include everyone in the professional military educational institutions (which I really never mention in the book other than to cite my time at the Naval War College), as well as everyone in civilian academia.
Weirdly, enough, as I sought to write a book that appealed to non-professionals, I decided to spend very little time on the academic debates of the 1990s, citing only a handful of books (Friedman's Lexus and the Olive Tree, Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, and Robert Kagan's book on European-U.S. relations. So obviously I was aware of these debates, I just didn't cite his favorite civilian academic tomes on the subject. I didn't do this because I wasn't interested in writing a giant review essay masquerading as a book, which is what most academic literature consists of: boatloads and boatloads of citing other people's work and publications.
But again, my real sin was to completely ignore the professional military scholarly writings of the post-Cold War era.
Why did I do this? Because in all my time of working in the Pentagon, no one ever referenced these publications in strategic discussions. Did they read them? I imagine they did. But I never heard them cited in any strategic discussions I engaged in over the nearly 12 years leading up to 2001, and frankly, I don't hear about them now when I go to the Pentagon. Frankly, I used to joke about this when I came to the Naval War College itself, because I remember a time during the deliberations leading up to the writing of the famous Navy White Paper Ö From the Sea, when three Naval War Colleges professors came down to sit in on one of our sessions. They introduced themselves to me, and when I asked what brought them down to our task force made up of Navy and Marine officers working out of the Pentagon, they informed me rather pompously that they were really the intellectual engines behind the whole Naval Force Capabilities Planning Effort, as they were cranking research paper after research paper up in Newport and sending them down here to the group, clearly steering all our debates whether we realized it or not. Well, we certainly didn't realize it because no one in the group spent any time reading these abstract and rather dense academic tomes as they filtered down from Newport. Days later I found the pile of all these papers sitting on a shelf, untouched. When I asked the Lieutenant Commander in charge of organizing all the research inputs to the task force, he just chuckled and said it was a load of bullshit from the academic crowd and that I shouldn't pay any attention to it.
I never forgot that in all my years working at the college, which is why I never published in professional military education journals. Instead, I gave briefs.
Obviously, my great sin in writing this book is not paying explicit homage to the stunningly influential and decisive role played by the war colleges' academic ranks in shaping Pentagon policy and force structure decisions across the post-Cold War era. Here's why I have no problem with that judgment: these academics had no real impact. When I wrote "the Pentagon" all those times, I was actually talking about the Pentagon. Cain had nothing to say about that, because he doesn't know anything about that. So he took a straw man to the wood shed in this review essay and beat the shit out of it. Good for him. He only reiterates my point about the utter uselessness of most academic writing in forging strategic vision.
And as for his own personal grasp of the "everything else," Cain's statement about my expecting "Chinese leaders somehow abandon their Ö their die-hard commitment to Communism" pretty much reveals his broad grasp of both political change there and his mastery of the historical process of globalization. All I can say is, "Buddy, get a frickin' clue!" China's leaders abandoned their die-hard commitment to Communism about 25 years ago with Deng's four modernizations.
All in all, pretty painful to read, not because I feel victimized by the analysis, but because I feel so sorry for the guy, thinking that he was really laying my argument to waste when in reality all he did was reveal himself as one sorry-assed green-eyed monster.
Cain is currently the Dean of Education and Curriculum at the Air Command and Staff College down in Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, where I briefed the entire class last November, to one helluva response from the students. How much you wanna bet that pissed him off enough to pen this review in response?
Me, I was just so thrilled to sign all those books for an hour or so after my talk. My hand got awfully tired, but probably not as much as Cain's in penning this magnificent ode to professional jealousy.
Thursday, June 23, 2005 at 7:34PM 
