Spoke this morning at TRADOC's Analysis Center, aka TRAC. TRADOC is the Army's famous Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Leavenworth in Leavenworth KS (also the site of the infamous military penitentiary). Got there a tad late (map they sent me was . . . hmmm . . . not so good), and so I got a bit lost in the rather rural countryside around Leavenworth (pretty, but not much to steer by, except the always pretty Missouri River). Spoke for two hours and did 15 minutes of Q&A. Nice facility and interesting to present to such a Army-dominated crowd (don't think I saw any other service represented). Audience seemed very appreciative in the end, and I had a nice personal conversation with young officer gearing up for adoption trip to China following my talk. Got a nice TRAC medallion from director as thanks. This one I plan on making sure I get back to my office, unlike the trio I lost from the AFCEA conference (nifty Intelligence Community medallion) and the two I lost from Montgomery AL (Air War College and Air Command Staff College). I'm still so pissed about that, that I may go ahead and buy them myself at Pentagon next time I'm in town.
Then later today I gave the talk at the University of Saint Mary, as described in the previous posting from the Kansas City Star. Good audience there and better-than average-Q&A, which I always appreciate. Also fun was simply having a couple of friends from our August China trip in the audienceóJanet and Michael Fitzgerald of Kansas.
Here's the text from Tom Slear's profile of me ("A Future Worth Creating"ójust so happens to be the working title of my next book with Putnam, slated for the fall of '05) that appears in the current issue of MS&T, which stands for Military Simulation and Training. Why write about me in such a journal? I don't know. My commentary follows the text. After that is today's catch.
A Future Worth Creating
Trouncing the enemy is fineóBut what about winning the peace? Tom Slear attended a brief by the US Naval War College's Thomas Barnett to explain how the new world order will affect military operationsóand training
It's hard not to listen to this guy. Harder still not to like him. Anybody within America's defense establishment who writes nearly every Pentagon and CIA projection about future threats has come to the same distressing and unhelpful conclusionósince anything is possible, eventually everything will happenócan't be all bad.
Anyone who lands a roundhouse punch on Congress by pointing out the political pattern of one moment highlighting the dangerous and unpredictable world that we live in and the next moment belittling on C-SPAN the intelligence community for failing to predict 9/11, tells you he's willing to color outside the lines.
"Who are these people kidding?" he writes.
And anyone who can take the big leap, one so large and perilous that no one else dare even approach the edge, has to earn your respect.
"To me, 9/11 was an amazing gift," Thomas Barnett wrote in The Pentagon's New Map (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2004), "as twisted and cruel as that sounds."
Barnett is a cross between Albert Einstein and Jay Leno. He's theoretical almost to a fault, but at the same time humorous and engaging. You like what he says almost as much for the way he says it as for what he says. But there's substance to the new world order that Barnett, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, is espousing. His book connects the dots between the disparate terrorist events of the last several years, and his conclusions have profound implications for military trainers.
RULE SETS
It's July in Rosslyn, Virginia. The weather is unseasonably cool. Barnett is speaking to a small group of military strategists in a room just across the Potomac River from the nation's capital. Admittance to the room is controlled by magnetic lock. The listeners are typical of those who comprise the bulk of the think tanks that author America's military strategiesóearly forties, relatively low in rank (colonel and lieutenant colonel), motivated, and incredibly fit.
Barnett has never served a day in the military. He has made a career of evaluating soldiers and general from the sidelines. His speaking style is flippant and sarcastic, conveying hints of intellectual snobbery. A safe bet would have been that Barnett and his audience would have mixed about as well as a vegan and a meat processor.
In fact, the audience is engaged almost from the start. Barnett builds a case for his view of the world military situation by logical point. It's all about rule sets, he says. After World War II, the rule sets were established by the bleak reality of a two-superpower worldóboth armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. If one stepped too far out of line, the other would start firing and we all would be introduced to the Stone Age. The doctrine was dubbed mutually assured destruction.
While Barnett laughs at the name, he applauds the approach. Simply stated, it worked. Governments had fixed parameters within which to operate, the overriding one of which was that the United States and Russia could never fight each other directly. That outcome was too horrible to contemplate. Consequently, the Korean War stayed in Korea, the Cuban Missile Crisis prompted the Soviet Union to meekly back down, and the Cold War never went hot.
For sure, the two countries engaged each other through proxies at the fringes, but both sides knew the limits. They didn't dare put their finger near the button.
For the United States and the rest of the free world, mutually assured destruction brought about a strategy of containment. Russia and communism would be contained rather than confronted. While it worked for 50 years, Barnett worries that it might hang around for another 50 with the U.S. military steadfastly clinging to the mindset of fighting the big oneótanks against tanks on the plains of Germany. Even today, Barnett said, the strategists in the Pentagon long for a Russian surrogate, an enemy to justify tank-heavy formations loaded with firepower. When none surfaced after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, one was created. First it was China. When that didn't suffice, the notion of fighting two wars at once came to the forefrontósomething akin to half of Russian one place (Iraq, perhaps) and the other half some place else (North Korea).
The benefit from all of this single-minded focus was that the American military became invincible, at least in the traditional sense. When it comes to set-piece battles fought between nation-states, America owns the franchise.
"All of this disappeared with 9/11," Barnett said to an agreeable audience. Question is, what type of mind-set will fill the void?
CONNECTED vs. DISCONNECTED
At this point Barnett was only too happy to offer his theory. His presentation was polished, using well crafted slides and accompanied by phrases perfected over the course of many similar briefings. Barnett has been a hot commodity since his book hit the streets early this year. However, his popularity has also brought a considerable amount of consternation. The U.S. military might be technologically advanced, yet it handles change no better than any other Washington bureaucracy. What Barnett proposes means change on an enormous scale. He envisions a military that can win the war and the peace, one that efficiently takes care of the business of killing the enemy and another one that effectively rebuilds the society of the conquered. The victor doesn't have to return, because it never really leaves. The nation-builders stay for the long haul.
Barnett's proposal flows from his view of the worldóhis rule set, if you will. The fault line is now between connected and disconnected countries, much as it was between communist and non-communist countries during the Cold War. The connected countries, as the name implies, benefit greatly from globalization and have an abiding interest in seeing it spread and prosper. These countries also tend to foster open societies with sophisticated legal systems and democratic governments. The core members of this group make up what Barnett called the "functioning area" of the worldóUnited States, Europe, Japan, Australia.
The non-functioning group, the globalization black hole, includes Africa, the Middle East and the northern part of South America. Countries within these areas have little interaction with the rest of the world and are content to keep it that way. Governments restrict trade and the information flow. To open their borders would mean calls for accountability and, God forbid, democracy.
When it comes to military matters, the countries in the functioning area have an established rule set. They won't fight each other because there is no value to it.
"The struggle is now between the core globalization countries and the gap globalization countries," Barnett said. "What do the gap countries get us? Pandemics, drugs, and terrorism."
At this point, most of the members of the audience shift uneasily in their chairs. They have heard black-and-white-scenarios before. In fact, Barnett is proposing the same simplistic view that he deplored in the 1980s and 1990s. Substitute Russia and its satellite countries for gap countries and Barnett could be speaking in 1975. But then Barnett inserts his caveat. Gap countries don't fight like nation states of old. In fact, they don't fight at all. Rather, it's the groups within these countries that bring about the mayhem.
The world is "suffering a significant amount of sub-national violence," he wrote in The Pentagon's New Map, "overwhelmingly concentrated in the states with the least connectivity to the globalization process."
No doubt the connected world's firepower can overwhelm its adversaries in the disconnected world, but then what? What will be left behind? Most likely an impoverished country that will breed not connectivity, but violence and terrorism. As America has discovered in Iraq, countries conquered geographically are a long way from being conquered philosophically. In fact, the former takes much less time and resources than the latter. Nevertheless, as Barnett pointed out to the agreement of his audience, the American military is organized just the opposite, with a force equipped to trounce an enemy with little left over to rebuild what's left behind. Barnett's concern is summarized neatly by an e-mail he received from an officer who served in Iraq with a construction battalion. He claimed he was doing more shooting that building.
SORE TEETH
To deal with this new reality, Barnett foresees a military organized with a Leviathan fighting force and a system administrator rebuilding force. The former will do the fighting and the latter will do the stabilizing.
Barnett's audience nodded politely. Counterinsurgency and peacekeeping is to the American military what sore teeth are to each one of usóthe more we touch them, the more they hurt. As Barnett himself admitted, "For years we in DoD said, 'We don't do operations other than war. We only kill people. We don't do follow-up. We go in with an exit strategy.' The problem, of course, is when we have a situation like we have in Iraq. What do we do when no exit strategy exists? If we leave, the situation will be worse than if we hadn't gone in at all."
The Leviathan force would be light, stealthy, and above all, fast. It would consist of submarines, bombers, jet fighters, and special operations forces. Its members would be straight off recruiting posters, or as Barnett says, "young, unmarried, and more than a little pissed off."
The system administrator force would use the Marine Corps as protection (that will go down with great difficulty) and make use of more senior members of the military as well as officials from State, Justice and Commerce departments as well as agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development. Whereas the Leviathan force's stay will be intense and relatively short, the system administrators will be in for the long haul. Their mission will be to bring the militarily conquered nation into the connected world.
Five years ago, Barnett would have been shown the door at any gathering of U.S. military officers. 9/11 and more particularly, Iraq, has changed the reception nearly 180 degrees. The Powell doctrine of public support, overwhelming force, and a quick exit doesn't seem to apply in a world where suicide bombers and tape recorded beheadings are every bit as effective as tanks and jet fighters.
Barnett believes his idea will gain traction if for no other reason than financial. As he travels the world explaining his theories (Norway, the Netherlands this fall; China earlier this year), the feedback indicates that many countries want to play a part in spreading globalization, but they don't have the money or the inclination to maintain a Leviathan force. They see their role as system administrators. The Leviathan force will be almost exclusively the domain of the United States.
"America will export security," Barnett said. "We always have, but it will become more pronounced."
The problems with Barnett's view are both political and technical. Rebuilding countries expends the patience of democracies, particularly when the commitment is long and the friendly casualties accrue.
ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE MORE DIFFICULT
But system administration also means a revolution in training. Just as combat forces have devised sophisticated ways to replicate battlefields, particularly with the help of simulation, along comes a whole new way of operating that does not lend itself to firing ranges and flight simulators. Some would argue that the American army has kept counterinsurgency and nation building at arm's length because neither offers a training scenario. In this regard, it's not the lingering mind-set of the Cold War that's the problem, but the bitter memories of Vietnam.
When first asked about training, even Barnett himself was brought up short. The question had never been raised, he said. He then offered some notions off the top of his head, such as massive, multiplayer, on-line gaming.
For sure, Barnett is on to something. The militaries of the connected world will certainly embark on as much building as destroying in the coming years. The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated how interwoven the two are.
The question is: Will training keep up with this new challenge? When I visited Fort Knox, the American Army's armor center, two years ago, I heard repeatedly that training had become so advanced that it had evolved into combat without the casualties. Reaching that level of fidelity with system administration will be just as necessary . . .and orders of magnitude more difficult.
Editor's note: Find out more about Thomas Barnett and The Pentagon's New Map at /
COMMENTARY: Very briefly, I think Slear does a better job than anybody to date capturing the sense of what it's like to be briefed by me. He also does a good job of describing my fine line between being overbearing and just engaging enough. Does he go too far in making me seem the anti-military stereotype? Sure, but that's just the tendency to confuse the actor with the act. Since he doesn't know me personally, he goes off the briefing completely. And there, his tendency to sort of get his quotes right is a bit annoying, but that's the price I pay for my high bit-rate of transmission. Overall, I'm very happy with this piece and think Slear did a great job, even as I don't like or agree with everything he said. In reality, I get along with military folks far better than he imagines. I and my family have lived and worked among military families for 15 years. To be honest, I like them better than the local civiliansóby a ways.
One final point: the picture of me talking in front of military officers is not from the July brief that Slear attended. I can tell because I'm wearing the tweed jacket that I wore for my author's photo (the same one that found it's way into the Wall Street Journal's dimpled image of me that's all over this site). I junked all my old suits when I got the check from my second Esquire, as my wife told me to update my wardrobe or else. The picture was actually taken in the spring during a student conference here at the Naval War College. The public affairs people just shot a bunch of pictures of me to have in advance so that when the press asked for them, they'd have some good ones.
Friday, November 19, 2004 at 8:11PM 
