U.S. NEWS: "Major Defense Contractors Aim for Soft-Power Role," by August Cole, Wall Street Journal, 2 March 2009. CORPORATE NEWS: "Lockheed Wins Pact For Defense," by August Cole, Wall Street Journal, 4 March 2009.

More good reporting from August Cole on the emerging industrial corner of the SysAdmin complex. Cited are BAE, Northrup and Lockheed, all of whom I've spent years briefing, division by division and at the senior leadership levels. They are moving into "soft power" programs that see them providing things like peacekeeper training and anthropologists to both the Pentagon and State. Cole reminds us of LockMart's purchase of Pacific Architects & Engineers, which has done everything from peacekeeping in Darfur to helping write the Afghanistan constitution. Key quote from Linda Gooden, head of LMCO's "fast-growing" Information Systems & Global Services:

We recognized five or so years ago that the industry was changing and that the government was looking at more than just hard power.

It was during this time of the year in 2004 that I briefed Lockheed's top 500 global execs in Phoenix (the original PNM brief). It was--in retrospect and from what I've learned--arguably the most influential single talk I've ever given. I had no idea at the time. Sometimes lampooned for not knowing--much less caring about--who's in the audience (see Jaffe's original WSJ profile on me), I spoke at a level laughingly above my paygrade, which is my norm. The constant feedback across my career has always been the same: "What you're talking about is so much more than what you're talking about!" In many ways, then, the successful grand strategist is a virtual idiot savant, crossing domains at a speed he does not understand fully and yet does not fear. That fearless, drawing-outside-the-lines mentality is easily mocked for being an inch deep and a mile wide, but every player has his function, so either you accept that constant gripe or you reach for the tools of the drill-down artist and find your intellectual security in knowing what you know, and not connecting what you see. As I noted in PNM: having the right answer is almost always meaningless, unless it's obtained at the right time and can be delivered to the right people. Unless the decisions follow, the vision is without weight. As they say in the Pentagon, vision without budget is hallucination. But for all you people who keep asking me, "Are you getting through?" This is major data point. Like I say in Great Powers, you don't convince a very conservative company like LMCO of anything that doesn't make sense to them as well. You nudge history; you do not make it. All the grand strategist can do is anticipate that answer and work on publicizing it as much as possible to the right people at the right time. That time is now. International Resources Group, a company I've worked with going back for well over a decade, is a blue-chip USAID contractor. It was bought in December by L-3 Communications, a long-time DoD contractor. Meanwhile, L-3 is unseated by Lockheed on a Special Operations Command logistical contract, another form of its branching out in markets now seen as adjacent and no longer operationally distant. Key paras to conclude the first piece:

The deal [L-3's purchase of IRG] was the latest sign that the industry expects business to grow in the coming years as the companies use many of these contracts as an entry point to sell an array of services. Bolstering the government's ranks of foreign-service officers and development experts will take time. In the interim, the companies want to step in, whether it is staffing new global health programs or continuing to operate in current hot spots. U.S. military forces are on their way out of Iraq, but civilian contractors are expected to remain there, training military and police forces, as well as assisting the government to rebuild infrastructure and improve basic services like education.

The real transition is beginning. What I say in Great Powers is this: first comes the military, then comes industry, then comes the political will. Expecting the political will to come absent the capabilities--both public and private--is illusory. We may stumble into such responsibilities in a fear-threat reaction (like Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11), but absent such intervening impulses, we will abjure. That's why it is crucial to take advantage of the Iraq and Afghanistan interventions, and that's why I supported going into Iraq after Afghanistan: we'd be forced to change in response to circumstances too grave to ignore. Now, we're actually much closer to having what it really takes for Afghanistan--most of all being strategic patience. You may ask, "Why did it have to take so long?" I will tell you that I'm pleasantly surprised by the speed, given the deep and intense opposition--here.