Statement submitted

By 

Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett,

Senior Managing Director,

Enterra Solutions LLC 

To 

Seapower and Expeditionary Forces Subcommittee,

House Armed Services Committee,

United States Congress

26 March 2009 
 

I appear before the subcommittee today to provide my professional analysis of the current global security environment and future conflict trends, concentrating on how accurately--in my opinion--America's naval services address both in their strategic vision and force-structure planning.  As has been the case throughout my two decades of working for, and with, the Department of Navy, current procurement plans portend a "train wreck" between desired fleet size and likely future budget levels dedicated to shipbuilding.  I am neither surprised nor dismayed by this current mismatch, for it reflects the inherent tension between the Department's continuing desire to maintain some suitable portion of its legacy force and its more recent impulse toward adapting itself to the far more prosaic tasks of integrating globalization's "frontier areas"--as I like to call them--as part of our nation's decades-long effort to play bodyguard to the global economy's advance, as well as defeat its enemies in the "long war against violent extremism" following 9/11.  Right now, this tension is mirrored throughout the Defense Department as a whole:  between what Secretary Gates has defined as the "next-war-itis" crowd (primarily Air Force and Navy) and those left with the ever-growing burdens of the long war--namely, the Army and Marines. 

It is my sense that the current naval leadership views the global environment with great accuracy, understanding its service role to be one of balancing between four strategic tasks:  a) sensibly hedging against the slim possibility of great-power war; b) preparing the force for high-end combat operations against a regional rogue power armed with nascent nuclear weapons capacity; c) supporting/conducting ground operations in the struggle against violent extremism; and d) improving maritime governance and security in those regions where today it remains virtually non-existent (e.g., most of Africa's coastline).  Using the vernacular of my published works^*, I consider the first two tasks (great-power war, war against regional rogues) to fall under the rubric of America's Leviathan^** or big-war force, while the latter two tasks (struggle against extremism, extending governance) define the growing portfolio of our nation's System Administrator^* or small-wars force. 

Historically, the Department of Navy defined the totality of our nation's would-be System Administrator force, meaning, prior to the World Wars of the 20^th century, it was the job of the Navy and Marine Corps to both defend and extend America's commercial networks with the outside world, while the U.S. Army (i.e., Department of War) served mainly as a continental constabulary force that worked to integrate western frontier lands.  Those World Wars, in combination with the Cold War, transformed the U.S. Army and its offshoot, the Air Force, into the primary Leviathan services vis-√†-vis the Soviet threat, while the naval services, despite the grand ambitions of their 1980s Maritime Strategy, were left overwhelmingly in the role of managing the adjacent theaters known as the Third World.  At Cold War's end, those naval forces gladly embraced their enduring "SysAdmin" role, portraying themselves as de facto global police capable of handling--on their own--virtually all developing-region crisis scenarios short of regional war.  But with the post-9/11 interventions (Iraq, Afghanistan), the Navy quickly saw its global constabulary role eclipsed by the U.S. Army, as that force, supported by the Marines, once again stepped into its pre-20^th-century role as our nation's primary nation-building /occupational/counterinsurgency force--this time on the shifting frontiers of globalization's advance. 

Now, the Navy finds itself split between preserving its blue-ocean Leviathan fleet while simultaneously expanding its green/brown-water SysAdmin fleet, the former speaking primarily to 20^th-century great-power war scenarios that have lingered despite globalization's deep, pacifying embrace (see my geographic definition of globalization's Functioning Core^* in Figure 1 below), while demand for the latter only increases because of globalization's historically swift penetration of a raft of previously off-grid, still largely traditional regions (my definition of globalization's Non-Integrated Gap^**) where today we locate virtually all of the wars, civil wars, genocide and ethnic "cleansing," mass rape as a tool of terror, children lured or forced into combat activity, acts of terrorism, exporters of illegal narcotics, UN peacekeeping efforts, and 95 percent of U.S. military overseas interventions since 1990. 

Figure 1:  The Pentagon's New Map (2004)

As someone who helped write the Department of Navy's white paper, ...From the Sea, in the early 1990s and has spent the last decade arguing that America's grand strategy should center on fostering globalization's advance, I greatly welcome the Department's 2007 Maritime Strategic Concept that stated: 

United State seapower will be globally postured to secure our homeland and citizens from direct attack and to advance our interests around the world.  As our security and prosperity are inextricably linked with those of others, U.S. maritime forces will be deployed to protect and sustain the peaceful global system comprised of interdependent networks of trade, finance, information, law, people and governance. 

Rather than merely focusing on whatever line-up of rogue powers constitutes today's most pressing security threats, the Department's strategic concept locates its operational center of gravity amidst the most pervasive and persistently revolutionary dynamics associated with globalization's advance around the planet, for it is primarily in those frontier-like regions currently experiencing heightened levels of integration with the global economy (increasingly as the result of Asian economic activity, not Western) that we locate virtually all of the mass violence and instability in the system.   

Moreover, this strategic bias toward globalization's Gap regions (e.g., a continuous posturing of "credible combat power" in the Western Pacific and the Arabian Gulf/Indian Ocean) and SysAdmin-style operations there makes eminent sense in a time horizon likely to witness the disappearance of the three major-war scenarios that currently justify our nation's continued funding of our Leviathan force--namely, China-Taiwan, Iran, and North Korea.  First, the Taiwan scenario increasingly bleeds plausibility as that island state seeks a peace treaty with the mainland and proceeds in its course of economic integration with China.  Second, as Iran moves ever closer to achieving an A-to-Z nuclear weapon capability, America finds itself effectively deterred from major war with that regime (even as Israel will likely make a show--largely futile--of delaying this achievement through conventional strikes sometime in the next 12 months).  Meanwhile, the six-party talks on North Korea have effectively demystified any potential great-power war scenarios stemming from that regime's eventual collapse, as America now focuses largely on the question of "loose nukes" and China fears only that Pyongyang's political demise might reflect badly on continued "communist" rule in Beijing--hardly the makings of World War III. 

As the Leviathan's primary warfighting rationales fade with time, its proponents will seek to sell both this body and the American public on the notion of coming "resource wars" with other great powers.  This logic is an artifact from the Cold War era, during which the notion of zero-sum competition for Third World resources held significant plausibility primarily because economic connectivity between the capitalist West and the socialist East was severely limited.  But as the recent financial contagion proved, that reality no longer exists (see Figure 2 below).  The level of financial interdependence across globalization's Functioning Core, in addition to the supply-chain connectivity generated by globally integrated production lines, renders moot the specter of zero-sum resource competition among the world's great powers.  If anything, global warming's long-term effects on agricultural production around the planet will dramatically increase both East-West and North-South interdependency as a result of the emerging global middle class's burgeoning demand for higher caloric intake/resource-intensive foodstuffs.  To the extent that rising demand goes unmet or Gap regions suffer significant resource shortages in the future, we are exceedingly unlikely to see resumed great-power conflict as a result.  Rather, we are likely to witness even more destabilizing civil strife in many fragile states (a situation to which even rising great powers such as Brazil, Russia, India and China could return under the right macro-economic conditions), thus additionally increasing the SysAdmin force's global workload and triggering further Pentagon resource shifts from the underutilized Leviathan force.  Naturally, the same could be said about the legacy of today's global economic crisis. 

Figure 2:  Initial market declines during 2008 global financial crisis, Core-Gap superimposed

(Source: Wall Street Journal, 13 October 2008) 

In sum, I see a future in which the SysAdmin side of the ledger (more Green than Blue) experiences continued significant growth in its global workload, while the Leviathan (more Blue than Green) experiences the opposite.  As such, the U.S. Government's ongoing budget woes, in combination with the rising costs associated with equipping the Leviathan force (e.g., incredibly expensive capital ships), means that the Leviathan's platform numbers will shrink significantly over the next couple decades while the SysAdmin's numbers (a cheaper mix of smaller and more disposable/unmanned platforms) will rise dramatically--along with personnel requirements (already seen with the move to add 92,000 ground troops).   As a result, America's "soft power" military resources will grow in size and capabilities, over time generating pressure to create some new bureaucratic entity more operationally in line with such activities--namely, somewhere between our current departments of "peace" (State) and "war" (Defense). 

As for the Department of Navy's current force-structure plan, I think it's safe to say that our naval Leviathan force enjoys a significant--as in, several times over--advantage over any other force out there today.  As such, our decisions regarding new capital ship development and procurement should center largely on the issue of preserving industrial base.  My strategic advice is that America should go as low and as slow as possible in the production of such supremely expensive platforms, meaning we accept that our low number of per-class buys will be quite costly.  To the extent that ship or aircraft numbers are kept up or even expanded in aggregate, I believe such procurement should largely benefit the SysAdmin force's need for many cheap and small platforms, preferably of the sort that can be utilized by our forces for some suitable period of time and then given away to smaller navies around the world to boost their own capacity for local maritime governance.  In other words, we should increasingly make our overall naval force structure symmetrical to the now-asymmetrical challenges and threats found in globalization's frontier regions (what I call the Gap), our long-term focus being on increasingly the capacity of states there to govern those spaces on their own.   

As such, I am a firm believer in Admiral Mike Mullen's notion of the "1,000-ship navy" and the Global Maritime Partnerships initiative, especially when, as a part of such efforts, our naval forces expand cooperation with the navies of rising great powers like China and India, two countries whose militaries remain far too myopically structured around border conflict scenarios (Taiwan for China, Kashmir for India).  America must dramatically widen its definition of strategic allies going forward, as the combination of the overleveraged United States and the demographically-moribund Europe and Japan no longer constitutes a global quorum of great powers sufficient to address today's global security agenda.    

To conclude, the U.S. Navy faces severe budgetary pressures on future construction of traditional capital ships and submarines.  Those pressures will only grow as a result of the current global economic crisis (which--lest we forget--generates similar pressures on navies around the world) and America's continued military operations abroad as part of our ongoing struggle against violent extremism.  Considering these trends as a whole, I would rather abuse the Navy--force structure-wise--before doing the same to either the Marine Corps or the Coast Guard.  Why?  It is my professional opinion that the United States defense community currently accepts far too much risk and casualties and instability on the low end of the conflict spectrum while continuing to spend far too much money on building up our combat capabilities for high-end scenarios.  In effect, we over-feed our Leviathan force while starving our SysAdmin force, accepting far too many avoidable casualties in the latter while hedging excessively against theoretical future casualties in the former.  Personally, I find this risk-management strategy to be both strategically unsound and morally reprehensible. 

As this body proceeds in its collective judgment regarding the naval services' long-range force-structure planning, my suggested standard is a simple one:  give our forces fewer big ships with fewer personnel on them and many more smaller ships with far more personnel on them.   As the Department of Navy finally gets around to fulfilling the strategic promise of systematically engaging the littoral ... from the sea, doing so in complete agreement--in my professional opinion--with the security trends triggered by globalization's tumultuous advance, I would humbly advise Congress not to stand in its way.