Blast from my past: "India's 12 Steps to a World-Class Navy" (2001)

India's 12 Steps to a World-Class Navy

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

The International Fleet Reviews in February showed off its impressive fleet; now the Indian Navy must determine how it wants to use it.

COPYRIGHT: The U.S. Naval Institute, 2001 (July issue, pp. 41-45); reprinted with permission

In February of this year ...  
I had the pleasure of attending the Indian Navy’s first-ever International Fleet Review in Mumbai, where I made a presentation to a symposium audience of 16 chiefs of naval staff and dozens of flag officers from an additional 13 navies. This fleet review, which went by the motto “Bridges of Friendship,” essentially was the Indian Navy’s “coming out” party after many years of building up and modernizing its force structure, mostly through foreign purchases.

You may ask, “Coming out for what?” Frankly, that was the real theme of the high-powered symposium, as well as of numerous discussions I had with Indian flag officers, both active and retired. In many ways, this grand celebration was the swan song for a generation of Indian admirals who propelled this once humble coastal force to its current heights as the world’s fourth-largest navy. Not only do they want the international community to take note and show some respect, but they also are looking for some clear sense of where their Navy fits in this messy post-Cold War security environment.

Future Pathways of the Indian Navy

It is fair to say that every Indian admiral I spoke with represented his own school of thought, but I sensed two broad strategic factions, which I dub the Soviet School and the British School. This division recalls not only the perceived operational disparity between the Eastern and Western fleets (the former long considered the “Russian half” of the Indian Navy; the latter the “British half”) but also the difference between a land-oriented great power’s strategic employment of naval force and that of a sea-oriented one. Not surprisingly, most of the British School admirals I met had studied at the U.S. Naval War College. Conversely, I could discuss my love for Russian poetry—in the original—with those of the Soviet School.

I further subdivide each school into two wings: those admirals who believe the Indian Ocean “belongs” to the Indian Navy (and not to any “meddlesome outsiders,” including the U.S. Navy) and those who believe the Indian Navy “belongs” to something larger—typically, the collective good of global maritime security.

Putting those two axes together, I see four future pathways for the Indian Navy:

• Minimum-Deterrent Navy (Soviet School/regional focus). This is the weakest long-term outcome because it relegates the Navy to an adjunct to the Army and Air Force in India’s continuing nuclear arms race with Pakistan. This tendency most recently is demonstrated in New Delhi’s declaration to remain “equal” to any Pakistani move to put nuclear missiles on its submarines.[1]  Recalling the Soviet Navy’s bastion strategy, this is a go-nowhere, do-little navy.
• Sea-Denial Navy (Soviet School/global ambition). This is an anti-China navy that seeks to export an antiaccess strategy to the South China Sea. Like the old Soviet fleet, it focuses on antiship capabilities with an emphasis on attack submarines. In its most aggressive form, it might be construed by some as an anti-U.S. navy in terms of its modest capacity for power projection toward the Persian Gulf. During the fleet review’s grand finale, Indian naval commandos demonstrated their quick-strike skills by planting explosive charges on three mock oil rigs in Mumbai’s Back Bay. They demolished the platforms to the delight of the huge crowds lining the shore, providing the VIP audience of foreign admirals a none too subtle reminder of where India resides, namely, right along the sea route that carries the majority of the world’s energy traffic from the Middle East to developing Asia.
• Sea Lines of Communication–Stability Navy (British School/regional focus). This is the polar opposite of the sea-denial navy, for it takes as its prime task the preservation of the Indian Ocean as a safe transit for global commerce. This Indian Navy seeks to supplant the U.S. Navy as the region’s sea-based Leviathan, not so much because it wants the United States out, but because India believes this is an appropriate regional security role for it to fill as its economy emerges. Another way to describe this navy is the “Mini-Me Navy,” or the Indian Navy’s regionalized version of the U.S. Navy—same rough spread of capabilities, just one-eighth the size.
• International Coalition Navy (British school/global ambition). This is the most ambitious navy, for it assumes two key developments: (1) a lessening of the land-based rivalries with Pakistan and China; and (2) a far bigger share of the Indian defense budget going to the navy, which now receives around 15%. In a practical sense, this is a “niche navy,” or India’s version of the current Royal Navy: a pro-international norms force that can deploy with some genuine reach when combined with the U.S. Navy in a multinational naval coalition. On the face of it, some nations might instinctively fear an Indian Navy of such capability, but such a long-term development would signal a secure and confident New Delhi looking to do its part for global security maintenance. As a rule, dangerous powers field large armies and air forces, not large navies.

Which navy India will end up with is anyone’s guess. Based on everything I heard in Mumbai, strong rationales exist within the Indian Navy for each outcome. But clearly, for India to achieve a world-class navy, its leaders have to move beyond viewing the fleet as a supplemental tool in New Delhi’s long-standing rivalries with its neighbors, toward an expansive security vision that takes into account the nation’s global economic status as an emerging information-technology superpower.

A 12-Step Program for the Indian Navy

India’s naval development has progressed to where its leaders need to elevate their vision beyond what the force can provide the country in terms of security to the larger issue of what it can provide the world in terms of stability. I see this as a 12-step program, borrowing liberally from the self-help literature so popular in the United States today. In effect, the senior officers of the Indian Navy need to:

1. Admit they are powerless over the Army and Air Force in determining national security priorities. Over the years India’s best and brightest did not join the Navy; there were a lot more opportunities to launch glorious military careers in the north against either the Pakistanis or the Chinese. But even if the ground pounders rule the military roost, their definition of national security is mostly internalized (what happens here), whereas the naval definition should be almost exclusively externalized (what happens over there). By my scoring, India is not a legitimate great power until it generates a surplus of external security—beyond what it needs to protect the country from outside attack. Once achieved, either New Delhi markets that surplus externally as a collective good or it ends up scaring the hell out of the neighbors. So let the Army and Air Force set India’s national security priorities, but the Navy needs to establish India’s international security priorities because only the Navy can make that sale.

2. Believe that a greater power—globalization—can elevate their force to strategic vision.  As one Indian commander complained, “We are strategic suckers!” What passes for grand strategy in the Indian military is nothing more than “J & K tactics”—India’s long-simmering, high-altitude version of trench/guerrilla warfare with Pakistan over the disputed Jammu and Kashmir region. Nuclearizing the fleet on Karachi’s say-so might seem the prudent tit for tat, but it hardly constitutes a strategic naval vision when the leaders in your industry have long since turned in their tactical nukes and loaded up on precision-guided missiles. Globalization is splintering the concept of national security, generating new markets for both supranational and subnational security, two venues in which naval forces offer unique response attributes. Through its information technology sector, India is becoming a major player in the process of globalization, sporting more millionaires than any country in the world.[2] At some point, it will be asked to give something back, and a visionary internationalist navy will answer the mail nicely—so long as it is good for something other than humping lots of nukes around territorial waters.

3. Make a decision to turn their Navy’s operational focus toward influencing events ashore.  I was both gratified and amazed to hear so many Indian admirals refer to the 1992 white paper, “. . . From the Sea” as a great turning point in naval strategy—gratified because I had a small role in shaping that document, amazed because I always had assumed the Indians looked more to Gorshkov than Mahan. Granted, there was some waxing nostalgic about the “spectacular Soviet Navy,” and more than a few Indian admirals revealed bitterness about Washington’s efforts to “demonize” the Indian Navy because of its old Soviet (and now Russian) ties. But by and large the flags revealed a real admiration for the U.S. Navy’s effort to shift from a blue-water to a littoral focus. Actually, it was almost an envy, simply because the U.S. Navy seems to know what it wants to do once it gains access to “events ashore,” and the Indians have not really made that cognitive leap. They know they want the capability; they just are not sure yet how they would use it. Again, this is because the Indian military acts as though security is something they import, like so many Russian subs, not something they export to the world.

4. Make a searching and fearless inventory of their lack of involvement in recent international coalitions.  In his impressive symposium presentation, retired Indian Navy Rear Admiral K. Raja Menon noted how the Indian Navy has avoided numerous opportunities over the past generation to join multinational maritime coalitions in response to significant regional instabilities (e.g., tanker wars, Iran-Iraq war, Persian Gulf War), even though the Indian Army has long played a significant peacekeeping role in U.N. operations. In short, he argued, the Indian Navy for far too long has pursued an excessively narrow interpretation of the role of navies in regional and international security. As he wryly stated, regional power is a lot like sex appeal: no matter how often India admires itself in the mirror, it isn’t a regional power until outside powers recognize it as such. Or as I would put it, India seems less the regional power precisely because it does not employ its navy in the manner of a sea-based great power. A small power may have regional interests, but only a great power has regional responsibilities.

5. Admit their mistakes in force structure planning.  Despite the scrappy genius of their plug-and-play approach to purchases of foreign platforms and systems, the Indians have not made much of a transition to a post-Cold War naval environment. As some younger officers complained, the Indian Navy still remains far more suited to the sort of open-sea ship battles associated with World War II than to the littoral-focused strategies of network-centric warfare. In a nutshell, the Indian Navy remains an antiship missile in a cruise missile world. It talks a good game on influencing events ashore, but it continues to buy for sea denial. But maybe that is an inevitable outcome from purchasing the bulk of your naval platforms from the world’s great land power.

6. Understand they are a relatively young navy, with the shortcomings that come from a lack of international experience.  I was struck by how many retired Indian flags kept referring to their navy as young, or even adolescent. Despite a naval tradition going back to antiquity, Indian admirals will tell you that their beloved institution still has a lot of growing up to do. In their minds, it takes a century to mature a navy, so February’s grand celebration marked just the rough halfway point to what they dream the Indian Navy is capable of becoming. I could not help but imagine the Indian Navy as a young man who, having been abandoned in his infancy by his father (Royal Navy), was forced to spend his youth with his eccentric aunt (Soviet Navy) but now wants to break out and see the world for himself—or perhaps with his rich, world-wise uncle (U.S. Navy). And if that makes it sound like the Indian Navy has a complex, conflicted, almost love-hate relationship with all three navies, then it is an apt metaphor.

7. Expand their nation’s security paradigm beyond the “sacred soil syndrome.”  This is another golden nugget from Admiral Menon, who describes this “cult of the land forces” as stemming from past wars with China (1962) and Pakistan (1965, 1971). Strangely enough, it is possible to argue that no other state in the world should care either more or less than India about the sanctity of its borders. On one hand, no nation has lost more land since World War II (e.g., Pakistan, Bangladesh). On the other hand, no economy today better demonstrates the “death of distance” associated with information technology—India produces roughly half of the world’s software, literally phoning it in to the rest of the global economy. In New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s lexicon, India is at once a leading “lexus” economy (i.e., high-technology producer) and a classic “olive tree” society (i.e., still fighting over seemingly meaningless bits of land).[3] Granted, the sacred soil syndrome is not going to disappear anytime soon, but some strategic balance is needed. And in the military world, such vision can come only from the naval service.

8. Improve their relationships with all small littoral neighbors.  In many ways the Indian Navy would like to supplant the U.S. Navy as the Indian Ocean’s naval, networking Leviathan—the trusted big brother everyone can turn to in moments of trouble. In some ways, this will never happen. By definition, any region’s smaller powers want and need a distant friend who can stand up to the neighborhood bully, and for many small littoral states, India comes closest to fitting that pejorative title. From India’s perspective, they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t: if they try to act the part of regional hegemon, they will only scare smaller powers into closer reliance on U.S. naval power, and yet in the absence of any productive input, India has a hard time demonstrating to its neighbors that it can play a useful, leading role in enabling regional security. In sum, India possesses too large a navy not to play a bigger stabilizing role in the Indian Ocean—especially as the waterway’s role in world energy transfers increases—but it needs to build relationships of trust with its smaller neighbors slowly over time.

9. Make some amends to regional rivals.  The obvious candidates here are Pakistan and China, neither of which made it to the fleet review, and that’s too bad. Pakistan was not invited, and China refused to come because its ally was excluded. India can build all the “bridges of friendship” it wants across Asia, but so long as those two countries remain quasi enemies or at least heated rivals, it is hard to see India achieving the sort of progressive, stability-enhancing regional role it desires for its growing navy. And again, that’s too bad, for no ocean is in need of strategic stability more than the Indian Ocean, which is arguably the most nuclearized of the seven seas.[4]

10. Make an inventory of the global maritime insecurities they need to play a more prominent role in reducing.  The Indians are fond of pointing out that not only do they sit astride the two most important commercial straits in the world (Hormuz and Malacca), but they also are situated smack dab between two of the most important narcotic centers—the Golden Crescent to the West and the Golden Triangle to the East. Toss in the fact that modern high-seas piracy is especially concentrated in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, plus all the overlapping sovereignty claims in both, and you have a sizeable security agenda for any would-be regional naval power. And when you get all those houses in order, get ready to tackle environmental damage, rising ocean levels, and altered weather patterns. In sum, India’s growing naval power could be put to good use across a very broad range of regional collective security needs.

11. Seek an expanded navy-to-navy relationship with the world’s sole military superpower.  U.S. naval presence in the Indian Ocean littoral isn’t going away any time soon. There are simply too many states there that want the collective good the U.S. Navy is selling, and it is a trusted brand with a long, solid reputation. If you look at U.S. naval crisis response over the past quarter-century, it is apparent that this area is the Department of Navy’s operational center of gravity. As former Indian foreign secretary J. N. Dixit commented about increased U.S. naval presence in southwest Asia following the Persian Gulf War: “These are the facts of life.” India becomes a genuine naval regional power only in conjunction with the U.S. Navy—not in opposition to it, or even as a marketed alternative. The U.S. Navy is the Microsoft of world navies; it simply sets too many operational standards and protocols to be ignored.

12. Having achieved this awakening from the strategic isolation of the Cold War, carry their new message of internationalism to the world.  This year’s International Fleet Review was a great start. The Indian naval leadership brought me to this star-studded gathering to—as one retired vice admiral put it—“say something about the future to the junior officers in the back of the hall.” But they also brought me to Mumbai, just as they brought all those foreign flag officers, to impress upon me a sense of all they have accomplished in building this navy over the past five decades, and what they hope to do with it in the future. And I did go away impressed, not only with the Indian Navy, but also with the incredible diversity, vibrancy, and ambition that is today’s India.

Why India Matters

As noted diplomat Sashi Tharoor argues, India is probably “the most important country for the future of the world.”[5]  If globalization succeeds in the United States or the European Union, no one will be too surprised. After all, globalization demands less change of these countries than it does of the world around them. And if globalization fails in China or Russia, many likewise will be unsurprised, for it requires much change from both societies—perhaps too much too quickly.

But whether globalization succeeds in India should interest just about everyone around the world. For if globalization can succeed in a democratic society where half the population is illiterate and terribly impoverished, then it can succeed just about anywhere. Conversely, if it can’t succeed in a free-market economy that features the world’s largest pool of information technology workers, then there is little hope for much of the world’s population.

Not too long ago Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld characterized India as a country that is “threatening other people, including the U.S., Western Europe and countries in West Asia.”[6]  In my dealings with Wall Street as part of a Naval War College project on globalization, I have spoken with a number of financial executives about India and its role in the global economy, and naturally I have found quite a different appreciation there.[7] In fact, besides China, there is no country in the world about which there is such a huge gap between how the U.S. security establishment and the U.S. financial establishment view—respectively—the security “threat” and the economic “opportunity.”

India suffers some profound military insecurities—the sort that often derail a society’s best attempts to open itself to the outside world. The Indian Navy is the country’s best near- and long-term instrument for positively asserting itself as a force for both regional and global stability. The Bush administration needs to think seriously about what sort of security relationship it wants with India in the coming years.  Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage’s May trip to New Dehli was a huge step in the right direction, signalling an easing of the restrictions on military contacts imposed by the Clinton Administration following India nuclear weapons tests in 1998.  Let’s hope it jump starts a far broader menu of strategic cooperation.

[1] As India’s Defense Ministry spokesman P.K. Bandopadhyay declared, “We are also fully prepared for the deployment of nuclear missiles by them.” See The Associated Press, “Pakistan Planning Fleet With Nuclear Weapons: India Vows to Match Submarine Deployment,” International Herald Tribune, 23 February 2001, p. 1.

[2]  Good estimates vary from 15 to 20 million millionaires. India is estimated to possess a middle class of about 200 million.

[3]  See Friedman’s The Lexus And The Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1999).

[4]  Among the nuclear powers whose navies ply this ocean are the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and Israel.

[5]  Sashi Tharoor, India: From Midnight to the Millennium (New York: Harper, 1998 paperback), p. 3. Tharoor actually quotes British historian E. P. Thompson with this phrase.

[6] This quote was run on the front page of The Times of India during the fleet review. See Siddharth Varadarajan, “Stop supply of N-fuel to India, U.S. tells Russia,” The Sunday Times, 18 February 2001, p. 1.

[7] To learn more about the Naval War College’s NewRuleSets.Project and to access its reports, visit us online at <www.nwc.navy.mil/newrulesets>.

Dr. Barnett is a former professor at the U.S. Naval War College, and served as a senior strategic researcher in the Decision Strategies Department of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies. He thanks Professor Bradd Hayes, Professor Hank Kamradt, Rear Admiral Michael McDevitt, USN (ret.), and Dr. Lawrence Modisett for their input to, and feedback on, this article.

Blast from my past: "Top Ten Post-Cold War Myths" (2001)

Top Ten Post-Cold War Myths

by

Thomas P.M. Barnett and Henry H. Gaffney Jr.

As a mobile, sea-based containment force, 
the U.S. Navy will continue to play an 
important role in the nation's foreign policy, 
but its missions will mirror the clustered responses 
in Iraq and Yugoslavia, not the 
obsolete two-major-theater-war standard.

COPYRIGHT: The U.S. Naval Institute, 2001 (February issue, pp. 32-38); reprinted with permission

As we begin . . . 
a new presidential administration, it is time to look over the recent past to see what we have learned about this new era of globalization.  Americans entered the Clinton administration with a lot of hope about an outside world where so many positives had emerged with the end of the Cold War.  The United States was the sole military superpower; what could go wrong?

Depending on whom you listen to, either a lot or not too much.  Those experts who focus on the global economy see plenty to celebrate, but most who track international security see lots of threatening chaos in the world.  How can these views be so different?  Are there no connections between global economics and security? How can the former flourish if the latter is deteriorating? 

We’ll say it up front: we don’t think international security has worsened over the past eight years.  Instead, we think too many political-military analysts—in an attempt to justify the retention of Cold War forces—have let their vision be clouded by a plethora of post-Cold War myths, the biggest of which is the two-major-theater-war (2-MTW) standard.  It was the best strategy placeholder then-Secretary of Defense Les Aspin could come up with to put a floor on force structure, but 2-MTW doesn’t capture the reality of the globalization era, the migration of conflict to the failing states outside that globalization, and the continued technological advances U.S. forces are introducing, which no other country pursues.  In short, it is not connected to the world at all.

In our decades-long hair-trigger standoff with the Soviets, U.S. strategists became addicted to “vertical” scenarios, meaning surprise situations that unfold with lightning speed in a specific strategic environment that is, by and large, static.  By static, we mean all potential participants are expected to come as they are.  No one is really changed by the scenario, and no evolution is possible in their response.  In this poker game, we expected everyone to play the single hand in question straight up: no bluffing, no hedging, and no changes of heart.  In essence, we had to assume the two main players were rational actors.  The only thing that seemed to change in this static picture was the race to add better technology.  We always feared the Soviets had gotten there first, or were about to—a fear we subsequently transferred to the rogues.

This approach made sense in the Cold War, when we had to make certain gross assumptions about how both Soviet Bloc forces and our NATO allies would behave at the outbreak of World War III, but it just does not apply in the globalization era.  If the last eight years have taught us anything, it is that political-military scenarios in the post-Cold War era will unfold “horizontally.”   Situations will evolve over time with few clear-cut turning points, typically lapsing into a cyclical pattern that nonetheless features dramatic differences with each go-around.  Think of our dealings with Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic and you’ll get the picture. 

In horizontal scenarios, everything—and everyone—is free to evolve over time, meaning positions change, allies come and go, and definitions of the “real situation” abound.  In this strategic environment, sizing and preparing one’s forces according to vertical scenarios isn’t just inappropriate; it is dangerous.  It fosters a confidence in packaged solutions employing packaged forces armed with packaged assumptions—the 2-MTW standard in a nutshell—so that anything else you do with the forces reduces your readiness for those 2 MTWs.

Both the 2-MTW standard and the high-tech wannabes, with their nostalgia for "imminent" Soviet breakthroughs, suffer from slavish adherence to a collection of myths concerning the post-Cold War era.  If we are ever going to move beyond their vertical scenarios to a better understanding of where the military fits in the globalization era, these myths must be punctured and discarded.  Our top ten list of myths is:

10. There are far more conflicts and crises in the world after the Cold War! The number inflation on this one is unreal: suddenly every terrorist shoot-out and ten-person liberation movement is a “low intensity conflict.” When we count the significant conflicts and crises of the 1990s and compare them to those of the 1980s, however, we don’t find the stunning increase some analysts do.  In the 1980s, we see one system-threatening conflict (the Iran-Iraq War), and in the 1990s we see two (Desert Storm, the Congo War—the latter a stretch).  In the 1980s, we count 6 significant state-based conflicts and 24 internal conflicts, compared to 7 and 28, respectively, in the 1990s.^[1]  In sum, we’re looking at an overall increase of 6 cases, or fewer than one a year.  Worth worrying about?  Yes, since internal warfare these days involves failing states and generates lots of refugees.  But a new world disorder?  Hardly.

What political-military analysts should recognize in globalization is a remaking of the international economic order that rewards the most fit and devastates the least ready—in the same society.  In advanced countries, the resulting conflict will be mostly political, but in some developing societies, these horizontal tensions will turn bloody in scattered instances. If you’re looking for a defining conflict, check out Indonesia’s disintegration following the Asian economic crisis.

9. The Soviet Bloc's collapse unleashed chaos!

The myth is that, with the stabilizing hand of the Soviets removed, conflicts have bloomed across the globe. This issue needs to be divided into its constituent parts: Soviet support to the Third World, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet republics.  In every instance the balance of the news is positive.

Looking at the old Third World, we view the collapse of Soviet assistance as an absolute good.  Central America is certainly quieter for its absence, as is southern Africa as a whole, though Angola still burns.  In the Middle East, Yemen is reunified, Qaddafi has stopped playing the Arab bad boy (for now), and the PLO lost Moscow's support. Granted, Soviet arms beneficiary Iraq reached a use-it-or-lose-it moment in 1990, and went for broke, but the same cannot be said for Syria.  Afghanistan still stinks as a place to live, and Vietnam still goes its own way, but in sum, it's a pretty good deal for global order.

Some people insist on calling Eastern Europe a security vacuum, but the balance is very positive, with the obvious exception of the former Yugoslavia.  But if Gorbachev had come to us 15 years ago and said he could arrange for the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, the peaceful reunification of Germany, and the absorption of several former satellite states into NATO, but the cost would be a bloody civil war in Yugoslavia . . . well, you get the idea.  Moreover, Balkan experts will tell you that Yugoslavia's demise had nothing to do with the fall of the Soviets.  It was a disaster waiting to happen once Tito passed away.

Finally, when looking at the former Soviet republics, we are sobered by events in Chechnya, the rest of the Caucasus, and Tajikistan, but still view the overall evolution as far more conflict free than anyone could have expected. Remember when we feared Russian invasions of the Baltic republics?  Or Ukraine’s imminent Anschluss with Moscow?  Or a wave of radical Islamic fundamentalism sweeping the “Stans?"  (Okay, we are still watching that one.)    Best yet, whatever violence has occurred here has been left to the Russians to figure out—unlike the Balkans.

8. We are swamped with failed states! 

“Failed states” is another label that’s bandied about far too loosely. Reading some reports, you’d think they were spreading like wildfire across the planet.  But there always have been failed states; we just never called them that.  Instead, we used to call the Somozas and Siad Barrés “valued friend” and “trusted ally,” even as we helped to prop up their flimsy dictatorships.  The Russians had a fancier phrase, “countries of socialist orientation,” but that was just Sovietese for flimsy communist dictatorships.

 What defines a failed state in the globalization era is its failure to attract foreign investment.  When none appears, or the leaderships steals it, the same feeble government that somehow muddled through the Cold War with superpower (or French) help now simply collapses.  In the early 1990s, when the United States led what became U.N.-sanctioned interventions into Somalia and Haiti, there was optimistic talk of a new model—namely, the United Nations serving as midwife to these tortured societies’ slippery transition to stable economies and government.  But the ill-supported United Nations proved a poor substitute for a superpower propping up a government with arms and military training.

Of the 36 countries in which internal conflicts occurred across the 1990s, the United States decided—after much angst—to intervene in only four: Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo.  So why did the decade seem so chock-full of U.S. interventions?   Those four situations accounted for about half of all naval responses overseas and the bulk of the ship days involved in such operations.^[2]  To put it bluntly, advanced countries can safely ignore failed states (except maybe Indonesia), until “those damned Seattle people,” with their silly “values,” embarrass them.

7. Transnational actors are taking over the world! 

This bugaboo must also be disaggregated to make sense of it.  Starting with terrorists, the hype ignores historical data.  According to the State Department’s annual report on terrorism, the phenomenon peaked in the second half of the 1980s, when it averaged 630 international attacks a year.  Then the Soviet Bloc’s support system disappeared and so did much of the terrorism.  Since 1989 terrorists have averaged 382 attacks per year—a 40% drop.^[3]

Drug cartels and Mafia syndicates do not seek to disrupt global economic or political stability, but merely to generate profits. In effect, they desire macrostability within and among nation-states in order to create and exploit microinstabilities—i.e., illegal markets. These criminals are not interested in destabilizing or capturing political institutions, but in influencing them for their own ends. Granted, Colombia represents an odd turn, as the Marxist guerrillas there are now dependent on drug proceeds.  But in general, the drug kingpins prefer to stay out of politics.

The same could be said for illegal aliens, who are looking for economic opportunity. Too rapid a migration can destabilize, but immigration is far from out of control in developed countries: seven out of eight immigrants now settled there arrived legally.^[4]  As for refugees displaced by conflicts, they are by-products of local chaos, and their "transnational" effects largely are limited to the next country over.

Finally, you have to wonder about the tendency of some national security strategists to lump transnational corporations (TNCs) in with this motley crew.  TNCs not only represent the future of the global economy, they also account for the bulk of our 401ks.  Anyway, it is a myth that TNCs act with indifference to their birth nations: every one has a home base, and almost all members of their boards come from that home.  But the big point to remember is that TNCs invest overwhelmingly in countries where there is firm rule of law.

6. Technology proliferation is out of control! 

This myth is sold in two sizes: rogue states and asymmetrical warriors.  The funny thing is, in both instances, everyone usually ends up talking about the same sorry list of old Soviet-client survivors.

With the rogues, the biggest concern is that they are either buying or selling nuclear and missile technology.  We also worry about them developing chemical and biological weapons, but that is not really high-tech anymore (nor have they made any of it work).  Then again, their missiles aren’t state of the art either, as everything passed around this gang tends to use old Soviet technology.   

Now, many of the “new security” types will try to sell you on the notion that missile proliferation is rampant among unspecified “potential adversaries” (their fear mongering would dissolve if they had to say who), but they’re really stretching here.  Over the past decade more countries have just said no than yes. 

Again, it is the four rogues who are proliferating (Libya, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea), and none is really doing very well at it.  This quartet lives off of three suppliers who are in it for the bucks—Russia, China, and North Korea.  U.S. diplomats are all over the three suppliers to join the civilized world of functioning economies, leaving it to the Pentagon to keep the pressure on the rogues.  That does not sound like an out-of-control problem to us.

The “asymmetrical warriors” or “potential adversaries” are implied to exist in vast numbers, although few, if any, have ever been spotted in the wild.  Nonetheless, we are told that all they need nowadays is a credit card and Internet access and voila—almost any dangerous technology can be picked up on e-Bay!  This is the “silver bullet” concept taken to extremes: these warriors are presumed to deftly deny our access to conflicts by negating our high-tech advantage with their Radio Shack stuff.  Meanwhile, we spend on military research and development alone more than what the rogues spend on their entire militaries.

5. China is the new Soviet Union! 

China is not the Soviet Union.  It remains a communist-governed country and retains major elements of a command economy, it mostly decollectivized its agriculture two decades ago and now sports a massive private sector.  This mixed economy makes it unlikely that China will undertake anything like the single-minded military-industrial effort the Soviets made. Moreover, its defense technology is primitive and there are no signs it is embarking on anything like the Soviets’ high-level, concentrated scientific efforts.

China never presumed to offer an alternative world system and has no satellites, although it wants Taiwan back.  Other than that myopic focus, it is fair to say that its relations with other Asian states are still evolving.  China doesn’t aspire to conquer its neighbors and doesn’t pretend to spread communism, but it still worries about Western nations encroaching from the sea, as they did in the 19^th century.

We kid ourselves when we cast China as this century’s Soviet menace.  China desperately needs our direct investment for its skyrocketing energy requirements and our market for its low-tech exports.  

4. Speed is everything in crisis response!

This concept is ingrained in our psyche because of our Cold War fears and the experience of Desert Shield. We have become addicted to speed of response because we are a reactive nation and have a long way to travel to any conflict.  But here is where the world’s sole military superpower may be underestimating its power. 

First, as the world’s Leviathan, what we bring to the table is not so much speed as the inevitability of our punishing power.  The speed demons will counter that we have to rush in precisely because our foe will deny us the access we need to bring all that power to bear.  This is an argument that strings a lot of little fears together into one big phobia:

• The Air Force fears we will be denied access to bases by cowed allies—an improbable scenario if we’re coming to defend them.
• The Marines fear we will have no choice but to perform forcible-entry amphibious landings because we don’t have any allies at all—cowering or not (tell that to the South Koreans).
• The Navy fears it won’t be able to operate in the close-in littoral in a timely manner and without losses, and will thus lose out to . . . the U.S. Air Force. 

Two underlying realities render this debate moot: First, we are living in an age of horizontal scenarios where nothing really comes out of the blue anymore. If we don’t see the crisis coming, it is because we choose not to pay attention.  Second, other than the unlikely cases involving extensive direct attacks on the United States, we are stuck with only surprise attacks by Iraq and North Korea (even China issued the required Notices to Mariners before testing missiles over Taiwanese waters in 1996). Sure, there could be other surprises, but none so system threatening.

Simply put, outside of Iraq or North Korea, administrations no longer have the writ to commit this country to large-scale violence without some sort of debate. The Cold War featured stand-offs with the Soviets (e.g., Berlin, Cuba) where the President was pretty much on his own, but those days—and that dire strategic environment—are long gone.

3. We cannot handle all these simultaneous crises!

At first glance, the Navy looks mighty busy across the 1990s, meaning three to five simultaneous naval responses across multiple theaters for much of the decade.  Look deeper and you see a different picture: lengthy strings of sequential operations clustered around just Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, and Yugoslavia.  Using traditional counting methods, these four situations account for roughly half of all naval responses in the decade.  Almost all the rest were noncombatant evacuations or responses to natural disasters, except for brief shows of force off Taiwan and Korea.

How we interpret the strategic environment determines how we prepare to meet its challenges, and clearly, these “response clusters” represent serious change.  During the Cold War we contained the Soviet Union along the entire breadth of Eurasia, concentrating our permanently stationed forces at such key points as the Fulda Gap and the Korean demilitarized zone.  Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy balanced the Soviet Navy in the Mediterranean, Gulf, and Western Pacific. But the bipolar age, with its unified containment strategy, yielded to a more scattered and shifting sort of containment in the 1990s.  In effect, we think the Somalia, Yugoslavia, Haiti and Iraq represent a new response category: drawn-out minicontainments designed to stabilize individuals regions.

2. We are doing more with less!

Just talking naval forces, ship numbers are down over the 1990s, while responses to situations—measured in the traditional manner—are up.  Behind all this numerology (e.g., a noncombatant evacuation operation counts as much as a Desert Storm), however, lurks a persistent myth: naval forces are therefore grossly underfunded and suffering serious operational strain.  Analysts pushing this argument are simply barking up the wrong tree.

Most of the stress on naval forces comes from the Persian Gulf and our near continuous operations there since 1979.  The Pacific, meanwhile, has been quiet—in terms of responses to situations—for the last quarter century.  Both the Mediterranean and the Caribbean were reasonably busy in the 1990s, but like the Gulf, the bulk of the activity involved one lengthy situation each (Yugoslavia and Haiti).  The numerologists see response totals as way up, but in reality the Navy spent the 1990s focused on just those four big situations. And it was not alone: Navy-only responses dropped from 74% in the 1970s to 35% in the 1990s, the rest being joint or combined.

Amazingly, despite being tied down in the Gulf and working the rest of the world with fewer ships, the U.S. Navy is breaking neither operational nor personnel tempo.  All of the responses are being conducted by regularly deploying ships (Desert Storm is the great exception). Ship schedules are definitely disrupted and some port calls missed.  Speed of advance for some transits has been accelerated, but turnaround ratios for carriers have lengthened.  In sum, we have not needed to deploy ships ahead of schedule, nor are we short a carrier when we really need one. 

In sum, the U.S. military is handling the current response load with dexterity, with the exception of high-demand/low-density assets (e.g., Navy EA-6Bs, Army civil affairs specialists).  But that particular problem only highlights the illogic of centering all our strategic planning on the abstraction known as the 2-MTW standard.

1. All we can plan for is complete uncertainty!

Trying to capture global change by looking at U.S. military history is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope: our interventions are but a thin slice of a much larger reality, most of which is wrapped up in globalization.  Moreover, the military deals mostly with the seamy underbelly of an otherwise pretty good world, which gives it a peculiar perspective.  The biggest global events of the past eight years were the explosive rise of the Internet and international financial flows, the Asian economic crisis, and last year’s Y2K drill, none of which involved the defense community in any significant way.  Instead, the military got stuck largely with watching the store on Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, and Yugoslavia—the losers of the world.

Some like to describe the 1990s as a time of chaos, identifying uncertainty as our new foe. Many take the Clinton administration to task for merely reacting to events and having no coherent foreign policy, as if that were different from previous administrations.  But anyone who lived through the tense and constant confrontations with the Soviet Union should be grateful for this sort of “uncertainty.” 

When we look over these years, we detect a clear routinization of what used to be legitimately described as crisis response, not some growth of uncertainty.  For the Navy, its presence in the Gulf has become routine. Its drug patrols has become routine.  Its presence in the Western Pacific is stabilizing as far as everyone but the Chinese are concerned, but this has practically nothing to do with “responses” since the end of the Vietnam War—thus it is routine.  Even last decade’s clustered responses in the eastern Mediterranean assumed a familiar routine, dragging on for years until Milosevic finally fell.  As for Africa, we have seen this nation and its leadership shy away, passing up lots of opportunities to intervene.

But was there any grand strategy that linked together all these choices? Not really.  And maybe that’s what irks us political-military strategists most: as this circus parade known as globalization winds it ways around the planet, the military is mostly left to clean up what the elephants of the advanced world would just as soon leave behind and forget.   As such, we think it is relatively easy to predict what the U.S. military will be called upon to do over the next ten years: several of these minicontainments plus the usual scattering of minor responses.   

Moving Naval Strategic Planning Beyond Mythology 

The world is not a more dangerous place after the Cold War.  Chaos, it turns out, is not as fungible as we once thought, and uncertainty, like all politics, is local.  But adjusting to this brave new world does not necessarily equate to a reduced role for the military in U.S. foreign policy, especially naval forces.  Rather, it means we now have a broader and more flexible basis on which to plan.  The new national military strategy clearly lies somewhere between our recent extremes—neither matching the Soviet Union nor policing the Soviet-less world.

Finding that middle ground means moving away from the abstractions embodied in the 2-MTW standard.  Simply put, we have gathered enough data points across the 1990s to plot out this decade’s navy, if not the navy after next:  

• It is a naval force that lives in, and deals with, the present world, one that is always likely to afford the United States several opportunities for lengthy, minicontainment operations.  We will not address all of them, but pick and choose as we see fit, with the key determining factor being that situation’s potential disruption of the global economy.
• This force is comfortable with uncertainty, because these response clusters will come and go, meaning multiple operational centers of gravity that shift with time.
• This force plays an important, if largely background role in enabling globalization’s continued advance, especially in developing Asia, by embodying the closest thing the world has to a true Leviathan—the undeterrable, always familiar military giant.
• This navy lacks any real peers and hence can confidently plan for the future, which means staying just enough ahead on technology to discourage the rest of the world from trying to keep up.
• Above all, this naval service should take good care of its ships, aircraft and people, without using them up and exhausting itself.  Outside the Persian Gulf, the world does not need it that much, and when it does, we will have warning time.      

The Navy has moved far enough beyond the Cold War to understand its “new” role in international stability.  If it seems familiar, it is because the base of our operations has remained essentially unchanged, even as the superstructure of the Cold War’s bipolarity came and went.  The U.S. Navy works the watery seam that both divides and links the planet’s northern and southern economic zones.  As these huge civilizations and individual societies bump against one another in the tectonic inevitability that is economic globalization, U.S. naval forces will play an important stabilizing role within this country’s overall foreign policy—that of a mobile, sea-based containment force. 

Response clusters such as Iraq and Yugoslavia will remain a stubborn facet of the future international security environment, representing the essence of the naval forces’ mission.  As such, it is time to end our dependency on abstract planning measures such as the 2-MTW standard, come to grips with the world as we have come to know it, and do right by our sailors and Marines. 

^[1] The 1980s conflicts (31) are Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, Peru, Grenada, Falklands, Northern Ireland, Poland, Turkey-Kurds, Nagorno-Karabakh, Western Sahara, Libya, Sudan, Chad, Ethiopia, Uganda, Angola, Mozambique, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Iran-Iraq, Sri Lanka, Burma, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Cambodia, Philippines, and China-Vietnam.  The 1990s conflicts (37) are Mexico (Chiapas), Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia, Peru-Ecuador, Peru, Haiti, Northern Ireland, Former Yugoslavia, Turkey-Kurds, Georgia, Chechnya, Nagorno-Karabakh, Algeria, Chad, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Liberia, Zaire, Somalia, Ethiopia-Eritrea, Burundi, Rwanda, Angola, Mozambique, Lebanon-Israel, Yemen, Iraq, Tajikistan, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Cambodia, Burma, China-Taiwan, Indonesia, and East Timor.

^[2] Somalia accounted for seven responses, Haiti for six, Bosnia/Kosovo for 12 and Iraq for 13.  That’s 38 total, or almost half of the decade’s total of 81 naval responses.

^[3] Find this report at <www.state.gov/www/global/terrorism/1999report>.

^[4] Demetrios G. Papademetriou, “Migration: Think Again,” Foreign Policy, no. 109 (Winter 1997-98), p. 16.

Dr. Barnett is a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, serving as a senior strategic researcher in the Decision Strategies Department of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies.  Dr. Gaffney is a research manager at The CNA Corporation, serving as Team Leader in the Center for Strategic Studies.  Professor Bradd C. Hayes provided valuable feedback.

Blast from my past: "Force Structure Will Change" (2000)

Force Structure Will Change

by

Thomas P.M. Barnett and Henry H. Gaffney, Jr.

COPYRIGHT: The U.S. Naval Institute, 2000 (October issue, pp. 30-34); reprinted with permission

Each service stands to win—or lose— 
depending on what national security visions 
the new administration embraces.  
System visions favor air forces; 
nation-state visions favor naval forces; 
subnational visions favor ground forces

In January 1993, we wrote an article in Proceedings about the election-year debate on foreign policy and its implications for U.S. Navy force structure planning.[1]  The piece later was cited as one of the journal’s best during its 125th anniversary celebration.  Emboldened by such recognition, we decided to update our analysis to see what the Clinton years have accomplished in shaping the major arguments about what sort of crises and enemies we should focus on—and plan U.S. force structure around.

This endeavor might strike some as quixotic (Clinton had no foreign policy and the world is thus a mess!), but we think the debate has faded into an inertia favoring the status quo of incremental modernization, albeit more by trial and error than by grand strategy.  In addition, we think this election’s non-debate on foreign policy demonstrates just how comfortable the public has become with a consensus that the United States is neither the global policeman nor a 911 force—that the U.S. military rather should be a selective enforcer of “mini-containment strategies” against regional troublemakers.

What does that mean for force structure planning?

• Despite calls for full-speed ahead on a revolution in military affairs (RMA), the “creeping incrementalism” approach to modernization is not going away soon.

• The defense budget definitely has a floor, and a yet-to-be-determined ceiling not far above it, and this means stable service shares, which also means each service “transforms” within its own resources.

• The Navy and Marine Corps keep the general course established back in 1992 in “. . . From the Sea”—a warfighting-focused, forward-deployed swarming force that sacrifices some numbers and technology to maintain its day-to-day readiness for quick crisis response.

Incrementalism in the Defense of Force Structure Is No Vice

Wistful Cold War memories have left many U.S. military experts and strategists yearning to continue technological revolutions.  They are alarmed by what has happened in the world in the 1990s, sensing great international disorder combined with confusion in U.S. foreign policy.  The real history is far more benign:

• Bush and his wise men ably wage the Persian Gulf War, leading many to hail a new form of high-tech war.  The administration’s real accomplishments, however, are forming the coalition that fought the war and masterfully riding along with the Soviet Bloc’s dissolution.  The New World Order really is about the North’s advanced countries cooperating in new ways, with the losers of the world relabeled as “rogues.”  Bush and Cheney start the proportional, incremental shrinkage of the Cold War force, and Desert Storm buttresses the Powell Doctrine’s “overwhelming force” concept.  Then Somalia beckons . . ..
• Clinton I interprets Bush’s New World Order too expansively, and plunges into humanitarian interventions where our national interests seem nil.  Instead of focusing on defense relations with allies, his administration plays ambulance to the Third World, turning the doctrinal spotlight on military operations other than war.  Aspin tries to set a floor on force structure in the Bottom-Up Review, but the maintenance costs associated with Cold War readiness standards create a squeeze, especially on procurement.
• Clinton II backs off from the Southern Strategy.  So it is a reluctant “yes” to the Balkans but a quiet “no” to Africa.  The Defense Department refocuses on the fault lines between North and South, and, by playing firewall, settles down to a series of mini-containments that necklace the planet—Cold Warrior reborn as Rogue Warrior.  Aspin’s force levels nearly are reaffirmed in the Quadrennial Defense Review, and the rising costs of sustaining that military squeeze both modernization and force structure.

Across all three periods, each service seeks to adapt itself to the changing security market, though largely through repackaging its product in new “expeditionary” wrappers.  But through it all, each buys—in ever-smaller numbers—those platforms and systems deemed essential to a “full-service” force, meaning one simultaneously:

• Warfighting oriented (ready for two major theater wars)
• Globally engaged and military-operations-other-than-war capable
• High-tech.

As the decade ends, the Pentagon budget features:

• A fairly static top line, as the deficit is cured and surpluses arrive
• Rock-solid service shares
• Continued force structure shrinkage as platform prices and support costs rise. 

In short, despite the hullabaloo about “the” RMA, the supposed brilliance of those “asymmetrical warriors,” and something called network-centric operations, incrementalism still rules force planning.  In addition, if you ask the services what their number one priority is, it’s always personnel and their care.

What might be the alternatives?  We see three competing national security visions, each with a geostrategic focus that favors one service marginally over time.

I. It's the Great Powers, Stupid! 

Those who view the world more as a complex system of security relationships focus on:

• How the advanced countries get along
• Number of “poles” in play (uni-, bi-, or multipolar)
• Whether Russia and China really can be brought into this playpen. 

Geostrategists worry about the big pieces and let everything else fall in line.  Sure, the G-7 runs the economic side of the house, but presidents must lead in these all-important dyad relationships, and they think Clinton played “trade president” to distraction.   This is the cry of George W. Bush’s “Vulcans,” where everything old is to be renewed again—except arms control.  Pointing to proliferation of missile technology that clearly bears the imprint of our old Communist foes, they call for national missile defense, promising (wink, nudge) to protect allies as well.

This camp sees the main foreign policy task of the next decade being the processing of Russia and China into the great power fold on our terms—meaning they learn to play by our rules.  Once the North is in order, the South should fall in line, especially since the rogues would not have anyone of consequence to supply them in their nefarious activities.  However, there is a danger in getting too explicit with Moscow and Beijing about “acceptable behavior.”  While ostensibly trying to consolidate the community of advanced countries, we may end up casting Russia and China into the gap as globalization’s bad boys.

II. Mind the Gap! 

Those who view the world more as an economic system focus on:

• Troublemakers (rogues) who challenge the status quo
• Regional balances of power that might disrupt economic flows
• Other regional disruptions that affect the global economy (e.g., a failing Indonesia).

These risk analysts treat every region with sensitivity for its unique vulnerabilities but calculate U.S. interests primarily along financial lines.  Some countries count in the globally networked economy and others do not.  Instability involving the former must be contained, but that involving the latter can be routinely ignored or treated with palliative measures.

This is the réaleconomik of the second Clinton administration after Somalia.  A successor Gore administration probably would take the same approach.  In this vision, rogues are something for the military to take care of while the rest of the government attends to domestic and international economic affairs.  Countries that disregard markets, such as Iraq and Serbia, will always represent either potential economic disruptions or something to be contained.  So when it comes to missile schemes, there is more support for theater defense than national defense.

This camp sees the main foreign policy task of the next decade being the effective management of the economic and technological gaps dividing North and South.  You keep the North’s economic expansion on track by making sure nothing—and no one—in the South messes it up.  When situations down there get really ugly, you do what you have to, but you avoid serious involvement unless key economic fault lines are involved.  This group also will agonize more about human tragedies in failing states, but they will use U.S. military forces only as catalysts to mobilize other nations’ forces.

III. Leave No Failed State Behind!

Those who view the world as a collection of “tribes” focus on:

• Rising anti-Westernism and the specter of “clashing civilizations,” with key disruptive agents being terrorists and drug traffickers
• Commodity-dependent economies withering away in globalization’s harshly competitive environment
• Societies under siege from destructive transnational forces (e.g., narcotics, AIDS, pollution, climate change). 

These social activists believe that the United States needs to care far more about the world’s “backward” economies, where most of the planet’s births and violent deaths will occur.  Forget your pork barrel Star Wars, and shift funds to something more useful!

It is the cry of Seattle Man, and it finds occasional, if sometimes ironic resonance in the campaigns of Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader.   Antiglobalization types feel pain erupting all over the world from predatory free-trade practices that expose Old Economy sheep to New Economy wolves.  They have seen the enemy and “they is us!”—the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World Trade Organization.  This unlikely coalition sees the adaptation of the global to the local—not vice versa—as the next's decade's main foreign policy task.  The South needs help now, and if it does not get it, it will bring its pain to us—one way or another.  Slowing down globalization’s march also will give much-needed breathing space to the New Economy’s “losers” in the North (e.g., low-tech labor).

Three Visions, Three Militaries

So to sum up the three competing political visions, either the United States concentrates on:

• The North’s advanced-power relationships—system-level vision
• The troubled “arc of instability” between North and South—the unruly nation-state level vision
• The South’s chronic pain—subnational-level vision. 

Admittedly, these are ideal representations that, while reflecting the general thrusts of various elite groups in the United States, offer few firm predictions as to how any one administration would behave once in office.  Anyway, reality usually occupies the mushy middle, where ideal types are rarely to be found. The base case always is continued incrementalism.  Still, it is useful to track how such visions would logically skew force structures to favor one service over another, for it is through such what-iffing that we learn to be careful—lest we get what we wish for.

System visions favor air forces.  The system vision employs the longest, over-the-horizon perspective.  It is concerned with maintaining the United States’ high-tech lead, and that emphasis naturally favors the Air Force as the Future Force.  This approach merges air, space, and cyberspace into a seamless whole, with the operational paradigm being that of system administrator—less warfighting Leviathan and more air traffic controller.  Interventions increasingly are virtualized: we enable or manipulate the combat expectations of others (both allies and foes), but go out of our way to avoid real in-theater presence.  This is the Kosovo air campaign taken to its logical extreme, with force structure planning emphasizing effects-based weapons, stand-off delivery, and networking capabilities.

In this vision, the United States seeks a future of niched advanced-country militaries that play “spokes” to our “hub” (i.e., we worry about major security disruptions and they take the lead on local ones).  The information umbrella replaces the nuclear one, and a Northern Hemispheric Security Zone finally realizes the Vancouver-to-Vladivostok dream of the Baker-Shevardnadze era.  Once joined in interlocking fashion, the North’s countries (United States, other NATO, Japan, Russia, and eventually China and maybe even India) effectively criminalize warfare in the South, policing all such outbreaks as simply “illegal” in the globalized economy.  This is the mergers and acquisition approach to international security—we effectively buy out our competition over time.

Nation-state visions favor naval forces.  The nation-state vision addresses the actual and potential messes created by an Iraq or other unruly state at the North-South boundary, along which much of the advanced world’s lines of communication lie.  It is concerned with maintaining the United States’ capacity to project power rapidly around the world, possibly in a unilateral fashion.  That emphasis naturally favors the Navy and Marine Corps as the Response Force.  This approach blends responses to rogue states and their putative antiaccess/asymmetrical strategies into a littoral strategy, with the operational paradigm being that of the SWAT team.  Coalitions serve as window-dressing during conflicts, but later as an important source of stay-behind, on-the-ground, peace enforcers.  Interventions are increasingly routinized and drawn out into lengthy, sequential containment operations.

This is the Iraqi containment process taken to its logical extreme, with force structure planning emphasizing platform survivability, the capacity for loitering and constant surveillance, and the day-to-day application of discrete force at will—thus to contain any and all challengers to the North’s growing Zone of Peace.  Meanwhile, the South’s Zone of Conflict is largely tolerated because it lies outside the pale of globalization’s New Economy.  In the lexicon of Thomas Friedman, the United States concentrates on making sure the “Lexus” world keeps functioning smoothly, applying military power in those few areas of the “Olive Tree” world where local instability might cross the gap.[2]  This is the outsourcing approach to international security—we do what we do best (high-end, rapid power projection) and then subcontract follow-on operations to local firms.

Subnational visions favor ground forces.  The subnational vision has the shortest and most real-time perspective of never-ending messes that lie outside the community of advanced countries.  It is concerned almost exclusively with keeping the violence “over there,” while adopting the emergency room credo of “treat ’em and street ’em.”  There is no sense of eventual rehabilitation, just a desire to stay on top of the flow by keeping sufficient numbers of boots on the ground, an emphasis that naturally favors the Army and National Guard as the Constabulary Forces.  This approach merges military operations other than war, cooperation with nongovernmental organizations and private voluntary organizations, and U.N.-sponsored peacekeeping coalitions into one big sloppy whole.  All interventions are quagmires on some level, because we always are treating chronic cases.  This is the Haiti humanitarian operation taken to its logical extreme, with force improvements emphasizing logistics, infrastructure restoration capacity, and nonlethal technologies.

In this vision, the United States seeks to prevent a future known as The Coming Chaos, where the South’s bad neighborhoods simply swell beyond capacity and eventually pour into the North’s great gated community.[3]  Some inevitabilities along this path are:

• The development of regional police forces leading to an eventual global one, probably sponsored by the advanced nations cooperating in the United Nations
• The increasing use of mercenaries or contract military personnel in peacekeeping operations
• The evolution of U.S. ground forces toward greater reliance on reserves. 

This is the privatization or divestiture approach to international security: we effectively spin off the military-operations-other-than-war portfolio from the Defense Department, with the Army’s constabulary forces as catalysts for multinational interventions that limit our involvement.

What Really Matters to Key Constituents 

How does the United States choose among these alternatives, if it decides to choose at all? We have talked mostly about the services, because they have to build and manage the forces, but there are many other players: the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), unified commanders, the defense industry, Congress, and the American public.  Practically none of these voices, however, is really engaged in the outside (i.e., economic) world or thinks in grand strategic terms.  They are fundamentally domestic or inwardly looking constituents.

Across the Clinton years, OSD has been scared away from having a focused strategic outlook.  Thus, it has let all strategies bloom in a crowded seedbed, with none emerging to full stature.  In addition, OSD suffers from an internal clash between the acquisition types, who—in cahoots with defense industry—want all the great new technologies, and the bean counters, who struggle with the services in balancing programs under the flattened top line.  In all, OSD is torn among all three visions.

The unified commanders have been searching for a post-Cold War role.  Recently they have begun presenting engagement in a diplomatic vein to justify maintenance of last year’s forces.  The problem is, they don’t know whether to engage more with new states or with old friends.  Distant from Washington, they cling to the past—stridently asking to keep the forces they used to have.  They are torn between the national and subnational visions, not quite knowing which gives them a better play in the game.

For defense industries, survival is most important.  Yet they fight for a limited pot.  They still are the source of innovation in technology, so they naturally favor the system vision.

The Hill thinks about people, bases, and the defense industry—all domestic concerns.  As deliberative bodies of elected representatives, they do not have “strategic vision.”  They repeatedly make clear that “perfect readiness is never having to use the forces overseas.”  They are constrained between the administration’s budget submission and their own budget committees.  If they had a choice, they would buy the system vision, for it means high technology and no messy international involvements.  The marginal upward changes they make to budgets are mostly in this direction, when they are not otherwise concerned with military pay and benefits.

The public is relatively indifferent to these debates.  They are torn between pride in technology and humanitarian concerns about the South.  This leaves them relatively indifferent to the state-level, mind-the-gap, vision.

What This Suggests for Naval Force Structure Planning

The defense community concerned with these debates is a very narrow group, not well connected to the public—and they are split in all three directions.  There is a great opportunity for leadership to clarify direction, but at the same time, there is no clear pressure from the external environment as to what the choice might be.

We know there are constraints that, until broken, mean all strategies cannot be serviced.  These constraints include:

• The top-line defense budget—the prospective (and dubious) federal surpluses all have been allocated by the candidates, with very little additional for defense
• The legacy forces and the personnel that operate them—one of the United States’ great strengths, but a force that constrains innovation and change
• Presence commitments abroad—for the time being, the United States will station nearly 100,000 military personnel in both Europe and East Asia, with maybe 25,000 containing Iraq
• Service shares—in the absence of clear strategic choice, they remain the same. 

As noted, the domestic drivers currently are stronger than the international ones.  Oddly enough, the domestic constituents do not line up strongly on the vision favoring naval forces, even though they enjoy a slight advantage in budget shares.

Naval forces, then, will end up hedging against several strategies—within the cited constraints.  They cannot afford the forces they have right now, much less to recapitalize them at the pace and to the extent they want.  They may well have to give up a little on both input (less of the most advanced technology) and output (more shrinkage in force structure), but this still leaves them in a great position to support the mind-the-gap vision as the United States’ premier Response Force.

^[1] Thomas P. M. Barnett and Henry H. Gaffney, “It’s Going to Be a Bumpy Ride,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, January 1993, pp. 23-26.

^[2] See Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999). 

^[3] Read anything by Robert Kaplan and you’ll get the general picture.  See The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (New York: Random House, 2000); or his The Ends of the Earth : From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy (New York: Vintage Books, 1997).

Dr. Barnett is a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, serving as a senior strategic researcher in the Decision Strategies Department of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies.  Dr. Gaffney is a research manager at The CNA Corporation, serving as Team Leader in the Center for Strategic Studies.  They would like to thank Professor Bradd C. Hayes for his feedback on an earlier draft of this essay.

Blast from my past: "It's Going to Be a Bumpy Ride" (1993)

It's Going to Be a Bumpy Ride by Thomas P.M. Barnett and Henry H. Gaffney, Jr. The Navy is in for some heavy seas if its leaders fail  to adopt a defense vision that gets them in the Washington game  and positions them well with the star players—Senator Sam Nunn,  Congressman Les Aspin, General Colin Powell, and President-elect Bill Clinton COPYRIGHT: The U.S. Naval Institute, 1993 (January issue, pp. 23-26); reprinted with permission Conspicuously absent . . . from this year's election cycle was a coherent debate on the future of U.S. defense policy. Admittedly, in light of this country's domestic difficulties and the general improvement in the world security situation, this debate does not warrant priority right now. But since further big cuts in the defense budget seem inevitable—with renewed efforts to reduce the deficit and fund domestic programs—the next administration and Congress must provide some vision and fashion some policy consensus quickly if they are to avoid mindless reductions by budgetary incrementalism. Actually, the term "incrementalism" is misleading. When the budget agreement's "fire walls" and "caps" dissolve, come consideration of the fiscal year 1994 budget, Congress will no longer be restrained from shifting defense funds to domestic programs. Capitol Hill may balance the reductions, because many principals there still believe in a strong national defense. But these cuts are likely to be anything but incremental. And if Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA) gets his way, a serious revision of roles and missions among the services will turn a downward glide path into dramatic changes. This is going to be one bumpy ride, and where the defense establishment will end up remains very sketchy.   Three Defense Visions Three possible defense visions are out there, each suggesting a certain slant for military force structure into the next century. The incoming administration of President Bill Clinton and the new Congress, however, eventually will have to sort out just one, since they and the rest of us believe we cannot afford all three. The visions carry the marks of how far their advocates peer into the future: The Transitioneers focus on the near term. They see a world minus the Soviets as still quite dangerous and seek to "assure the transition" to a safer era. The Big Sticks look ahead to the next regional dustup. They foresee some dangerous conflicts that could upset the new world order, and echo Theodore Roosevelt's advice to "speak softly and carry a big stick." The Cold Worriers take the long view. They worry that internal preoccupation will lead to the dismantling of U.S. military strength, especially in technology, which will render us helpless against the next "global threat," however remote that may seem today. While the camps differ in the length of their visions, their arguments intersect over three basic questions: How much should we reduce the military forces inherited from the Cold War? How should we operate these forces in the new era? Most important, what future world do we seek, and how does military power help us get there? The Transitioneers The Transitioneers' answer to the size question is that the United States should hold onto what has proved to be the best military force in the world by protecting force structure over procurement. Their enemy is global fragmentation, punctuated by ethnic and religious conflicts. The Transitioneers' nightmare is the "Balkans scenario" spreading into the former Soviet republics, where the nukes are. The big backers here have been the George Bush White House and most top Pentagon officials, and their attitude has been "Why change a winning hand?" As for operations, the Transitioneers emphasize forward presence and quick crisis response. That means troops stationed abroad and naval forces operating around the globe. Examples are "911 calls" involving humanitarian relief, antiterrorism, and rescuing U.S. citizens. Peacetime operations are the crux here, with Transitioneers focusing their day-to-day activities on hotspots of the world. Lately the Persian Gulf has been the focus, but now they are also agonizing over how the United States and other nations might seek to use military power to resolve the appalling situations in the Balkans and Somalia. It is not easy to be the 911 force-cum-SWAT team. The Transitioneers' long-run strategy is maintaining U.S. access and influence around the globe. Why? The new world order is very shaky, despite the thwarting of aggression in the Gulf War. If this order is to survive at all, the world's sole superpower must lead the ongoing, often painful transition from the still-dissolving Cold War status quo. TheTransitioneers' mantras are influence, stabilization, and deterrence, none of which is working in Yugoslavia or Nagorno-Karabakh right now, but may be working in Korea, Cambodia, and Central America. The Big Sticks The Big Sticks' approach to the size of military forces is that the United States should preserve the combat power needed to disarm regional bullies threatening our vital interests. Potential enemies include such well-known troublemakers as North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and Libya. Worst cases here are proliferation combined with religious radicalism—the nightmare of a united "Islamic Belt" stretching from Casablanca to Jakarta, armed with nukes. The Big Sticks' strongest advocates are Congressman Les Aspin (D-WI) and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell, and their shared attitude is "Let's make sure America wins big when the call goes out." This sits well with younger officers and their families, who want to strike hard, not get killed, and come home soon, if they have to fight at all. For operations, the Big Sticks stress the surge of power projection with bombers, naval forces, and expeditionary land forces. The concept here is to strike out from the U.S. homeland, dominate any regional battle space, and take the offensive at the time of our choosing. They would ensure that ample investments be made in mobility and lift. Day-to-day operations matter less to them than "regional contingencies," with Operation Desert Storm as the template. The Big Sticks focus on the Middle East, but they will go anywhere, anytime. Citing the superpower status of the United States as prerequisite for any new world order, the Big Sticks focus on preserving core combat capabilities despite declining budgets. These warfighters look to scare off or squash most aspiring regional kingpins. In their view, this approach also keeps the peace so countries that wish to live in peace and prosper can forgo military buildups of their own. But the Big Sticks believe in international support and coalition operations, and will take the time to line one up before striking. The public reports on the Pentagon's Defense Policy Guidance reflect this rationale. Regional aggressors are anathema to the Big Sticks, while their mantras are credibility and decisive force. The Cold Worriers The Cold Worriers' view on the size of military forces is that the United States must move from guns to butter and renew itself internally to secure its continued global leadership. The enemy is uncertainty, plus U.S. complacency and retreat from the world. Their nightmare is a fiscally frail United States yielding to economic powerhouses in Europe and Asia. The Cold Worriers' loudest proponents are congressmen whose attitude is "Let's meet our real national security needs by putting America first." While not isolationist, the Cold Worriers show little interest in managing current events with military power. Ethnic troubles? See Los Angeles. Proliferation? Try handguns, teenage pregnancies, AIDS, and crack. More internal definitions of national security count here, such as Senator Nunn's plan to have military personnel augment social programs. Viewing industrial jobs, military bases, and reserves as important political links to the public, the Cold Worriers turn the U.S. vision inward to its slow growth rate and decaying infrastructure. For Cold Worriers, stemming global chaos is secondary to getting our own house in order. As for regional troublemakers, Team USA just waxed the world's fourth-largest army in nothing flat. In their opinion, the best way to keep our global leadership is to dispel the stench of decline. Things are safe for now, so they would take advantage and preserve those capabilities the United States needs most for building the military of the future. They are especially proud of U.S. technological prowess and do not want to lose it. The Cold Worriers' mantras are dual-use, industrial base, and competitiveness. Connections to Strategy and Force Structure Those are the highfalutin' national security concepts, but how do they translate into military strategy and force structure? The Transitioneers favor the beat-cop or community-policing analogy: the United States must be out there deterring crime and promoting peace. Otherwise we get called in later to clean up the mess, usually at higher cost. Platform numbers count more than sophisticated weapons, since we need large numbers to cover the world on a regular basis. The Navy and Marine Corps are featured players in this posture. The Big Sticks like the SWAT-team analogy: the United States gets called out only for the really nasty jobs that local authorities cannot handle. Warfighting and readiness are crucial, meaning we keep our edge in people and technology. The Air Force and Army are heavy hitters in this military, although naval forces may set the stage by arriving first and can contribute to the big effort as well from a different direction. The Cold Worriers employ the analogy of the Lone Ranger armed with small, high-tech, silver-bullet forces. Keys include reserves, prototypes, limited production runs, and breakthrough technologies. The domestic side of defense spending plays heavily through jobs and spin-off technologies. The winners here include advanced platforms such as the V-22 tiltrotor aircraft, the Seawolf (SSN-21) submarine or its successor, the AX bomber, and any missile-defense system. All three camps stress the unique U.S. capacity—and thus responsibility—for global leadership, especially in the security sphere. But the Gulf War experience, the new domestic atmosphere, and constrained federal budgets all conspire to force our political leaders to set priorities. It seems clear the United States cannot afford all three defense visions, nor does it make sense to assign one vision to each of the services. Hard choices will have to be made within each service, however, if they hope to keep pace with the public's still-evolving definitions of U.S. national security, not to mention surviving the likely budgetary bloodbath beginning in fiscal year 1994. Looking at the Navy and Marine Corps So how does the Department of the Navy play in these different visions, with their competing goals? One thing is clear: naval forces cannot go their separate ways anymore. They have been strongly admonished to join the nation. The Goldwater-Nichols Act, the riots in Los Angeles, and the Tailhook scandal all say that they have to be sensitive to U.S. culture and economy, and to work closely with their fellow services, the new administration, and Congress. Any other approach is just asking for trouble. With the collapse of the Soviet threat, many defense experts foresaw a decidedly maritime slant to U.S. force posture—no matter what the budgetary outcome—since most of our overseas forces were being pulled home and even disbanded. By default, the Navy and Marine Corps would be the forces left out there to perform the great bulk of day-to-day security tasks. But as time passes, the United States still maintains sizable forces in Europe, Korea, and Japan, so it is not yet clear which are the prime forward forces. More evidence came during Desert Shield and Desert Storm, when the Navy and Marine Corps seemed disappointed that they were not asked to run the show all by themselves. The truth was that the United States could readily defeat a regional power like Iraq only by applying overwhelming force, that is, by using a very large portion of its military assets. Most telling of all, however, is the emerging reality that most of the messy situations cropping up in the Cold War's wake (Yugoslavia, Somalia, the Kurds, etc.) are conflicts internal to states, where the adversaries rarely pay much heed to naval forces steaming on the horizon, however menacing. Since the Cold War's end, senior Navy leaders, as well as the surface community, have tended to favor the Transitioneer argument, because concepts such as presence, access, and influence pervade it and because it requires large numbers of platforms. They see naval forces as the only forces truly deployed forward—the glue of the Mediterranean and the Pacific. The tendency here is to believe the Navy can almost single-handedly assure the transition to a more peaceful world where commerce flows freely. After all, the United States is a maritime nation that communicates with the world only across the seas. But as Desert Storm reminded the Navy and Marine Corps, the Big Sticks have the upper hand now, and the name of the game is overwhelming force applied in joint fashion both over land and from the sea. Desert Storm shifted the focus from numbers of platforms for open-ocean warfare to what you do with those platforms in littoral warfare to influence events ashore directly. The naval contribution can still be quite substantial, as Desert Storm showed, even if naval forces cannot do the whole job themselves. Within the naval communities, the Marines are most drawn to the Big Sticks' approach because of its emphasis on projecting power ashore, something that should force more blue-green integration (i.e., more blue support for green operations). For now, this debate between the Transitioneers and Big Sticks has left the guardians of the U.S. military's finest technological achievement—nuclear-powered submarines—out in the cold. Subs were not a very convincing presence during the Persian Gulf crisis, and they could not deliver as many Tomahawks as surface ships could during Desert Storm. But they have emerged as the premier U.S. nuclear-deterrent force, which is warm comfort for the Cold Worriers. The submarine community also found surprise congressional allies who rose to defend the two or three Seawolf submarines under construction out of concern for the jobs (and votes) it represents for the country's economic (and their own political) future. Given their common fears about the industrial base, the Cold Worriers and the Navy could be natural allies in preserving and advancing technology for an unknown and possibly adverse future. Finally, the much-troubled naval aviation community seems to be split between the medium- and long-term visions. Some aviators like the Big Sticks' emphasis on air power, but they fear the focus on jointness will diminish the role for carrier air. Others prefer theCold Worriers' push for silver bullets, of which the AX would certainly be one, but worry that the new domestic focus will deprive the Navy of the large funds it needs to keep all those carriers stocked with such costly aircraft. It is probably unreasonable to expect the Navy to be any closer to the consensus about the future of U.S. defense vision than either the government or the public. But while the Navy Department has expended much energy developing a new internal vision over recent months, the long-postponed budgetary debate over the post-Cold War U.S. defense posture has finally arrived. One hopes that reorganization and the White Paper " . . . From the Sea" will help the Navy join the fray, because the Base Force has clearly reached the end of its life span. The Choices Ahead We return to the basic point: these visions, taken together, are unaffordable. Choices and compromises are inevitable, especially within the Department of the Navy. Naval forces will probably find the broadest range of satisfaction if they cast their lot with the Big Sticks, rejoining the nation by becoming truly joint team players, as the White Paper has declared. They also can retain their first-class status as warfighters by maintaining their power-projection capabilities. If the touch choices are made on procurement (and they will be unpleasant), naval forces also should be able to improve their technology by preserving a reasonably good share of their current investment budget. The submariners have the greatest problem, but Congress is apparently not inclined to dismantle their technological base. So that capability may yet survive as we grope toward a better future. Even under the most dire budgetary predictions, the United States will still have a Navy second to none, even with substantial reductions in platform numbers. This still sizable force will deploy freely around the world, maintaining its knowledge of the sea and coastal environments and staying in contact with the navies of other nations. Our sailors will not be deprived of their chance to see the world. And they will enjoy more harmonious relations with the other services and U.S. political leadership. But maintaining the best balance among ships, aircraft, modernization, readiness, and deployments will be tricky within the inevitably lower budget levels. The Department of the Navy will be able to manage such a feat only if it continues to regroup the various naval communities and plays the Washington game wholeheartedly. Dr. Gaffney is Director of Concepts Development at the Center for Naval Analyses.  He was Director of Plans for the Defense Security Assistance Agency from 1981 to 1990.  Dr. Gaffney holds a Ph.D. in Government from Columbia University and served in the U.S. Navy from 1956 to 1959. Dr. Barnett serves on the Research Staff of the Center for Naval Analyses. He is the author ofRomanian and East German Policies in the Third World: Comparing the Strategies of Ceausescu and Honecker (New York: Praeger, 1992), and has written for both The Washington Post and The Christian Science Monitor.  Dr. Barnett holds a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University.

Blast from my past: "Globalization and Maritime Power" (2002)

Chapter 10

of

Globalization and Maritime Power
Sam J. Tangredi, editor (Washington DC: National Defense University Press, 2003), pp. 189-200.

Asia’s Energy Future: The Military-Market Link

Thomas P.M. Barnett

Globalization has resulted in the expansion of market capitalism throughout much of the world, particularly in East Asia.¹ Even China, with its recent entry into the World Trade Organization, appears poised to open its markets and unleash its commercial potential. China could be the world’s largest auto market by 2020, increasing the oil needs of its enormous population by 40 percent. Obviously, this would have significant effects on the already-globalized energy market. In light of these global effects, both the Pentagon and Wall Street must understand their interrelationship: economic and political stability are crucial to reducing energy market risk.

As is evident in chapter 6, the Department of Navy is continuing its effort to enunciate the presumed linkage between the Navy’s worldwide operations and the progressive unfolding of economic globalization. The goal is nothing less than the Holy Grail of naval presence arguments: proof positive that ship numbers—especially aircraft carriers—matter to international stability.² Some of this analytic effort will be rightly dismissed as pouring old wine into new bottles because many “Navy-as-the-glue-of-globalization” formulations sound an awful lot like the old bromides about the “Navy as the glue of Asia.” Nice work if you can get it, but given the relative lack of naval crisis response in East Asia since the end of the Vietnam War, it is a hard story to sell. Simply put, once the Shah of Iran fell in 1979, U.S. naval crisis response activity quickly became concentrated on Southwest Asia—a pattern that continues to this day.³ As far as “proving” the utility of naval presence, East Asia has long remained the dog that did not bark.

But all that is about to change, if you believe the stunning Department of Energy projections of growing Asian energy consumption over the next 20 years.⁴ Not only do a lot of bad things have to not happen over the next 2 decades, but also a lot of good things must occur in both East Asia and the Middle East—and across all paths in between—to ensure the region’s much-anticipated economic maturation will actually occur. In short, if you want a Pacific Century, you will need a U.S. Pacific Fleet—strong in numbers and forward deployed.

Asian Energy: A Globalization Decalogue

For several years, a Naval War College project (NewRuleSets.Project) on how globalization alters definitions of international security has provided considerable opportunity for an examination of the views of Wall Street executives, as well as of regional security experts (both military and civilian), on Asia’s future economic and political development.⁵ The following decalogue (summarized in table 10–1) distills the essential rule sets our project has identified concerning Asia’s energy future:⁶

Global energy market has the necessary resources

Asia as a whole currently uses about as much energy as the United States, or about 100 quadrillion British thermal units.⁷ By 2020, however, Asia will roughly double its energy consumption, while U.S. consumption will rise just more than 25 percent. Asia’s plus-ups are significant no matter what the energy category, as evidenced in the following current estimates:

• oil consumption to increase by roughly 88 percent
• natural gas by 191 percent
• coal by 97 percent
• nuclear power by 87 percent when Japan is included, but 178 percent for the rest
• hydroelectric and other renewables by 109 percent.

This is a genuine changing of the guard in the global marketplace—a shifting of the world’s “demand center.” Today, North America accounts for just under a third of the world’s energy consumption, with Asia second at 24 percent. But within one generation, those two regions will swap both global rankings and percentage shares. In short, Asia becomes the world’s center of gravity for energy flows, giving it virtually the same market clout as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries—or North America and Western Europe combined.

The good news is that there’s plenty of fossil fuel to go around. Confirmed oil reserves have jumped almost two-thirds over the past 20 years, according to the Department of Energy, while natural gas reserves have roughly doubled. Meanwhile, our best estimates on coal say we have enough for the next 2 centuries. So supply is not the issue, and neither is demand, leaving only the question of moving the energy from those who have it to those who need it—and therein lies the rub.

Slide from old NewRuleSets.Project brief

But no stability, no market

Asia comes close to self-sufficiency only in coal, with Australia, China, India, and Indonesia the big producers. All told, Asia self-supplies on coal to the tune of 97 percent, a standard it will maintain through 2020. That is important, because virtually all of the global growth in coal use over the next generation will happen in Asia, mostly in just China and India.

Natural gas is a far different story. In 2001, Asia will used around 10 trillion cubic feet, with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan representing the lion’s share of consumption. The three of them already buy virtually all of the region’s currently available methane (for example, from Australia, Brunei, Indonesia, and Malaysia). The trick is this: Asia’s demand for natural gas skyrockets to perhaps 25 trillion cubic feet by 2020, with the majority of the increase occurring outside of that trio. So if those three countries already buy what is available in-region, that means the rest of Asia will have to go elsewhere—namely, the former Soviet Union (Russia with 33 percent of the world total) and the Middle East (Iran with 16 percent). This is what futurists might call an historical inevitability.

Finally, even though oil will decline as a percentage share in every major Asian economy over the coming years, absolute demand will grow by leaps and bounds. Asia currently burns about as much oil as the United States, or roughly 20 million barrels/day (mbd). Since oil is mostly about transportation nowadays, and Asia is looking at a quintupling of its car fleet by 2020, there is a huge swag placed on this projection. The latest Department of Energy forecast is roughly 36 mbd, but even that means Asia as a whole has to import an additional 12 mbd from out of region, or close to double what it imports today from the Persian Gulf region.⁸

Asia already buys roughly two-thirds of all the oil produced in the Persian Gulf, and by 2010 that share will rise to approximately 75 percent.⁹ Meanwhile, the West’s share of Gulf oil will drop from just under a quarter today to just over a tenth in 2010. The strategic upshot is that the two most anti-Western corners of the globe are inexorably coming together over energy and money over the coming years. Increasingly, the Middle East becomes dependent on economic stability in Asia, and Asia on political-military stability in the Gulf. If either side of that equation fails, the energy market is put at risk.

No growth, no stability

All this predicted growth engenders social expectations. In other words, Asia’s developing societies have been placed on consumption trajectories that are nothing short of revolutionary. As a middle class develops in these countries (small as a percentage but enormous as an absolute number), a significant portion of the global population is being rapidly promoted from an 18th- or 19th-century lifestyle into a 20th- or even 21st-century consumption pattern—and they will get used to it pretty darn fast.

Moreover, if Thomas Friedman’s “electronic herd” of international investors decides to take it all away one afternoon in a flurry of currency attacks and capital flight, the struggling segment of the population that suddenly finds itself expelled from the would-be middle class is likely to get upset. This is basically what happened in Indonesia following the tumultuous events of the Asian Flu of 1997–1998. Huge portions of Indonesia’s economy had experienced rapid development in the preceding generation, only to see it disappear virtually one fickle market day.

Yes, some good resulted; Suharto’s crony capitalism collapsed, but with it went much of the country’s emerging middle class. Now, as the country disintegrates into pockets of chaos, the machetes are flying as disoriented villagers work nightly to dispatch the “sorcerers” and “black ninjas” purported to be behind this continuing economic decline. In short, Indonesia loses its growth trajectory and suddenly finds itself transported back in time several centuries.¹⁰

No resources, no growth

Asia cannot grow without a huge influx of out-of-area energy resources. The quintupling of cars is impressive enough, when you consider that General Motors predicts China will indeed be the world’s largest car market in 2020.¹¹ But even more stunning is the three-fold increase in electricity consumption, which will be generated mostly by coal and—increasingly—natural gas. Put those two together, and we are talking about an Asia that must open up to the outside world to a degree unprecedented in modern history. Or to put it in another way, Asia’s choice of energy will largely determine its attitude on globalization. China is the classic example here.

One can think of China’s decisions about its pattern of energy consumption as a choice between the past (coal), the present (oil), and the future (methane, or natural gas). If China chooses to remain, as much as possible, in the “past” with coal, this decision will essentially delay its full-fledged absorption into the global economy. This is clearly the path of least resistance for Beijing, and there lies the temptation, for the perception of autonomy afforded by coal allows China to:

• remain more opaque to outside scrutiny
• retain more control over its energy future
• continue the more easily directed top-down path of extensive growth (that is, more inputs versus more productivity).

If China chooses to move—as much as possible—into the “future” with natural gas, this decision will speed up its full-fledged absorption into the global economy. This is obviously a far more difficult path, because it:

• opens the country to greater interdependency with the outside world
• forces more transparency upon its financial systems
• asks it to trade control for calculated risk (nothing is guaranteed in the free market)
• demands a far greater push for intensive-style economic growth.

The bigger point, however, is this: neither China nor Asia as a whole can develop without opening to the outside world economically, and energy is the essential driving force in this process.

No infrastructure, no resources

Asia’s infrastructure requirements over the next 2 decades will be unprecedented in human history. Simply put, never have so many people developed an economy at such a rapid pace in such a concentrated chunk of global real estate. This rough doubling of energy consumption will place extraordinary demands on the environment. The combination of rapid rises in energy consumption, population, urbanization, and water usage (especially for agriculture) will further damage an already battered regional ecosystem, creating great political pressures on national governments—both from within and outside—to limit the pollution associated with energy production.

Cleaner cars and more mass transportation are important, but even more so is the choice of how all that electricity is to be generated. Asia will attempt to grow its nuclear and renewables capacity to the fullest extent possible, but as a combined share of total energy production (that is, 10 percent), these categories will not grow—even as they double in absolute amounts to keep pace with economic development. The story is roughly the same with coal, which stands at just over 40 percent of total energy production now and still will in the year 2020. The real shift in Asia’s energy profile comes in oil and natural gas, with the former declining from roughly 40 percent to 30 percent, and the latter basically doubling from 10 to 20 percent.

This 275 percent increase in the absolute amount of methane energy employed across the region highlights the story-within-the-story of Asia’s energy future: the push for energy is really a push for infrastructure. Regarding natural gas, this infrastructure comes in three forms:

• For the near term, the vast majority of natural gas that flows into Asia will arrive in a liquid form on ships. That means port facilities on both ends of the conduit, plus liquidification plants on the supplier’s end and regasification plants on the buyer’s end.
• Over the longer haul, pipelines become the answer to meet the rising demand—both by land (for example, Kazakstan-to-China, Russia-to-China) and sea (Russia-to-Japan, Iran-to-India).
• Finally, there is the domestic infrastructure required to pipe all that gas to the final consumers.

None of this comes cheaply, and as the recent history of regional electricity development makes clear, lots of outside money is required.¹²

No money, no infrastructure

Foreign direct investment (FDI) is the most significant scenario variable for Asia’s energy future. Energy infrastructure requirements could easily top $1 trillion by 2020, according to many estimates. Such numbers will overwhelm the region’s ability to self-finance, and that means Asia will have to open up its energy generation and distribution markets to far more joint or foreign ownership—a touchy subject, as former global energy giant Enron’s experience in India demonstrated.¹³

Right now, Asian states invest in one another to a very high degree, as many developing regional economies funnel upward of 90 percent of their external capital investments into their neighbors. But their combined resources are very limited compared to the West. A good estimate of Asia’s current outward stock—meaning the cumulative value—of foreign direct investment would be roughly $750 billion. In contrast, the United States and the European Union—even when one discounts intra-European investments—control roughly three times that amount of capital.¹⁴

Until now, Asia has relied on intra-Asian FDI for almost two-thirds of its cross-border capital needs, keeping the West at a certain distance in the mergers and acquisition trade. But this will have to change for Asia’s ambitious energy future to unfold according to plan. On an annual basis, the European Union and the United States routinely account for over 80 percent of all cross-border direct investment flows, far outdistancing their combined share of global gross domestic product, which sits as just under 60 percent.¹⁵ These two economic giants mostly invest in one another (and Europe in itself), creating an unbreakable trans-Atlantic bond. So if it seems inevitable that Asia must turn to the former Soviet Union and the Middle East for energy in the coming decades (the energy triad), it is just as inevitable that it must turn to the West for the money to finance this trade (the capital triad).

No rules, no money

Many on Wall Street voice the opinion that Asia has not sufficiently “cleaned up its act” as a result of the 1997–1998 financial crisis. The buzzword here is transparency, which refers primarily to internationally accepted accounting practices in the financial and corporate sectors. This is a huge challenge for Asia to overcome in terms of attracting the necessary foreign direct investment for future energy needs. Simply put, institutional investors need to feel confident in their ability to get a long-term return ofinvestment and not just a short-term return on investment, and that sort of confidence comes only with the firm rule of law.

Another problem with Asia’s energy investment climate is the current mix of private-sector investments and public-sector decisionmaking—in effect, too many bureaucrats with too much of other people’s money. In most Asian economies, the government still plays far too large a role as far as Western financiers are concerned. For the most part, Wall Street likes to see monopolies build networks but prefers them to be run by market forces once they are operational—their version of having a cake and eating it too. But so long as rule sets lag behind, the rise of private-sector market makers is delayed, for firm rules of play are required before deregulation of state-run energy markets can proceed.

Viewed from this angle, it might be said that the greatest long-term threat to Asia’s energy security is internal: its own proclivities for crony capitalism. Whether it is called Asian values, capitalism with Chinese characteristics, or globalization on ourterms, all Asian claims to a particular brand of capitalism are ultimately self-defeating. In sum, money has to behave in Asia just like it does in the West if the region hopes to attract the investment necessary to secure its energy future.

No security, no rules

Foreign direct investment does not occur in a vacuum. Long-term certainty is the greatest attraction a country can offer to outside investors, whereas war and political-military instability (especially leftist revolutions) are the best methods to scare them away. Not surprisingly, the strongest FDI bonds exist between the three main pillars of the Cold War’s trilateral alliance structure: the United States, Western Europe, and Japan.

This triad controls 80 percent of the world’s stock in foreign direct investment, keeping two-thirds of that total invested in one another. That means the other 90 percent of the global population has to get by on the remaining half of global FDI capital available. In a nutshell, investment follows the flag far more than trade. For example, the United States does about a third of its trade with Western Europe and Japan but concentrates closer to a half of its FDI in these two markets.¹⁶

Developing Asia, in contrast, readily presents a handful of potential and/or existing security trouble spots that could negatively impact the region’s FDI climate in significant ways:

• India-Pakistan nuclear standoff
• Indonesia’s disarray
• The Korean situation (especially the North’s nuclear/missile programs and/or “imminent collapse”)
• China-Taiwan
• Overlapping sovereignty claims in the South China Sea.

Bluntly stated, Asia is still a place where military conflict could dramatically alter the FDI landscape, unlike a Europe where the conflict in the former Yugoslavia had a negligible impact on economic integration and investment flows.

No (benign) Leviathan, no security

Many international experts agree that Asia’s current security situation belongs more to what Thomas Friedman calls the “olive tree” world, where backward tribes fight over little bits of land, even as its rising economic powerhouses clearly join the “Lexus” world, producing many of the global economy’s best high-end technology products.¹⁷ Lacking Europe’s crucible-like history of 20th-century warfare, as well as its currently robust regional security alliances, Asia remains the one place in the world where direct great power warfare seems possible over the next generation. This becomes especially true as previously authoritarian states experience greater amounts of political pluralism, typically the most dangerous time for interstate wars.¹⁸

In this region where the concepts of spheres of influence and security dilemma are still valid, there remains a viable long-term market for the services of an outside Leviathan—namely, the United States. In a part of the world where numerous states are still technically at war (dating back more than half a century), the United States enjoys healthier security relationships with virtually every government than any two governments there enjoy with one another. While it is easy to deride the notion of a “four-star foreign policy,” there is little doubt that the combatant commander of U.S. Pacific Command plays a special—even unique—role in working the security arrangements that underpin the region’s strong record of structural stability over the past quarter century (basically, since Vietnam was reunified).¹⁹

And if there was no U.S. military presence, then what? How comfortable could Japan be with China? Taiwan with China? South Korea with North Korea? India with Pakistan? India with China? Vietnam with China? The list goes on and on. Simply put, the U.S. military occupies both a physical and a fiscal space in Asia: our forward presence both reassures local governments and obviates their need for larger military hedges. Our presence is a moneymaker on two fronts: local governments spend less on defense and more on development (the ultimate defense), and FDI is encouraged, however subtly.

No U.S. Navy, no (benign) Leviathan

As noted earlier, what Asia needs in terms of future energy requirements is entirely available either in-region (for example, coal) or from the central portion of the Eurasian landmass (gas and oil from the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, and Russia). These distances are all feasibly conquered by pipelines, and most of the involved sea lines of communication lie within the reach of the region’s naval forces—for good or ill.

Meanwhile, the West, which has come to rely less and less on Persian Gulf oil, is likewise becoming more regionally focused in its energy trade patterns. The United States, for example, imports more energy supplies from Canada than any other nation, and gets the bulk of its imported oil from North and South America.

None of these statements are meant to suggest that East-versus-West energy blocs are forming. In reality, the regionalization of energy trade occurs precisely because the commodities in question are behaving more and more as one would expect of a globally traded, highly fungible good. If price determines all, then reducing transportation distance makes sense.

In the end, all this regionalization comes about because the energy trade is no longer confined to the sort of strategic bilateral relationships of the Cold War era, so the new rules of energy are nothing more than that sector’s joining up with the global marketplace and losing its special status as a strategic asset.

Having said all that, the U.S. Government—and the U.S. Navy in particular—faces a far more complex strategic environment in the 21st century, whether or not it yet realizes the change: our national security interests in the Persian Gulf, while increasingly important for the global economy, no longer hold the same immediate importance to our national economy.

In effect, U.S. naval presence in Asia is becoming far less an expression of our nation’s forward presence than our exporting of security to the global marketplace. In that regard, we truly do move into the Leviathan category, for the product we provide is increasingly a collective good less directly tied to our particularistic national interests and far more intimately wrapped up with our global responsibilities.

And in the end, this is a pretty good deal. We trade little pieces of paper (our currency, in the form of a trade deficit) for Asia’s amazing array of products and services. We are smart enough to know this is a patently unfair deal—unless we offer something of great value along with those little pieces of paper. That product is a strong U.S. Pacific Fleet, which squares the transaction quite nicely.

Understanding the Military-Market Connection

The collapse of the Soviet bloc and its longstanding challenge (or rejection) of the Western economic rule set made possible—really for the first time in human history—a truly global rule set for how military power buttresses and enables economic growth and stability.

How so? For the first time in human history, we have a true global military Leviathan in the form of the U.S. military, and no peer competitor in sight—not even a coherent alternative economic philosophy (although one clearly brews in the anti-globalization protests that started with Seattle). This unparalleled moment in global history both allows and compels the United States to better understand the national security-market nexus, in large part because of its complete reversal of the priority from that of the Cold War era. During the strategic standoff with the Soviet Union, economic might was seen as supporting military power, but now that situation has been turned on its head: to the extent that the military matters, it matters because of the stabilization role it can play in the global economy.

How do we define this yin-yang relationship between the military and business worlds? First, we speak of stability, which flows from national security, and then we speak of transparency, which is both demanded and engendered by free markets. These two underlying pillars form the basis of the single global rule set that now essentially defines the era of globalization.

Within those two pillars, the United States clearly plays a crucial role:

• The U.S. Government, through the U.S. military, supplies the lion’s share of system stability through its Leviathan-like status as the world’s sole military superpower.
• The U.S. financial markets, which lead the way in fostering the emergence of a truly global equities market that will inevitably operate all day, every day, play the leading role in spreading the gospel of transparency—any country’s best defense against the sort of financial currency crises that have periodically erupted over the last decade (Mexico 1994, Asia 1997, Russia 1998, Brazil 1999, Turkey 2001).

As such, it is essential that these two worlds—the Pentagon and Wall Street—come to better understand their interrelationships across the global economy. Uncovering and comprehending this fundamental relationship is especially important because—the vast majority of the time—the security and financial communities operate in oblivious indifference to one another.

One is tempted to counter, “So what? They don’t need to be aware of one another on a day-to-day basis.” And in a basic sense, that is true. But if you consider the rise of system perturbations as a new form of international security threat, and if you understand that many of these perturbations first appear in the form of financial crises that can engender serious subnational violence (for example, Indonesia today), then perhaps this connectivity seems more pertinent. Ultimately, the global economy operates on trust, which is based on certainty, which in turn comes from the effective processing of risk.

In the end, the national security and financial establishments are in the same fundamental business: the effective assessment and mitigation of international risk. For the military, it is the risk of conflict and the disruption of normal life by large-scale violence, while in the financial world, it is the risk of bankruptcy (insolvency) and the disruption of normal business by large-scale panics or meltdowns.

Invariably, these two problem sets merge in the historical process that is economic globalization, so understanding the military-market connection is not just good business, it is good national security strategy. Osama bin Laden understood this connection when he selected the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as his targets. We ignore his logic at our peril.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is professor and senior strategic researcher at the Naval War College. He directed the NewRulesSet.Project, an effort to draw new “maps” of power and influence in the world economy through collaboration with financial corporations such as Cantor Fitzgerald. Currently, he is serving as the assistant for strategic futures in the recently formed Office of Force Transformation within the Office of the Secretary of Defense. His articles appear with frequency in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, and an abbreviated version of this chapter appeared in the January 2002 issue. The author would like to thank Bradd Hayes and Rear Admiral Michael McDevitt, USN (Ret.), for their comments on the original draft.

Notes

¹ For the purposes of this article, the author defines Asia as extending from Afghanistan to Japan, but not including Australia and New Zealand (Oceania), although he identifies Australia as an in-region supplier of energy (coal and natural gas) due to its proximity. 

²For a good example of this sort of work, see Thomas P.M. Barnett and Linda D. Lancaster,Answering the 9–1–1 Call: U.S. Military and Naval Crisis Response Activity, 1977–1991 (Center for Naval Analyses Information Memorandum 229, August 1992). 

³For the best analysis on this subject, see Henry H. Gaffney, Jr., et al., U.S. Naval Responses to Situations, 1970–1999 (Center for Naval Analyses Research Memorandum DOOO2763.A2/Final, December 2000). 

⁴ See the Energy Information Administration’s International Energy Outlook 2000: With Projections to 2020, DOE/EIA–0484 (2000), March 2000, accessed at <www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/index.html>.

⁵The NewRuleSets.Project was a multi-year research effort designed to explore how globalization and the rise of the New Economy are altering the basic “rules of the road” in the international security environment, with special reference to how these changes may redefine the U.S. Navy’s historic role as security enabler of America’s commercial network ties with the world. The project was hosted by the online securities broker-dealer firm, eSpeed (an affiliate of Cantor Fitzgerald LP), and involved personnel from the Decision Strategies Department of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies. Adm. William Flanagan, USN (Ret.), and Philip Ginsberg of Cantor Fitzgerald (then-senior managing director and executive vice president, respectively) served as informal advisers to the project, actively participating in all planning and design. The joint Wall Street-Naval War College workshops in the series involved energy, environmental issues and foreign direct investment in Asia. All research products relating to this effort can be found at <www.nwc.navy.mil/newrulesets>.

⁶ All the energy data presented in the decalogue, unless otherwise specified, comes from the Department of Energy’s International Energy Outlook 2001. 

⁷ A good rule of thumb for thinking about a quadrillion British thermal units (Btus) is that you can take the annual number for a region and divide it by two, giving you the rough equivalent in millions of barrels of oil per day the region would need to burn if it was achieving that entire energy amount by oil alone. For example, North America used about 110 quadrillion Btus in 1997, so that would equate to approximately 55 million barrels a day (mbd) of oil if that entire amount was achieved by oil alone. For point of comparison, note that the United States currently uses about 20 mbd, importing roughly half that number. 

⁸ For an excellent exploration of this, see Daniel Yergin, Dennis Eklof, and Jefferson Edwards, “Fueling Asia’s Recovery,” Foreign Affairs 77, no. 2 (March/April 1998), 34–50. 

⁹ The Middle East currently accounts for roughly 90 percent of all Asian oil imports; on this see Fereidun Fesharaki, “Energy and Asian Security Nexus,” Journal of International Affairs 53, no. 1 (Fall 1999), 97. 

¹⁰ For a frightening description of this situation, see Nicholas D. Kristof’s chapter, “Search for the Sorceror,” in Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia, ed. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 5–23. 

¹¹ Cited in Clay Chandler, “GM’s China Bet Hits Snag: WTO (Car Shoppers Await Discount From Trade Deal),” The Washington Post, May 10, 2000, E1.

¹² See “Foreign Investment in the Electricity Sectors of Asia and South America,” in International Energy Outlook 2001, 120–21. 

¹³ For a good description of Enron’s difficulties in the Indian electricity market, see Celia W. Dugger, “High-Stakes Showdown: Enron’s Right Over Power Plant Reverberates Beyond India,”The New York Times, March 20, 2001, C1. 

¹⁴ These figures are derived from United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), World Investment Report 2000. 

¹⁵ In contrast, Asia accounts for less than 10 percent of global foreign direct investment flows, even though its gross domestic product share sits at 25 percent.

¹⁶ Estimates based on the figures taken from UNCTAD, World Investment Review and CIA, World Factbook, various years.

¹⁷ See Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus And The Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1999). 

¹⁸ On this subject, see the data analysis by Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, “Democratization and War,” Foreign Affairs 74, no. 3 (May/June 1995), 79–97. 

¹⁹ For an excellent exploration of this concept, see Dana Priest, “A Four-Star Foreign Policy? U.S. Commanders Wield Rising Clout, Autonomy,” The Washington Post, September 28, 2000, A1. See also the second and third articles in the series (September 29–30).