Why I hope to brief at Leavenworth
Thomas Barnett
¡"On Ground in Iraq, Capt. Ayers Writes His Own Playbook: Thrust Into New Kind of War, Junior Officers Become Army's Leading Experts," by Greg Jaffe, Wall Street Journal, 22 September 2004, p. A1.
Another impressive Greg Jaffe story: this time on how the return of junior officers with recent field experience in Gap counterinsurgency is shaking up that citadel of Army new thinking: the elite Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. It's to the point where Lt. Gen. William Wallace "has told superiors that officers returning from Iraq who attend [the school] know more about counterinsurgency than their instructors." Out go the usual lectures and in come discussion groups. As one major puts it, "This is entirely a bottom-up war."
I would make the following distinction: it was a top-down first half (warfighting against a military), but it's a bottom-up second half (peacewaging against an insurgency). Big platforms raining down death worked just fine in the former, but it takes very innovative boots on the ground to win the latter.
The war in Iraq taught the U.S. military almost nothing, because we overmatched our opponent so effectively. The transformation of the Leviathan force is going along just fine. Where we're learning plenty is in the Sys Admin work that's followed the end of "major hostilities." Army Chief of Staff (and former commander of Special Operations Command) Gen. Peter Schoomaker says [in Jaffe's paraphrase] "the Army is in the midst of the most wide-ranging changes since World War II."
Hmmm . . . "since World War II." Interesting how we keep hearing that phrase so much in security affairs since 9/11. New era, new rule sets, and so new strategy, new structure.
I say it again, the Iraq War changes nothing, but the Iraq Occupation transforms transformation from its long-time focus on the front-half force to the back-half force. Get the back-half force down right, and it's a permanent off-season for the front-half crew. That's global peace in our time, there for the creating.
I have a tentative invite from Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) at Leavenworth to come and brief in late November. College-willing, I will make that trip.
Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett at 03:50 PM
The Big Bang's latest reverberations
¡"Time to Squeeze Syria," op-ed by Jim Hoagland, Washington Post, 16 September 2004, p. A31.
¡"Saudis Take a Small Dose of Democracy: Results of Local Ballots May Determine Whether Electoral Experiment Is Widened," by Scott Wilson, Washington Post, 16 September 2004, p. A18.
Strong words from Jim Hoagland on the need to finally start pushing Syria over its "decades-long control over Lebanon," calling it "an urgent new task" in transforming the region. Recently, he notes, the UN passed a Security Council resolution that called on Syria to withdraw its troops from the country by a 159-0 vote. Why? Assad the Younger is strong-arming the Lebanese Parliament to extend the presidential term of his preferred lackey, and promising to double the number of troops in the country by year's end. Meanwhile, Beirut continues to re-establish itself as a regional vacation spot, despite all those years of civil strife, so you'd have to think that if Syria ever got out, Lebanon would be able to reconnect itself to the outside world as it once was.
In the Gulf, Saudi Arabia continues to try and head off Osama bin Laden's appeal at the "pass." Besides passing out jobs to young male Saudis that previously went to guest workers, now the House of Saud is passing out ballots in local elections that will pick half of the seats on municipal council boards around the country. This is a first in more than four decades and the first done on a national scale in over seven decades. Why did it take so long? I guess because America didn't decide to invade one of its neighbors and seek to install a democracy until last year.
Here's the silent kicker: a new by-law says everyone over 21 can vote, unless they're in the military/security forces. Did it say women could vote? No. But it didn't say they couldn't either . . .. |
