Transcript of this past Sunday's Booknotes interview with Thomas Barnett of the US Navy War College, about his latest book. I love this guy. Wish I could grab people by the lapels and make them read him.
booknotes.org
Edit: oh, what the hey.
The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century
by Thomas Barnett
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BRIAN LAMB, HOST: Thomas P.M. Barnett, what`s "The Pentagon`s New Map"?
THOMAS BARNETT, AUTHOR, "THE PENTAGON`S NEW MAP": Well, what the book tries to do, really, is nothing less than to enunciate a successor to the cold war strategy of containment, in effect, to define the true sources of mass violence and terrorism within the global community, so as to facilitate, at first, their containment through diplomatic and military means, but ultimately, their eradication through economic and social integration.
And the mantra I use in the book is that it`s disconnectedness that defines danger. If you think about globalization as a process of integration, then the definitions of crisis we now face, like a 9/11, are instances where connectivity is disrupted. And when you think about it in those terms and you start casting what it means to wage a global war on terrorism within this larger process of globalization spread, you begin to see how a Bush administration can say, in effect, to take down a Saddam is to be part of -- logically, is located within a larger globalization -- or, excuse me -- global war on terrorism because, in effect, what we`re dealing with is those instances where you`re going to find very disconnected societies.
And it`s in that disconnectedness that we tend to find the violence and the bad treatment. And in many ways, what you`re waging war against with a bin Laden is a guy who looks to take a big chunk of humanity off line from the globalization process and in stall authoritarian regimes based on his particular definition of what a -- a good life is led.
LAMB: Before we get into some of your theories, I want to go through what`s written about you in the back and just quickly get you to -- the word that we use in Washington a lot -- parse what is said about you...
BARNETT: OK.
LAMB: ... so that we can an idea of where you`re coming from. Senior strategic researcher and professor at the U.S. Naval War College from October 2001 to June 2003. What is the Naval War College, and what did you do there?
BARNETT: Well, actually, that goes all the way back to 1998. I had done eight years here in Washington at the Center for Naval Analyses, which is sort of the Rand for the Department of Navy, a think tank. I go to the Naval War College in 1998 and become a senior strategic researcher.
One of the key things I did during that time period was I ran a series of workshops with Cantor Fitzgerald, atop the World Trade Center, where we brought together Wall Street heavyweights, National Security Council members and OSD, office of secretary of defense, planners and whatnot, and subject matter experts, and we explored the future of globalization and what could threaten globalization and what would be new definitions of international instability and crisis.
That gets wiped off the board with 9/11 because Cantor loses so many people. At that point, the person who had been the president of the Naval War College, Vice Admiral Art Zabrowsky (ph), retires as president, goes to work for Don Rumsfeld as his transformation guru. They start this new office within the office of the secretary of defense called the Office of Force Transformation. It`s going to be about really transforming the U.S. military for the tasks that lie ahead. This administration comes in very committed to this concept. We`re going to build the military of tomorrow today.
So Art Zabrowsky calls me soon after 9/11, knowing that my project`s been shot out from under me, somewhat literally, and says, Come work for me. We need rationales. We need an explanation of the world that says not only that we`re transforming because we`re a rich and technologically capable country and thus can have a, you know, well-endowed and technological enabled military, but that we`re doing this transformation of the U.S. military in response to real changes in the international security environment that we think we now understand, in part, thanks to 9/11, that a certain world has been revealed to us.
That`s when I start putting together this briefing, which I deliver throughout OSD -- I do it 150 times, roughly, to 4,000 or 5,000 DoD officials -- that tries to explain a new way of looking at the world, a new way of understanding the spread of globalization, the connectivity between national security and economics, and says, This is where the global war on terrorism fits within. This is the larger reference.
And that receives good purchase within this administration. They let me brief it all over. It becomes an "Esquire" article. That becomes a book. That`s why I`m here.
LAMB: I want to get -- I want to get beyond the -- I want to get beyond the language. OSD stands for?
BARNETT: Office of the secretary of defense.
LAMB: DoD stands for?
BARNETT: Department of Defense.
LAMB: If someone were to walk inside the U.S. Naval War College -- first of all, where it is?
BARNETT: It`s in Newport, Rhode Island.
LAMB: How many people would be inside it?
BARNETT: You`re going to see a staff of 200 or 300. They`re going to process officers, graduate degrees, about 500 or 600 a year, from all over the U.S. military, primarily from the U.S. Navy and Marines. But they also process hundreds, or several dozen each year of foreign military.
LAMB: And what do they get when they`re there?
BARNETT: They get a master`s in national security studies.
LAMB: And then you mention the Center for Naval Analysis. Where is that?
BARNETT: That`s in Alexandria, Virginia. That`s where I started when I got out of Harvard with a Ph.D back in 1990, at the end of the cold war.
LAMB: How many people are in that organization?
BARNETT: That is a federally funded research development center. It`s like the Rand Corporation. It basically works for the Department of Navy, although it has other clients, as well. That`s about 400 analysts. So it`s a pretty sizable organization.
LAMB: And most people in there have what, Ph.D.?
BARNETT: A lot of them do. And a lot of them do what they call operations research, kind of -- they`re scientists. I was sort of an odd duck there, in that I was a soft scientist, I was a political scientist.
LAMB: What`s the Center -- no, the Institute for Public Research? Is that a (UNINTELLIGIBLE)
BARNETT: That`s a division within the CNA Corporation.
LAMB: Is there, by the way, a Center for Army Analysis or a Center for Marine Analysis or a Center for Air Force Analysis?
BARNETT: Yes, there are those kinds of -- those kinds of federally funded research and development centers and there are private corporations that do that kind of work, as well. There`s also an Army War College in Carlisle. There`s an Air Force War College, Air College, down in Alabama, I believe. Those are different from, for example, West Point, which does the undergraduate degree for the Army, the Naval Academy in Annapolis, those kinds of situations.
LAMB: At one point in your book, you say you wanted to be a Paul Nitze.
BARNETT: Right.
LAMB: What does that mean?
BARNETT: Well, I mean, what was frustrating for me, going through and getting a Ph.D. in political science in the 1980s was that all the rules with regard to how the cold war worked had been kind of figured out by the time I got on the scene and started studying them in a serious fashion in the 1980s. It was all fairly, you know, carved in stone. It was called strategic arms limitation talks, and we knew what was our part of the world and the Soviets knew what was their part of the world, and we had all sorts of unwritten rules that said this is how we interact with one another.
And so it was fairly -- it was fairly stolid. It didn`t change too much. You could master the field by memorizing, you know, a pretty small list of players and historical events. And it just wasn`t a very dynamic arena, as I looked at it. I thought I was just going to come in and have a career in Soviet studies. I got a master`s at Harvard in that first and then got a Ph.D. in political science. I thought I`d be doing arms control treaties for the course of my entire career. All gone.
LAMB: You live where now?
BARNETT: I live with my family in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, actually on the island where the Naval War College is located. It`s the original Rhode Island in Narragansett Bay up in Rhode Island.
LAMB: And other than writing this book, what do you do for a living?
BARNETT: Well, what I do for a living is I`m a senior strategic researcher at the War College. I conduct workshops. I conduct research. I write reports. We have various clients that we work for, help them do strategic planning within the U.S. government. We`re sort of like an in-house consultancy at the War College.
LAMB: What is strategic planning? In other words, what other kind of planning is there?
BARNETT: Well, strategic planning, which the military engages in, in a way that`s different from, I would argue, the private sector, is that they engage in truly long-term thinking. I mean, the military -- DoD is one of the rarest places, where you can have a career where they routinely ask you questions like, Help us understand this particular dynamic in the year 2025, OK? You go to a McDonald`s Corporation, you go to GM, they may go out five or ten years, but there are very few places that really think down the pathways of potential global futures to the degree that the Defense Department does.
And that`s fascinating. It`s challenging. But when you think about it, what the Pentagon really does primarily, as opposed to the commands around the world that we have -- what the Pentagon does is it spends most of its time imagining future war, creating a force to wage that future war, and processing intelligence that supports that definition of future war.
So to tie it to something current today, the debate about the 9/11 intelligence failure -- I`ll tell you about it, and I write it in the book, in my mind, there was no failure, OK? I knew exactly upon 9/11 that there would be smoking memoranda found within weeks and that there would be somebody within the intelligence community who had been screaming their head off in the days and weeks and months up to that point.
Why that doesn`t penetrate up the ranks in the Pentagon is that the Pentagon decided in the mid-1990s, when they got far enough away from the old Soviet threat and started looking around for something familiar to plan their future war against -- because it takes a long time to build all these ships and these aircraft, tremendous lead times in development -- they got fixated on a China, 1991 Taiwan Straits crisis. And so that became, and still is in much of the Pentagon, the preferred vision of future war. China, Taiwan Straits, 2025.
We run a lot of so-called secret war games, where the unclassified description is, A large unnamed Asian land power with an unhealthy interest in a small island nation off its coast, OK? And it`s a secret who that is, except everybody knows it`s China. So if you look at the planning guide that`s inside DoD right now, with regard to the technologies we pursue, the force structures -- meaning the mix of ships and aircraft and whatnot that we buy -- you will see China looming throughout these documents as the dominant planning assumption.
So when the Pentagon is focused on that definition of future war and is building for that and only wants to hear intelligence that supports that, people can be screaming their heads off throughout the intelligence community about an al Qaeda in the days, weeks, months leading up to 9/11, that does not penetrate up the ranks. I mean, the Pentagon simply wasn`t interested in that until 9/11 made them interested.
LAMB: Let me ask you about the most political statements you make in your book.
BARNETT: OK.
LAMB: At one point, your wife is afraid you`re becoming a Republican.
BARNETT: Right.
LAMB: What does that mean? Are you not a Republican?
BARNETT: Well, I`m a registered Democrat. I tend to vote Democrat. It`s an odd thing to be a Democrat who works with the military, which is overwhelming Republican. I`m comfortable in that -- in that milieu because I like to be the skeptic in the room. I like to be the contrarian. And if you`re going to be a contrarian in the military environment, you`re probably going to have to be a Democrat. But that`s the family background I come out of. I had a grandfather who ran as a Progressive.
LAMB: In Wisconsin.
BARNETT: In Wisconsin, for the Senate. And so that`s the kind of background I come from. I will tell you, though, I tend to describe myself more like a Tony Blair Democrat. I tend to get lumped in, because of the work I`ve done with this administration -- and I`m not a political appointee, I`m just a government worker who was elevated for 20 months to a certain position in the office of the secretary of defense and therefore became known for that.
LAMB: And that was when you were the...
BARNETT: Assistant for strategic futures in the Office of Force Transformation.
LAMB: In the Office of Force Transformation.
BARNETT: Right.
LAMB: Is there any easier way of saying force transformation?
BARNETT: No. I mean, that`s one of those Pentagon buzz terms. What it means is this is the office that imagines the changing nature of war and is trying to get the rest of the Pentagon to move in the direction of accepting the challenges of the information age and, in effect, moving us off kind of the industrial era models that we`ve had for decades.
LAMB: Who did you answer to? Who were your assistants?
BARNETT: Art Zabrowsky.
LAMB: And what was his title?
BARNETT: He is the director of the Office of Force Transformation in the office of the secretary of defense.
LAMB: And who does he answer to?
BARNETT: Don Rumsfeld, secretary of defense.
LAMB: What I`m trying to do is to simplify this to where people get, who don`t have any idea about any of this, and language and all that...
BARNETT: Right.
LAMB: ... where they -- they can get to the point, should they go buy your book -- and what would you say to someone, who is drowning right now in language, about why they should buy this book.
BARNETT: Right. Well, I think what you`re going to find when you read the book is it is written -- it avoids the jargon, by and large, and it is written in a very conversational tone. It sounds like listening to me talk about things across the table, as opposed to kind of a high concept, Here`s a great race throughout history, and here are all sorts of high concepts I`m going to throw at you in reckless abandon.
It is interwoven with a history of my career as a strategic planner, which, in effect, takes you inside rooms that you don`t normally go inside, tells you what it is to put together a Power Point briefing, to deliver a Power Point briefing in some of these insider arenas, to talk to people who are doing the strategic planning and helping them imagine the future of war and these kinds of situations that I don`t think the public really understands, and yet it really determines the kind of force that we have, so that when we`re in an Iraq right now and we are short of certain things and we don`t have these certain things, those are all based on decisions we made on what we bought over the last 10 years, and those were based on strategic planning.
LAMB: What`s a Power Point briefing?
BARNETT: Well, it`s a hard thing to explain but, I mean, most people understand what a Power Point briefing is because it`s infiltrated large aspects academia and education and they`re fairly common in the business world. But inside the defense community, the Power Point briefing is the dominant mode of idea transmission, much more than a policy memorandum, much more than an article or a book you can write.
LAMB: What`s it look like?
BARNETT: It`s a series of slides that are projected behind you. And you stand up and deliver a narration to these slides. Now, the classic way you see it in movies and whatnot, they show you overhead satellite pictures. It`s fairly static pictures. And they describe, you know, Here we`re looking at -- Here we`re looking at -- Here we`re looking at. The kind of stuff I do, because it`s very conceptual, and what I`m trying to do is explain a way of thinking about the future of the world -- my presentations tend to be highly animated.
LAMB: You actually say in the book you`re pretty good at this.
BARNETT: Well, I will tell you, people have been telling me throughout my career that I`m one of the best Power Point briefers. And it`s a -- I will say that with some humility, in the sense that it`s a very odd skill and it doesn`t -- people don`t understand how powerful it can be inside the Pentagon because it doesn`t have that same sort of power outside the Pentagon. The closest thing you see to that type of activity is probably your weatherman standing in front of a screen and all sorts of animations and maps and stuff like that changing behind him as he describes something.
Well, I basically do something like that, except the tableau that`s behind me is the future of warfare and I`m describing where the world is going, in terms of how regions are coming together and moving apart, and I`m trying to sell a vision for where DoD, the Defense Department, fits in a U.S. foreign policy strategy long-term that says, This is the world we seek to create. This is the happy ending we`re trying to bring about.
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