Bill...did you see this piece on Barnett? From playing wargames to building a new world over
thebusinessonline.com
By : Dominic Cummings in Newport, Rhode Island July 17, 2005
The Chinese President sat down and smiled. "The US President is demanding that we pressure the Iranians to accept new rules for their nukes; he wants a grand summit to discuss the economic and security affairs of East Asia", he said. "I told him we would support the new rules for Iran but only when he's leant on the Israelis to accept the same rules - we must have equal rules - and I politely stiff-armed the idea of a security summit. He knows they've lost their position and he's fighting to get it back. They aren't going to hit Iran and they know they're in trouble." The Chinese President paused: "Typical Americans", he said. The Chinese Politburo chuckled at American impotence.
The time: between 2010 and 2012, at least in the imagination of the participants. The place: multiple hotel ballrooms next to the US Navy War College in Newport, Rhode Island. The occasion: a new type of futuristic war game conducted by top US military and corporate leaders. This was a serious intellectual experiment using real people to try and grab a glimpse of how the world may look in a few years' time. There were four teams, representing the US, China, Iran and Brazil, each made up of 15 people, sitting around tables in four separate rooms. There was also a control room where leading academics and others set scenarios for the different teams, judged who had made good moves and who hadn't, and regularly introduced new developments - a bloody rebellion in China following a renminbi revaluation was one such bombshell - then sat back, relaxed and watched the impact.
The results were fascinating. In the course of the game, China supported Iran's right to develop nuclear weapons in return for an Iranian oil pipeline to western China. America acquiesced to Iran possessing nuclear weapons because it did not feel able to strike militarily and could not create a diplomatic coalition to stop it. Instead, it tried to define new rules for nuclear powers and came to the view that a nuclear balance between Iran and Israel may be a good thing for Middle Eastern regional security. China invested in a modern navy to protect Asian sea lanes and keep the oil flowing; and it avoided aggressive action that could provoke opposing coalitions. Absent a major crisis over Taiwan, China remained peaceful, content to invest in economic growth. By contrast, America spent money on a high-tech military but had no high-tech war to fight; by the end of the game, the US was perceived by all players to have suffered relative decline against China.
Defining winners, however, raises a crucial question about how American strategists will define victory in the future. Will it mean the US waging an escalating war with China and eventually "winning" a nuclear exchange? Or is accommodating China's rise by helping its integration into the global economy and limiting the opportunities for great power war a truer victory, even if this means a relative diminution of US power?
One thing is sure: the assumptions and course of the war game, and the conversations surrounding it, would have come as a horrible shock to the European Commission, the British Foreign Office and most British Members of Parliament (MPs). Almost the only time Europe was mentioned was when the Control Team threw in the idea of a European Defence Force being deployed to the Middle East. An American general said: "I know we're now around 2012 but does anybody here seriously think the EU will have any significant force to deploy to this theatre by then?" Hearing that, everybody laughed. "It's chaff from Control. Let's ignore it and focus on the real problems", the general said.
What made these war games so interesting is that they were merely a very small reflection of a much larger trend which will transform the way the world is organised. While Europe's political elites grapple incompetently with economic stagnation and the disastrous consequences of their three failures -- the single market, the euro and the constitution; and while an increasingly parochial Britain continues to sink under the weight of a dysfunctional political system, America is engaged in a vast intellectual debate, echoing from university to boardroom to Pentagon, to work out its strategy for the 21st Century.
It is a debate that explores how globalisation can be protected and expanded by spreading liberal democracy; how America engages with China in the context of Asian Realpolitik and new trade and security relationships; how the US military must be transformed; and how all of these questions are informed by developments in overlapping fields including cognitive science, genetics, computing and "complexity research" - the study of complex systems such as evolution and financial markets. Over the debate hover, as almost unspoken assumptions, the economic decline and political irrelevance of the European Union (EU) and the emergence of new security and trade institutions focused on the Asian Great Powers, which will supplant those, such as the UN, built by the victorious powers after the end of the Second World War in 1945.
The game in Newport was designed and conducted by two companies, Alidade and Enterra, that operate on the new frontiers of mathematics, business and war. It was specifically designed to explore the theories of one of the most influential - and controversial - military strategists in America: Tom Barnett, author of The Pentagon's New Map. Barnett's work began as in internal Pentagon PowerPoint presentation after 9/11 and became a best-selling book.
Barnett divides the world into three groups of countries: a "Functional Core" of globalisation; a non-functioning "Gap"; and a variety of "Seam" states. The Core includes rich, capitalist economies such as US, Britain, Germany, France and Japan, which make up the Old Core; as well as emerging superpowers such as China and India, which constitute the New Core; all of these countries embrace globalisation and are, or wish to be, international players. Plot wars, disaster and US military engagements through the 1990s onto a map, and you overwhelmingly get the Gap states: Iran, North Korea and most of Africa. The Seam states such as Brazil or Serbia are those currently making the transition from poor, unstable countries to rich, developing capitalist economies; they stand between Core and Gap.
Barnett argues that America's strategy ought to be the protection and expansion of the Core and the gradual elimination of Gap regimes that resist globalisation and liberal democracy. He supported the invasion of Iraq for the same reasons as Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy defence secretary turned World Bank chief: both hoped the event would set off a Big Bang across the Middle East, act as a catalyst to bring democracy and a market economy to the region; and shrink the Gap. Though this view terrifies European elites, Barnett is not the caricature they may imagine. He opposes those in the Pentagon who believe that China will take over the Soviet Union's erstwhile role as America's superpower enemy. Instead, he argues, America should welcome the development of China; work with it to expand the Core against the Gap; and hope for minimal violence when the Communists eventually lose power as a result of the economic boom of recent years.
Barnett argues that a radical new approach to Pentagon budgeting, procurement, and policy is needed - with the biggest change required being the evolution of the US military into two very different but parallel forces. The first, which would include America's nuclear arsenal and traditional war-fighting machine, including special forces, Barnett calls the Leviathan; it would aim to deter conflict between the great powers and provide for the rapid elimination of Gap regimes when necessary.
The second, the Systems Administrator force, would complement the Leviathan by focusing on counter-insurgency and state-building. Whereas the US military is unchallengeable in conventional battle -- the Leviathan -- it is not very good at rebuilding countries once a regime has been overthrown, as Iraq shows. Rebuilding is much harder than regime change and it is crucial to leave no void in which the Core's enemies can operate as Bin Laden in Afghanistan, planning the next, bigger 9/11.
Barnett made it clear that he regards the United Nations (UN) as largely irrelevant. "The UN is not a place for serious discussion," he says. "In the future, the location of serious discussions will increasingly be the G-20", a group of the largest and richest economies. For Barnett, managing Asian relationships and the Middle East are of greater importance than worrying about the impenetrable workings of Brussels. "The New Core is more important to me than the Old Core," he says.
He accepts that America now has few reliable allies of weight outside Great Britain and Australia; but he thinks the future lies in Asia. He would like all of the Core's Asian powers to unite behind a Systems Administrator force and to work together rather than compete as hostile powers; whereas the Leviathan would be mainly made up of US personnel in this new world order, the Systems Administrator forces would be much more international.
They would operate within such norms as the International Criminal Court (ICC) but, crucially, the Leviathan forces would not - "when a special forces team screws up a hit on a terrorist camp, it should be swept under the carpet", he says, in a comment guaranteed to drive European officials up the wall. While the Leviathan would not be subject to UN veto, the Systems Administrator use could be voted on by the G20 in proportion to allies' contribution. Recent leaks suggest that Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is succeeding in convincing the Pentagon to accept that Systems Administrator operations will form a significant proportion of future operations; this may affect the forthcoming Pentagon Budget.
Needless to say, not everybody agrees, even in the US. The proposed Leviathan and Systems Administrator divide has triggered a major debate which directly affects UK strategy and the emerging Common European Foreign Policy and European Security and Defence Policy.
Barnett's old boss is a man called Art Cebrowski, brought into the Pentagon by Rumsfeld immediately after 9/11 to advise on "defence transformation". Cebrowski is the godfather of what is called Network Centric Warfare: the concept that war is being transformed by a shift from simply building ever-more technologically advanced and expensive platforms (such as stealth fighters or aircraft carriers), to network-centric warfare, where the emphasis is on networking platforms to leverage their effects via "information dominance".
In this vision, the sensor, command and control, and engagement "grids" of Network Centric Warfare locate and destroy targets across the globe, from individual sensor to soldier to ship to unmanned drone to satellite. This "system of systems", it is argued, will fundamentally alter the nature of warfare because it will largely eliminate what until now has been the most important fact of human conflict: the inherent uncertainty of a complex world that produces "the fog of war".
Jeff Cores, boss of Alidade, is a former military officer, a leading mathematician and a corporate and Pentagon adviser. In his forthcoming book, The Fundamentals of Distributed, Networked Forces, he writes: "This [futuristic] force would have increased survivability, because its assets are dispersed and operations are not crucially dependent upon a small number of high value platforms; increased adaptability, since combat power can be readily exchanged between air, surface, or subsurface controlling units; improved balance, since distributed combat power can be massed for both offence and defense; and improved sustainment in crisis, since combat power can be sent forward to where sustainment is already deployed in the hulls of the forward units."
But Cores also urges caution. The challenges of networking counter-insurgency forces is greater than that of networking the airforce and navy. The more enthusiastic advocates of networks are also guilty of perpetuating the fundamental error that uncertainty can be eliminated, he says; and despite the impression given by some in the Pentagon, Network Centric Warfare remains a theory rather than a reality. "Iraq was not Network Centric Warfare. It was better precision warfare; but precision warfare does not define Network Centric Warfare", Cores says. Another problem is that while its enthusiasts are discussing futuristic technologies, the West is "still using Victorian maths and Industrial Age command and control" techniques, he says.
Network Centric Warfare remains in its infancy; at the same stage that aeronautics was a century ago, when people experimented wildly, went down dead-ends, and operated without an established academic discipline. "Although most innovators are focusing on physical platforms and physical information technology systems, true transformation will be the result of innovation in the information and cognitive domains", Cores argues. Finally, there are those who think that the real challenge is the imminent eruption of what they call Fourth Generation warfare inside Western countries and the application of Al-Qaeda and other guerrilas' doctrines within the West's own borders.
Barnett's ideas and all of these arguments over future war are directly linked to profound philosophical and geopolitical questions concerning the stability of liberal democracy and possible threats to it, as we shall see next week.
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