Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog
Declaring victory for "your mum's military" in UK
Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 26 June 2004
Approximately one month following my interview with Alec Russell, DC bureau chief of the London-based Daily Telegraph, here is the resulting article finally. The length of time for him to generate the piece was clearly tied to all the other sources he tapped for either supporting or dissenting views.
Daily Telegraph
June 26, 2004
US military faces future as Jekyll and Hyde force
(Filed: 26/06/2004)
The idea that an army makes war and makes peace is gaining ground, writes Alec Russell in Washington
The sprawl of neat, identikit Virginian suburbs south-west of Washington is familiar to any aficionado of Cold War thrillers: this is the heartland of America's "military-industrial complex". It is here that military and intelligence chiefs make the decisions that shake - or at least shape - the world.
And it is here that, early one steamy morning recently, a dozen top officials and analysts gathered in a glistening plate-glass office block for a briefing that was to shake them to their core.
They had come to hear a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat and former teacher of Marxist studies argue that the American military should be split in two. The first, dubbed "Leviathan", would fight. The second, the "System Administrators", would rebuild failed states to pre-empt crises and so help secure America.
Together they would reshape the "Gap", a swathe of the world stretching across Africa and the Middle East, and much of Latin America and south-east and central Asia.
Tom Barnett, a professor at the US Naval War College, "packages" his message with a mix of very "un-Pentagon" allusions from Monty Python to Star Trek. But any shock at his zany approach is quickly overshadowed by the reaction to his thesis. It is, he concedes, an explosive idea.
"It's a generational thing," he said after a lively opening session. "A lot of the guys who fought this were the oldest in the room. They say it's their 'goddamned' army and they fear it's going to be turned into a bunch of peacekeepers.
" 'You want us to take someone down, tell us who it is and we'll go do it,' they say. 'Let us remain a warrior force. Don't screw us up'."
But with the American military clearly struggling in Iraq, his radical solution to the Pentagon's dilemma in how to confront the post-September 11 world is not seen as the heresy that it would have been a few years ago. His briefing has made its way through the upper levels of the Pentagon to the office of Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary.
If you walk into the Pentagon's "transformation" headquarters, carrying Prof Barnett's book, The Pentagon's New Map, officials nod and say "ah, the book" - even if in some other parts of the Pentagon officials snort when you mention its name.
"There comes a time in history when rule sets are out of whack," says the professor. "There isn't any situation we can't go into where we can't run up a score of 100 to nothing at half-time. The problem is that we have a first half team and don't invest in the second half.
"We don't have any four-star generals working the second half. There are no four-star military police generals. Why? Because their work has been seen as a sideshow, an attitude that many in the Pentagon may be regretting given the scandal over prisoner abuse in Iraq.
"Leviathan will be like a metropolitan Swat team. They go in and do their stuff and as soon as the smoke clears they are out of there. Then there will be a force that is closer to society. It is 'your mum's military'. Its members will be older, married, more educated.
"In Iraq now, guys who aren't built for war-fighting are being forced to do it. I get calls from the corps of engineers out in Iraq and they're saying, 'Thank God somebody said this'."
Mr Barnett has expounded his theories at a time of extraordinary change for the American military. There are plans to cut by nearly half the 70,000 troops based in Germany by withdrawing the First Infantry and First Armoured divisions and replacing them with a brigade. Over the next two years about a third of the 37,000 troops in South Korea are being withdrawn.
The redeployments are in part a response to the changing nature of the military threat to America since the end of the Cold War. But they also reflect the zeal for radical change that marked Mr Rumsfeld's arrival in 2000 for his second stint as secretary of defence - his first was under President Gerald Ford - and the difficulties in Iraq.
The Rumsfeldian vision has not been well received in the Pentagon. Many uniformed officers see him as too overweening, and view his revolutionary proposals for cuts and changes with deep suspicion.
"I smile when I hear what is going on now," said one former high-ranking general. "Almost every sec def has spoken of transformation and yet their talk ends up full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.
"There is an institutional bias to keep things as they are. A lot of things Rumsfeld has agreed will drop dead if he leaves. And there are an awful lot of people who will be pleased to see him go. He came in saying, 'No more of this or that'."
Yet the course of events in Iraq and the need for rapid reaction forces across the globe have given an impetus to calls for change. "This is the age of the small, the fast and the many," said Retd Vice-Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, the head of the office of transformation in the Pentagon. "We are moving away from the slow, the ponderous and the few."
The admiral has backed the Barnett vision, even if his experience suggests he is more of a natural "war-fighter" than a "nation-builder". And while a formal division of the army appears far-fetched, in light of the mishandling of Iraq in the aftermath of the invasion, the need for a radical overhaul of the army's ancillary units is undeniable.
Michael O'Hanlon, a senior analyst at Brookings Institute, said: "Barnett has already won. He should declare victory. It's not so much that he won the argument. Iraq won the argument for him."
This is not the first time that Prof Barnett has been "ahead of the curve". In 1991, as a young analyst, he briefed top admirals on the need to "embrace" the Soviet navy. Such was the outrage of his audience he had to break off his lecture.
"It went down like a lead balloon. Several admirals questioned my sanity. One wondered aloud if I was a 'pinko' or 'just plain stupid'. That got a lot of laughs and immediately my credibility was shot to pieces."
Six months later the Soviet Union was in ruins and he no longer looked so daft.
COMMENTARY: Not much to complain about in the piece. It's actually the most well-pitched article yet on my "influence." I say that because Russell stresses less my pull with people and more the simple pull of the vision. In other words, it ain't about influence, but accuracy. If the vision is accurate, you should be able to spot the change.
I did like the bit about "your mum's military": a little bit of UK editing on that line. I also like the reference to "the book," as it is described inside of the Office of Force Transformation. That makes me feel very good indeed-like I delivered the goods that Cebrowski originally hired me to generate.
The O'Hanlon quote is good too (the man is a high-quality quote machine), because it emphasizes the particular reality of the Leviathan/Sys Admin part of the vision: the failures in the Iraq occupation elevate that concept from whacko to imminently real. How do I know? Out of the many examples, here's one I can openly cite: I was just asked to give the keynote address to Joint Forces Command's first big lessons learned workshop to explore the new reality of postwar ops.
But declare victory? Hardly.
All this does is start the conversation and get the ball rolling. I've legitimized and given voice to something that must happen. Taking credit is a bit much; visions are like giving somebody with very poor vision a new pair of glasses that makes everything clear: they still have to do all the real work themselves, even if you get credit for pointing your finger in the right direction beforehand.
So buckle up, the real transformation of the U.S. military is just beginning. |
