Great Powers

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  Thus, after being ignored since the beginning of time (save for its slaves and its treasure), Africa just got strategically important enough for America to care about. The Bush administration’s decision to set up Africa Command is historic, but not for the reasons given or assumed. There aren’t enough Islamic terrorists in Africa to stand up a full combatant command. If all we wanted were flies on eyeballs, a small number of special operations trigger-pullers would have sufficed for the foreseeable future. There’s oil there, but the United States would get its share whether Africa burns or not, and it’s actually fairly quiet right now. The Chinese are arriving en masse, typically embedded with regimes we can’t stand or can’t stand us, like Sudan and Zimbabwe. But the Chinese aren’t particularly liked in Africa and seem to have no designs for empire there. Beijing just wants its energy and minerals, and that penetration, such as it is, doesn’t warrant Africa Command, either. So, in my mind, America sets up an Africa Command for the same reason people buy real estate—it’s a good investment. As the Middle East “middle ages” over the next three decades and Asia’s infrastructural build-out is completed, only Africa will remain as a source for both youth-driven revolution and cheap labor and commodities. Toss in global warming and you’ve got a recipe for the most deprived becoming the most depraved.

  America’s Central Command set up shop in Djibouti, located right across from Yemen where the Red Sea meets the Gulf of Aden, in May 2003, moving ashore a Marine-led Joint Task Force that had been established six months earlier aboard the command ship Mount Whitney to capture and kill al Qaeda fighters fleeing American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. The task force did register one immediate big hit in November 2002: A top Al Qaeda leader was taken out in Yemen by a Hellfire air-to-ground missile launched from an unmanned Predator drone in a scene right out of the movie Syriana. But other than that, the great rush of rats fleeing the sinking ship did not materialize, and so the Marines took up residence in an old French Foreign Legion base located on Djibouti’s rocky shore, just outside the capital. Uncomfortable just sitting around, the Marines quickly refashioned the task force with the blessing of General John Abizaid, then head of Central Command, who envisioned Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) as a strategic inoculant. If the Marines weren’t going to get to kill anybody, then they’d train the locals to police the area instead.

  But CJTF-HOA, whose area of responsibility stretched from Sudan down to Kenya, soon evolved into something much more: an experiment in applying the 3D approach so clearly lacking in America’s recent postwar reconstruction efforts elsewhere. Because the task force didn’t own the sovereign space it was operating in, as U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq did, the Marines were forced to work under and through the American ambassadors, their State Department country teams, and the attached U.S. Agency for International Development missions. If little of that cooperation was occurring in Kabul and Baghdad, then maybe Africa would be better suited. CJTF-HOA was implicitly designed to be Washington’s bureaucratic mea culpa for the Green Zone, a proving ground for the next generation of interagency cooperation that fuels America’s eventual victory in the long war. CJTF-HOA became the essential model for AFRICOM, which effectively seeks to replicate its de facto subunified command model (sort of a “mini-me” regional combatant command) in Africa’s northern, western, southern, and central regions, corresponding to the African Union’s desire to stand up five regional peacekeeping brigades. In effect, AFRICOM will eventually represent a “franchising” of the CJTF-HOA model, complete with its innovative 3D approach.

  Thus, Africa Command promises to be everything Central Command has failed to become in its recent interventions. It will be interagency from the ground up. It will be based on interactions with locals first and leaders second. It will engage in preemptive nation-building instead of preemptive regime change. It will “reduce the future battlespace” that America has neither intention nor desire to own. It’ll be Iraq done right.

  At the end of the day, then, America’s strategic interests in Africa, as reflected in AFRICOM, can be summed up thusly: keep civil strife down, build local capacity up, and keep the radical jihadists out. Unstated in that formula for now is the logic of encouraging Asia (and Middle Eastern) firms “in” as a means of plugging African labor into globalization’s network trade. If this were all done effectively over the long haul, U.S. military presence and influence in the region would be self-negating: The more successful we are in this strategy, the less influence we have over local African governments. The end goal is simple: not permanent U.S. military bases but African militaries and governments bolstered to the point where continental peacekeeping can be accomplished on the basis of indigenous capacity first, regional cooperation second, and help from external great powers third.

  How well will AFRICOM fare? For now it remains an experiment subject to a lot of local suspicions and the usual bureaucratic and budgetary turf battles back in Washington. But it’s interesting how—when left to its own devices and located away from the global glare created by U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan—the U.S. military, in the form of CJTF-HOA, basically adopted my Leviathan-SysAdmin split: the joint task force essentially playing SysAdmin with its couple of thousand military trainers, medics, well-diggers, and civil affairs specialists; and CENTCOM’S Special Operations Command (SOCCENT) playing occasional Leviathan, such as its short-duration intervention alongside invading Ethiopian troops in Somalia in early 2007 to drive out the radical Council of Islamic Courts (CIC). CJTF-HOA works its many precincts primarily through its system of frontier mini-forts called contingency operating locations (COLs). Operated by KBR civilians, these small bases typically lie inside an existing host-nation military base, such as the COL I visited in Manda Bay, Kenya, in 2007 as part of my reporting for Esquire’s story on AFRICOM. Yes, the Manda Bay COL served as a launching point for special operations strikes against Somalia-based al Qaeda and CIC operatives just a few weeks before I got there, but I spent my time trailing a civil affairs Army captain who was checking up on a slew of local capacity-building projects his teams had overseen during the past year. In effect, Manda Bay’s handful of civil affairs teams were operating no differently from coalition Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan and Iraq; they were, in effect, preconflict PRTs, or the 3D approach applied before a regime-toppling or nation-building exercise is required. “Imperialism” to some but nothing more than a pistol-packing Peace Corps to me, because if you want the state-building sans invasion, this is what it looks like—CJTF-HOA growing into AFRICOM.

  CJTF-HOA likes to brag that it’s never fired a round in anger, and that’s true, because it has played the local precinct cop and left it to SOCCENT’s SWAT-like forces to pull the triggers as needed. That essential split is being repeated in AFRICOM, where the command has been divided between two deputy commanders: a military officer to run normal military operations (more Leviathan) and a State Department civilian who oversees the “everything else.” This is an unprecedented development in the history of U.S. regional combatant commands (thus creating immediate bureaucratic blowback in Washington, where State and USAID fear a militarization of their presence on the continent), but it’s one I think we’ll see replicated across other commands in coming years. Frankly, you can spot all the same beat cop-versus-SWAT tensions in U.S. military operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq. AFRICOM, in combination with U.S. Southern Command (Latin America), thus represents the sort of 3D template that will eventually remake America’s entire military command structure—the essential “cannibalizing agent” triggered by the long war. To that end, SOUTHCOM already moves in the direction of replicating the dual deputy commander structure of AFRICOM.

  Yes, America will still need the nineteen-year-old “generation kill” types who can be trained up to do the Leviathan work, but increasingly it will need the older, more experienced type who speaks the local language and works the beat like a regular cop, soaking up “human intelligence�
�� the old-fashioned way—simply chatting up the local citizenry. In short, you can train the Leviathan but you need to educate the SysAdmin. If all you want to do is kill bad guys, the algorithm for that “kill chain” is relatively simple: a series of steps that get you the desired outcome. That sort of vertical knowledge can be drilled into young recruits: observe the environment, orient yourself therein, decide which steps need be taken against which targets, and then act (this is Colonel John Boyd’s famous “OODA loop”). But according to the new Army-Marine COIN field manual, the SysAdmin relationship- and network-builder has a tougher row to hoe in terms of successful counterinsurgency: He or she needs to diagnose an environment’s deficits (e.g., economic, political, security, essential services), dialogue with local inhabitants about how to address them, design programs, learn from their application, and then redesign them over and over again until the local capacity has been effectively built up—not a loop to be rushed.

  Just as important in all this work is the behavior our troops model for their local counterparts. In Africa, for example, a nation’s military has often been a force of repression or great violence against its own people, so professionalizing local militaries becomes a primary goal of COIN or state-building in general. This kind of institutional mentoring takes time—as in, face-to-face time. How do you teach a boy living in a fatherless house to act like a man? You get him a good role model. African militaries need a solid role model, and as imperfect as America’s military seems to its critics, it is the gold standard. Plus, it is the only one that actually shows up anywhere inside the Gap in sufficient numbers to make this sort of interaction happen consistently. I say, if you don’t want to play “big brother” to the world’s militaries, then don’t own the world’s biggest and best gun, because the rest comes with the territory.

  Across the entirety of the Cold War, the United Nations got involved in eighteen peacekeeping operations. Since the Cold War’s end, it has accumulated almost four dozen more. That means we’ve gone from the UN doing a PKO once every two or three years to doing two or three new PKOs every year. Does that sound like a future global security environment that needs a bigger U.S. Leviathan capacity or one that demands something more SysAdmin-like, more in the range of CJTF-HOA and AFRICOM? Because I’ll tell you this: Getting China to do more inside the Gap gets a whole lot harder when our main instrument of cooperation is a force largely designed to fight a military like China’s. If we want to tap the rising great powers of this age, we need to present them with institutions they can readily access in terms of cooperation. We need new forces and new commands, for new coalitions with new allies, for new types of operations in locales that are historically unknown to us. Or we can simply keep building a Cold War force and wondering why it doesn’t perform well in counterinsurgency or state-building and keeps burning itself out trying to adapt itself to these very different tasks.

  Everyone always wants a quick fix. We got hit with 9/11 and the quick fix was a new Department of Homeland Security. So sure, after the debacle that was postwar Iraq, it is tempting to reach immediately for some new, cabinet-level department to fix everything that’s gone wrong and continues to go wrong. But the far more likely course is this: Left to its own devices, the military experiments with new operating structures in the field (e.g., CJTF-HOA) and then grows those structures upward into new command structures—like AFRICOM. With further experience, those new and different command structures begin to influence older ones, cannibalizing them in their own image. After a while, you’ve got a profound bureaucratic center of gravity operating out there in all these regional combatant commands, or entities that serve a number of bureaucratic masters (Defense, State, USAID, others) back in Washington. Eventually, those entities will need their own dedicated voice in the corridors of power, and logically their own dedicated source of funding. That’s when you get a Department of Everything Else: in response to demands from the field to coordinate the huge transaction volume that’s not quite Defense and not quite State and not quite USAID but something quite different altogether.

  Can you mandate such change from above? The example of the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, which radically reblended the military services into a much stronger “unity of command” model, suggests that’s possible within a single department. The experience of the Department of Homeland Security to date, however, suggests that suddenly kluging together lots of agencies is a bad idea, creating more dysfunction than synergy. So while it’s tempting to request some sort of deus ex machina to drop out of the theater’s upper region and provide a quick and conclusive end to these confused proceedings, the far more likely outcome is that the U.S. military will grow its own SysAdmin solution in places like AFRICOM and the always resource-deprived, and thus inventive, U.S. Southern Command.

  Having said all that, and given my druthers, here’s how I’d push things along with the AFRICOM experiment: I would definitely franchise the CJTF-HOA structure across the continent, refusing to locate a central headquarters anywhere in Africa. Rather, I’d set it down somewhere in northern Virginia to attract both the necessary civilian talent and to encourage superb interagency development. I would mandate that a retired four-star flag officer (admiral or general) with joint combatant command experience head this “command” (which I would label something less military-sounding) so as to give it a clear civilian head. Then I’d designate as my two deputies a uniformed military officer to work the defense side and a USAID/State official to work the development side. I’d give my retired four-star boss a cabinet-level status (at first just the position, not the command) equivalent to the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. My cluster of regionally focused combined joint task forces would be set up in a very low-key manner, just like CJTF-Horn of Africa. There would be no “pointy end” on any of those “spears.” If kinetics were required, I’d have Special Operations Command run the entire show. Within ten years, these would be my goals: All Defense Department planning for Africa would be based in this blended agency, ditto for State Department diplomatic plans, ditto for USAID development program planning.

  In effect, I’d create my interagency process inside the command instead of above it in the National Security Council, whose main function, quite frankly, will always remain keeping the president blameless for foreign policy failures. Eventually, Congress would grow so frustrated with its current committee structure that it would need to create a new, 3D-blended committee to conduct a coherent conversation with this entity. As that new conversation unfolded, Congress and the executive branch would come to the same conclusion: What works in Africa should work throughout the Gap. As the Gap shrinks, this Department of Everything Else (obviously given a more bureaucratically appropriate moniker) would evolve into a sort of Department of Network Security for all America’s vast globalization connectivity—the equivalent of a Department of Homeland Security all grown up or matured beyond its currently myopic fixation on firewalls.

  In my mind, Africa and AFRICOM represent the ideal tabula rasa for engineering a new type of defense entity that’s synergistically blended—from the start—with both diplomacy and developmental aid components. But even more important than that, AFRICOM could serve as the launching point of a new type of security alliance with rising New Core powers such as India and China, neither of whom, like America, comes to Africa with past colonial baggage. It could also pioneer new forms of cooperation with private-sector entities looking to cash in on Africa’s rising globalization profile. In short, AFRICOM represents a major opportunity to reset the rules for America’s grand strategy. I suppose we could wait for the “threat after next” to pop up and send us scrambling for new answers, or just rerun the Cold War with Russia. But wouldn’t it be nice if this time, we started building that “command after next” to shape this potential battlefield so preemptively and so effectively as to rule out the need for old-style interventions by outside powers or—worse—some pathetic rerun of the “race for Africa” among those same powers?
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  Wouldn’t it be nice to own that future instead of replaying the past?

  Seven

  THE NETWORK REALIGNMENT

  The Rise of the

  SysAdmin-Industrial Complex

  Vint Cerf, a universally acknowledged “father of the Internet,” describes the Web in the following manner: “Nobody owns it, everybody uses it, and anybody can add services to it.” Since the Internet’s spread mirrors the global economy’s expansion to a tremendous degree, the same can also be stated about globalization itself. The global economy is the ultimate service-oriented architecture that nobody quite controls even as almost everybody avails himself of its connectivity, adding transactions to its volume every day—mostly good, but some bad, too. So it’s a cluster of “frenemies” on top (i.e., rivals who nonetheless collaborate extensively) and all sorts of cats and dogs in a scrum at the pyramid’s bottom. Many security experts interpret the current global order in this manner, with some choosing to see “empires” imposed from above, while others are just as certain that they’re witnessing uncontrollable “chaos” fomenting down below. In reality, we’re all witnessing the rise of a superempowered middle class somewhere in between those two extremes. We just don’t yet know how to describe it, much less speak in a language it understands. We only know that it wants . . . everything!