But there are tectonic shifts underfoot, years in the making. Our military leadership understands this need to change, even if our political leadership doesn’t. Most important, our business leadership—even in the defense sector—is moving rapidly in this new direction.
In the winter of 2004, I keynoted a conclave of Lockheed Martin’s top 500 global executives in Phoenix, Arizona. Lockheed Martin is the biggest defense firm in the world, and aims to hold on to that number-one slot. What I told Lockheed’s assembled leaders then was that if the company hoped to remain on top of its industry, it would have to move its focus progressively from the “first half” that is war to the “second half” that is beyond war, including all the stabilization and infrastructure-building activities associated with bringing new economies online with globalization. I told them that remaining America’s number-one defense contractor wasn’t enough to ensure it had the technology and means to provide for America’s future needs; it would have to aim higher, becoming the world’s biggest security contractor, adept at simultaneously serving both the top and bottom of globalization’s pyramid.
Lockheed took this admonition to heart, and three years later, after much soul-searching, bought Pacific Architects and Engineers, a longtime contractor to the U.S. State Department. Indeed, you could describe PA&E as basically State’s version of Kellogg Brown & Root, the longtime full-service contractor to the Pentagon. Lockheed’s purchase was a shot across the bow of the entire U.S. defense industry, signaling its historic decision to focus more on serving the U.S. military’s ballooning postwar portfolio. Within a generation, I predict Lockheed will evolve from being primarily a U.S. defense firm to operating as a global security contractor whose systems-integration work spans all manner of crucial network flows. In other words, Lockheed will see its future less in supplying the Leviathan a small number of superexpensive platforms and weapons and more in building up America’s SysAdmin capabilities for network security and market integration.
When Lockheed Martin executives sought to convince PA&E’s leadership that their two companies were destined to share a combined future, they provided them with copies of my first book, The Pentagon’s New Map, telling them to read it in order to understand their motivations. When Lockheed held its first management retreat in the spring of 2007 to officially welcome PA&E’s senior executives to the fold, it brought me in as the sole outside speaker, and all of PA&E’s leaders were given a copy of my second book, Blueprint for Action. In introducing me to the gathering, Lockheed executive Michael Dignam, who would eventually become PA&E’s new boss, told the crowd that they were to become serious agents of change within the world’s largest defense firm, teaching it how it needed to adapt to this new world of opportunity. A year later, as the massive Lockheed division (Information Systems & Global Services) that houses PA&E held its first postacquisition summit, I was again brought in to make a speech. IS&GS is a new consolidated division of Lockheed that brings together all the information service contracts the company holds throughout the world. It already represents roughly a quarter of Lockheed’s portfolio, and in the future will constitute Lockheed’s primary profit engine.
I don’t kid myself that I alone somehow convinced the world’s largest defense firm to shift gears. Lockheed is a notoriously conservative corporation. It does not adapt itself to fads, nor does it lightly reconsider its relationship with its number-one client—the U.S. military. When Lockheed buys PA&E, it is nothing more than the usual dynamic of the established behemoth snatching up the innovative smaller firm, adding the seemingly exotic skills of the new company to its own, but, in doing so, indicating that it knows which way the wind blows in the global security environment. My books and speeches are simply a reflection of that reality, a useful articulation of the way ahead. When readers and audience members ask me whether or not people in Washington are listening to me, I tell them that, as far as the “iron triangle” of the military-industrial complex is concerned, I work the military first, industry second, and Congress last.
You can’t argue with operation experience as it builds up—along with the casualties. That operation experience demands a response from industry. Needs must be addressed. As those industry responses pile up, budgets must shift, and here’s where Congress can either lead or obstruct, because the military has no choice but to execute and industry has no desire but to provide. It is Congress and the executive branch that must either meet those emerging requirements or tell the American people why they cannot. And if, in that explanation, we hear that different security priorities must prevail, then Americans must ask Washington why its employment of military force around the world does not match its implied grand strategy. Because when the Bush administration’s Millennium Challenge Corporation says, “The private sector is our exit strategy,” that strikes me as a pretty big hint of where victory lies.
I view efforts like Development-in-a-Box as a crucial bridge between America and rising economic powers: We fear their economic penetration of the Gap will result in bad or weak regimes, while they fear our efforts to improve regimes inside the Gap will shut them out of economic opportunities. Development-in-a-Box provides a neutral engagement space, within which each side’s concerns can be addressed. We want connectivity according to standards that promote certainty and security, something nobody argues against. In this way, we recast our foreign aid to account for advances we make inside the Core regarding system resiliency, as anything that improves the resiliency of our networks there can be applied to even greater positive effect inside the Gap. Moreover, what we learn from such applications inside the Gap will assuredly improve our understanding of our own resiliency inside the Core—the pyramid’s bottom and top truly networked with each other.
Here’s a good example of how this can work, courtesy of one farsighted U.S. Navy admiral.
One of the main problems in counterterrorism today is that there are so many people and vehicles and so much data and material moving through globalization’s myriad networks that it seems virtually impossible to track it all effectively. Nowhere has this problem been more acute than on the high seas, which is how most commerce moves around this dirty globe. In 2006, Admiral Harry Ulrich, then commander of U.S./ NATO Naval Forces Europe, decided to do something about it. He had no money and virtually no resources to pull it off, but his dream was to apply the same system we currently use in air-traffic control to sea traffic. Worldwide, aircraft are transparent, because they’re all required to carry an “identification friend or foe” beacon that allows them to be tracked leaving and entering airports by aircraft-traffic-control systems and monitored between airports by sensors distributed across a global network. Trip the wire that defines “suspicious activity” and somebody’s fighter aircraft will soon be on your tail. NATO routinely launches several fighters a week to identify unknown aircraft.
No such pervasive system currently exists globally for maritime traffic. If a ship any bigger than a small freighter is flagged by a nation belonging to the International Maritime Organization, it carries an ID beacon similar to that carried by aircraft. But without a shared monitoring network, that’s like tracking only selected commercial jets part of the time and giving everyone else a pass. So Admiral Ulrich, upon taking command in Naples, Italy, asked a simple question: “If we can do that in the air, why can’t we do it on the sea?” He made a point of pioneering his sea-traffic-control effort first inside the Mediterranean, where NATO’s southern naval forces have been historically concentrated, but his real target was Africa. Africa’s littoral waters are the most ungoverned maritime space in the world. Smuggling, drug running, human trafficking, illegal immigration, illegal fishing, environmental degradation, oil theft, and piracy—you name it, it’s all there in abundance. Ulrich wanted somebody to govern that ungoverned space, and he knew the U.S. Navy couldn’t do it alone, much less bring Africa’s meager coast-guard-like navies up to snuff so they could do it on their own. So he quickly came to the conclusion that he’d
need to create a network of assets—both public and private—to manage that space; thus his decision to model his monitoring system on international air-traffic control.
Taking his cues from that global consortium, Ulrich began stitching together a network of shore-based sensors ringing the Mediterranean, and then began his initial monitoring by having his naval command tap into an existing IMO Automated Identification System, transforming NATO’s ability to track ship traffic in the Med. Almost overnight, NATO went from tracking dozens of ships on the Med to thousands of craft, and instead of getting the data sometimes as long as 72 hours late, now the contacts were being tracked within one to five minutes—all within 50 feet on the earth’s surface. When the classic big-firm systems integrators told Ulrich it would be cost-prohibitive to pull it off, the admiral turned to the Volpe Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a Department of Transportation research center. Instead of hundreds of millions, Ulrich’s initial network cost $900,000. The shore-based receivers are small, roughly the size of a radar dish you might find on a pleasure craft. Most can be attached to tall buildings or existing cell towers along the coast.
The strength of the system is obviously a function of its reach: The more countries join, the larger the shared operational picture. By the time Ulrich retired at the end of 2007, he had enlisted thirty-two countries throughout the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic, along the west coast of Africa, around the Black Sea, and in the Pacific. Today, the network continues to spread around the planet.
This is where the SysAdmin function kicks in, cleverly blending private-sector and public-sector elements: With Ulrich’s system in place, local police, coast guards, and border patrols catch all the bad guys for NATO, saving an American military response. As Harry told me for an article I wrote about his work in a fall 2007 issue of Esquire, “I don’t do defense; I do security. When you talk defense, you talk containment and mutually assured destruction. When you talk security, you talk collaboration and networking. This is the future.” The current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, has long posited the notion of a “thousand-ship navy” that’s really a global SysAdmin force consisting of the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard, plus navies and coast guards the world over. This navy would be able to police the entirety of the world’s oceans, but only if it was augmented with the sort of sensor network that Admiral Ulrich pioneered. Whom do you get to pay for all this effort? Think about insurance companies interested in reducing liability, as well as global corporations looking for fast-pass entry into ports. Then think about linking these highly sensored ports to these sensor-laden ships to all those sensor-tagged containers and boxes and individually wrapped products—all of them networked for maximum transparency. Then think about packaging all that up and delivering that capability to developing or damaged countries eager to join the global economy, and that’s what we call Development-in-a-Box—an essential building block for a global SysAdmin-industrial complex.
Harry, by the way, is now an executive vice president at Enterra Solutions—no coincidence, that. When you come across great ideas, you don’t get jealous and you don’t get defensive. You immediately bring them—and the person behind them—into your network and keep building. The admiral’s legacy program, known officially as the Maritime Safety and Security Information System, is the crown jewel of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s ongoing collaboration with the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard, known as the Global Maritime Domain Awareness program. Collectively, that effort earned the Volpe Center a prestigious “Innovations in American Government” award in 2008 from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government’s Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation.
What, then, does victory look like for the SysAdmin-industrial complex? One of my favorite examples is an advertisement I keep coming across in the back pages of The Economist and the Wall Street Journal. Its message is disarmingly simple: “Invest in Macedonia.”
“Macedonia?” you might ask. Isn’t that one of those lousy Balkan countries we fought in a while back? The answer is, sort of. Of the six independent states to emerge from the ruins of Yugoslavia, Macedonia is arguably the least well known internationally, in large part because it escaped mass bloodshed following its quiet departure in 1991. Having joined the UN in 1993, Macedonia seeks future membership in both NATO and the European Union, which named it a “candidate country” a few years ago. Roughly the size of Vermont and landlocked amid Albania, Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia, Macedonia offers little beyond its location as a major transportation corridor between larger economic players. To that end, Macedonia, with the help of the U.S. Agency for International Development, made itself the first all-broadband wireless country of its size in the world. The name of that USAID program, “Macedonia Connects,” is wonderfully symbolic of this small country’s dogged determination to join the global economy. So when I first came across those “Invest in Macedonia” ads, I couldn’t help but think to myself that this is what victory would look like in places like Iraq and Afghanistan—their victory, not ours.
The ad, appropriately enough, is one big sales job. Describing itself as the “new business heaven in Europe,” the unspoken come-on seems to be, “If you can’t afford Croatia anymore, try us instead!” As for investor benefit packages, which the ad declares “will be approved within 10 business days,” try these on for size: no corporate tax for ten years; 5 percent individual income tax for five years; free connections to gas, electricity, sewer, and water; and concessionary land leases “for up to 75 years.” All that for joining a free economic zone with “immediate access to main international airport, railroad and vital road corridors.” As an international businessman who focuses on infrastructure development, let me tell you, that sort of offer gets my attention, along with the fact that the World Bank’s “Doing Business 2008” report named Macedonia the fourth-best reforming economy in the world (China was ninth). What I like about the ad is how shamelessly Macedonia sells its existing connectivity to attract even more: free economic zone, transportation hubs, and free-trade agreements encompassing 650 million consumers. Toss in cheap labor and nationwide Wi-Fi, and you’ve got yourself a country just itching to be “exploited.”
And that’s what I think victory will look like for your average failed state in the years ahead: getting yourself off the front page of the New York Times and into the business advertising section of the Wall Street Journal. Now, you might choose to interpret this dynamic as globalization’s army of multinational corporations swooping in to enslave people to meet the insatiable demands of the capitalist world order. But if that’s your take, I’d advise you to consider the alternative: that bottom billion falling ever further behind, with much of the Gap integrated into China’s updated version of imperial Japan’s “Co-Prosperity Sphere.” That would not make a safer world, or one that’s environmentally sustainable—judging by what China has already accomplished at home. It wouldn’t be a more just world either, but one in which a good third of humanity would continue to live in scary neighborhoods threatened by nasty dictatorships and the even nastier failed states they tend to leave behind once they collapse. Extreme deprivation breeds extreme ideologies the world over. No culture is immune. But every country can be inoculated, and the vaccine is called economic connectivity.
America needs to create a SysAdmin-industrial complex that’s just as hungry for preconflict and postconflict/postdisaster opportunities as our long-standing military-industrial complex is for big war. If all you do is build hammers, then the entire world starts to look like nails.
You want a different world? Build a different toolkit.
Eight
THE STRATEGIC REALIGNMENT
Resurrecting the Progressive Agenda
The fundamental premise of this book has been that America must dramatically realign its own post-9/11 trajectory with that of the world at large—a world undergoing deep transformation. This comprehensive realignment requires a new understanding of the
world and our role in its evolution. Such understanding is found in the realm of grand strategy. When it comes to crafting grand strategy in the era of modern globalization, this is what I believe.1. To be plausible, grand strategic vision must combine a clear-eyed view of today’s reality with a broad capture of the dominant trends shaping the long-term environment, meaning no sharp detours—much less U-turns—in history’s advance.
2. Grand strategy does not seek to change human nature (which got us to this point quite nicely) but to placate it, thereby ensuring the portability of its strategic concepts (the dos and don’ts) among minds from different backgrounds, cultures, and ages.
3. Grand strategic thinking always keeps the U.S. government’s role in proper perspective, because globalization comes with rules but not a ruler.
4. Grand strategic analysis starts with security, which is always 100 percent of your problem until it’s reasonably achieved, because then it’s at most 10 percent of your ultimate solution.
5. Grand strategy is not clairvoyance; it does not seek to predict future events, but rather to contextualize them in a confident, opportunistic worldview.
6. Because we live in a time of pervasive and persistent revolutions, the grand strategist is neither surprised nor dismayed when the awesome force of globalization’s tectonic shifts elicits vociferous or even violent friction from locals.
7. Grand strategy purposefully aspires to be proactive, not merely protecting itself from failure but also exploiting avenues of success as they are revealed.
8. So grand strategists do not entertain, much less succumb to, single-point-failure doomsaying, because systematic thinking about the future means you’re not “for” or “against” issues like peak oil or global warming or resource scarcity but instead accept the implied dynamics of the change that has been triggered and factor them in accordingly.
Great Powers Page 43