You might say, “That’s being awfully pessimistic. Surely there is no reason to expect America to part ways with its oldest friends, even if our new, tougher foreign policy alienates old foes like Russia and China.” It is true that it is extremely difficult to posit global futures in which America so angers our old Cold War allies that we no longer seek similar ends, even as we often argue about the choice of means. The real danger, in my mind, lies in potential splits not among the Old Core but between the original pillars of Globalization II (North America, Western/Old Europe, and Japan) and the emerging pillars of Globalization III, such as China, India, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, South Korea, and Russia. In some ways, you could call this scenario the “West versus the rest”—sort of a division between Old School and New School globalization.
What signs do we see of this occurring? If the United States has trouble attracting peacekeeping forces from New Core states like India, Russia, and China, and we can only get our staunchest military allies to help out whenever we topple a rogue regime in the Gap, that is a bad sign. Another bad sign is when New Core economies band together against Old Core economies in trade negotiations, because that signals that globalization’s emerging markets still feel somewhat shut out of its “inner sanctum.” So when China, India, and Brazil come together to lead a new movement of emerging markets—the so-called Group of 20-plus—in the current negotiating round of the World Trade Organization, that is a bad sign.◈
Looking more broadly, we may note that a good example of a future intra-Core wedge might be the environment: the Old School globalizers push hard for more stringent environmental controls that hamper the New School globalizers in their efforts to further develop their economies and catch up to the West. Another might be the still-unfolding AIDS crisis. According to the National Intelligence Council’s excellent study on the epidemic, most of the growth in cases in the coming years will be centered in the New School globalizers—India, China, Brazil, and Russia.◈ Not surprisingly, one of the most divisive current issues in WTO negotiations is the question of loosening patent restrictions on AIDS-treatment drugs so that these states can stem this rising tide without bankrupting themselves.◈
Say the Old and New Core do not turn on each other, is it enough simply to keep these two great communities together while making sure the Gap doesn’t grow in size? In my opinion, the main danger in having the world divide into the “Best versus the Rest” (or a pure division by competency) is that the Best (Old and New School globalizers) will invariably be tempted to engage in kneejerk reactions to perceived threats emanating from the less connected parts of the global economy—globalization’s losers. This global pathway could be shorthanded as “I’ve got mine so to hell with you!” It is a world full of walls between the functioning and nonfunctioning regions of the global economy, or a long-term acceptance of the current status quo. These barriers are mostly about keeping bad things from flowing from the Gap to the Core. What is so scary about this outcome is that it effectively means that connectivity—and thus globalization—will not spread beyond its current frontiers. In effect, the club stops admitting new members, like a European Union that continues to find Turkey “too different” and likewise stonewalls former (Slavic) Soviet republics.
But worse than that, if all the Core does is maintain itself while telling the Gap to fend for itself, eventually all that pain and suffering trapped inside the Gap will seek release, much as we saw on 9/11. In short, we cannot simply put a long fence around the Gap and assume that it can be contained, as the old Soviet threat was.
To reiterate, the only global future truly worth creating involves nothing less than eliminating the Gap altogether. America can only increase its security when it extends connectivity or expands globalization’s reach, and by doing so, progressively reduces those trouble spots or off-grid locations where security problems and instability tend to concentrate. In sum, the best-case scenario for Globalization III must be its continued expansion. It is not enough for the Core to survive. It must grow. Conversely, the best-case scenario involves not just growing the Core but shrinking the Gap as well. Keeping with the theme of this opening chapter, the only way to accomplish Core expansion and Gap shrinkage is to extend the reach of rule sets. That means not only must Old and New School globalizers reach agreement on the rule-set reset for trade (i.e., better alignment of economic and political rule sets in the ongoing Doha Round negotiations of the WTO), but they must also come to a clear understanding on what the reset between technological and security rule sets must be.
Right now, the biggest proposal out on the table is the U.S. strategy of preemption, which, in effect, argues that whenever known rule breakers get close to obtaining weapons of mass destruction, it is only normal and right for great powers to strike preemptively for the avowed purposes of regime change. But again, focusing solely on that strategy does a great disservice to the task at hand. In many ways, the breadth of the rule-set reset on security is far wider than just the question of how we deal with bad actors in the system. In reality, it encompasses the far larger question of how we deal with all this rising connectivity in ways that do not hamper globalization’s continued expansion.
Remembering that the rule-set reset following the Second World War took a decade or longer, we can see that some patience is clearly in order. Moreover, to get to that best-case outcome, America needs to understand that getting the rest of the Core to accept its new security rule set will require significant compromises along the way. This is crucial, because if the United States is viewed by the rest of the great powers as going off the deep end in its idiosyncratic quest for what other cultures consider to be unacceptable new rule sets, then America may well find itself belonging to a Core of one. That means the quickest route from the best- to worst-case scenarios runs right through the White House. No matter how logical or necessary our new rule sets may appear to us, if we cannot sell them to a large chunk of the planet, we lose our credibility as a competent superpower, and our rules will invariably be dismissed by other cultures as reflecting an American bias, not universal truths.
In many ways, nudging globalization in the direction of that best-case scenario is the ultimate example of global risk management: the quickest way to secure America absolutely is to run hog-wild with preemptive strikes against the most dangerously disconnected states like Iran, North Korea, Syria—or basically, the “who’s next?” strategy. But a mindless pursuit of America’s short-term security is likely to damage globalization’s capacity for expansion, and therein lies our best hope for increasing our security over the long haul. Scaring the rest of the world to death with some half-cocked “World War IV” to-do list will divide up the planet pronto, not to mention send our own society into anguished upheaval.
America faced a similar situation during the Second World War, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower were both pressured by public opinion, allies, and world events to end the war as quickly as possible. But instead of winning that war quickly only to lose the peace, they made a series of calculated compromises that not only kept the alliance intact but kept the American public firmly supportive of an activist postwar strategy as well. The global war on terrorism cannot be a multileg sprint from one “Berlin” to the next, because the United States simply cannot shrink the Gap by itself.
Ultimately, to shrink the Gap over the coming decades, the United States will need the combined assets of the entire Core. To bring that much of the world along as we seek to test out and propagate new rule sets in international security, America must carefully but forcefully enunciate a comprehensive vision of a future worth creating. That vision will have to sell on both Main Street and Wall Street, in both Berlin and Beijing, and in both the Core and the Gap. Anything less is a waste of our servicemen and -women.
2 – The Rise Of The “Lesser Includeds”
THE U.S. MILITARY HAS always done well in responding to defeats. It has never done a
s well responding to victories. America won a huge victory across the Cold War: we stood down the world’s only other military superpower while simultaneously setting in motion globalization’s great advance around the planet. A new era was born with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but our being present at its creation was not nearly enough. America needed to embrace the new security environment in which it faced no peers, through its clear redefinition of both an enemy worth fighting and a future military worth building.
The Pentagon failed dramatically on both counts, and it did so primarily out of fear for its own institutional standing within the U.S. political system—or, to put it more bluntly, its share of the federal budget. That fear drove the military to cling to the dream of a “near-peer” which would justify its desire to retain a military fashioned primarily for great-power war, when the new era not only did not generate such a threat but instead challenged America’s definition of a “New World Order” by producing its exact opposite: the rise of the so-called lesser includeds.
Pentagon long-range planning in the Cold War had been very simple: figure out what the Soviets had and then build a roughly similar mix of ships, aircraft, and heavy armor (e.g., tanks), always keeping our forces ahead of their curve by pursuing the best technological advances. World War III, therefore, constituted the Big One against which all long-range planning proceeded. Everything else the U.S. military did in terms of operations around the world was bundled together in the concept of the lesser includeds. Lesser includeds were not situations the military shaped itself around. Instead, by “force sizing” according to the Big One, it was assumed that the resulting military would be able to handle all the smaller-sized contingencies—hence the diminutive phrase “lesser includeds.” Even though the U.S. military spent over 90 percent of the Cold War engaged in such lesser includeds, its force-sizing principle remained the Big One with the Soviets, because—quite naturally—that one was for all the marbles.
When the Red Army went away, the Pentagon lost its measuring stick. The U.S. military had two choices: it could find some new enemy, or combination of enemies, to size itself against, or it could try to prepare more broadly for the future by planning for a wide range of capabilities that were not necessarily linked to any one enemy, or any one threat. In the latter path, called capabilities-based planning, the Pentagon would have logically scanned the strategic environment as a whole for the skill sets required to manage it effectively, but it chose not to do so, instead focusing on identifiable threats. Military leaders did so out of fear for their institutions’ future in the post-Cold War era: they were afraid they would lose this great Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps they had re-created out of the debacle that was the Vietnam War.
So the Pentagon clung desperately to the definition of a big bad threat out there to justify a continued focus on great-power war, when in reality none was in the offing. In the early 1990s, this first took the form of “reconstitution” for any reemergent Soviet threat. In short, the military could not change too much because the Soviets might reappear. That concept faded as quickly as the Red Army. Then the incoming Clinton Administration came up with a new force-sizing principle called the Two-Major Regional Conflicts scenario under Secretary of Defense Les Aspin. It was a two-for-one deal, substituting two regional threats (Iraq and North Korea) for the old Soviet threat. That concept mutated repeatedly over the mid- and late 1990s, as the Pentagon kept coming up with new twists (typically involving the sequencing of events between the two theaters of operation, the Persian Gulf and Northeast Asia) to make the scenario seem as stressing as possible to its budgetary masters in Congress.
But neither half-scenario nor the combined dual scenario sufficed for Pentagon strategists committed to “transforming” the U.S. military into the next-generation, warfighting machine without peer. But here was the conundrum: The Pentagon wanted this fabulous military force in order to defeat any future foe, and yet—over time—it became convinced that the only way it could achieve that future force, because of budgetary constraints, was to retreat from the present world, where it kept being dragged into all these lesser included situations. With the Clinton Administration apparently focused on constructing a new world financial order, the Pentagon felt as if it were left holding the bag in a series of lesser includeds (e.g., Somalia, Haiti, Yugoslavia, Iraq), none of which was going to propel the military toward any future “transformation,” because in combination they constituted a huge drain on resources.
In short, the Pentagon feared this new world disorder would ruin the military it had spent the previous two decades resurrecting after Vietnam. It would turn our fighting forces into a “9-1-1” emergency response force tending to the world’s bad neighborhoods. The U.S. military would end up pulling guard duty for the International Red Cross and other humanitarian relief organizations, finding itself trapped in Third World hellholes where ethnic tribes wanted nothing more than the freedom to hack their enemies to death en masse.
Most military leaders wanted little to do with trying to manage this messy world, preferring instead to plan brilliant high-tech wars against brilliant high-tech opponents. The Soviets were clearly gone, and if the Iraq-North Korea combo was not doing the trick, something more frightening would need to be invented—some future, down-the-road threat that would justify “transformation” budgetary requirements for the long run. That future threat, it was decided in 1995, would be China. In that year China fired off several missiles in the general direction of Taiwan, ostensibly to test them but in fact to scare the hell out of an increasingly assertive Taiwanese political leadership. A year later, during Taiwan’s national elections, the United States sent naval forces into neighboring waters as a “show of force” in the face of similar threats (aka the Taiwan Straits crisis of 1996), and the strategic die was cast—the new, future “peer competitor” had been found.
The Pentagon’s unwillingness to embrace the emerging reality of the post-Cold War strategic environment reflected America’s general ambivalence about playing security guard to any “new world order.” We told ourselves that if we tried to manage that world, all we would end up doing was making the rest of the planet mad at us, so better that we accept the economic “multipolarity” of this new era, one in which a united Europe, Japan, and eventually other rising economic powerhouses would become our equals in diplomatic strength. So we let the international security environment largely run itself, committing ourselves piecemeal to its management. Meanwhile, the Pentagon dreamed of a future force worth building to wage war against a future enemy worth defeating—rising China.
As the 1990s ended, all the contradictions that we now face in our post-Saddam military occupation of Iraq were in place: We continued to build a military that could wage war without peer, but one that could not wage the peace that necessarily followed. Our continued focus on the Big One left us with a force that can topple rogue regimes at will, without the assistance of allies, but cannot manage all the lesser includeds that arise in the aftermath—even with the help of our closest allies. In effect, we spent the 1990s buying one sort of military, only to realize after 9/11 that we needed another to wage this global war on terrorism, a threat that until recently was routinely considered the least of the lesser includeds.
This chapter is about a deep fear that gripped the Pentagon throughout the 1990s. This fear was not about the world outside but about what was happening within the Defense Department itself following the disappearance of the Soviet threat. The Pentagon spent the decade denying the rise of the lesser includeds, or the growing importance of small threats, small enemies, and small wars. Pentagon leaders feared that if the U.S. military lost its Cold War unifying focus on the Big One, it would suffer ruination—it would not be ready when America needed it most.
In the end they were right, but for all the wrong reasons. It is easy today to look back on this time and say it was all about the money, but it was all about the money only because America lacked the vision—and the visi
onaries—to define the 1990s as anything beyond a mere addendum to the Cold War. America simply assumed that a better future was there for the taking, when in reality it was there for the creating. This country—through Democrat and Republican administrations alike—just waited a dozen years to take up the challenge.
Examining the roots of that fear allows us today to understand the nature of the challenge that lies ahead for U.S. military forces as they rapidly transform themselves for this global war on terrorism—as America finally steps up to the task of managing the strategic security environment that is globalization’s Gap.
The Manthorpe Curve
In the early 1990s, William Manthorpe was Deputy Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence. He came to CNA one morning in the fall of 1991 to brief a select group of Navy admirals and Marine generals on his view of the future of the world. This group of “flags,” as they are collectively known in the military, had been handpicked by the Chief of Naval Operations and the Commandant of the Marine Corps to lead a several-month effort by the Department of Navy’s best and brightest to enunciate a new strategic naval vision for the post-Cold War era.◈ Their end product was to be nothing less than the first major naval White Paper on grand strategy since World War II. In short, they were asked to play Mahan for the twenty-first century.
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