The Pentagon's New Map

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  In contrast to that particular vision, the Cold Worriers argued that America needed a force that emphasized high tech above all else as the key to staying prepared for the Big One. Because all that high technology is supremely expensive, you needed to sacrifice numbers of platforms for quality of platforms. You would end up with fewer ships and aircraft, or a smaller force structure, but your military force would rock ’n’ roll like nobody else’s on the planet.

  Now, those are two very different choices, so the Pentagon split the difference: buying the Cold Worrier force but operating it according to the Transitioneers’ code. By building one sort of military for some imagined future while operating another sort of military in the here and now, the Pentagon stressed itself out far more than the Clinton Administration, Congress, or “global chaos” ever could.

  More than once in the mid-1990s, I had the opportunity to brief senior admirals in charge of force-structure planning, and I was quite blunt in my diagnosis that they were buying one navy and operating another. Their response carried the ring of bureaucratic fatalism: “You’re absolutely right, Dr. Barnett. Can you come back next year and remind us again?”

  Why did the Pentagon feel it had to argue for the high-tech strategy even as it put the squeeze on the number of platforms and personnel so desperately needed to manage this messy world? The military knew that it was still running itself largely on an industrial-era model that said you defeated your opponents by overwhelming them with stuff (ships, aircraft, tanks, bombs, etc.). But the military also realized that this type of warfare was disappearing, because great powers, including the United States, simply could not afford that sort of massive military establishment anymore.

  It is awfully hard to argue against the U.S. military embracing new technologies as they emerge, because we all want our forces to be the best equipped in the world—that is how we win. But the trade-off with numbers is no small matter, either, especially if it meant—as it did across the 1990s—that our military was stretched hard to respond to all the lesser includeds the White House chose to engage. So it was not a case of the Pentagon ignoring either the present or the long-term future but of its trying too hard to cover both bases—albeit in different ways. In effect, by trying to prepare for the long run while simultaneously managing so much in the here and now, it was the mid-term that got lost in the shuffle. Of course, the mid-term always gets lost in strategic planning, which itself represents a constant struggle to disengage yourself sufficiently from the here and now to prepare adequately for things beyond the foreseeable future.

  But if one remembers back to Manthorpe’s Curve, it was that mid-term outlook where all those lesser includeds came closest to matching the threat from the peer competitor—as Russia continued its collapse and China continued its rise. To listen to the Cold Worriers, there was simply no chance all those lesser includeds would ever replace the fabled “near-peer competitor” as a worthy target for a “transformed,” or next-generation, U.S. military. I mean, all this sexy, high-tech military capability that we were buying across the nineties really needed a sexy, high-tech enemy to fight against, right? Absolutely, said the Cold Worriers, and if Russia looked more feeble as the decade unfolded, then, damn it, we would make do with China.

  When China and the U.S. Navy seemed to square off during what became known as the Taiwan Straits crisis of 1996, the Cold Worriers fell in love at first sight. China provided them everything they needed: an emerging great power that was building up its military for what looked suspiciously like an anti-access asymmetrical strategy for an invasion of Taiwan—a key ally of the United States that logically fell within the purview of our national interests. Best yet, China’s military buildup was relatively slow, meaning Cold Worriers could make their case for transforming the U.S. military ad infinitum, because we would always need to stay one step ahead of those tricky Communists.

  Talk about old times!

  The only problem with this whole approach was that China spent the same decade joining the global economy, sucking up foreign direct investment from Europe, Japan, and the United States, and rapidly becoming one of America’s biggest trade partners and the largest source of its trade deficit. I mean, for a future “near-peer competitor,” this was almost unseemly. Didn’t Beijing realize they were supposed to be our strategic opponent down the road? If they weren’t careful, they were going to screw it up faster than the Russians did!

  As the new Bush Administration entered office in 2001, the schizophrenic atmosphere of the Pentagon’s strategic planning process was heading for a breaking point, or at least a complete loss of credibility. We were buying this fabulous “transformational” force for our distant-but-splendid conflict with China, which instead kept insisting on integrating its economy with ours, while at the same time our military seemed stretched around the planet, dealing with all these lesser includeds. The result was like having our cake, but putting it in the freezer to eat—maybe, just maybe—in a couple of decades. What suffered in the meantime? Our military personnel, especially in the National Guard and Reserves. These long overseas deployments represented a fundamental renegotiation of the Pentagon’s contract with its own personnel—in effect, a greater workload for the same pay.◈

  This misalignment of strategic vision and strategic environment was turning brother against brother inside the Pentagon in the second Clinton Administration. Simply put, there was not enough money to go around for all the services to pursue transformation (read, lots of new, high-end platforms), plus engage in all these overseas operations. Something had to give, and without a great single enemy to point at, that something was not going to be the defense budget’s top line.

  So the services did what they always do in times of peace: they turned on each other. The Air Force wanted transformation in the worst way, because they worship technology above all. Naturally, the fighter jocks felt the best way to advance their cause was for the Pentagon to shortchange the Army, which—after all—was not really needed in a world where smart bombs alone won entire wars. Of course, the Army is pretty nice to have around once you have decapitated that rogue leadership and end up having to run a country, as we found out in Iraq. Similar tensions were brewing both within the Navy itself (carriers versus the rest of the fleet) and between the Navy and the Marines.

  The upshot of all this interservice competition was a heightening of the Pentagon’s desire to trump up the Chinese threat, because arguing that the Big One was being neglected was the tried-and-true method to get Congress to plus-up the budget. It also increased arguments within the Pentagon to withdraw from trying to manage the world. In many ways, the military spent the second half of the 1990s waiting out the Clinton Administration, openly voicing the assumption that a return of the Republicans would mean less nation building and more budget for high-tech acquisitions, and George W. Bush was sending all the right signals as he geared up his run for the presidency.

  As the Clinton Administration came to a close, this insiders’ debate over short-term responsibilities versus long-term requirements had not changed much from the arguments I witnessed during the Department of Navy’s effort to define the future a decade earlier, except that the participants now spoke in updated tongues. The Cold Worriers now spoke the complex language of “network-centric warfare,” or the notion that the rise of computing technology now made communication networks the locus around which all operational planning would revolve, as opposed to the military’s “platform-centric” past, in which we developed doctrine around the dominant ships, aircraft, and heavy armor in our arsenal. Naturally, all this high-tech focus on digital power was going to cost plenty, so the basic tune had not changed (we need a high-end opponent to plan against), even if the lyrics had (we will overwhelm him with information dominance!).

  Meanwhile, the Transitioneers, who had no desire to retreat from the world but instead sought to manage it day in and day out, were condemned to a sort of pig Latin known as Military Operations Other Than War, or MOOTW (pr
onounced “moo-twah”). In the macho world of the military, it wasn’t difficult to see who would lose this doctrinal fight: obviously the guy who’s only talking about things “other than war.” Who, after all, joins the military to do things other than war? I mean, isn’t that called the Peace Corps?

  As the 1990s came to a close, the split in the Pentagon between those who wanted to focus on the high-tech wars of the future and those who were stuck wrangling the lesser includeds of today was widening to the point where, if some solution was not soon found, the military’s strategic planning process would collapse under the weight of all the contradictions. Inside the Pentagon, this much-feared crash was called the “coming train wreck” between “future requirements” and “current operational realities.” Everyone knew it was just around the corner, but the only thing that could break the bureaucratic logjam was a significant defeat at the hands of an enemy, or something that would throw all the conventional wisdom and the rule set it generates right out the window.

  The terrorist attacks of 9/11 were just such a defeat. That terrible day did more than just bring Americans together, it effectively healed the rift between the Pentagon’s competing strategic visions. It did so by pulling all those advocates of transformation out of the clouds and back down to the earth, telling them that if their dreams of future warfare made sense for some distant “near-peer competitor,” then they had better decide what is ready now for this global war on terrorism. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared in the fall of 2001, the 9/11 attacks provided the Pentagon with a new “sense of urgency” regarding a transformation that “cannot wait.”◈ It was not simply that a new Big One had been found, the concept itself had been completely redefined. Overnight, China dropped off the radar, to be replaced by terrorist groups “with global reach” and any rogue nation suspected of supporting them.

  But if Rumsfeld saw transformation energized by 9/11, by the spring of 2002 plenty of other reformers were already declaring it a “casualty of 9/11.” In a well-read New York Times Magazine article, Bill Keller declared that the first post-9/11 defense budget “drenches all the old status-quo programs that keep the military pretty much the way it is.” In effect, 9/11 signaled transformation’s death knell, because it allowed the Pentagon to put off the tough budgetary choices between long-term desires and near-term realities.◈ The flaw in that logic was the assumption that the budgetary plus-up for this war on terrorism would be permanent, when in reality there will never be enough money to put off these difficult choices, especially with the return of gargantuan federal deficits.

  On the contrary, this war on terrorism only sharpened the budgetary struggle between the advocates of transformation and the practitioners of MOOTW, because it called in the former’s promise to “do more with less” while elevating the latter from doctrinal stepchild to grand strategy. As America is learning in this global war on terrorism, it is one thing to topple the Taliban or Saddam Hussein with our highly lethal, highly maneuverable force, but quite another to actually transform those battered societies into something better—to reconnect them to the larger, globalizing world outside. As Washington Post columnist David Ignatius quickly pointed out, that sort of social transformation is an up-close-and-personal effort, requiring not just lots of boots on the ground but well-trained, well-versed, and well-motivated boots on the ground.◈ September 11 did not merely substitute al Qaeda for China, it knocked the concept of the Big One right off its doctrinal pedestal. The rise of the lesser includeds was complete, and new military rule sets were in the making.

  My claim that 9/11 elevated Military Operations Other Than War to grand strategy is something I know many national security strategists will vehemently deny. Plenty will argue that America is still better off focusing on China as our inevitable opponent in the future Big One, and if that scenario becomes politically unpalatable in the new security era, we should simply invent someone else. Their dogmatic contention is that if the United States becomes obsessed with managing this messy “empire,” we will commit the same mistake the Romans and the British made during their imperial heyday: we will focus so much on administering our system that we will miss the great threat rising in the distance.

  It is an interesting argument, but ultimately a false dichotomy. As author Max Boot points out in his recent history of America’s “small wars,” Britain did not lose its empire for simply trying to run it well, but because it was forced to fight two world wars in rapid succession.◈ America will not lose globalization for simply trying too hard to facilitate its advance, but rather by administering the global security system so badly that emerging economic superpowers like China feel they have no choice but to redirect resources desperately needed for economic development toward a senseless military confrontation with us.

  The pragmatic advocates for transformation realize that the Global War on Terrorism, or GWOT, has become a permanent fixture in Washington’s ongoing budget debates. But the GWOT is far more than just a meal ticket, for this struggle must lead to a consensus within the Pentagon that a never-ending search for the Big One cannot be allowed to blind us to changes in the strategic environment, much less the crucial military tasks they generate. The future worth creating is the globalization that is truly global. That is the Big One we seek, and if it takes a Pentagon obsessed with mastering a universe of messy lesser includeds, then I say, let the real transformation begin.

  3 – Disconnectedness Defines Danger

  IF THE 1990s WITNESSED the death of the old rule sets in international security, none of the new ones seemed readily apparent inside the Pentagon as the century came to a close. The U.S. military continued to buy one sort of military while operating another, planning for war strictly within the context of war. “Transformation,” or the push to modernize the U.S. military for future threats, was more rhetoric than reality. Old Cold War habits died hard, if at all. Defense contractors continued to offer their big-ticket wares for great-power war, declaring with complete confidence that these high-tech ships, aircraft, and tanks were wholly suited for the strategic environment at hand.

  DEFENSE CONTRACTOR: This billion-dollar platform is exactly what the U.S. military needs for the future!

  PENTAGON OFFICIAL: How can we be sure?

  DEFENSE CONTRACTOR: Because this is exactly what we’re selling right now!

  During the second Clinton Administration, I ran across this mock “personals ad” taped to a wall in a Pentagon office:

  ENEMY WANTED

  Mature North American Superpower seeks hostile partner for arms-racing, Third World conflicts, and general antagonism. Must be sufficiently menacing to convince Congress of military financial requirements. Nuclear capability is preferred; however, nonnuclear candidates possessing significant bio-chemical warfare resources will be considered. Send note with pictures of fleet and air squadrons to:

  CHAIRMAN JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF

  THE PENTAGON

  WASHINGTON, DC

  UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  The rise of the lesser includeds found few, if any champions inside the Pentagon as the new century dawned. Military Operations Other Than War, where later almost all of the “global war on terrorism” would be found, remained a bastard doctrine. Meanwhile, the incoming Bush Administration seemed hell-bent on depicting China as the rising near-peer threat—the new measuring stick for great-power war. The emerging strategic environment I was charting in my New Rule Sets Project with Cantor Fitzgerald could not be found on any maps being used in the Pentagon in 2001. Instead, the Defense Department rank and file were told by our new civilian masters that there would be no nation building on their watch, no wasting of U.S. forces in meaningless peacekeeping operations in remote countries, and no Third World quagmires of any sort. America would focus on the “big pieces” in the security environment. The Pentagon’s new map looked an awful lot like the old one.

  I began drawing my new map for the Pentagon in the mid-1990s—1996, to be exact. At that point,
I was so unhappy with the state of strategic planning within the Pentagon that I began generating “alternative global futures,” or scenarios of future international security environments based solely on the premise that the world was progressively integrating itself economically. I tried to insert these ideas into a prominent “strategic vision” study that the Center for Naval Analyses was conducting for the commander of U.S. naval forces in Europe, but they were summarily rejected by the senior project director as being so much globaloney. I was told, “This isn’t a study about global economics, but about the future security environment.”

  Nonetheless, I continued to work on these strategic concepts on my own time, eventually generating a huge PowerPoint briefing that I offered to anyone who would listen. Lacking an official Pentagon sponsor for the work, I finally found refuge under my longtime mentor, Hank Gaffney, who let me bill my hours as a “self-initiated study” as long as I spent most of my time toiling on officially sponsored research projects. That was fairly embarrassing for someone who prides himself on always having ideas that sell, but either you believe in the material or you don’t, and I did.

  My strategic vision centered on a best-case scenario in which North America, South America, Europe, and most of Asia came together in a vast, nearly global economy, with only Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa trapped on the outside, noses pressed to the glass. Lacking a clear great-power enemy in this scenario, I posited that radical Islam itself would ultimately be labeled the main threat. Intuitively, I knew this was a poor sales job on my part, because the Islamic world would remain far too fractured to constitute a coherent threat. Simply put, my enemy just wasn’t “sexy” enough. Still, I did not want to give up on the brief, because it felt like my best work, if only I could understand its true ordering principle, which I was pretty sure was not radical Islam but something larger.