Because the connectivity associated with globalization tends to empower women relative to men, it will be opposed on that basis by most men in traditional societies. Connectivity is essentially gender-neutral, meaning it offers the same economic advantages to women as to men, but that is a huge problem in societies where the males have traditionally conducted economic transactions and have thus controlled family incomes. A great story along these lines was reported in the New York Times a few years back. From a remote village in Guyana, a collection of village women began selling their hand-woven hammocks over the Internet, reaping relatively large profits. It was a wonderfully heartwarming tale, which included Guyana’s state phone company installing a special satellite system to connect this isolated village to the global communications grid. But this sliver of connectivity deeply threatened the all-male regional leadership, which immediately feared the women making that much money without male oversight. The result? The men took over the enterprise, the woman who ran the Web site quit in protest, and within weeks the village women were struggling to find customers.◈
Sometimes the very government agencies you would assume would encourage connectivity fight it themselves, preferring absolute control over a smaller pie to risking loss of control if that pie were to grow. A good example of this phenomenon is how the rising use of Internet telephony across Africa is meeting with fierce resistance from government-owned telecoms. Africans have long suffered limited telecommunications connectivity with the outside world thanks to the strict control over such services by state-run phone companies. These companies, known for being rife with corruption, are now counterattacking subscribers they suspect of Internet telephony, shutting down their service in retaliation. Ghana’s national phone company was so expert at depressing popular demand for telecommunication services that when a new wireless service was introduced in 1996, the company’s executives predicted a customer base of probably 3,000 subscribers, only to end up with 100 times that amount in less than seven years. Based on that sort of success and numerous others, some Western high-tech executives are predicting that Ghana could become for West Africa what Bangalore is to India—a global high-tech hub.◈ Ghana, of course, is the single most peaceful state in West Africa and one of the few on the entire continent to be rated as “free” by Freedom House in its annual survey of democracy. The global forces of telecom connectivity apparently like what they see in Ghana, and want to lift it out of its relative disconnectedness as a result.
Iraq under Saddam Hussein was so disconnected from the global telecommunications grid that in the immediate aftermath of the 2003 war, the global satellite phone industry experienced a mini-boom as a result. Since Iraq had simply been passed over by the Information Revolution, it completely lacked a cell phone infrastructure and its wireline industry was antiquated.◈ So when Saddam’s statues were falling all over Iraq, ordinary citizens had no other way to reach loved ones overseas than to beg the international media pool for calls on their satellite telephones. Once the fighting stopped, Kuwaiti entrepreneurs rushed in armed with portable cell phone towers and a plan to provide the country with complete cell phone coverage within six months. Based on cell phone penetration rates in other Middle Eastern countries, experts are predicting an Iraqi subscriber base of at least six million out of a total population of twenty million.◈
What these examples of disconnectedness being overcome say is that globalization’s frontiers are far from fixed. They also say that peace and stability are essential for such connectivity to flow from the Core to the Gap. That means the fundamental measure of effectiveness for any U.S. military intervention inside the Gap must be: Did we end up improving local security sufficiently to trigger an influx of global connectivity? Not whether we created an instant democracy or a loyal military ally—or even defeated an enemy in record time. Increasingly, our military interventions will be judged by the connectivity they leave behind, not the smoking holes.
Minding The Gap
Around the same time in the early 1990s that I was working on what became . . . From the Sea, the Center for Naval Analyses received an urgent request from the rear admiral in charge of the Navy’s Office of Legislative Affairs (OLA). This flag, named William “Bud” Flanagan, was known by all as a hard-charging ship driver blessed with a velvet touch, which made him perfect for OLA, because that post involved the care and feeding of senators and congressmen of particular importance to the department’s annual budget push. Since everyone knew Bud was going places (he eventually rose to the rank of full admiral, or four-star, in almost record time), CNA told me to drop everything for a couple of weeks and assist Flanagan.
The request was unusual: I was to put together a package of PowerPoint slides that would drive home the point that the Navy-Marine team was the premier crisis-response force in the U.S. military. Now, making the Navy look good was hardly an unusual task for a CNA analyst, but the focus on crisis response right when the Navy was putting together this new vision of “influencing events ashore” was striking. The Navy had spent decades defining itself in terms of countering and defeating the Soviet Navy, and in all that time it spent precious little effort collecting, much less interpreting, its crisis-response activities around the world. After all, these were just the lesser includeds.
A colleague of mine at CNA, Adam Siegel, had just concluded a huge study of all naval crisis responses since World War II, and my job was to expand his historical database to include the Army and the Air Force, focusing on the last four presidential administrations (1977-1991).◈ The typical way these data are collected is by counting the individual operations, meaning if the Marines performed a noncombatant evacuation operation in Liberia (e.g., rescuing American nationals from a dangerous environment), that was considered a single crisis response. But since not all responses are alike, counting each as one data point can hide a lot of context. If the Air Force flies one cargo plane of relief goods into an earthquake zone, it’s called a single crisis response. And when the Marines send hundreds of soldiers into Lebanon and end up with 200-plus dead after a car-bomb attack, that would count as one crisis response as well. In short, it can quickly become a game of comparing apples and oranges, with some services stressing numbers of responses and others emphasizing magnitude of response.
This is exactly what happened, as Siegel’s original report triggered a “research war” among the services. Competing think tanks working for the Army and Air Force quickly cranked out their own historical databases of service-specific crisis responses.◈ By doing so, they sought to correct the “false impression” that the Navy and Marines were the premier crisis-response force. Why such an effort? In the early 1990s, all four services were already going out of their way to show how little their role in U.S. national security would change simply because the Soviets went away. If, five years earlier, they justified their budget primarily on the Soviet threat, now they went to great lengths to “prove” that most of their past operations had little to do with the Soviets, but instead involved managing the “chaotic world,” which—of course—was growing more chaotic by the moment. So each service tried to make the case that it alone performed the great majority of the “truly important” crisis responses. That “lesser included” sales pitch was used to buttress the far more important argument over which service actually “won” Desert Storm. Because the Navy and Marine Corps felt they had the weaker case regarding the Persian Gulf War, they naturally pressed harder in their arguments about crisis response. All of this interservice jousting revolved around the budget’s bottom line: each service wanted desperately to convince Congress to cut the other guy instead.
When I began building this all-service database with the help of a Navy lieutenant commander, I could not help feeling that the numerology of counting up the individual responses was the wrong way to go, in large part because the time lag between the start dates and end dates for these nonroutine operations seemed to grow longer the closer you got to the end of the Cold War.◈ It wa
s not just that the Pentagon seemed to be conducting more crisis responses as the Soviet empire faded away during the 1980s, but also that those responses grew significantly longer in length. Hit-and-run operations that were typically measured in days were gradually being displaced by serious babysitting jobs that dragged on for months, and those longer jobs seemed to be concentrating in and around the Middle East.
As someone who worked for a defense contractor and kept strict records of my billable hours, I was intrigued by the notion of—in effect—calculating the Pentagon’s billable days in terms of crisis response around the planet. In many ways, the U.S. military is the world’s largest security consulting firm and service provider. Like any good consultant, they go wherever the client lives, so if the market for U.S. security services was shifting from Europe to the Middle East, or from East Asia to Southwest Asia, then the Pentagon simply needed to adjust to the new demand pattern.
So I added up all the response days, and the results were rather striking: the Middle East was already accounting for more than half of all the four services’ cumulative response days in the 1980s, with the percentage rising to 75 percent for the Navy and Marine Corps. More important, the cumulative number of response days for all four services was rising over time. There were not that many more individual operations in the 1980s than in the 1970s (an increase of only 20 percent). It was just that the responses in the 1980s were getting a lot longer, so the total number of response days increased by roughly 70 percent. This trend, as we would later learn, accelerated even more across the 1990s, as some crisis responses dragged on for year after year, a few encompassing almost the entire decade. In retrospect, those never-ending crisis responses should have been seen as a sign of the shift in the strategic environment: at some point you stop calling it a crisis and begin defining it as a permanent reality.
But back in the early 1990s, the services were less interested in arguing about shifts in the strategic environment than in demonstrating their worldwide utility, such were their fears that Congress was set on “bringing the boys back home.” The Defense Department was desperately searching for a way to describe the military’s role in securing the post-Cold War security environment, or something that emphasized how our forces deployed around the world provided the glue for global stability while deterring the Big One. To that end, Pentagon strategists preferred arguments and data that made it seem like we needed to maintain our “presence” just about everywhere in the world.
Well, that is not exactly true. The Pentagon was deeply concerned that because the Soviet threat was disappearing, we would lose our long-term bases in both Europe and Northeast Asia. They were afraid that if that happened, NATO would lose focus, and if the Russians ever became dangerous again, we would be in the position of having to reinvent that wheel. In Asia, the “resurgent Russia” concern was less prominent than our fear that if we pulled out—or were brought home by Congress—Japan might go nuclear to defend itself against a rising China and we would feel like the odd man out militarily just as the vaunted “Pacific Century” dawned.
That was the problem, in many ways, with the data I generated. Here we go back to Defense Budget 101: preparing for a distant war against Russia or China meant more money for ships and aircraft. To vote against preparing for that fundamental sort of threat left a member of Congress open to charges of being “soft on U.S. defense.” But spending money on all these lesser includeds? That is a vote a member could say no to with far less risk. No one is ever accused of being “soft on international security”; rather, they are typically lauded for “putting America first” and “taking care of things back home.” If underequipped troops are sent overseas for crisis response, Congress does not catch the blame, the White House does—for sending American troops into harm’s way in the first place. So while my analysis was greatly welcomed by Admiral Flanagan for how it showcased the Navy’s strong role in the Middle East, the Pentagon as a whole was not at all interested in building a strategic vision around crisis responses—these lesser includeds.
Yet, a mere decade later, this is exactly what I am proposing we must do if America ever hopes to win this global war on terrorism. The Pentagon must first and foremost reshape the U.S. military to facilitate its crisis-response capabilities, and all the Military Operations Other Than War skill sets and resources that go with it, while simultaneously downgrading the Defense Department’s longterm preparation for the Big One with some future near peer. This involves nothing less than turning upside down more than half a century of Pentagon practice—in effect, reversing the priorities that have defined America’s long-range strategic planning since the Defense Act of 1947. I am not talking just about a new defense “contract” between the U.S. Government and the American people but also about a new security “contract” between America and the rest of the world. Such a reordering is crucial for two reasons: First, America cannot afford to fund both the respond-all-over-the-Gap force and the hedge-against-the-Big-One force in equal measure; the former’s share of the budget must grow dramatically as the latter’s decreases dramatically. Second, by deemphasizing the Big One force, America sends strong signals to fellow Core powers, but especially to China, that our sense of common cause in this global war on terrorism extends far beyond overlapping hit lists. If America tries to have it both ways, it will not only fiscally bankrupt the government, it will end up destroying the Core’s long-term unity, and possibly even globalization itself.
In short, this country needs to start equating “national defense”—even “homeland defense”—with “Core security.” If joining the Core and acknowledging its security rule sets does not even get a country off the Pentagon’s long-range list of potential enemies, then America has little hope of shrinking the Gap through the war on terrorism. Instead, it will probably fracture the Core into competing security rule sets: one dominated by the United States, another dominated by the European Union plus Russia, and a third dominated by China plus Japan. “Realists” might describe this as nothing more than the inevitable return of multipolarity in international security, but I would call it nothing less than a historical tragedy.
In the aftermath of 9/11, America faced a unique historical opportunity to recast the strategic environment in such a way as to dramatically expand the insiders’ security community known up to now as the “West.” If, over the years, we fail in this task, the blame will fall primarily on the Bush Administration, less in terms of motives than of execution. For example, I see America’s best motives in the Bush Administration’s ongoing push to shift our overseas military basing out of its Cold War concentrations in Western Europe and Northeast Asia and closer in toward those regions where our crisis responses have since been concentrated—in other words, out of the Core and into the Gap. This is America stepping up to a task that only it can fulfill. But the diplomatic execution of this historic shift is crucial. If America seems to be acting in a zero-sum manner, as in “my gain is your loss,” then we are likely to damage security relations in “old Europe” while simultaneously setting in motion long-term confrontations with both Russia and China over our expanding long-term presence in Central and Southwest Asia.◈
History is not just judging the actions of the Bush Administration. In many ways, it is waiting upon them. To date, the administration’s sins of omission far outweigh its sins of commission. It has ably responded to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, but it has not gone nearly far enough in explaining those actions to the world, much less compromising enough on the international means once it has become clear that our national ends would be achieved—the slow internationalization of the postwar Iraq occupation being the prime example.
To say that perceptions matter is a gross understatement. What actions the Bush Administration takes in this global war on terrorism and the nature of its explanations regarding those choices may well determine which alternative global futures are still possible in the near term and which are postponed for several generations. Perceptions are dam
n near everything when it comes to proposing radical redefinitions in the security rule set that has defined the West for more than half a century, and a strategy of preemptive war inside the Gap is exactly that—a radical redefinition that can easily be misinterpreted to suggest that America reserves the right for unilateral military actions inside the Core as well. Following World War I, the world “lost” Russia to the forces of disconnectedness and spent most of the century dealing with the consequences. To assume that today the world cannot possibly lose some country or region of equal magnitude to a similarly exclusionary ideology is to forget that history often repeats itself, albeit always in subtly different ways.
I have told you which parts of the world I consider to be functioning within globalization and why. I have also explained what I mean when I say the rest of the planet, or roughly two billion people out of six billion, seems to be largely disconnected from this globalization process—lying beyond globalization’s frontier. Now let me show you why those definitions matter, because the map of U.S. crisis-response activity since 1990 corresponds almost perfectly with these definitions of who lies within, and who is stuck outside of, globalization’s Functioning Core.
If you turn to the maps in this the book, you will see displayed the roughly 140 separate military responses, or named operations, the U.S. military has engaged in over the time period of 1990 through the end of 2003, excluding purely humanitarian responses. The icons on the map correspond to five different categories of response: evacuation operations, peacekeeping and humanitarian relief operations, contingency positioning, show of force, and combat operations. Let me explain each briefly in turn:
The Pentagon's New Map Page 16