In terms of command, the current combatant commanders (Europe, Central, Pacific, Southern) will continue in their long-term evolution as the main purveyors of system administration. Not pro consuls so much as precinct captains, they will maintain the continuous presence of U.S. air, ground, and naval forces around the world, but increasingly focused around and throughout the Gap. Over time, the forces they field will feature smaller platforms (e.g., ships, aircraft) designed for greater loitering capacity (i.e., the ability to dwell and monitor), thus marking the Sys Admin’s general trend toward “the many and the cheap.”
In contrast, the Leviathan force will progressively withdraw from the world, maintaining a network of Spartan, launching-pad bases around the Gap, and leaving behind its signature Special Operations Forces as its early reconnaissance force. These SOF operators will work largely undercover throughout the Gap in their continuing prosecution of the global war on terrorism, drawing upon the larger Leviathan forces whenever larger-scale interventions are required. In terms of command function, the Leviathan force will rise from a progressive fusion of four current supporting commands (Special Operations Command, Strategic Command, Transportation Command, and Joint Forces Command). Compared with the always out there Sys Admin force, the Leviathan force will largely surge from bases within the continental United States to interventions overseas, and its force structure will reflect the philosophy of “the few and the expensive,” spreading its platform capabilities over as many categories as fiscally feasible. Compared with the generalist, minimalist force structure of the Sys Admin, the Leviathan will favor the biggest possible tool kit of platforms, preferring to buy a few of many types versus many of a few types.
In terms of the current services, the Leviathan force tends to draw more from the Air Force than from the Army, and more from the Navy than the Marines. If we define the Air Force as logistics, combat, and strategic assets, then the latter two are drawn more to the Leviathan force, while logistics clearly plays in both. From the Navy, the Leviathan draws more on submarines, while the Sys Admin draws more on surface combatants in general. Naval air, or carriers, would serve as an effective swing asset, as would the Army’s airborne troops. From the Army in general, the Leviathan force retains the heavy armor, while the Sys Admin absorbs the ground troops. The Marines are almost a pure “small wars” force, and therefore are better suited to the Sys Admin role. Each service’s Reserves would be similarly dispersed, and a redefined National Guard will migrate overwhelmingly toward the Sys Admin ranks. In terms of who gets custody of the kids in this divorce, that is basically how it works out.
Over time, the defense budget’s top line will remain relatively flat, growing only with inflation. Within a generation, the Sys Admin force will command the majority of the defense budget, taking advantage of the continuous transformation that the Leviathan force pursues, making this warfighting force ever smaller, more lethal, and more decisive in application. The strategic hedge maintained by the Pentagon as a whole will reside within the Leviathan force, matching its profound distance from society. Nuclear weapons will not be sanitized for the Leviathan’s use but remain in their permanent status as sources of existential deterrence.◈ In short, they remain for having, not using.
Likewise over time, the Sys Admin force will merge extensively with those assets of the Department of Homeland Security focused on border defense and internal disaster mitigation, as America’s immune-system capabilities are progressively integrated with those of the rest of the Core. In many ways, the Leviathan’s share of the Pentagon’s budget will constitute the core defense spending associated with war, while the Sys Admin’s share will reflect the nation’s growing commitment to the Core’s collective security. In essence, our success in shrinking the Gap will be reflected by the diminution of the Leviathan’s budget and the expansion of the Sys Admin’s funding.
Bureaucratically speaking, both the Leviathan and Sys Admin forces will remain within a single Department of Defense until the Core’s continuing security integration eliminates all reasonable fears about the potential for a near-peer conflict. You might assume I am referring to some distant future, but this point will be reached before I retire in three decades’ time. I have lived through much strategic change in my short career. I no longer think it logical to assume that war as we have known it is somehow immutable to the technological and economic forces that have transformed globalization from merely a characteristic of the global security environment to the primary force reshaping that environment. In sum, I see the future worth creating and I choose to embrace it.
This country spent most of the twentieth century running from fear in its planning for war, working not to create viable futures but to prevent unviable ones. That legacy of fear infects our world vision still, causing our words to sound shrill and arrogant when they should ring with optimism and hope. Americans are reluctant warriors, but at this point in human history, it is crucial that we have resolve. With globalization achieving critical mass across the planet, our model of future peace prevails so long as our willingness to wage just wars does not falter. My definition of just wars is exceedingly simple: They must leave affected societies more connected than we found them, with the potential for self-driven connectivity either restored or left intact. We cannot demand democracy or free markets or adherence to some “imperial order” from vanquished foes, but merely transparency and the preservation of individual choice regarding connectivity with the outside world.
My vision of America’s future military power will undoubtedly seem fantastic to many, living as they do in a world full of “chaos,” “uncertainty,” and “perpetual war.” It is this purposeful distortion of reality that allows so many commentators today to seek to soothe the American psyche with warm words of praise for an emerging American “empire.” But this is old fearmongering in new packages. America’s gift to the world is not military empire but economic globalization and the collective security it both engenders and demands. Kant’s world is expanding, while Hobbes’s is ever shrinking. War and peace as we have known them across the twentieth century will not survive long into the twenty-first century. A new American Way of War emerges, remaking the world in its image much as the American Way of Peace provided the template for globalization’s rebirth following World War II and its expansion ever since. Our side is not just winning, it is growing.
The American Way Of War
In January 1998, Art Cebrowski and John Gartska published a seminal article heralding a new era of war entitled “Network-Centric Warfare: Its Origins and Future.”◈ It was a breathtaking piece that described a fundamentally new method of warfare based on using networks to defeat enemies with less mass—exchanging bombs for bits, so to speak. The article revolutionized a lot of thinking within the Pentagon, and within half a decade, this seemingly odd way of describing war (built around networks, not platforms like carriers or aircraft) had risen to the point of conventional wisdom across the military. While I was greatly impressed with the piece, and was very excited to meet Art when he came aboard as Naval War College president in the summer of 1998, I had a lot of problems with how this new concept of net-centric war was being applied. So much so that my first act upon joining the college was to send an article entitled “The Seven Deadly Sins of Network-Centric Warfare” to the U.S. Naval Institute’s flagship journal, Proceedings, where Art’s article had been published.◈ Not everyone tries to impress their new boss in this manner (especially one so famously Catholic), but in my mind, I was just trying to start a conversation with the legend himself—without getting myself fired, I hoped.
My basic criticism of net-centric warfare was that its adherents were employing these concepts to describe fabulously large shooting wars with fabulously sexy great-power opponents (read, again, China), and I just did not see that world out there. Instead of disabling modern enemy information technology networks in war, I saw U.S. Marines struggling to resurrect archaic transportation networks in humanitarian respon
se situations. Instead of facing enemies who were modernizing their forces in line with this information revolution, I saw even our own rich allies unable to keep up with our new purchases of technology, to the point where they simply had trouble communicating with us in coalitions. In short, I saw all this great technology being put to seemingly very old uses, and that struck me as tragic. What Art was describing in his vision was a fundamentally American way of war, one that promised not just better wars, and not just shorter wars, but perhaps the end of war itself. Art likes to say that “policy = power × moral principle.” What I saw in net-centric warfare back then was lots of power in search of moral principle. I did not want to see it used simply to kill a lot more Chinese faster and more efficiently in war, I wanted to see it used to short-circuit wars and warfare in general. I want wars to be obsolete because America becomes so powerful that no one is willing to take it on, and thus America is willing to take on anyone—a self-reinforcing deterrence.
It was absolutely true that prior to 9/11, most net-centric war advocates were egging the Pentagon on in its misguided search for a near-peer competitor. They felt they needed a standard to work against as they transformed the U.S. military beyond its current capabilities, thrusting it into a new era of warfare. What was sad about this push was that it seemed like a solution in search of a problem, and I saw no moral principle in that. It seemed more like a mortal sin to this Catholic, and that’s why my article disturbed Art so much. He felt I was accusing him of doing something very bad, when he felt he was trying to do something very good. What we both needed was a future worth creating, not just a bad one worth preventing. The American way of war needs that moral edge. We need to be liberators, not mere protectors of the status quo. Our wars need to expand the good, not simply check the evil. We spent the Cold War trying to put so much fear out of our minds that we lost track of America’s revolutionary story line, which sees us remaking the world in our own image of freedom, connectivity, and the rule of law.
When Art hired me after 9/11 to work in his new Office of Force Transformation at the Pentagon, we both laughed at the irony. Many in the business have long assumed we were enemies of sorts, because my article is often paired with his as the great counterpoint to his signature vision. In reality, we were both searching for the same happy ending, or a grand definition of why it would be a good thing for the world for America not only to possess such amazing military powers but to actually use them proactively to shape a better tomorrow. When Art pulled me aboard, he gave me one simple assignment: develop a strategic view of the world that would elevate transformation from a discussion of which weapons systems or platforms needed to be purchased or retired. His definition of transforming the Pentagon goes far beyond changing what it buys or how it buys it, or even how it wages war. In his mind, it is the very role of the Pentagon in U.S. national security that needs changing, and 9/11 plus the global war on terrorism provided us with just what the doctor ordered—a fluxing of the Cold War rule set that still dominated our thinking.
What is so crucial about the historical creation point at which America now stands is that we have the opportunity to redefine not just our way of war but that of the entire planet. Those commentators who warn about a “second nuclear age” simply do not get it. They argue that America has become so powerful in a conventional (or nonnuclear) sense that the only way any state will be able to counter our power in the future is to acquire and be willing to use nuclear weapons. This was allegedly the great lesson of Desert Storm (“Don’t fight the Americans unless you have nukes!”), and many alarmists repeat that claim after Operation Iraqi Freedom. But the world and even the Gap is moving in another direction. What we saw across the 1990s was a host of emerging powers walk away from their nuclear potential, in large part because of what America did to Iraq in Desert Storm. Basically any Core member could be a nuclear power if it wanted to be, and yet no new ones have appeared beyond the five original nuclear powers—the United States, the U.K., France, Russia, and China, plus India, which is trapped in its own MAD situation with Pakistan. South Africa walked away from that capability. So did all the former Soviet republics that found themselves with nukes following the USSR’s collapse but did not want them (e.g., Ukraine, Kazakhstan). Brazil could have developed them but chose not to. Germany has never reached for them, nor has Japan. South Korea never turned to this option, despite knowing that North Korea clearly has. We know Israel has them and we understand why, surrounded as it is by countries that, for decades, called for its destruction. But even as it has fought wars against all odds and suffered years upon years of terrorism, Israel has never made a serious move in the direction of employing them. All we really have to worry about right now is a handful of states (now just Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, and a few other possibilities) that clearly exist outside the security rule set to such a degree that contemplating such war with them is not idle speculation.
Meanwhile, America has elevated its particular brand of warfare to the point where we are able to fine-tune a defeated nation’s ability to recover following the war that removes its ruling regime. We fight wars against individuals today, not countries, or societies, or even the government as a whole. We simply go after bad guys, using weapons with a real moral dimension, such as smart bombs and new nonlethal forms of warfare that target enemy systems without harming people. America has gotten so good at this that we no longer even need strategic surprise to defeat a well-armed enemy. A foe can know we are coming, even when we are coming, and there is nothing he can do to stop us. That kind of power, armed with moral principle, should equal a real grand strategy. America ultimately does not transform the Middle East to defeat terrorism, contain Islam, secure oil, or defend Israel. We seek to transform the region to end its disconnectedness, and if it is worth doing there, then it is worth doing everywhere it exists. What stands in our way is a collection of bad actors sprinkled across the Gap, some who have embedded themselves in corrupt, repressive regimes, and others who do not have regimes to protect but who desire to hijack societies and isolate them further.
This is an enemy worth fighting, because it is truly evil. This is a war worth waging, because not only can we defeat this enemy, we can eliminate it from the world’s future and—by so doing—steer history down a far better path. This is a military worth building, because it signals everything good about this country: our connectedness, our faith in individual decision making, and the appeal of our ideals. When a Special Operations soldier laser-guides a bomb into a bad guy’s house, killing all inside but sparing all around, we are saying that America owns the consequences of its wars. When we spare an enemy’s infrastructure even as it puts our own soldiers’ lives at greater risk, we demonstrate that Americans can love their enemies more than themselves. When the Pentagon invites dozens of reporters along with its fighting troops, it not only understands that the whole world is watching, it wants them to see the truth of this uniquely American way of war. These are new rules sets, and by exporting them around the world through our words and deeds, we make everyone safer by demonstrating how pointless war has become. So if you are a “big man” who believes you have the right to take some chunk of humanity offline to abuse them for your own purposes, you are wrong. If you believe you can get away with it forever, you are wrong. If you believe no one cares, you are wrong. And if you believe America cannot and will not stop you if you seek to acquire WMD, you are more than wrong—you do not belong in our future.
What is so important about seeing the international security environment for what it really is today is that America recovers its historical purpose in that knowledge: disconnectedness defines danger, so connectedness defines safety. When we wage war against the forces of disconnectedness, we generate safety for the planet as a whole. Is it hard to tell the good guys from the bad? Not at all. Look for those who, if they had their way, would decrease connectivity for those they rule or seek to rule. Is Israel a bad state? Look at its connectivity, and imagine how much more
it would pursue without its security problems. Is China a bad state? Does it seek more connectivity over time or less? Is Iran a bad country? On top, yes, but on the bottom, no. So target one, and not the other. Same for North Korea, or any other country ruled by a bad regime. There are no bad people save those who would deny others connectivity, choice, and freedom. We will not always be welcomed as liberators, because no one long enslaved is ready for freedom on Day One. We know that freedom is sometimes a long process of awakening.
So the American way of war as we have come to define it is built around the concepts of connectivity, networks, and individual freedom of action within defined rule sets. You want to know what makes our military so scary to the rest of the world? Our noncommissioned officers wield more combat decision-making power on the battlefield than basically every other nation’s admirals and generals. When you fight Americans, you face the worst of all enemies: disciplined creativity. When Art Cebrowski and I published an article in Proceedings in January 2003 called “The American Way of War,” we wrote,
The ultimate attribute of the emerging American Way of War is the super-empowerment of the war fighter—whether on the ground, in the air, or at sea. As network-centric warfare empowers individual servicemen and -women, and as we increasingly face an international security environment where rogue individuals, be they leaders of “evil states” or “evil networks,” pose the toughest challenges, eventually the application of our military power will mirror the dominant threat to a significant degree. In other words, we morph into a military of super-empowered individuals fighting wars against super-empowered individuals. In this manner, the American Way of War moves the military toward an embrace of a more sharply focused global cop role: we increasingly specialize in neutralizing bad people who do bad things. Adding these new responsibilities to the U.S. military is not only a natural development but a positive one, for it is the United States’ continued success in deterring global war and obsolescing state-on-state war that now allows us to begin tackling the far thornier issues of transnational threats and subnational conflicts—the battlegrounds on which this global war on terrorism will be won.◈
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