Truth be told, entering the world of classified material does not bring you any closer to reality, but rather farther away. You start talking primarily to others like yourself—the clean. You engage in conversations that cannot be repeated anywhere else, except with those likewise cleared, so you lose your ability to engage in reality checks with outsiders (“Does that make any sense to you?”). Not surprisingly, as external influences wane, your confidence level soars with regard to your secrets. You just know they must be true, because they are secrets. You have access to them because you are smarter and better than others—you can be trusted. Moreover, you are surrounded by other smart, better, trustworthy people, and so your discussions about the material are immensely self-reinforcing. These are not simply secrets, they begin to become absolute truths. As a bearer of such, you are empowered beyond normal people. You live on a higher plane, and are able to discuss concepts that would simply freak out ordinary people if they were exposed to them. Intellectually, you have become an übermensch, a superman of sorts. Like Neo, you have broken out of the Matrix of lies and false perceptions—welcome to the real world.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying everyone with a clearance is a head case, just that the more clearance you have and the more you really use it, the more you’re at risk of falling into the head trip I just described. Of course, all of these perceptions are wrong. Being admitted to the world of secrets does not send your IQ skyrocketing or elevate your consciousness above that of mortal men. You just know one version of the dirt that exists throughout life, and because many security types tend to lead fairly closed lives outside of work (the business attracts intense, workaholic types), far too many assume that this version of the dirt allows them to understand life and humanity far better than others—doctors, lawyers, business leaders, and so on. But in reality, every profession has its insider information, and all of it involves dirt. What’s different about my business is how that skewed belief in insider information emboldens so many of us to spend our lives scaring the hell out of people.
The classic way to scare ordinary people is that sly, if-you-only-knew-what-I-know confidence that lets you fearlessly prognosticate concerning all matters of future security. Since what most people fear is unpredictable bad stuff happening in the future, this is an intoxicating sort of power. Plus, since no one can ever really fact-check your nudge-nudge-wink-wink—Say no more’s because, of course, you can’t reveal your sources, it’s almost impossible to catch you in either a lie or a mistake. The result? You can say the most outrageous things that scare people in the worst way and basically never be called on the carpet. Since most people do fret about the future, you can play to their worst fears. The real-world data is, by and large, completely meaningless to the conversation. When you speak the unspeakable about either the present or the future, people just know you’re telling the truth.
So far, I’m just talking about an open society like the United States. If you transplant this argument to an authoritarian state like the old Soviet Union or Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, then you move into a far more serious realm of mind control. In the United States, of course, we have an entire industry called the press, which is devoted to punching holes in the fear factoring done by the defense and intelligence communities, and that’s what keeps us healthy and sane as a society.
I learned just how effective such fearmongering can be in an authoritarian state the summer I lived in the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s. One afternoon, while my student group was visiting a Communist youth camp out in the woods, I broke off from the main meeting to go have a smoke with one Russian teenager in a cabin that stood on the edge of the camp. In reality, this kid had asked around my group to discover which of us had the strongest background in security studies, and once he had decided I was the man, he talked me into leaving with him for smokes and some shots of vodka. Being the adventurous type, I went along, figuring we’d get slightly smashed and talk all sorts of trash about the relative ease of having sex with American girls versus Russian girls.
To my complete surprise, when my new friend opened the door to the cabin it was crammed full of teenagers, all sitting around a chair in seemingly tense anticipation. I was led to the chair, offered the standard small tumbler of vodka and a papyrosa (a gawdawful Soviet cigarette), and once I’d emptied the glass and lit up, the questions started flying. Basically, what these kids wanted to know was whether or not they’d all die in a nuclear war with the United States. At first I thought they were joking, but after a while I understood how completely serious they were, and so I spent close to an hour telling them—in my childlike Russian—all the reasons I was certain nuclear war would never happen between our two countries. In that brief moment, I liberated several dozen young minds from the paranoid grip of living in a society of secrets, and it was one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done.
The first time I ever really got to test out my Top Secret clearance at CNA was relatively soon after I got it in 1991. I was invited to the “vault,” the special facility within CNA’s headquarters where analysts had access to Top Secret material and could conduct Top Secret discussions—thanks to all the extraordinary precautions taken within this secure mini-facility. I was pretty psyched going in. I mean, who knew what I’d learn?
Well, the discussion was pretty amazing, largely because it was so divorced from reality as to seem a dream. I had been brought in to help brainstorm a new study that was reviewing U.S. nuclear strategy in light of the Soviet Union’s demise. That alone didn’t make it a Top Secret discussion, because analysts write unclassified reports on this sort of thing all the time, as this one ended up being. What made it classified was the exact numbers we’d be discussing and the analysis we’d use in generating those numbers, because there you start moving into matters of actual military capabilities, and that’s the stuff you really do want to keep secret. Naturally, whenever you’re talking nuclear weapons, you’re talking high body counts. There’s just no two ways about it.
About fifteen minutes into the discussion, I found myself staring at the wall. None of this seemed real. It was all just so preposterously impossible to contemplate, not because it made me want to get all moralistic, but because the political scientist in me simply rejected the logic other analysts were assuming would let an American president actually engage in this sort of warfare. I made a requisite number of analytic protests regarding the approach, but I could see I wasn’t going to get anywhere with these guys. They had that classified glow about them that told me they had already gone over to the dark side, and nothing I could say would bring them back. In the end, I didn’t begrudge them this. They were, after all, just doing their jobs.
Anyway, I left the meeting early and drove over to my wife’s obstetrician’s office down the street. Vonne was three months pregnant with our first child, Emily, and today we’d be doing an ultrasound. The magical moment for me was not seeing Em’s fuzzy outline on the monitor, but rather listening to her heartbeat. It was so incredibly real, that sound. I suddenly realized that I’d need to protect that single heartbeat for the rest of her life. And, yes, it was a bit intimidating and it did make me think of all the bad things out there in the real world that could end this life in a heartbeat. But it also filled me with an immense sense of hope. I was in this business to save single heartbeats, not contemplate immolating them by the millions.
Hunched over Vonne’s prostrate body in that doctor’s office, I suddenly realized that despite the allure of the world of secrets and my long anticipation at being admitted to that society, I needed to avoid classified work for the rest of my career. I just knew I wasn’t cut out for the business of scaring people half to death.
It was a very good decision on my part because it played naturally to my personality. I love to be the skeptic in the room, or the smartass who’s always poking holes in other people’s grand schemes. It’s the nastier, more sarcastic side of my personality. But it’s also where many of my analytic skills co
me from, because the wary eye is the discerning eye, and seeing through all the bullshit is a relatively rare skill in a business where so many swallow it without blinking.
Again, I don’t so much begrudge analysts their tendency for worst-case groupthink, because somebody’s got to do it. What angers me is when that sort of analysis is authoritatively inflicted on the public in published reports or, worse, by talking-head experts on television—whether it’s a fire-breathing senator, a gravel-voiced retired general, or just your all-purpose intense-looking “national security expert.” My pet peeve for years now has been the tendency of national security experts to describe the post-Cold War international security environment as one of unremitting “chaos” and “perpetual war.” Naturally, this sort of rhetoric has only increased since 9/11. Not because it’s any more true but simply because the public’s more receptive.
Let me poke some holes in this myth, which many security analysts will use to tell you why my “future worth creating” will never come about.
First reality check: If the world was full of chaos and perpetual war, then wouldn’t the global economy be hurting on some level? There is simply no evidence of that. According to the World Bank, the global economy has grown approximately 30 percent since 1990. Wouldn’t there be more poverty from all that conflict? There’s not. Global poverty rates (the percentage living on less than $1 a day) have declined by 20 percent since 1990. Certainly countries would integrate less with one another economically with all that rising conflict. Again, no. Trade in goods as a percent of gross domestic product has increased significantly since 1989. Same for gross private capital flows and gross foreign direct investment. Apparently, despite all this conflict and perpetual war, the world is trading and investing money overseas far more than it did at the end of the Cold War.◈
Second reality check: Certainly we can track a growing number of conflicts around the world since 1990, right? Wrong again. According to the University of Maryland’s Center for International Development and Conflict, “the general magnitude of global warfare has decreased by over fifty percent since peaking in the mid-1980s, falling by the end of 2002 to its lowest level since the early 1960s.”◈
Third reality check: With all this perpetual warfare, wouldn’t global military spending be increasing over time? I mean, wouldn’t states become more fearful about the world outside as the chaos spread? Well, global military expenditures are up 14 percent in real terms since 1998. Aha! Then again, today’s level is still 16 percent less than it was in the late 1980s, the peak of the Cold War. And who’s doing much of the spending since 1998? That would be us—the United States.◈
Fourth reality check: With all this conflict, wouldn’t at least U.S. military crisis responses have increased since the end of the Cold War? There you have me. The U.S. military responded to international crises 230 times across the 1980s and 280 times across the 1990s, or an increase of roughly one-fifth. But the vast bulk of that increase was focused on just four situations in the 1990s: Somalia, Haiti, the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia and Kosovo), and Iraq. So busy, yes, but all over the planet? Not exactly.◈
Fifth reality check: Certainly U.S. forces have engaged in far more combat operations over time, correct? When measured as a percent of total days involved in crisis response, U.S. forces engaged in combat operations just under 10 percent of the time in the 1980s, but almost 20 percent of the time in the 1990s.◈ So, yes, there has been an increase, but one that says that 80 percent of the time U.S. forces respond to crises around the world, they are not engaged in combat. So even for the United States, the 1990s was a decade of activity other than war.
So why, then, when you read a newspaper or watch TV news, are you constantly bombarded with these phrases? Why do experts talk so confidently of “chaos” and “perpetual war”?
In my opinion, a myth was born in the early years after the Cold War. Like most myths, this one began with actual truths: the magnitude of global ethnic conflicts and separatist movements exploded around the end of the Cold War. For example, there were five new separatist conflicts around the world in the first half of the 1980s. That number doubled to ten in the second half of the eighties, and then increased by half to fifteen in the first half of the 1990s. Amazingly, the global total of ongoing separatist conflicts did not rise much over that time period, jumping slightly from the early-eighties total of thirty-five to the late-eighties total of forty-one, but then declining to thirty-nine by the early 1990s and decreasing thereafter as more and more conflicts reached political settlements. Today, the total is just under two dozen worldwide, the lowest numbers since 1960.◈
So what happened was really a spurt of conflicts involving separatists and ethnic violence as the Soviet empire collapsed in the late 1980s, with eleven such conflicts beginning in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia between 1988 and 1994. This bulge of conflict corresponded perfectly to a new pet theory that many security analysts were touting at that time within the Pentagon: the breakdown of the bipolar order would unleash a prolonged period of global chaos, as many ethnic conflicts previously held in check by Moscow’s military might would erupt and burn at length.
I can remember sitting through dozens of such briefings in the early 1990s, feeling as if I were Alice in some amazing Wonderland. The flip-flop on this subject was so fast it made my head spin; in just a few short months we abandoned the notion that the Soviets were behind most of the mischief and conflict in the world and jumped immediately to the notion that—noooo!—Moscow had really been a source of great stability around the planet, and now that the Red Army had pulled back, the world was entering an uncertain and dangerous era!
To someone who had just finished writing his Ph.D. dissertation on Soviet bloc security assistance to revolutionary movements around the world, this 180-degree turn was mind-boggling. In a nutshell, the Pentagon simply missed the Soviet threat, and in its intense longing for that longtime companion, it immediately began idealizing that now-dead relationship.
The Pentagon would spend much of the 1990s pining for its old rival, and the search for its replacement would become a driving force in its long-range strategic planning right up to 9/11. That misguided quest would blind the Defense Department to the emerging international security landscape that we “suddenly” found ourselves in as we launched this global war on terrorism.
The Myth Of America As Globocop
Whenever I am a guest on a talk radio show, I always field at least one question from a caller clearly worried that America is becoming the world’s policeman or globocop. Because they have heard about U.S. military activity in South America, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, they have become convinced that the Pentagon is waging war all over the planet.
You might be wondering by now if I am guilty of sending mixed messages. First I tell you that the world is not nearly as chaotic as the fearmongers would have it. Then I tell you that the old Big One scenario of global war has been replaced by an almost unlimited number of lesser includeds that the U.S. military needs to get better at dealing with. But now I am unwilling to admit the Pentagon is the world’s policeman? What gives?
First, I do not object to the terms “policeman” and “cop,” because a focus on rule sets naturally brings such images to mind—the people who enforce the rules, catch the rule breakers, warn the rule benders, and so on. I also like the cop image because it suggests that it’s not personal, it is simply business. America does not go to combat because we hate a certain religion, or people, or even a bad ruler. We intervene when the rule sets are being so badly broken that the offending parties need to be stopped and removed from power. So cop, policeman, and fireman are all good images that keep us focused on what really matters: extending rule sets to parts of the world where they are thin or absent. Rule sets encourage and protect connectivity, and growing connectivity is ultimately stabilizing.
Yes, you can find conflicts on every continent on the planet. But it is important to remember that good news is ra
rely news; bad news always is. For example, Colombia is a dangerous and persistently violent country where drug cartels, rebel groups, and the government routinely war over who gets to control particular regions.◈ That fighting has, on occasion, spilled over into border clashes with neighboring Venezuela, which, under strongman Hugo Chavez, has had its own share of internal instability in recent years. Factor in the rebel activity that has ebbed and waned at times in Peru, plus the usual concerns about drug trafficking across the Andes region and throughout Central America and the Caribbean, and that seems like a fairly nasty mix. But you know what? That relatively minor amount of activity does not come anywhere close to describing Latin America, which includes a lot of countries that, frankly, the United States spends almost no time worrying about in a security sense.
Africa is an even better example of this. Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the Ivory Coast in West Africa have all experienced serious levels of internal violence in recent years, but it is important to remember that there are almost a dozen other countries in that subregion alone that are not prompting the world to the same level of worry. The same can be said for southern Africa, eastern Africa, and north Africa. In each instance we are usually talking about a handful of bad situations embedded within a larger array of far more stable situations. Central Africa is clearly the worst overall situation of Africa’s subregions, but even there, it is important to remember, there is a lot of normal life going on amid the recurring violence. Clearly, what constitutes “normal life” in Africa is far different from normalcy in the United States, but it is important to realize that Africa—a huge continent containing hundreds of millions of people—is not completely awash in nonstop violence.
The Pentagon's New Map Page 39