For those of you who aren’t familiar with him, Thomas P. M. Barnett is a strategic thinker who has developed something of a cult-like following in the hallowed halls of the five-sided wind tunnel. Clearly very bright, he’s also exceptionally witty, even glib, and he’s taken his patented, PowerPoint road show - complete with “Law and Order ‘ca-ching’” transition soundtrack, all over the world, selling a pair of popular books along the way. He’s a great briefer, with showman perfect timing and fairly dripping with self-confidence.
I get the distinct impression of an indefatigeable self-promoter, as well - he was only a very little ways launched into his presentation when he joked that when he arrived from Wisconsin for the first of his six years of instruction at Harvard, he was asked what country he had come from. Thus trotted around the stage for self-deprecating titter, six years at Harvard are once again retired to the barn.
No sin this, though: For a man whose brand is his name, self-promotion is nothing more than making a virtue of necessity. And while I didn’t find myself agreeing with all that he said, he said it convincingly, and nearly all of it was thought-provoking. And by the way? Yes, the world-traveling-strategic-thinker-gig does look like good work, if you can get it.
Here are the notes I took, interspersed at places with observations of my own. Reader’s digest version? Kill irreconcileable Islamists where you find them, throw Taiwan under the bus, and hitch the wagon of our inevitable decline to the rise of China and India.
Barnett loves the CJTF-HOA (commander, joint task force - Horn of Africa) model of fighting the GWOT. JTF-HOA was set up to prevent al Qaeda types from flushing by sea out of Afghanistan and Iraq and into northeast Africa, but after that work dried up they stuck around and adapted to changing circumstances. I think it’s easier to love JTF-HOA the further you are away from it myself, but Barnett says the people there have great morale and love what they’re doing.
On the nature of future competition for the US: China is engaged in “pre-emptive” nation building in Africa, as are non-government actors such as Dubai Ports World. He calls this making markets and shaping the future without shooting anybody. Just to give you some idea of the focus, he spends noticeably more time talking about China, and, to a lesser degree India, than he does on the Arab middle east. For what that’s worth.
Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History” was broadly misunderstood because nobody read on to the end. Fukuyama said that Islamist movements won’t make history in the way that the 20th century ideological struggles such as those between democracy and fascism or communism did because the appeal of fundamentalist Islam does not extend beyond the range of its heartland. He goes on to say that whether you call it globalization, modernization or westernization, what we’ve got presents a much greater threat to the Arab Middle East than what they’ve got does to us. Modernization inevitably empowers women, with the probem being - for traditional societies - that nothing is as culturally wrenching as the re-definition of gender roles. Which is true I suppose in the calculus of cultural existentialism, but less true - from my perspective anyway - in the math of “are we more likely to find that a dirty bomb has been planted in New York, or Teheran and thousands of people have been killed in an afternoon” kind of a way.
Samuel Huntingdon, who wrote “The Clash of Civilizations and the Re-Making of the New World Order” had a point about the way identity has aggregated up from the local to the civilazational, but in practice, he has mistaken “friction” - the result - from the force: Globalization. Globalization, per Fukuyama Friedman in “The Lexus and the Olive Tree” is inevitable. Barnett attempts to triangulate between Huntingdon’s friction and Friedman’s inevitability by adding that while Globalization is inevitable, it will move in fits and starts, faster in some places and slower in others, and the friction points will map to ideological and physical combat zones. Which sounded somehow deeper, less tautological and more meaningful when he was saying it.
Globalization won’t stop because we get tired. No argument there.
There are four forces in play for Globalization and modernity. Free markets, free trade, (something-something: rule of law, maybe?), and transparency. Notes that pluralism and democracy are not required for membership in the “functioning” core, but usually develop afterwards. Notes that we have a precious myth about those freedom loving, slave holding, democracy preaching, anti-suffrage founding fathers. Which strikes me as committing the sin of historical presentism, or judging ancestors against evolved sensibilities rather than those of the time. Compared to the society they broke away from and their own antecedents, both the pilgrims and the Founders were radical revolutionaries indeed. The path Barnett takes here walks deliberately away from the “American exceptionalism/shining city on a hill” model of foreign policy and illuminates the pathway to empire. We can and ought to be able to do better than building a military to defend our merchants who pay taxes to support our military in the 21st century. This is where he begins to lose me.
The Non-integrating Gap: 95% of all the world’s terrorism, cross-border crime, illegal narcotics trade, rape as a weapon of war and famine occur in the Gap states, which cover all of the Arab Middle East, non-industrial Asia - significantly, excluding China - nearly all of Africa, with South Africa as a tentatively rising pillar of Core-state integration, and most of Spanish-speaking South America (but excluding Brazil, and perhaps one or two others). This will be the expeditionary battlefield of the 21st Century. You can’t build a fence around it, it’s not a neo-con plot and you can’t vote it out of office - you’re stuck with it. He’s got a point, but I believe it has been made before.
The Gap can be shrunk in chunks, the HOA will be the last to go.
Strategy:
I. Work across the Core to withstand and mitigate 9/11 perturbations to the system and preserve our ability to grow the Core.
II. Firewall the Core from the Gap’s worst exports: Pandemics, narcotics, terror.
III. Shrink the Gap by exporting security.
Which brings Barnett into his Leviathan / SysAdmin partition of military force packages. Briefly, Leviathan is the big sticks - the air strike capability of the naval aviation and USAF are Leviathan forces, they break things. Kinetic special forces are Leviathan, as is mechanized armor and arty. After the Desert Storm demonstration of Leviathan, everyone else swore off of conventional nation-state warfare because they knew they weren’t in the same league as the US. No one does Leviathan like we do, and if there is a war anywhere in the world, it is because either we are waging it, or we are permitting others to do so. That may not actually be true, but rest of the world believes it to be true. Darfur, e.g. Everybody in the military wants to be Leviathan because it sounds cooler. Most of the force structure is SysAdmin though.
SysAdmin is the combination of soft power and dissuasion that creates security out of the rubble of what Leviathan left behind, leading finally to a rebuilding of the cracked Gap state along Core lines. It doesn’t take the threat out of the environment, it manages the environment of threats. It’s more civilian than uniform, more government than DoD, more rest-of-the-world than US, and more commercial than government. The surface Navy is mostly SysAdmin (except when they’re launching TLAMS), and so is the Marine Corps (over their strenuous objections). Civil Affairs are obviously SysAdmin, as is the JTF-HOA operation. SysAdmin doesn’t leave the house with the intention of killing anybody, and it doesn’t come home for a long, long time once it gets where it’s going. Notes, parenthetically, how silly it is for government and military types to play in the sandbox of developing market systems.
“Exporting security” is where the strategy gets controversial, but Barnett doesn’t mind the controversy. The whole “Leviathan / SysAdmin” dichotomy is, I think, a little overblown - we have a blended force structure, and the Marines in particular are good at tailoring forces to their task across the entire spectrum of operations. I do think it’s useful as a way of training - potentially even equipping - various elements of the force structure, because it’s obvious that our “create security” capability is not commensurate with our “take stuff down” capability. It’s also a great deal harder to rebuild than it is to destroy, though - a lesson most of us learned in kindergarten, wicked beasts that we were.
Well, this is getting pretty long and I’m only half way through my notes. More later. Maybe.
20 responses so far ↓
1
SGT Jeff (USAR)
// Mar 15, 2007 at 3:34 pm
Stuff like this reminds me of why I am, and will remain, enlisted… even with a BS in Information Systems. OTOH, my promotion packet should be at the board now, so perhaps I’ll be SSG Jeff (USAR) one of these days….
2
ManlyDad
// Mar 15, 2007 at 4:54 pm
(Yawn.) Is it time for lunch yet?
Not my cuppatea, but I guess it’s good that there are some Big Thinkers to whom this makes sense.
3
Skippy-san
// Mar 15, 2007 at 5:27 pm
Lex,
I think you have nailed most of the pertinent points about Barnett-particularly the self promotion part. He reminds me of some the retired types I see at exercises now pulling down BIG bucks as “mentors”. He’s making some pretty good coin himself.
I read his blog regularly and have corresponded with him via e-mail. (He was kind enough to reply-a lot of folks would not do that).
I agree with him about some things, some of the things he advocates are just a slick repackaging of others ideas. He’s right about the HOA / PI model of GWOT though. Both are making big differences without the large investments of forces. (And Navy plays big in both……..).
What I find really interesting and you did not comment on was the reaction of the audience-some of whom are bright guys and others are more narrow minded and were probably asking themselves only one question-what’s in it for me?
At least its better than listening to lectures about the virtues of Six Sigma…………
4
Bill
// Mar 15, 2007 at 5:36 pm
Thanks. Interesting. Some of us were into this during earlier days. Your precis is being passed around through the “elder circuit”. Please continue, Kind SIr.
5
Michelle
// Mar 15, 2007 at 6:04 pm
I’m not sure if this is a good or a bad thing. But I almost understood half of that. Favourite comment:
We can and ought to be able to do better than building a military to defend our merchants who pay taxes to support our military in the 21st century.
Don’t know why. Just is.
6
Sean
// Mar 15, 2007 at 6:20 pm
‘Lexus and the Olive Tree’ is Friedman
i hope you do a part 2…
7
fliterman
// Mar 15, 2007 at 7:07 pm
Thanks for posting the Barnett notes. And I fairly agree with your take on the man and his concepts. Some of his thoughts are exceptionally refreshing and stimulating; and then some are not worth my time. But as an iconoclast, he does provoke much needed new thinking, and that is very good. He does open up novel pathways that may one day be essential. But many of his ideas are implausible and some actually smack of imperialism.
I am also surprised that although I believe he was a Kerry supporter in the last election, some of his ideas parallel the neoconservative visions of the Project for the New American Century in exporting democracy, and perhaps even Polk’s Manifest Destiny. The Amazon reviews of his recent books really take Barnett to task, and make for interesting reading in and of themselves.
Part of the problem with his theories, I think, is that radical fundamental Islamists do not fit very neatly into his Core/Gap theory. Indeed many of the terrorists are well educated and of means. Can they be “converted” by this globalization? I think not.
But of course economic globalization is indeed inevitable. And it is certainly preferable to war. But it is the “transition” that is traumatic.
Envision the hobo atop an eastbound freight train, needing to go westbound. Suddenly, a westbound freight train appears on the parallel track. But if he jumps from the eastbound speeding train to the one westbound, even if that is where he needs to go, he will be injured severely in the transition. It’s better to apply some brakes, to slow the train and transition, and make for a much safer and softer transition to the new desired direction.
I have rather large investments in two companies that have factories and corporate offices in both Taiwan and China. When tensions escalate between the US and China, I fear for the financial repercussions more than military ones. And that I believe is good. It is in our interest that the Chinese feel the same way?¢‚Ǩ¬¶and I believe they do as our economic ties grow and strengthen.
But China poses a severe economic threat to the US with our stunningly massive and growing trade deficit with them, and their artificial valuation of the Yuan. Couple that with the strength of the Euro, and our own horrendous budget deficit, and the US has great and looming globalization problems on the horizon.
We are no longer producers, but mostly consumers. We have had five years of increasing productivity, yet real wages have remained stagnant. We are increasingly in danger of losing foreign investors that would only compound and exacerbate our economic misfortune. We educate the world’s brightest and elite and they return to their own countries leaving us with nothing in return. We are far too dependent upon foreign oil, and on foreign companies for our national defense. Our economy is beginning to approach the point of diminished returns - the backside of the power curve ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äú and globalization will only hasten our problems.
Globalization is not a rising tide that lifts all boats, but is rather like a flood that tears away at the highest buildings and fills in the low valleys. It will be an equalizer, and we have more to lose than any.
Like the hobo on the train, economic globalization is not something we should rush headlong into. The transition to globalization ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äú although inevitable and necessary - must be slowed and regulated. Otherwise we as a nation will be like the traumatized hobo, going ultimately in the right direction on the westbound train, but very bloodied and battered by an all too abrupt transition.
8
Justthisguy
// Mar 16, 2007 at 12:41 am
That boy needs to read “Cryptonomicon.” The way we won the second world war was by combining the strictly violent “Leviathan” with the cool-headed sysadmin thinking of Athena, and her aegis. I give you, e.g., the proximity fuze, the Manhattan Project, Ultra, the Navy codebreakers at Pearl Harbor, the MIT Radiation Lab, George Patton’s fictitious pre-D-Day Army, the Ford ballistic computer, et cetera.
Not that a strong arm is not also necessary. If you need to fight and want to win, in a desperate fight, it’s necessary to have both strong arm and sharp wit. Having both may not be sufficient, but it helps you to give a good account of yerself if you do
9
sid
// Mar 16, 2007 at 3:48 am
“Which brings Barnett into his Leviathan / SysAdmin partition of military force packages.”
Good representation of sysadmin here:
http://www.navy.mil/view_single.asp?id=43964
10
Zane
// Mar 16, 2007 at 3:52 am
“… the appeal of fundamentalist Islam does not extend beyond the range of its heartland.”
Lex, those notes are a very good summary of the road show as presented here. As another commenter noted, his iconoclastic qualities can be useful in helping one to re-examine many a problem. But he’s also just plain blind at times. He first states that the rising tide of empowered and liberated Muslim women will change Islam, oblivious to the fact that those uppity Muslimahs he refers to (all two or three dozen of them) exist only in the USA (no, not even in Europe, there are too many Muslims there and retribution too easy). Then he states that “radical Islam” poses no threat to us because in the next few decades all our current young muj are going to get into their 40s and 50s. Mmm, so what happens in the meantime? What happens when Europe finishes becoming a vassal state of Arabia? What happens when all those pissed-off Muslims (cuz we’ve liberated their wimmin) go nuclear, literally? What happens when Russia, whose military is or is soon to be 1/3 Muslim, finishes collapsing in the next two decades? That one really throws a spanner into that world globalization thing, I think.
Likewise, he says North Korea needs to be eliminated as quickly as possible, but we can cut a deal with the Iranians as soon as they have nukes, because Persian women are the most popular prostitutes in Europe?????? Cutting a deal should be easy because the Iranians like Americans (I recall the story PJ O’Rourke tells of being held at gunpoint by a 13-year-old HezbAllah member, who boasted that as soon as he was old enough, he was going to dental school in the USA). Huh? I sorely resented the implication that Iran is getting nukes simply because the US threatens Iran by having forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, a view thoroughly disconnected from the historical reality of Iran under the Mullahs (attacks in Argentina, Europe and Beirut, for starters), and from the tremendous threat they pose now.
At the same time, he’s right that stopping the Iranians now is nigh onto impossible. So what happens when the Iranians develop the nukes and learn how to missilize them, and then follow through on their long-standing threat to evaporate Israel? He alludes to the obvious in the beginning. Fukuyama’s argument was that ideology was finished, market-driven liberalism won the day and History was over, except for those annoying wars of passion, like say, Jihad. With nukes. What’s his sysadmin solution for that?
He does admire the wonderful sysadmin job we did in Indonesia. I wonder what he?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ll think of it in the next 5-10 years, as all those orphans we left behind in Saudi-funded orphanages reach the age of jihad and head out into the world.
He reminded me of a telling old saw: You can always tell a Harvard man, but you cannot tell him much.
11
Zane
// Mar 16, 2007 at 3:53 am
Sorry for the run-on, he torks me off the more I think about what he said.
12
Zane
// Mar 16, 2007 at 6:30 am
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13 The Thunder Run // Mar 16, 2007 at 6:41 am
Web Reconnaissance for 03/16/2007…
A short recon of what?Ç‚Äôs out there that might draw your attention….
14
BeachBum
// Mar 16, 2007 at 6:45 am
Until now, I’ve not heard much of Barnett, but others have made some of the same distinctions as he has. Pournelle packages it a bit differently, he goes right out and calls the heavy military forces of the US ‘legions.’ Legions are there to break things, and they cannot be stopped in battle. Pretty much what Barnett call ‘Leviathan.’ Oh, and Guy, everything you list from Cryptonomicon I’d list as Legion/Leviathan, it may take brains to build/invent that stuff, but an a-bomb is definately intended to break things, not put them back together.
Pournelle’s version of Sysadmin he calls ‘auxilaries/constabulary.’ He makes the point that the US military is completely UNsuited for peace-keeping duties after the war is won. You can’t and shouldn’t ask a soldier to be a cop. Is Barnett calling Marines in Iraq today ‘Sysadmin’? Maybe, MAYBE in peacetime on a humanitarian mission, but even humanitarian missions have a way of turning hot (ie Sudan circa 93).
…and however you analyze the postwar force alignment, I’m not sure how it all ends. My dad spent the summer of 1945 in Germany. Nobody was shooting at him, and he didn’t have to look out for IEDs driving his Jeep around. Same thing in Japan. They surrendered, and gave up all their weapons. Iraq is more like Yugoslavia after the Germans went through, with all those partisans running wild.
There is another Iraq (pre 03)-Yugoslavia (1945-death of Tito) parallel. Both countries have different ethnic groups thrown together into an artificially constructed country. Both had strong leaders keeping a lid on internal tension.
I wonder if the tactics of a Tito and/or a Hussein are the only ones that will work in Iraq. Frankly, I’d just as soon have our troops in there now than see if the country goes through the same convulsions as Yugoslavia did breaking up.
..and I’ll 2nd everything Zane says.
/BeachBum
15 Chapomatic » Lex Report On Current Barnett Brief // Mar 16, 2007 at 6:34 pm
[...] Lex fell victim to “The Brief” and reports in. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays over at Barnett’s [...]
16
PeterGunn
// Mar 16, 2007 at 9:05 pm
fliterman…
Please help me understand where you’re coming from when you say that you have rather large investments in both Taiwan and China AND that you believe China poses a severe economic threat to the United States. I agree with you, but I don’t invest in my own downfall.
When I was a young boy, I was taught that it was much better to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
You state that your concern is with the economic repercussions; why contribute to China’s means of exercising her economic moves against us? Are you motivated by personal gain more than concern for your homeland? Are your factories contributing to our horrible trade deficit or do they assist the U.S. in some way? What motivates your investing in factories in China rather than the United States? Does this thinking have something to do with being a Kerry supporter? Were his many “photo ops with the common man” proof of his American red blood or were they merely a “red path of Heinz Catsup” to his back pocket?
Perhaps you have equal investments in the U.S.? I believe that adding to our local economy for the benefit of the American working men and women would be part of the solution. Please help me understand if there are reasons other than ones own personal gain for investing in our own potential economic disaster… as you predict.
Perhaps we’ll all become hobos one day, consuming your products, stamped with “Made in China” on the bottom.
17
fliterman
// Mar 18, 2007 at 11:02 pm
PeterGun - FYI, the investments I mentioned are with two large US corporations, not Chinese. Both are based in California but have worldwide markets. Nevertheless, they both have very close ties to China as I mentioned, from a production standpoint, partnerships, and much more importantly with China as a current and future, monstrous market for their US goods and services.
The success of these and other US companies in China not only helps to mitigate our enormous trade deficit, but also creates more jobs in California as well as benefiting my and all their other (mostly US citizens) stockholders’ portfolios.
Therefore, when China/US tensions escalate, these US companies suffer, and so does their stock price. But equally important, so does the stability of the Chinese economy.
Otherwise, I’m sorry to disappoint you in not discussing political blather.
18
PeterGunn
// Mar 19, 2007 at 12:36 pm
fliterman…
Thank you for taking the time to clear that up. I’m happy you’re invested in U.S. Companies; it wasn’t clear from your earlier post in which companies in China your investments exist.
As far as political blather goes, I’m glad you don’t wish to indulge yourself in “blather”. Many of us don’t feel that our political views fall in the “blather” category; in other words my blather may be your views and vice versa.
I’m happy to see you aren’t interested in getting drawn into any more political disucssions on this site. After all, Major Mike has first call and you really have only one face to give.
By the way, if you remembered the TV show, you would know my alias is spelled with two “n’s”, PeterGunn.
19 Irregular Warfare | Neptunus Lex // Dec 4, 2008 at 3:09 pm
[...] It’s SysAdmin and Leviathan. [...]
20
Marianne Matthews
// Dec 4, 2008 at 3:20 pm
PeterGunn … I not only remember the TV show, I remember the handsome alpha-type guy who played you … Craig Stevens. He looked like a real person, not like the usual Hollywood type weenie. Whatever happened to him? Do you know?
Just reminiscing …
Marianne
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