Great Powers

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  What this all says, in the end, is that the Bush administration, in its decisions to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, unwittingly pushed most of the U.S. military to evolve in a manner consistent with Franklin Roosevelt’s preferred grand strategy of aggressively expanding American-style capitalism globally in the aftermath of World War II. In a perfect post-WWII “new world order,” Soviet Russia would have offered little resistance to FDR’s grand scheme. But that’s what makes our current global environment so inviting: The clear absence of a competing superpower allows America to optimize its grand strategy, as well as the U.S. military, to this ambitious end—making globalization truly global as quickly as possible. In effect, today we are Theodore Roosevelt’s big stick plus Franklin Roosevelt’s grand vision minus Harry Truman’s duty to hold off the Soviets. Right now we’re living the dream: the power in place, the environment prepared, and nobody of consequence standing in our way. Indeed, on one level we can thank God for providing Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to sharpen our focus somewhat and provide a measure of urgency.

  That’s why the most important question today concerning the long war is not “How do you view radical Islam?” but rather “How do you view authoritarian capitalism?” If America’s grand strategy cannot move beyond China as its preferred force-optimizing threat (Russia’s economic trajectory is far less impressive), it will so retard our military’s much-needed evolution toward addressing the long war’s many challenges as to make superpower rivalry with China inevitable.

  I say again: To the extent America bungles the long war and thus puts globalization at risk, we buy ourselves inevitable conflict with China, presaging America’s fall from superpower status.

  THE NEW NORMAL: THE LONG (POST)WAR

  The first thing Americans need to realize about what comes next is that we’ve done it plenty of times before, meaning most of our wars have been anything but crusades. As historian Max Boot argued in his book The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, there is nothing new to be found in undeclared wars or those without clear exit strategies, wars that were unpopular or lacked a “vital” national interest, much less wars that saw America meddle in the affairs of broken states in the manner of a social worker. The trick in all such interventions is to make sure we detach ourselves from the total-war mentality that democracies typically bring to large-scale conflicts. As soon as “in for a penny” becomes “in for a pound,” we find ourselves destroying the village in order to save it. When generals like Petraeus and Mattis talk about those who “get it,” this is what they mean: Doing no harm to the people comes before doing—even great—harm to the enemy. Success in small wars is measured by less overall violence, not your casualties relative to your enemy’s. Once we lose sight of that larger political and economic context, there’s no amount of high technology and firepower that can save us. Revolutionary wars are never won on battlefields but in the hearts and minds of the population. America won its revolution when it declared its independence in 1776; the war, which lasted until 1781, was just about convincing the British. Having said that, history tells us that most insurgencies fail because either local conditions improve or the central authority grants the locals sufficient autonomy. In short, there’s more than one way to drain a swamp.

  In terms of grand strategy, the trick with small wars is that you’re forced to accept higher levels of tactical risk in order to reduce strategic risk. As Sewall argues in her introduction to the Counterinsurgency Field Manual: “Getting out and about among the population allows U.S. troops to gather information and more effectively destroy the insurgents. Exercising restraint in applying firepower means fewer enemies to attack your forces. Thus short-term losses can yield success more rapidly and efficiently.” I would argue that this explanation constitutes, in a nutshell, the logic of my proposed grand strategy of making globalization truly global: By engaging the forces of disconnectedness inside the Gap, we expose ourselves to more short-term trouble than we’d otherwise have to face in isolation or withdrawal. But there’s no more efficient way to achieve our ultimate security than to take advantage of globalization’s currently rapid advance, allying us openly with its most prominent agents of change. Our trade-off is admittedly difficult: We sacrifice “force protection” (the safety of our troops) in order to reduce collateral damage. To me, this is the real American way of war, one that connects our actions to our innate spirituality and desire to avoid doing unto others what we would not accept from them. In this way, as Sewall notes, good COIN helps America’s warriors find their way back to the Geneva Conventions in this long (post)war.

  There is the danger that COIN, in its growing popularity, will suffer the same fate as network-centric warfare: Becoming synonymous with everything, it comes to signify nothing. Counterinsurgency alone will not defeat all terrorist threats or fix all failed states or come anywhere close to comprehensively shrinking the Gap. The dangers of “doctrinal miscegenation,” as Sewall puts it, are real. The military loves rank, and so there’s the immediate tendency with any popular answer to assume that everything that came before it can be tucked under its umbrella. Still, it’s important that COIN does provide doctrinal “cover” for those activities previously relegated to only those operations that involve coalitions or the United Nations, such as nation-building, stability operations, and disaster relief. In that way, COIN provides military rationales that allow us to justify those uses of our forces as being immediately relevant to the larger grand strategy of shrinking the Gap, “draining the swamp,” and what have you. All can now be linked to a military strategy that envisions global counterinsurgency operations against a global insurgency.

  Again, if we didn’t have al Qaeda, it would behoove us to invent it at this time in history, if only to save us from the strategic folly of self-fulfilling prophecies of rising great powers inevitably triggering global conflict. Exploited by the right kind of U.S. leadership, bin Laden and his ilk are history’s gift to American grand strategy: the mirror image of a

  “closer.” If you find that imagery disturbing, let me submit that there’s hardly anything more meaningful in dying prematurely from violence perpetrated by extremists than there is in dying from disease enabled by economic deprivation. Exposing us somewhat to the former in the service of radically reducing the latter is what I call a victory so subtle that our enemies won’t even realize they’re losing. Good counterinsurgency is thus ideological inoculation—pure and simple. Sarah Sewall declares that COIN cannot be used to support a revolutionary grand strategy, because it “favors peace over justice.” I say, Fine. America’s revolutionary grand strategy is globalization itself and globalization thrives on peace while delivering justice first and foremost through income growth, expecting the locals to master the political equations in a direct relationship to their greed for more success. Thus the dynamics of insurgency apply only in specific conditions of critical mass resistance to globalization’s penetrating connectivity—specifically, when elites fight to keep it out because it threatens their oligarchic hold over national wealth or when extremists do the same as part of their campaign to achieve dictatorial power.

  What I like best about COIN doctrine is that it moves our strategic thinking back to being population-centric. In counterinsurgency, the focus is on the people, because the people are the prize. In an interconnected and interdependent world, made more so each passing year by globalization’s advance, force-on-force thinking in security affairs is very dangerous. By force-on-force, I mean the tendency to think it’s all about our badasses versus their bad guys: We kill more of them than they kill of ours. The corollary in strategic nuclear warfare is both first strike and missile defense, because either way, our promise is that “our missiles will kill your missiles before your missiles can harm us.” The intellectual breakthrough afforded by the concept of mutually assured destruction is that it forced both sides to become population-centric and thus do something with nuclear weapons that humans had never done before wit
h any new, more advanced and more powerful weapon—refuse to use them. By re-focusing our global counterinsurgency on the people, we reframe the essential competition with this Reagan-like question: “Who’s doing more to improve your pursuit of happiness?” If that sounds like bribing our way to victory, well . . . you just might be an American.

  Good COIN, persistently pursued, also speaks to the logic of both my Leviathan/SysAdmin split and the need for a department that does “everything else.” On the first point, consider this excerpt from David Galula’s COIN bible, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (1964):

  Adaptation of the Armed Forces to Counterinsurgency Warfare: As long as the insurgent has failed to build a powerful regular army, the counterinsurgent has little use for heavy, sophisticated forces designed for conventional warfare. For his ground forces, he needs infantry and more infantry, highly mobile and lightly armed. . . . For his air force, he wants ground support and observation planes . . . plus short-takeoff transport planes and helicopters, which play a vital role. . . . The navy’s mission, if any, is to enforce a blockade. . . . In addition, the counterinsurgent needs an extremely dense signal network. The counterinsurgent, therefore, has to proceed to a first transformation of his existing forces along these lines, notably to convert into infantry units as many unneeded specialized units as possible. The adaptation, however, must go deeper than that. At some point in the counterinsurgency process, the static units . . . will find themselves confronted with a huge variety of nonmilitary tasks which have to be performed in order to get the support of the population, and which can be performed only by military personnel, because of the shortage of reliable civilian political and administrative personnel. . . . Thus, a mimeograph machine may turn out to be more useful than a machine gun, a soldier trained as a pediatrician more important than a mortar expert, cement more wanted than barbed wire, clerks more in demand than riflemen.

  Update the technology references and Galula, a French officer writing almost a half-century ago, basically captures all the tension inside the U.S. military today as it struggles with COIN in the long (post)war environments of Afghanistan and Iraq. As Galula avers wryly, “There is room in the armed forces . . . for the cadres who cannot shed their conventional-warfare thinking. They can be assigned to the mobile units” (meaning the Leviathan-like forces that engage boxed-in insurgents in conventional fights whenever possible). In other words, if you’re not smart enough to be SysAdmin, don’t worry, we can still find a spot for you and your trigger finger.

  As for the logic of designating some coordinating agency for all this activity, Sewall admits that the Counterinsurgency Field Manual “raises a larger question: if the United States is going to conduct counterinsurgency, will it broaden the associated division of labor and build the necessary civilian capacities?” If not, Sewall seems to suggest, the new COIN doctrine will remain “a moon without a planet to orbit,” lacking the “broader strategic framework” that must strike the American public as “compelling.”

  Here’s what I see in all my travels around the U.S. military and national security establishment, to whom I give dozens of speeches each year: agencies and commands across the dial offering up their preferred version of a SysAdmin-style force. The question is, Offering up to whom? The Navy elevates humanitarian assistance and disaster response to a “core mission,” a new Army manual declares the mission of stabilizing war-torn nations “equal in importance to defeating adversaries on the battlefield,” the Marines repurpose amphibious landing ships for disaster-relief duties, the Air Force designs a bomb to kill people while not harming infrastructure, and Congress wants to create a Civilian Response Corps and stick it in a State Department unable to fill its own quota of personnel in Iraq. Doesn’t this all strike you as myriad solutions seeking some institution that will actually own the problem?

  Meanwhile the burden of duty gets heavier for those who get stuck “holding the dripping bag of manure,” as Sewall derisively describes difficult postwar operations. Twenty-something Army and Marine captains are given huge chunks of territory in Iraq and told to “fix it,” leading to twenty-one-hour workdays and confessions that “I feel like Dr. Phil with guns.” Junior officers are leaving the force in droves, thanks in part to sky-high divorce rates among personnel on deployments that last fifteen months and feature seven-day workweeks. “Unity of command” in (post)war zones comes with its own harsh price, including a lack of recognition. Only five Medals of Honor have been awarded in more than five years of high-tempo operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Yes, it’s easy to throw your hands up and say, “No more Iraqs.” But if we’re honest with ourselves about the world we live in, that’s not a realistic response. Globalization is coming at these disconnected regions with a power that no military can command, driven by private-sector forces that no government can control. America can withdraw and keep its powder dry for that big war all the world’s defense contractors still dream about supplying, but that is a fool’s errand.

  The new COIN field manual brings our military back to a world it’s long ignored. Now if only we can locate enough partners, both in terms of military allies and private-sector entities, to handle the intimidating workload.

  THE GLOBAL ACCELERANT: THE PRIVATIZATION OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

  The U.S. government tends to privatize operations whenever the historical tasks at hand outpace the internal resources in hand. War is an obvious example, and the history here is clear: Not only have U. S. government operations vastly—and permanently—increased during significant and long wars, but so has government spending on contractors. Long postwars have also seen the government blur the line between direct hires and contractors, as have periods of intense integration of frontier areas. The Cold War was, in many ways, a decades-long postwar to Europe’s long civil war that saw the United States get deeply involved in Western Europe’s recovery (Marshall Plan), security (NATO), and finalizing peace-treaty negotiations (the German question that extended into the early 1970s détente process). The private-sector involvement there was enormous: the rise of the industrial side of the military-industrial complex. The other great and long war/postwar combination in American history was the Civil War, which was linked to the South’s lengthy, contentious, and violent reconstruction, as well as the stunningly rapid integration of the American West. If World War II’s staggering amount of death (concentrated in Europe) created a new sense of American international destiny, that surge merely replicated the profound sense of American national destiny that arose following the Civil War.

  What should interest us in considering American grand strategy going forward is how closely integrated the U.S. military became with private-sector interests in these previous extensive postwar experiences, especially in settling the American West after the Civil War. The U.S. Army’s bodyguarding role in the West was most explicit, starting with the protection of settler trails and railroad construction corridors, expanding into episodic wars with Native American tribes, and finally settling into the enforcement of the reservation system. Over time, the trans-Mississippi West was divided into Army “departments” that birthed some of the divisions that would later fight in Europe’s twentieth-century wars. These departments constituted the U.S. military’s original regional combatant commands—continental harbingers of America’s post-WWII global command scheme. The Indian agency system, run by civilian supervisors because Congress was uncomfortable with President Ulysses Grant’s proposal to have Army officers take charge, eventually outsourced significant portions of its operations to religious charities.

  This period constituted the first great expression of the U.S. Army’s “system administrator” role in helping to settle and integrate frontier areas, and it employed contractors galore in a variety of key roles, the most famous ones being the scouts with expertise in fighting Native Americans, with Kit Carson as the exemplar. Another classic example was William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, whose career spanned military service in
the Civil War, buffalo meat supplier to railroad workers (where he got his nickname), and extensive service as “chief of scouts” for the U.S. 3rd Cavalry during the so-called Plains Wars. More controversial was the Pinkerton Detective Agency, which found its original fame in foiling an assassination attempt on President-Elect Abraham Lincoln. It later became a major contractor to the U.S. Department of Justice, aiding in the detection and suppression of labor unrest in the East, as well as a private military contractor in the American West involved in providing security guards and tracking down criminal elements. U.S. Army personnel themselves often moonlighted in private-sector jobs to augment their meager salaries and simply to fill in downtimes, with land surveying a primary pursuit.

  For the U.S. Army, the Indian Wars were a multi-decade affair involving classic counterinsurgency tactics, including many pioneering special operations-style campaigns led by officers such as General George Crook, who famously tangled with the Apache warrior chief Geronimo in the American Southwest. The many conflicts generated more Medal of Honor winners than did every other American war save WWII and the Civil War. As Max Boot observes of America’s later, long counterinsurgency campaign in the Philippines, the vast majority of generals (twenty-six of thirty) in that successful postwar occupation had already gained similar experience back home in the Indian Wars. What the American military had first learned at home, it later practiced abroad—the purposeful generation of security in regions on the frontier of advancing economies.