Great Powers

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  Fast-forward to the Cold War’s end and we see America inexorably drawn into the same sort of System Administrator role regarding globalization’s rapid advance that our government and army assumed during our nation’s rapid surge westward following the Civil War. It’s really just a matter of substituting some of the key dynamics. If gold drew America’s security umbrella westward in the mid-nineteenth century, oil drew the same umbrella eastward to the Persian Gulf over the past several decades, with supertankers and their well-traveled “sea lines of communication” serving as the railroads of this era. Not surprisingly, given the complexity and geographic reach of these activities, the U.S. national security establishment has turned increasingly to contractors to fill in the blanks of its capabilities and to reduce operating costs.

  With each overseas military intervention, then, the role of prominent contractors grew. Kellogg Brown & Root—whose previous incarnation, Brown & Root, built 85 percent of the military infrastructure used by American forces in Vietnam—first achieved significant prominence in the Balkans interventions of the mid-1990s. When you travel to remote U.S. military facilities inside the Gap today, as I have on repeated occasions, you’ll find that many of KBR’s employees are actually Balkans natives who joined the company during those conflicts. In Iraq, the companies that received the biggest boost were those providing private security guards and military/police training, such as Blackwater, DynCorp, and Triple Canopy.Blackwater’s stunning rise from struggling start-up to billion-dollar global enterprise recalls that of the Pinkerton Agency. Having achieved its initial fame by guarding the vulnerable new leaders of countries torn asunder by civil strife (the CPA’s Paul Bremer in Iraq, then Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai), Blackwater now aspires to provide intelligence services to governments and private companies alike, along with armed relief services to the international community—founder Erik Prince’s dream of fielding a private army to settle Darfur’s increasingly lawless situation (a “Janjaweed-Be-Gone” solution, as one Blackwater executive puts it).

  As the controversy over Blackwater’s role in killing Iraqis (and with it, questions over who is ultimately responsible for governing Blackwater’s conduct) demonstrates, there are plenty of new rule sets that need to be constructed for this blending of private and public security elements engaged in frontier-settling activities. But for our purposes, the key thing to keep in mind is that this trend toward outsourcing much of American foreign policy activities is both pervasive and decades in the making, not surprisingly, tracking quite nicely with globalization’s rapid expansion around the planet beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Go back to that time period and you’ll find the U.S. Agency for International Development recasting itself from being a direct provider of foreign aid to essentially playing the role of pass-through funder of private U.S. development companies. You’ll also see the U.S. military letting its first LOG-CAP (Logistics Civil Augmentation Program) omnibus contract in 1985, effectively outsourcing the operation of U.S. military facilities overseas to KBR. By the time we reached the year 2000, more than $200 billion in total U.S. federal contracts was being spent each year outside the United States, and that total has roughly doubled since then. The Defense Department accounts for the bulk of that spending (almost 70 percent), with the departments of State and Homeland Security (combined) representing another 4 to 5 percent.

  Back to the arguments of what it takes for America to be successful in waging a global counterinsurgency campaign: If COIN is expensive and long and succeeds primarily in terms of generating local economic growth, doesn’t it make sense that we’d see a greater blending of public and private efforts in these frontier economies? Moreover, as Galula noted, insurgencies tend to be cheap to operate and thus extremely fluid in their ability to change tactics. States, by contrast, tend to be rigid in their overall approaches, changing their policies and their spending priorities slowly. By outsourcing more of America’s efforts to stabilize Gap regions to private-sector players, the U.S. government is simply tapping the same entrepreneurial pool of talent it previously exploited in taming the American West: people and companies willing to take higher risks in return for higher rewards. Plus, by being more demand-sensitive than governments, private companies seek to turn “early-entry” opportunities into lasting markets that service local needs—the very essence of globalization’s networking function.

  By casting this long war first and foremost as a public-sector venture (America’s military, America’s foreign aid, America’s diplomacy, America’s strategic communications), the United States excessively narrows its grand strategic vision—not to mention its options. Globalization is not a government plot but a planet-spanning force driven primarily by the rising, private-sector demands of those 3 billion new capitalists. Americans need to distinguish public-sector supply (a response) with private-sector demand (the driver), for it’s the latter that constitutes the most awesome power within a global economy. We may get bored or tired or angry enough to withdraw from the world, but those people will not simply call off globalization to accommodate America’s latest populist whim. We may have started this party, but it stopped being ours to organize a long time ago—much less call off.

  To be effective, then, America’s grand strategy needs to connect its total DIME package—as much as possible—to those tail-end “E” players in the private sector, thus avoiding the self-delusion that globalization expands primarily in response to public-sector supply. This is the grand illusion of our age: the notion that the Gap will be shrunk in direct relation to the Core’s public-sector aid or regime-toppling exercises. While it’s true that during the Cold War most infrastructure development inside the so-called Third World came as a result of the West’s official development aid (a public-sector supply “push” function), the truth today is that the vast majority of infrastructure development ($22 trillion over the next decade alone) inside emerging and developing economies comes as a result of private-sector demand “pull”—those 3 billion new capitalists and all the resources they need to catch up in economic development.

  We want to get in front of all that money, then, and not just in front of all the social blowback those aggressive investments trigger. We want to ride globalization’s strongest currents, not swim against them in some unilateralist, kinetic fit of pique.

  THE INESCAPABLE REALIGNMENT: REBLENDING DIPLOMACY, DEFENSE, AND DEVELOPMENT

  President George W. Bush’s 2002 National Security Strategy is best known for its enunciation of the military doctrine of preemptive war. More lasting and important was its far more subtle argument that development and diplomacy are the equals of defense when it comes to victory in the long war against violent extremism. Taking that high-level cue, the U.S. Agency for International Development began promoting the so-called 3D approach of blending each element far more synergistically than was being done in either the Afghanistan or the Iraq occupation. Based on my interviews locally for a 2007 Esquire story on the rise of U.S. Africa Command, ground zero for this new way of thinking appears to have been the USAID mission in Nairobi, Kenya, one of USAID’s larger missions with responsibility for much of the agency’s programs across the Horn of Africa.

  Of course, USAID wasn’t the only government entity calling for such a blend. General James Mattis had been arguing, right from the start of his nation-building exercise with the Marines’ 1st Infantry Division in southern Iraq that “jobs, jobs, jobs!” was the primary method of diminishing popular support for an insurgency. The COIN field manual, in arguing for an 80/20 blend of nonkinetics and kinetics, was stealing a line from that great progenitor of twentieth-century “revolutionary war,” Mao Zedong, who argued, along with his generals, that successful insurgencies were only 20 percent military in nature and 80 percent political. As such, throughout the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations official Washington has been barraged by blue-ribbon-panel recommendations, op-eds by experts, and calls from the field for some sort of new, blended organizational approach that
was not quite State and not quite Defense but somehow made these two antagonistically opposed bureaucracies work with each other seamlessly. While most nongovernmental voices called out for something akin to my proposed Department of Everything Else, government-sponsored “group thinks” favored expanding the State Department, a solution few familiar with that bureaucracy’s perfectly preserved nineteenth-century style of operations found acceptable. Both Defense and State have created new senior-level positions to focus on postwar operations, but beyond that, the level of cooperation between the two remains stunningly limited. A good example? In Afghanistan, the United States has sought to hand over coordination of economic and political reconstruction to the United Nations—a sure sign of lack of coordination leading to bureaucratic capitulation.

  Again, U.S. history suggests that we’ve approached this challenge better in the past. By most historians’ judgment, the U.S. occupation of the Philippines following the Spanish-American War was quite successful both in terms of waging an effective counterinsurgency and in state-building. To create unity of command and effort, President William McKinley created two successive temporary occupational authorities, the first to deal with the immediate aftermath of the war and a second, led by future president William Howard Taft (who later performed a similar role for President Theodore Roosevelt in Cuba), to oversee the transition from military to civilian rule. General MacArthur’s postwar rule in Japan is likewise often cited as an example of successful transition, as is the Allied coalition rule over postwar West Germany. The difference in all these cases would seem to be the underlying logic that everyone involved (both military and civilian) brought to the effort—nation-building was a government-wide effort involving skill sets reasonably transferred from recent American experience back home.

  The problem we face today is that America is so far distant—historically speaking—from such nation-building experiences at home that both its leadership and its people have an innate aversion to the concept. What was once viewed as a noble endeavor is now viewed with real distaste, as if it’s morally wrong to “impose” a better form of governance upon a society typically lacking a functioning version altogether. The downside, of course, is that we know what the libertarian paradises of the Gap usually produce: widespread violence, disease, and starvation. As soon as America gives up on a country, expect globalization’s vultures to start circling.

  The reason American politicians resist the notion of embracing these skills to the point of creating a cabinet-level agency is that they, as well as many citizens they represent, fear America will be left with the bulk of the international responsibility, which in turn is then foisted almost solely upon our military. But here’s where the “rise of the rest,” as Zakaria calls it, works distinctly to our advantage. The reality is that our lack of institutional integrity on this subject makes it harder to attract other nations to our cause, as well as the far more crucial private sector in general. By performing badly, America advertises its incompetence—hardly a turn-on, and by refusing to create a seriously empowered bureaucratic center of gravity, we make it almost impossible for our collective nation-building effort to be approached from outside, a complaint I hear constantly from senior executives of major multinational corporations. The Counterinsurgency Field Manual, for example, lists fourteen federal departments or agencies, in addition to the Department of Defense, that are logically considered “key organizations” in any coordinated COIN campaign. Meanwhile, in the field, Provincial Reconstruction Teams attempt to blend all such contributions on the ground. In between, however, a bureaucratic no-man’s-land still exists (I’ll offer a fix for that in the next chapter).

  Legendary baseball manager Casey Stengel once described his job as having to “keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided.” In a nutshell, those are the two very different target populations pursued by Defense (the guys who hate us) and State (the guys who are undecided) in a COIN campaign, the problem being the fundamental lack of coordination—the absence of the manager.

  Right now, the U.S. military tries to fill that bureaucratic vacuum to the best of its ability. The reality is, however, that the Pentagon so fears falling into that void, and losing its warfighting raison d’être in the process, that innovation in that direction is often squashed as soon as it appears, along with the innovators. This is what Secretary of Defense Robert Gates derisively called “next-war-itis,” or the tendency of the big-war crowd to demean attempts to adapt the force to the current “diversionary” struggle, preferring to focus on the sexier, high-tech, conventional wars to come—great-power wars. The training mission is a good example: Colonel John Nagl, a principal author of the new COIN field manual, has long proposed a dedicated Army Advisory Corps (signifying something at least as large as a 20,000-man division) to address the ongoing task of mentoring and building up militaries in failed states. For now, this idea has been rejected by the mainstream Army leadership, which says defensively that such skills will remain a niche within the U.S. military and thus addressable solely by the far smaller special operations community. This is a common bureaucratic tactic among the big-war crowd: pushing off the responsibility of waging a global counterinsurgency to Special Forces. It is, in my mind, at best a highly romanticized reading of the strategic environment that says, “All I need are a few supermen to keep this scary world at bay,” and at worst a very self-serving expression of industry greed or military budget territoriality. Interestingly enough, the “direct action,” or trigger-puller, community within Special Operations Command (SOCOM) has taken recently to agitating for a dedicated Unconventional Warfare command that would relieve it of this growing responsibility. As far as I’m concerned, when even SOCOM starts asking for its own SysAdmin force, that’s a big hint as to where the future lies.

  Colonel Nagl, by the way, never made general and now presses his agenda quite ably from a think tank perch in Washington, D.C. Don’t be surprised to see him serving as a political appointee someday soon.

  In the end, the main obstacle to achieving a serious blending of the three D’s will be found inside the military itself, or—more specifically—within the Defense Department’s acquisition community. What Dwight Eisenhower once identified as the military-industrial complex remains alive and quite powerful today. In budget cycle after budget cycle, and even in most emergency supplementals, the major “programs of record” have continued to do well throughout this long war. Our troops in the field may go into battle underarmored or forced to buy their preferred personal equipment on their own (waiting forever for reimbursement from the government), but don’t expect the fantastically expensive Joint Strike Fighter or the Army’s overengineered Future Combat Systems to voluntarily give up much of its funding in response—this on a defense budget that is higher than it has ever been! Thus the conventional wisdom reigns: America must keep all its old, twentieth-century enemies even as it adds all its new twenty-first-century foes.

  I’ve been accused my entire career of trying to “ruin the military,” but the truth is, I’m only trying to “ruin” its force structure by improving its operational strength for the tasks I know will dominate our security agenda in the years ahead. Run through the list of insurgent tactics in the COIN field manual and tell me how many major weapons systems you can locate among its challenges: ambushes, assassination, arson, bombing and high explosives, weapons of mass destruction, demonstrations, denial and deception, hijacking and skyjacking, hoaxes, hostage-taking, indirect fire, infiltration and subversion, kidnapping, propaganda, raids or attacks on facilities, sabotage, and seizure. The harsh truth, as Barrett Tillman argues in his book What We Need: Extravagance and Shortages in America’s Military, is that we need more training, better guns, more maintenance, more linguists, no Future Combat System, less Navy power projection but more minesweepers, less stealth aircraft and more electronic countermeasures platforms, more close-air support, a whole lot more helicopters and a lot more unmanned aerial vehicles for real-time
surveillance. That is most definitely not the familiar gold mine for today’s major U.S. defense contractors, but—quite frankly—if they’re not shifting toward becoming tomorrow’s leading global security contractors, they’re lost anyhow.

  The good news is this: The deeper we move collectively into this long war, the harder it gets for the acquisition community to remain aloof and unperturbed by the proceedings. Over time, the operational experience builds up, in turn changing tactics, techniques, and procedures, in turn altering training and schoolhouse curricula, in turn unleashing doctrinal shifts and shaping new warfighting scenarios, in turn making it harder and harder for existing programs of record to justify themselves in light of all this change working its way up the bureaucratic food chain.

  And when that happens pervasively, then the serious reblending of defense, diplomacy, and development truly begins.

  THE BETTER NORMAL: THE COMMAND-AFTER-NEXT

  Two realities inform our thinking about what comes next in this long war: (1) Paul Collier’s “bottom billion” is clustered mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia; and (2) today’s radical Salafi jihadist movement is centered in Southwest Asia (from Egypt to Pakistan), a region that effectively links those two impoverished areas. To the extent that we’re successful in dislodging al Qaeda from Southwest Asia, the center of gravity is likely to shift to either Central Asia or Africa. If the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation truly represents the will of great powers surrounding Central Asia to keep that region relatively clean of violent extremism, and I think it does, then the radical Salafist movement, to the degree it either must flee Southwest Asia or attempt to expand its influence from that base, is more likely than not to move into Africa over time. The recent rise of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) in North Africa would seem to confirm that judgment. The grand strategic response to that scenario is therefore clear: accelerate Africa’s integration into the global economy in a strategic flanking maneuver designed to deny radical Islam’s successful penetration there.