Since September 11, 2001, it has gotten a lot harder for even experts to speak authoritatively about the rule sets governing war and peace, primarily because it seems as if the world has left one era behind and entered another that feels very different and unfamiliar. It is almost as if we were playing football one minute and then the game suddenly switched to soccer—the two sides in this conflict do not seem to be keeping score in the same way, or even playing by similar rule sets. If this “global war on terrorism” is something new, then it will naturally generate a new rule set concerning war and peace, or one that replaces the old rule set that governed America’s Cold War with the Soviet Union.
My purpose in writing this book is to explain how I think these new rule sets for war and peace will actually work in the years ahead, not just from America’s perspective but from that of the entire world. To do that, I will need to take you inside the game that is U.S. national security planning, because America is the biggest rule maker in the business of global security affairs. As I explain these rules, I will have to decode a lot of jargon, and explain the many long-running, insider debates that have shaped how the Pentagon views this new “global war.” That means I will be exploring a lot of past history before I can walk you into the future; I have to make you a student of the game so you can appreciate just how much the rule sets have changed since 9/11.
The easiest way to start explaining the new rule sets in national security is to share a story or two about what it has been like to work as a ground-floor analyst in and around the Department of Defense since the end of the Cold War in 1990, which is basically when my career began.
What does a national security analyst do? I directed research projects, meaning I would spend several months looking into a specific question or issue that some higher-up in the Pentagon food chain decided needed addressing, because either it was a new problem or it was an old one for which new answers were desired. At the end of this research—which consisted mostly of reading other experts’ similar reports, reviewing any real-world data from past military operations, speaking to former policymakers with lots of experience, and sometimes simply brainstorming new approaches with fellow analysts—I would write up my findings in a formal report and deliver that document to the sponsor of the project along with a set of recommendations for future action. This formal reporting process usually included a face-to-face meeting with the sponsor, during which the project director would summarize the research team’s analysis in a briefing, meaning I would deliver an oral presentation of the report organized around a series of slides projected onto a screen.
Since I was a specialist in political-military issues, a lot of times what I did in these projects was simply to review existing Department of Defense policy to see if it still made sense as the world outside continued to change and evolve. As you might imagine, many such “policy reviews” were conducted in the early 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet threat. It was here that I realized how hard it was going to be to get the Pentagon out of the Cold War mind-set and start adapting to a radically different world.
Playing Jack Ryan
My sister Maggie has always suspected I really work for the Central Intelligence Agency, and that my pretense of being a “national security analyst” is just a cover. Like most people I know, she simply doesn’t believe that the military pays me just to sit around and think about the future of the world. But that is basically what I do: I worry about everything.
In the movies, anyway, lowly analysts are constantly cracking codes or discovering huge plots to launch a global war. Then the soundtrack kicks in, our normally mild-mannered hero grabs a weapon, and it’s off to the exciting if improbable climax, where he gets to shoot the foreign spy, recover the stolen computer disk, or maybe defuse the weapon of mass destruction just as the counter hits 0:01.
In The Hunt for Red October, Tom Clancy’s hero, Jack Ryan, a mere Naval Academy professor with good connectivity inside the intelligence community, pulls off what every real pol-mil analyst dreams of: the briefing of a lifetime to senior decision makers confronting a major international crisis. But more than just narrating slides in front of some principals, Ryan convinces a room of Cold Warriors that now is the time to extend an olive branch to a renegade Soviet submarine captain seemingly hell-bent on starting World War III. Of course, there’s gunplay and all sorts of close calls as the story unfolds, but in the end Ryan actually brings an entire Soviet submarine crew in from the cold. It’s a wonderfully hopeful ending, and you walk out of the theater thinking maybe—just maybe—we’ve turned a corner with this “evil empire.”
Well, I actually played a similar role in making peace with the Russian Navy following the end of the Cold War. I didn’t shoot anyone or pound my fist on the table in front of the President, but I basically got to play the Jack Ryan role in the way it actually happens in the real world. In doing so, I got my first great exposure to the shifting global rule sets that would come to define the 1990s.
The story begins in the winter of 1990. I was just starting my first professional job as an analyst within a tiny think tank working directly for the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO). This group of select analysts and naval officers, called the Strategic Policy Analysis Group (SPAG), was—like everything else in the defense community—undergoing serious transformation following the fall of the Berlin Wall. SPAG had been set up in the late 1980s to help the CNO brainstorm new nuclear warfighting strategies. But when the Soviet Union collapsed, the group lost much of its luster and was passed off to the Navy’s prime operations research contractor, the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA).
My first assignment with SPAG was to review the Navy’s options for potential upcoming naval arms control negotiations with the successor Russian Navy. The official U.S. Government position on naval arms control had long been “just say no!” Frankly, my implied task was simply to rebless that conventional wisdom. So I made the rounds in Washington, D.C., interviewing all the usual suspects (the so-called Formers, or individuals who previously held high national security positions in the government) and visiting various Western embassies. When it came time to write the report, I was paralyzed by the illogic of the starting premise: that arms control still mattered with an enemy whose military forces stood on the cusp of an unprecedented peacetime decline. I mean, their economy was collapsing, so certainly their military would shrink dramatically over the 1990s. If that was true, why bother with arms control?
Enlisting the help of one maverick naval intelligence expert by the name of Ken Kennedy, I ginned up a series of alternative future scenarios for the Russian Navy, ranging from an “Ugly” one, in which their warfighting capabilities improved even as their fleet shrank, to a “Good” one, in which their entire fleet withered away by the century’s end. Our calculations were exceedingly simple, back-of-the-envelope stuff: figuring out the composite age of their existing fleet, how much it would cost to keep those ships up and running, and what new ships and subs they would logically build across the nineties as budgets were radically slashed. It was not the usual way intel experts went about their business of forecasting the future Soviet military. In fact, Ken confessed that this approach pretty much went against his entire career up to that point.
The bottom line, which I packaged into a PowerPoint brief, was quite direct: since the Soviet Navy was going away, the U.S. Navy should immediately ditch arms control and instead dramatically ramp up its military-to-military cooperation with the Russian Navy. In effect, I argued that we should make immediate peace with the Russians and become their mentors as they transformed their fleet from a threatening blue-water navy with global reach to a minor, Coast Guard-like force.
My first-ever professional brief came in the spring of 1991 in a large conference room at the Center for Naval Analyses. The event was a regular quarterly meeting of one- and two-star admirals in charge of implementing Navy policy, a meeting in which they reviewed our think tank’s latest research. It was a big deal to have m
y work showcased in this manner, since I was not the project director on this one but only a lowly analyst. I was nervous as hell, because I had never delivered a brief before to the top brass, and I had been forewarned by colleagues that if they did not like what they heard, I would know it immediately.
In that presentation I made my impassioned, Jack Ryan-like plea to immediately embrace the Russian Navy as a new ally. What these guys were expecting was that I would say it still made sense to stonewall those devious Russians on naval arms control, but instead here I was going on and on about rapidly increasing all our cooperation with our former enemy—guys against whom these admirals had spent a lifetime planning for war. It went over like a lead balloon. Several of the admirals openly questioned my sanity. One admiral wondered aloud if I was a “pinko,” or “just plain stupid.” That got a lot of laughs around the room, and immediately my credibility was shot.
Another announced gravely that he had “joined this navy to fight the Soviets, not to be their mentor.” Pretty soon the room was simply buzzing with all these negative rejoinders and I knew I had lost control of the situation, which is just about as bad as it gets during a brief. Usually at that moment, someone senior will pipe up, “Let’s let the man finish his brief before we start taking it apart,” but this time no one did. The senior-most admiral just stared at me like I was a complete waste of his time.
My immediate superior, a Navy captain, had no choice. He walked up to my overhead projector and flicked off the lamp, pulling me offstage before I could do any more harm—something I have yet to see occur again in all my years in this business. He later called it a “mercy killing.” Needless to say, I was embarrassed beyond belief.
Right after the brief, one of my colleagues, a newly minted Navy captain named Phil Voss, came up to me and opened my regulation dark-blue sports jacket, looking for “smoking holes.” Then he put his arm around me and said something I’ll never forget: “Tom, a year from now, no one in this room today will remember a word of what you said. What they will remember is that you did not lose your cool under fire.”
About six weeks later, communist hard-liners in Moscow staged the infamous August coup that culminated with Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank, exhorting the masses to take back the government. Naturally, once word of the coup hit the airwaves, I felt about three feet tall. How could I have been so naïve? So stupid? I was actually afraid to walk down office hallways, the snickering was so loud. I thought I was finished in the business. I mean, if this was my first strategic call, how was I ever going to live it down?
All’s well that ends well. The coup collapsed within three days, and a whole new dialogue immediately opened up between Moscow and Washington. In an unprecedented twist for a novice analyst, I began giving the brief over and over again throughout the intelligence community, pushing my argument for expanded military cooperation with the Russians more aggressively with each audience. I was the only guy in the business with a detailed vision for this unexpected moment in history, so every time I briefed, someone in the audience would decide that So-and-so somewhere higher up the policy food chain “absolutely needs to see this immediately!”
The words every analyst longs to hear from the “principal” (the senior-most audience member) during a brief are “Who has seen this brief?” When you hear that, you know you have just passed through another gate and someone higher up awaits. Eventually, I made it all the way up to the three-star admiral in charge of Navy policymaking, Vice Admiral Leighton (Snuffy) Smith. It had taken me six months of delivering the brief well over a dozen times, virtually unheard of for a lowly CNA analyst.
Then came the real payoff. About six months after the failed August coup, the White House called over to the Pentagon to ask Admiral Smith what the Navy’s plans were for expanding navy-to-navy ties with the Russians. According to his deputy at the time, Rear Admiral Jim Cossey, Snuffy turned to him and barked, “Well, where’s that plan for making nice with the Russians?” Cossey blurted, “Give me a minute, sir,” and walked back to his desk, where he had a copy of my report. In it, on page 19, was a chart detailing sixteen ways the U.S. Navy could expand cooperation with the Russian Navy.◈ As Admiral Cossey told me later, “I simply ripped out that page and handed it to him, saying, ‘Got it right here, Admiral!’ ”
Not exactly a Tom Clancy novel, but it’s how things actually work inside the Pentagon. That report was on the admiral’s desk because someone close to him had made sure it got there. That someone got it there because word had gotten around the Pentagon that this report was worth reading. That word got around because I gave all those briefs—winning battles one briefing room at a time. It’s one thing to have the right answer, but it’s another thing to have it in the right person’s hand at the right time. In the movies, that’s just one dramatic scene, but in real life it is more a matter of plugging away month after month, even when a lot of people think you have a screw loose.
Admiral Smith ended up proposing most of the list to his Russian counterpart in a subsequent summit. Only about half of the ideas came to fruition in the 1990s, primarily because the decline of the Russian Navy was as profound as we had predicted in the “Good” scenario.◈ Naturally, back in 1991 most knowledgeable security experts considered that scenario to be the least plausible and therefore most fantastic. To these die-hard Cold Warriors, the idea that the Soviet military would simply melt away in a few short years was simply too bizarre to entertain.
As for me, I walked away from the experience convinced that the old rules no longer applied and that dramatic new rules were coming to the business of national security.
When I gave my “let’s-make-peace” brief time and time again into the fall of 1991, I often noticed that while the admirals around the table vigorously shook their heads in disagreement, the younger officers lining the back walls nodded their heads in assent. This was a huge lesson for me: if one was going to change things, one needed to focus on the mid-level officers, or the commanders and the captains. Because in just a few short years, they would be running the Navy, and they realized, intuitively, that the future threat environment they would be dealing with would not revolve around the Soviets but around something or somebody else. I didn’t pretend to have a good description of that new world order back in 1991, but many of those junior officers (lieutenant commanders and below) were roughly my age (late twenties) and must have seen me as someone who would be seriously working that case in the coming years—someone not trapped in the past.
Breaking from the Cold War wasn’t exactly easy for me, not after spending ten years in college preparing to do analytic battle with the “evil empire.” Hell, I expected to spend my life helping to end the Cold War! I wasn’t even thirty years old, for crying out loud, and already I was a former Soviet expert on the former Soviet Union.
Much like the U.S. military, I felt the need to reinvent myself. The only thing I was certain of was that if we did our jobs right, we wouldn’t be calling it the “post-Cold War era” for long. The new rule sets were already coming at us from all angles—from technology, international trade, generational demographics, and the damaged global environment.
The trick, as I saw it, was simply to sharpen my listening skills, for all the clues were already appearing in the emerging strategic environment, waiting for all of us to connect the dots. To do that, I knew I needed to spend most of my time talking to smart people outside the military. In short, I needed to focus my career on helping the military reconnect to that larger world outside the Pentagon.
New Rules For A New Era
Across the first half of the 1990s, the Defense Department ordered think tanks like CNA to conduct major research projects examining how U.S. military forces should change in response to the “emerging environment”—one not dominated by the old Soviet threat. I participated in several of these studies, serving as a deputy project director to a senior CNA manager.
One feeling I never could shake as I worked with the Pentagon during
these years was that the defense community was becoming increasingly irrelevant to the process of global change. So much seemed to be going on that had almost nothing to do with the employment of U.S. military power. In fact, whenever we did send our forces around the world, it always seemed as though we were babysitting chronic “bad boys” (e.g., Saddam Hussein) or basket cases (e.g., Haiti, Somalia) on the margin. As the millennium neared its end, it seemed as if it were the Pentagon itself being left behind by the great sweep of history. It seemed as though the military was becoming increasingly divorced from this amazing world of rapid integration and increasing flows of trade, capital, ideas, and people. When the planet collectively decided to name that phenomenon “globalization,” the Pentagon instinctively distanced itself further. I began using the term widely in my work in the mid-1990s, only to be chastised for my “globaloney” by more than a few colleagues.
My attempt to focus on globalization proved very hard for me as an analyst, because I was working in one of the world’s premier operations research facilities, the Center for Naval Analyses. CNA attracts a lot of logical engineer types who like to crush large process problems down to manageable (and countable) tasks. Brilliant as many of these analysts are, they don’t spend much time pondering the imponderables. To them, the phrase “big picture” is more epithet than illumination. Nonetheless, CNA was almost a perfect finishing school for someone who had spent years at Harvard learning how to think abstractly about international relations. Surrounded by all these hard, or physical, scientists (I being a soft, or social, scientist), I was forced to introduce a lot more rigor into my thinking, to link my strategic concepts more clearly to real-world statistics, and—most important—to constantly pursue that holy grail of operations research: reproducibility.
The Pentagon's New Map Page 2
