The Pentagon's New Map

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  A good strategic concept is reproducible, meaning as you share it with others, you replicate that same, undeniable understanding of the crux of the issue—in mind after mind after mind. The Cold War strategy of containment was quite reproducible in the fifties and early sixties, when it seemed exceedingly clear what we had to do to keep the Soviets from extending their Iron Curtain any farther across Europe. Later, when the threat became more multifaceted, to include national liberation movements and alternative Third World development models, containment lost much of its reproducibility. It simply started meaning different things to different people. The rule sets were shifting.

  This is an important thing to remember, because we as a nation have spent the last decade trying to decipher the post-Cold War era, trying to figure out what’s the essential task or fundamental struggle. Until September 11, 2001, we basically had no reproducible strategic concepts to guide our use of military power. In fact, the closest thing we had to a reproducible strategic concept was really the opposite of one, or the notion that the post-Cold War strategic environment was defined by chaos and complete uncertainty, hence we needed to defend all against all.

  Why did the defense analytic community perform so poorly across the 1990s in terms of generating reproducible strategic concepts? Being bottom-up thinkers, most security analysts believe it’s only right to leave the big questions for the policymakers up on top. But as I learned each and every time I walked into a Pentagon briefing room, most of those policymakers are neck-deep in day-to-day management issues and are rarely able to step back from their never-ending schedule of fifteen-minute office calls to actually contemplate the big-picture question of Why?

  So much of the defense analytic community—not to mention the intelligence community—assumes that as all the worker bee analysts toil in their individual cubbyholes, someone up top fits all the disparate efforts into some logical, strategic whole. In truth, that rarely happens in the Pentagon—or elsewhere in the government. Most senior and mid-level policymakers spend their days putting out bureaucratic fires, and when someone like me comes into the room to brief them on the view from 30,000 feet, I’m typically welcomed like a fabulous diversion from their daily grind.

  I’ve given a lot of briefs over the years to special groups embedded throughout the U.S. Government that are dedicated to “strategic issues,” “strategic assessment,” “long-range planning,” and so forth, suggesting that all they do is focus on the big picture, only to have them exclaim at the end of my presentation that “nobody focuses on the big picture like you do!” This always leaves me wondering, “What the heck do you guys do all day?”

  The answer, of course, is that all these “strategic studies” groups are trapped in the production cycle of reports, quadrennial reviews, annual estimates, and long-range plans. In effect, they’re too busy cranking out big-picture material to ever spend any serious time actually thinking about the big picture. They focus on “what” and “how” but almost never ask “why?” Having put in time in some of these groups over the years, I know that the drill is meeting upon meeting until every single word on every single page (or slide) has been massaged to death. In the end, these assignments are like crack for strategic thinkers: highly addictive, providing you with delusions of grandeur, but ultimately leaving your brains fried. Do enough of these stints and you’ll start rapping Armageddon like Nostradamus.

  Why is this? These planning efforts almost universally focus on preventing horrific future scenarios rather than building positive outcomes. Despite the fact that these blue-ribbon groups and commissions enjoy the participation of some of the brightest people and generate some of the most fascinating operational concepts, I have yet to see any one of them ever come up with a compelling vision of a future worth creating. Instead, their reports mostly decry all the nasty futures that must be avoided. The only place where I’ve found positive long-range planning in the U.S. foreign policy agencies is, oddly enough, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), where I worked for close to two years as a CNA consultant in the mid-1990s. I’ve long daydreamed about what it would be like to combine the USAID’s eternal optimism with the Defense Department’s rigorous worst-case planning procedures.◈

  So how does a hungry pol-mil analyst go about generating the big picture?

  Besides avoiding every staff meeting possible, the first rule to becoming a truly long-range thinker is to do whatever it takes to weasel out of every assignment you are ever offered to actually join some official long-range planning effort. Don’t worry, you’ll actually be trapped into enough of them to check that box on your resume.

  The second rule is to read everything you can get your hands on that seriously explores future trends, meaning you almost never read any official Defense Department reports or projections. Those documents are crammed from stem to stern with fear and loathing of the future, and if they were ever correct in their projections, this planet would have self-destructed decades ago and fallen to those damn dirty apes!

  The third and most important rule is to interact with as wide a group of experts as possible while avoiding like-minded thinkers. For me, this meant spending the 1990s talking with technologists, business leaders, Wall Street heavyweights, mass media gurus, grassroots activists, social psychologists, and economic development experts, to name just a few. I have come up in the world of “military strategy,” and I spend almost none of my time with fellow strategists. Frankly, many of them are okay with that.

  In the early 1990s, the conventional wisdom around the Pentagon said we were living in a “more dangerous world” than the one we had just left behind in the Cold War. That’s right. Even though the threat of global nuclear war had basically passed, many national security strategists were touting the notion that the world was a far more chaotic place, because the Cold War’s “bipolar order” had collapsed. Because Washington and Moscow were no longer able to manage their respective camps, the global security environment was devolving into “chaos,” the new Pentagon buzzword to describe the lack of a global security rule set to replace the one that had defined the “stable” Cold War standoff between America and the Soviet Union—you know, the good old days.

  I have a lot of problems with the notion of chaos as a guiding strategic principle. It just seems like such a cop-out. So like any good Roman Catholic, I obsess instead about “rules,” or all the procedures, laws, treaties, rules of thumb, and conventional wisdom that seem to guide the actions of individuals, corporations, governments, and the international community at large. I focus on rules because wherever I find them in healthy abundance (read quality, not quantity), I know the U.S. military’s role in enforcing them will be small, because once you have rules, you typically find rule enforcers already built into the system (e.g., our very robust and distributed U.S. law enforcement network of federal, state, and local police). Likewise, wherever rules are clear because most players in that system agree they’re good, there’s not as much enforcement required, because most participants simply decide on their own that playing by the rules is the best course of action. But where you don’t find generally agreed-upon rules, or where rules are out of whack or misaligned across social sectors, then you’re talking about the future of instability, the potential for misperceptions leading to conflicts, and the clash of competing rule sets.

  It’s as simple as that: The fewer the rules, the more war you have. Back in the early 1990s, it was becoming clear to me that the world was not a more dangerous place, just one in which the rules concerning war and peace were not as clearly defined as they had been during the Cold War. So, yes, the Pentagon’s security blanket (the Soviet threat) may have been torn to shreds, but a new global security order was clearly in the works—just not one defined by a military superpower rivalry. Figuring out what the new global security rule set was and what larger forces were shaping it would determine the future strategic posture of the U.S. military.

  I knew it would not be easy to convince a
nyone in the Pentagon that there was some underlying method to the seeming madness of U.S. military crisis responses in this yet-unnamed “post-Cold War era.” Containment was coherent. Chaos is not. Throughout the 1990s, the Pentagon lurched from Somalia to Haiti to Bosnia to Kosovo, and it did so without the slightest understanding why. Each engagement had its merits, but taken as a whole, they did seem to spell chaos, and chaos is no one’s idea of a strategic paradigm, especially if you are the world’s only superpower.

  According to most people in the defense community, if you want to understand the future of conflict, you figure out the future of weapons technologies. Then you plot out who’s likely to get their hands on these technologies. Then all you need to do is assume that anyone who wants to get their hands on those technologies must inevitably fear or hate America and thus seek to do her harm and—presto! You’ve identified the future threat! Unless, of course, they are already allies and it was you who sold them the weapons in the first place.

  An even easier calculation is, Who’s an ally? Answer: Basically anyone who agrees with your definition of the future threat, or anyone to whom you’ve already sold weapons.

  See, it may look like rocket science, but it really isn’t.

  Admittedly, that sort of step-by-step threat-identification process is easy to follow, spy upon, or track in intelligence estimates. In short, you follow the technology and assume the worst about everything and everyone. It’s a lot like being a suspicious parent: “What have you got there, son? Oh, really, and what do you intend to do with that, mister? All right, then, hand it over now or you’re going to be in big trouble!”

  This sort of approach is the reason the defense community was so flabbergasted by the rise of globalization in the 1990s. As far as most security experts were concerned, it was a complete negative, for all it did was facilitate the spread of dangerous military technologies around the world. So if you described globalization as a good thing leading to the integration of economies, the development of emerging markets, and the “shrinking” of the world, you were almost immediately labeled naïve or a wide-eyed optimist. As far as the Pentagon was concerned, the post-Cold War era was one in which constant warfare raged around the planet and dangers to U.S. security grew at every turn. So what if the nineties marked the biggest peacetime expansion of the U.S. economy or a huge growth in the spread of a truly integrated global economy? Most national security doomsayers knew full well that America was heading for a nasty fall, and these genetically predisposed pessimists felt fully vindicated by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

  Of course, these same fearmongers had been touting these dangers for years and years, so if they’re right only every decade or so, then damn it, even a broken clock is right twice a day! I’ve been reading Pentagon and CIA projections about future threats for years, and each report I’ve ever perused has always said the same thing: anything is possible and eventually everything will happen.◈ That sort of brave futurology means you’ll never take one in the rear end, but it doesn’t mean you’ll be pointed in the right direction or that you’ll be able to move any faster than the flow of current events. You’ll always end up being reactive, even as the inevitable, ex post facto congressional hearings “prove,” yet again, the “disturbing” and “alarming” failures of your intelligence community to predict the unpredictable—like a 9/11. Doesn’t it seem weird that the same senators who prattle on during Sunday news programs about how the world is a chaotic, unpredictable place still always seem to show up on C-SPAN following some security disaster to decry yet another “intelligence failure”? Who are these people kidding?

  Rather than dwell on the unpredictability of future threats or attacks, our strategic vision for national security needs to focus on growing the community of states that recognize a stable set of rules regarding war and peace, as in “These are the conditions under which it is reasonable to wage war against identifiable enemies to our collective order.” Growing that community of like-minded states is simply a matter of identifying the difference between “good” and “bad” regimes, and rallying the former to work collectively to encourage the latter to change their ways, applying military power when diplomacy alone does not do the trick. But changing “bad” states to “good” ones requires that we generate some broadly accepted definition of what a “good state” is, meaning a government that plays by the security rules we hold dear—like “Don’t harbor transnational terrorists within your territory” and “Don’t seek weapons of mass destruction.” Enunciating that rule set is the most immediate task in this global war on terrorism, and promoting the global spread of that security rule set through our use of military force overseas (e.g., preemptive war against regimes that openly transgress the rule set) is our most important long-term goal in this struggle.

  But the growth of any global security rule set reflects the underlying economic reality of the world at large. In the Cold War, that security rule set reflected the bifurcation of the global economy into capitalist and socialist camps. So where do we draw a similar line today? In the era of globalization, we draw that line between those parts of the world that are actively integrating their national economies into a global economy, or what I call globalization’s Functioning Core, and those that are failing to integrate themselves into that larger economic community and all the rule sets it generates, or those states I identify as constituting the Non-Integrating Gap. Simply put, when we see countries moving toward the acceptance of globalization’s economic rule sets, we should expect to see commensurate acceptance of an emerging global security rule set—in effect, agreement on why, and under what conditions, war makes sense.

  Where this global security rule set spreads and finds mass acceptance, the threat—by definition—will diminish. Because if the economic rule sets are fair and equitably applied, “losers” or “unhappy” players will find sufficient political opportunities, within the rules, to press their cases for adjustment, restitution, and the like (like Canada going to the World Trade Organization to protest U.S. tariffs on lumber—no soldiers, just lawyers). Moreover, as political and military cooperation grows among the states within the Functioning Core, their collective ability to absorb the disruptive blows unleashed by terrorists and other bad events will inevitably grow. In effect, that which does not kill globalization makes it stronger: the world gets blindsided by AIDS, wakes up a bit, and then handles SARS better, which in turn only makes us smarter and more prepared for the SARS-after-next. The preparations for Y2K had the same positive effect on our recovery from 9/11.

  If we apply that sort of approach to the global security system, then we break out of the Pentagon’s tendency to view U.S. national security as somehow divorced from—or worse, exacerbated by—the spread of economic globalization. Instead, we begin to understand the threat less in terms of anyone, anywhere getting his hands on dangerous technology and more in terms of which players, governments, and even entire regions count themselves either in or out of the expanding global rule set we call globalization. Up to now, the U.S. Government has tended to identify globalization primarily as an economic rule set, but thanks to 9/11, we now understand that it likewise demands the clear enunciation and enforcement of a security rule set as well.

  When we view the global security environment as divided between those states that adhere to globalization’s emerging security rule set (the Core) and those that do not (the Gap), we begin to understand that the real sources of instability in our world are not only concentrated in those “off-grid” areas but are likewise found anywhere that rule sets are out of whack—even at home.

  What I mean by rule sets “out of whack” is when one aspect of life (say, security) seems to have fallen behind some other aspect of life (say, technology) in terms of providing sufficient rules to account for an unexpected turn of events. Identity theft is a good example: The technology of communications and finance simply leapfrogged ahead of the legal system to the point where criminals were committing crime
s that we didn’t even have names for not too long ago. Eventually enough people got burned by this new form of crime that the political system responded, passing new security rule sets that allow the police to prosecute the offenders. But until that happened, the rule sets were out of whack—too many rules in one sector but not enough in another.

  Think about 9/11 for a minute. It told us that we didn’t have enough rule sets in certain areas of our lives (e.g., airport security, visa policies), and that those rule-set gaps could easily be exploited by those who not only don’t adhere to our general rule sets but actually prefer to see them overthrown or at least kept out of their neck of the woods (e.g., Muslim extremists who dream of a Middle East greatly isolated from the “infidel” West). This kind of diagnostic approach isn’t about assigning blame or pointing fingers; that’s what Congress is for. What this sort of rule-set focus is really good for is understanding where we are in history, what the main security tasks of the era truly are, and how we can forge a comprehensive strategy for not only protecting America but likewise making the world a better place for everyone over the long haul.

  I believe that history will judge the 1990s much like the Roaring Twenties—just a little too good to be true. Both decades threw the major rule sets out of whack: new forms of behavior, activity, and connectivity arose among individuals, companies, and countries, but the rule sets that normally guide such interactions were overwhelmed. These traditional rule sets simply could not keep up with all that change happening so quickly. People were doing new things, both good and bad, for which we had to invent not just new names but entirely new rule sets to make clear to everyone what was acceptable and unacceptable behavior in this new era. That tumultuous situation of rule sets being disjointed existed within families, communities, nations—even the international security order itself.