The Pentagon's New Map

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  One stormy Saturday night, our band of brothers finally presented the completed brief to the Gang of Five. It was a do-or-die moment for us all, because the CNO and Commandant were scheduled to review the material within days. Either the ideas we encapsulated in this long brief would strike the flags as the new “great story” the Navy and Marine Corps would use to sell themselves to Congress and the American public, or we would have failed in our mission—something no one wanted on his personnel record. The presentation went very badly, and when the Gang of Five moved next door for a closed executive session, we could hear the yelling through the office walls. The next Monday Admiral Ted Baker was out as head of the working group, and General Wilkerson took over day-to-day operations of a much smaller collection of captains and colonels, since the bulk of them had to return to their various commands around the world according to a predetermined schedule. We had blown our deadline, and heads were beginning to roll. But worse than the fear that careers might get cut short (and some ultimately were), everyone knew there were strong institutional forces that worked against the Navy’s being able to adjust to the strategic environment that was emerging. The old joke went, “The U.S. Navy—200 years of tradition unimpeded by progress!” The Secretary had given us a free hand to come up with the right vision, but there was an overwhelming sense that we had fumbled this historic opportunity to do the right thing.

  At that point, we were down to fewer than twenty officers, all of whom were already assigned to the Washington area. We were told by the Gang of Five that we had two weeks to come to some consensus—or else. Then, a breakthrough. Going back over the brief, Wilkerson located the stumbling block that was keeping us from reaching agreement. It was actually on the first substantive slide, which laid out the “the strategic concept of the naval service.” And it all came down to one word in the first bullet.

  The bullet had begun, “The fundamental purpose of naval forces is to achieve command of the seas,” followed by a series of sub-bullets that listed some goals: “To protect U.S. citizens and territory . . . demonstrate U.S. commitment overseas and promote our interests . . .” and so on. In the final version, that bullet read: “The fundamental purpose of naval forces is to use command of the seas.”◈ Changing that verb made all the difference in the world, because in the first rendering, the United States still needed to secure command of the seas before anything else could be achieved. In the final version, command of the seas was simply assumed, and that breakthrough meant naval forces could revolutionize the way they thought about projecting U.S. combat power ashore.

  That may not sound like much of a difference at first blush, but it actually describes a turning point in human history. Think about it: Great military powers throughout history have staked their ability to wage war far from home on the power of their navies. Stretching all the way back to ancient Greece, the ability to rule the seas has essentially defined which powers are great powers.

  What the Navy was coming to grips with in 1992, as the Soviet Navy continued its decade-long collapse, was an unprecedented moment in world history: America possessed the planet’s only blue-water navy. By “blue water,” I mean a navy capable of projecting military power across all the world’s open oceans. In contrast, the rest of the world’s major states subsist largely on “green” (littoral) or “brown” (inland) fleets, meaning they have no effective reach beyond their region. Sure, a Russia today can send a few capital (or large) ships to distant waters, but they are not capable of operating on their own for any length of time. They cannot rule the waves, just ply them now and then. Frankly, the same is true for every other navy in the world today, including China’s. While that country may harbor dreams of global naval power in some distant future, let me assure you that China’s ruling Communist Party will not survive to see that day.

  Again, what is amazing about this period of history is not only that America possesses the world’s dominant navy, something that previous imperial powers have achieved—like England in the nineteenth century. What is amazing is that we own the world’s only navy with a global reach, and no other power is making any serious attempt to catch up. If you look around the world today, you see countries that have armies and air forces and what can charitably be called the equivalent of the U.S. Coast Guard. The world has effectively surrendered the seas to the U.S. Navy, and it has done so out of immense trust that America will not abuse that unprecedented power. That is the end of one great arc of human history, and the beginning of something completely different.

  Accepting this stunning reality was incredibly difficult for the U.S. Navy back in 1992. Achieving command of the seas has been the driving goal of the U.S. Navy throughout most of its existence. Saying that it was just ours for the taking was like telling a boxer that his opponent in the ring no longer had the use of his arms—the historical contest that had defined the Navy’s warrior ethos no longer existed. This is why the Navy desperately needed a new operating theory of the world once the Soviet Navy began its disappearing act. Simply put, the Navy needed to move beyond its history into something completely unprecedented. It needed to decipher the new security rule set (let’s not forget about the boxer’s ability to kick, for example) or risk becoming irrelevant to the projection of America’s air and ground forces, which no longer relied on its ability to secure the “sea lines of communication” during war. The U.S. Navy needed a new raison d’être.

  This is where Manthorpe and Mahan met in our debates over the Navy’s new, post-Cold War vision, because it was on this point that the Navy and Marines finally admitted to themselves that a fundamental aspect of their operational rule set had changed. Not surprisingly, many of the officers had a very hard time surrendering that verb (achieve), because once they did, they knew serious force structure changes would result. In other words, certain ship categories (like submarines) would be cut more than others (the sacred carriers that define our Navy) in the coming years.

  So it was not simply semantics, because those words (to achieve command of the seas) had to remain if the submarine community had any hope of limiting its losses in coming years. Careers were on the line, because opportunities for future command were on the line. Simply put, fewer subs meant fewer commands, and fewer commands meant fewer captains making it all the way to admiral over time. The dominance of the submarine community within the Navy, which stretched back several decades thanks to the dominant role of ballistic-missile submarines (read, the Big One with the Soviet Union), was coming to an end. Institutionally, this was a tectonic shift within the Department of Navy, and the Cold Worriers were not going to take this lying down.

  Wilkerson knew how hard it would be to get this group of officers to let go of that past, but unless they did, the new naval vision of focusing more directly on “influencing events ashore” could never be truly embraced. At its core, then, it was a resource issue. But it was also a question of the needs of the many (the Navy as a whole) overcoming the needs of a few (the submarine community). It was all ashore that are going ashore! You knew the Marines were champing at the bit to project power ashore, as were the fighter jocks that flew off the “big decks,” as carriers are known. The one force that would be left behind historically in the blue waters was the submarine fleet, which has struggled ever since to redefine itself as a littorally focused land-attack force.

  So here is where you begin to see how one slide—even one bullet item on one slide—can change history. I will not pretend that everything changed overnight with this brief. The naval community has suffered infighting ever since over the meaning of the white paper that ultimately resulted from our work. But substituting that one word on that one slide represented nothing less than a sea change for the U.S. Navy. Once we stated that America owned the seas and was without peer, the new naval vision—or the new rule set on war—could be pursued. The Navy was the first of the major services to recognize this massive rule-set shift because it suffered the greatest threat loss when the Soviet Union disappeared. B
oth the Army and the Air Force have other armies and air forces they can and will occasionally fight against—as in our recent wars in Iraq. But the Navy fundamentally has no other navy left to fight anymore—unless you cling to the chimera of naval war in the Taiwan Straits.

  General Wilkerson’s genius was that he never forced the issue with the group in these highly charged debates. Instead, every time the group came to some sticking point somewhere else in the brief, he would gently bring us all back to that first slide and remind us of where the crux of the matter lay. Finally, one morning, the group voted to change that first slide’s first bullet, and the rest was history.

  Well, almost. Now that we had our story ready to tell, we had to sell it to the Gang of Five. Here I thought my moment of personal glory was coming. As the captain who was preparing to give the final brief to the flags readied his slide package, I presented him with the script I had so diligently constructed over the previous weeks. To my shock, this Captain Charlie Schaefer, a good friend and colleague of mine in SPAG, refused to use my script. He was very kind in his rejection, saying he needed to be able to say what he felt needed to be said at this culminating moment. Charlie, as a submariner, had great difficulty delivering the final package to the Gang of Five, and so he planned to use that moment to raise some objections he still had to the vision as completed.

  I was crushed. All those weeks of eighteen-hour days had been—in my mind, at least—leading up to this payoff. My secret hope was that the briefing script would serve as the basis for the resulting white paper. Instead, I felt completely shut out of the moment. Angry beyond words at Charlie, I threw my text down on the floor and stormed out of the building. I did not return until the final brief occurred. The new vision was very warmly received by the Gang of Five, and orders were given to immediately put together the final written report that would serve—months later—as the basis for the historic Department of Navy white paper entitled . . . From the Sea.

  Now for the end of the story.

  A couple of days later I wandered into the group’s office spaces at CNA, looking to gather up my working papers. It was the day the final written report was due, and as I walked in I bumped into one of the two Marine colonels in charge of putting the document together. Rick “Sterno” Stearns greeted me with a great big grin. “Hey,” he said. “We used a bunch of your stuff in the final report!” I was stunned. Then Sterno told me how he and his partner, Colonel Mike Strickland, had pulled an all-nighter to get the final report stitched together. When they got stuck about halfway through the process, they found my papers strewn across the floor.

  Well, after reading some of them, they decided to include much of my material in the final report. In the end, the report consisted of a first section on grand strategy built primarily with writings from Captain Bradd Hayes, a middle section on operational concepts that utilized my write-up of the group’s debates, and a final third on future changes that the two colonels themselves had collected together from various other participants’ contributions. Colonel Stearns joked that the final document was a “real Frankenstein,” confessing, “It took us most of the night just trying to hide all the zippers.”

  . . . From the Sea represented a genuine turning point in the history of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. By admitting to themselves that the old Mahanian rule set of focusing on sea control first and foremost had been overtaken by events, the Department of Navy began a decade-long search for a new strategic map that would guide their application of this new operational vision of “influencing events ashore.” But as the new Clinton Administration took the reins in 1993, major questions still remained, such as what the dominant threat of this new era would turn out to be.

  Should America focus on influencing events ashore primarily in Asia, to deter possible rising competitors in a China or—God forbid—a Japan? Or should our focus remain centered in the Persian Gulf or the Korean peninsula, where dangerous regional hegemons needed careful watching? Or should America seek more vigorously to deal with all this rising ethnic conflict and this new category of “failing states”? To many observers in the early 1990s, the world appeared to be coming apart at the seams, making the choice difficult indeed. Would the Pentagon help build a “new world order” in this fractured security environment crammed full of lesser includeds, or would it retreat from this fractious world to focus ahead on the Big One?

  The answer is, the Pentagon tried to do both.

  The Fracturing Of The Security Market

  It is always interesting to go back and see what people in the past were predicting would happen in the future. Since seers typically predict bad things, such reviews are like chicken soup for this optimist’s soul. Things never really turn out as bad as predicted, and yet reviewing the fears behind such predictions is usually quite illuminating, because the unease underlying these fearful prognostications is invariably warranted on some level. People have an innate sense for detecting when rule sets are out of whack, or for when all your procedures and contingency responses seem built for one type of emergency and suddenly you find yourself dealing with something completely different.

  Working with the Pentagon during the changeover from the Bush to the Clinton Administration, I picked up a lot of that unease in various working briefs I saw. Working briefs, or draft briefs, are the equivalent of the Pentagon’s subconscious. They consist of a universe of PowerPoint presentations that explore—in a preliminary fashion—the strategic issues at hand. They are generated by the boatload as part of the Pentagon’s never-ending stream of annual planning. Most never leave the building, and they are not meant for public consumption, even though few of them are ever classified. These briefs are sort of the pillow talk within and among the military services—stuff they confess to one another and worry about ceaselessly, but not something for polite conversation.

  The U.S. military was a mass of conflicting fears and impulses at this point in history. The security rule set it had grown so comfortable with over the past couple of decades was evaporating. Once the United States and the Soviets had basically figured out the relationship in the early 1970s, the struggle became almost completely internalized on each side—a pure balancing act of military capabilities that each knew they would never really use against the other in war. Yes, each side would practice and prepare for such warfare as though their lives depended on it, but as an officer, you were not going to earn your “stars” (or flag rank as an admiral or general) actually fighting the Soviets anywhere.

  At least through the mid-1970s, there was an alternative to the grand conflict: the lesser-included proxy wars we fought in the Third World—Korea and Vietnam being the two great examples. But when Vietnam ended, even that option for real-world combat seemed to disappear for the U.S. military, and the Pentagon entered into a long period (1975-1990) of internal rebuilding that featured no real wars. As we began to emerge across the 1980s from the cocoon of the Vietnam Syndrome—or the fear of quagmire and body bags—the pickings were pretty slim. The Soviets seemed to be pulling out of everywhere: first the Third World in general, then out of Afghanistan in particular, then Eastern Europe, and finally out of the Soviet republics themselves.

  The Persian Gulf War definitely gave the military a renewed sense of confidence and purpose exactly when it needed one, but the effect was not long-lasting. The static quo of the Cold War was gone and—for the first time in our history—we had to figure out how much responsibility we felt for the world at large, not just as a military power but as a nation. In the Cold War you worried about your friends and your enemies, and everyone else was pretty much on their own. But now it seemed that the entire world comprised everyone else. This was a pretty scary thing to contemplate for an institution genetically predisposed to worry about everything in a worst-case sort of way. There seemed to be no logical boundaries to the problem sets we might be called upon to deal with, and there was simply no compelling rule set to guide our choices. George H. W. Bush had offered up the phrase “new
world order,” but that hardly narrowed anything down.

  The Pentagon’s unease with this new world order simply jumped out at me in those working briefs. Scared—not scary—sentiments abounded. The U.S. military worried about not having allies in the future, that Soviet military technology would flood the world, and that it would get left holding the bag in failed states around the world. Worse, military leaders feared that the American public expected casualty-less wars after Desert Storm, a fear that later seemed vindicated after eighteen servicemen were killed in Mogadishu in October 1993 (the Black Hawk Down incident), leading to our subsequent pullout from warlord-dominated Somalia.

  It was in this nervous environment that the concept of “mission creep” began to be discussed more and more, and the U.S. military’s unease on this subject spoke volumes about what they sensed was emerging in the international security environment. “Mission creep” is an old concept that many experts used to describe the process of the military’s incremental assumption of tasks in the Vietnam War that were—by most soldiers’ standards—beyond their normal purview. The concept of “nation building” is often viewed as a result of mission creep. You go into a country like Somalia in late 1992 and all you are supposed to do is settle things down enough so the relief supplies can flow again, and before long you find yourself drawn into remaking a nation from the bottom up.

  The fear of mission creep was justified, but it was just a microcosm of what the U.S. military really feared about the post-Cold War era: interest creep. “Interest” here refers to “national interest,” which is one of those great phrases constantly used in Pentagon publications, even though nobody really knows what it means. The Pentagon just knows it needs to protect American interests, promote them when possible, and never step beyond their logical boundaries—whatever those are. There is no list of “national interests” to be found anywhere throughout the U.S. Government, much less the Pentagon. You either know them or you don’t. Raising your hand during a Pentagon brief to ask what exactly these interests are is considered impolitic in the extreme.