The Pentagon's New Map

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  What drove the military nuts across the 1990s and still does today is that unlike the static quo of the Cold War, where our security interests seemed clear enough (Hold that line!), definitions of U.S. national interests now seem incredibly fluid. Pick up the New York Times or the Washington Post and you can find half a dozen different interpretations in the op-ed pages alone—day after day after day. If I had a nickel for every time I heard a mid-level military officer exclaim how nice it would be if the politicians simply got together and decided what those “national interests” were, I could have bankrolled the peace dividend myself.

  To put it most simply, America’s national interest in the era of globalization lies primarily in the extension of global economic connectivity. Global connectivity benefits America economically by increasing our access to the world’s goods and services while promoting our exports of the same. With that growing connectivity around the planet, we see the rising need for political and security rule sets that define fair play among nations, firms, and even individuals, not just in trade but in terms of war, which—as we have seen with 9/11 and the resulting war on terrorism—is no longer restricted to just organized violence between nation-states. That global system of security rules is the most important peace dividend of the Cold War; these rule sets allow globalization to flourish and advance, and by doing so, they have effectively killed great-power war, a destructive force that haunted the international community for close to two centuries (dating all the way back to Europe’s Napoleonic Wars of the early 1800s).

  Reiterating the theme of chapter 1: more rules means less war. So extending globalization’s rule set leads ultimately to less violence in the system, and that is definitely in America’s national interest.

  Today, nations and societies that desire greater economic connectivity with the outside world understand that it comes with a price—adherence to a wider array of political and security rule sets. Not every regime accepts that essential transaction easily, and a few display a firm willfulness to play outside the rules. We call these governments “rogue regimes,” and we seek to change their behavior and—at the very least—constrain their ability to engage in any rule-breaking (or -bending) behavior. Ultimately, their need to transgress the emerging global rule set on security stems from their fear of losing control over their own populations, whose disconnectedness from the outside world is seen as a prerequisite of their continued subordination to the state’s authoritarian grip over their daily lives.

  But as we have seen with al Qaeda, there are also groups of individuals within societies that reject the notion that their “homeland” should join this larger community of states that define globalization’s Functioning Core. They fear that by joining this modern—or “Western”—system of rules, their traditional society will be forever damaged and ultimately perverted. They are willing to wage warfare against individuals, states, and even the system itself to prevent that outcome. Increasingly, as the number of rogue regimes shrinks around the world, thanks both to time (dictators never fade away, but they do die) and the occasionally coherent efforts of the Core (prodded primarily by the United States), these nonstate actors committed to hijacking their societies from globalization’s creeping embrace will come to define the dominant security threat across the system as a whole. In a nutshell, this is the rise of the lesser includeds: violent individuals fighting the system of globalization, with disconnected states as the prize.

  In my career, I have found it very useful to view the international security environment across these three separate perspectives: the system or community of states, individual nation-states (both “good” and “bad”), and individuals operating both within societies and across them (e.g., evil leaders abusing their own populations, transnational terrorists).◈ Applying this tripartite perspective (system, states, individuals) to the question of where big violence may be sourced in the international security environment, I break down the universe of traditional military contingencies as follows: there is system-level violence of the sort we feared would occur in the Cold War, otherwise known as World War III; then there is the classic sort of interstate war like Saddam’s Iraq (the quintessential rogue state) invading Kuwait in 1990; and finally, there is the sort of violence that occurs not between states but within them, like the ethnic cleansing of Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s and the terrorism that afflicts Israel on a daily basis. I basically include “transnational” terrorism in this category, because like all politics, all terrorism is ultimately local: it occurs within states and it typically involves specific grievances even as it rages against the system—be it an oppressive regime, the “hegemonic” United States, or the “polluting” forces of globalization.

  Despite the fact that the Cold War era was defined by the superpowers’ nuclear standoff or the threat of system-level war, the military mind is far more comfortably located at the level of the nation-state, where the paradigm is one of my-army-against-your-army.◈ In reality, most military officers thought of the Soviets in this way, which made the whole process of strategic planning for war so oddly antiseptic and pristine: in effect, you could plan for it all you wanted because the overarching reality of nuclear weapons and Mutually Assured Destruction meant you would never get the chance to try it out for real. But you nonetheless had to gin up and maintain a huge conventional military force, because no one was comfortable with the notion of relying solely on nukes to keep the Red Army at bay in Europe.

  When the Soviets went away at the end of the Cold War, the military mind’s natural tendency to view the world through the prism of the nation-state was subtly reinforced. System-level conflict became a complete abstraction, but in a world seemingly populated by rogues and regional hegemons like Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, it made even more sense to have your strategic planning—not to mention your intelligence community—focus heavily on what other states were buying, building, or developing for their militaries.

  This tendency to focus on nation-states has made it hard for the Pentagon to decipher the new security rule sets generated by globalization’s progressive advance. As globalization has spread dramatically over the past two decades, two huge changes have unfolded across the international security environment. First, the sources of mass violence have migrated downward, or from the state to the individual. To put it somewhat facetiously, in the current age, states don’t kill people, people kill people. Second, while nation-states still “compete” with one another, that competition has left the military realm, where governments are the dominant actor, and moved on to the economic realm, where increasingly international organizations become the dominant venue of coordination and negotiation, such as the G-7/8 group of advanced economies or the World Trade Organization. What that means is traditional economic power and competition have migrated upward, or from the state to the system.

  These two developments help explain the progressive rise of the lesser includeds in U.S. national security planning.

  The migration of violence downward, or below the level of the nation-state, is fairly easy to express and track. Basically, wars between states have disappeared over the past half century, but especially since the end of the Cold War. Nukes effectively ended great-power war following the Second World War, giving the world as a whole a wonderfully long respite from system-level war that I believe will never end. Meanwhile, state-on-state wars have effectively gone the way of the dinosaur in recent decades. When wars occur now, they are almost exclusively internal wars, where some subsection of a state wishes to break off from the whole or where social violence between groups within a state erupts into full-blown civil war. In fact, the only real wars that have occurred between sovereign states since the end of the Cold War have involved United States-led multinational coalitions to either reverse an act of overt interstate aggression (kicking Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991) or to effect regime change (Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003). In my mind, describing these three wars as interstate conflicts is entirely misle
ading, because in each instance the conflict was initiated by a United States-led coalition on behalf of the international community—albeit with varying levels of support. In effect, these are wars between the system and renegade states, with the United States-led coalition serving as the system’s proxy or representative. The goal of each war was not to conquer a state for particularistic gain but rather to readmit that disconnected state back to the system—or community—of peaceful states.

  If the threat of system-level war ended with the Cold War and interstate wars are virtually extinct, then where is all the violence in this “chaotic” world? It lies overwhelmingly within nation-states, or those lesser includeds to which the Pentagon had developed an aversion during the Cold War. Not surprisingly, the spending associated with all that violence has likewise begun migrating from the level of the state to the individual. State-to-state arms transfers may have declined significantly with the Cold War’s end, but the traffic in small arms has increased dramatically, by all credible accounts fueling the endemic societal wars that afflict many backward states in the Gap.◈ According to the Small Arms Survey, an independent research project of the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, the trade in civilian small arms recently surpassed that of military small arms.◈ Factor in the growth in private security firms in both the advanced and underdeveloped portions of the global economy, and it becomes clear that both individuals and corporations have begun self-financing a good portion of their security needs in the post-Cold War era.◈

  A good share of that security spending by corporations is likewise designed to protect the growing connectivity between states and regions that we define as globalization. This brings us to the other great security trend of the last two decades, the migration upward to the system level of the sort of power and competition long associated with states. Who conducts this competition and exercises this power? A certain amount of regulatory oversight is maintained by the international organizations that have sprung up over the decades to facilitate all the growing connectivity we now associate with globalization’s advance. These largely faceless international bodies regulate all manner of trade, along with such obscure efforts as the codification of Internet protocols, protection of patents, and harmonization of global pharmaceutical testing. The international regulatory organizations probably best known to most Americans today are the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund.

  This system-level competition is largely economic now. Instead of military superpowers jostling over desired client states, we now have supranational entities such as the European Union and NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement zone encompassing the United States, Canada, and Mexico) jostling over candidates for free-trade agreements. Of course, most global economic activity is conducted by corporations and individuals on their own, because in many ways globalization is all about expanded connectivity between nonstate actors and the system, with states largely getting out of way except for regulating activity on the margins (i.e., policing the rule breakers and rule benders).

  So if competition is migrating above the level of the nation-state and violence is migrating below it, how does a military that largely views the world in terms of nation-states keep current with global change? It begins to understand that the global market for its security “service” is fracturing. Yes, the world still needs a Leviathan-like military superpower to come into regional security situations and dispatch the rule-breaking regime in question, so certain state-on-state military capabilities will always be required. But the world is also suffering a significant amount of subnational violence, overwhelmingly concentrated in the states with the least connectivity to the globalization process. Then there are those nations we need to rebuild once we have decapitated their rogue leadership.

  But where is the global Leviathan for nation building? It sure does not look like the U.S. military, based on our historical track record. And where is the global Leviathan for stopping transnational terrorists from pulling off the next 9/11, whatever form that takes? Can the U.S. military aspire to that role in any form, or do we specialize solely in regime change in response to catastrophic acts of terrorism? If so, maybe the United States might want to reconsider spending more than ten times as much on the Defense Department as it does for the Department of Homeland Security. Because who knows? Maybe the American public believes it should be protected—as individuals—from transnational terrorists hell-bent on their mass murder, and not just see the bulk of security dollars go toward securing America’s “national interests” abroad.

  The essential rule-set gap that defined U.S. national security in the 1990s was that we had a military that was fundamentally designed to protect our nation from other nations, when in reality the biggest direct threats we now face are from nonstate actors waging war against a global system to which we are strongly connected and with which we are intimately identified. Where do those nonstate actors find sanctuary? Primarily in failed states located inside the Gap, which means those states are indirectly a source of threat to the United States, whether they are ruled by authoritarian leaders such as Liberia’s Charles Taylor (now deposed, in large part because of his support to terrorist groups) or divided up by warlords (meaning no one’s really in charge).

  What did the Pentagon spend the nineties planning for? Wars with Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and China—all nation-states. What have been the Pentagon’s biggest successes in the global war on terrorism since 9/11? Our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

  There is an old saying that if all you have is a hammer, the entire world begins to look like nails. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 revealed a global security environment far more fractured than any the Pentagon had previously been able to visualize in its constantly churning production of quadrennial reviews, annual posture statements, and technology road maps. That is because all those strategic planning documents focused first and foremost on nation-states, and the Pentagon continues that focus primarily because the nation-state is the “image” it most comfortably recognizes.

  The Rise Of Asymmetrical Warfare

  I was both unwittingly and unwillingly introduced to the concept of asymmetrical warfare as a young child growing up in my small hometown of Boscobel, Wisconsin. My dear father was the city attorney, which meant he sometimes had to enforce city ordinances with townsfolk who, for example, saw no reason why raising pigs in their backyard might disturb their neighbors. I sometimes found myself standing up to fairly sizable bullies who were determined to make me pay for the fact that my dad had made their dad lose the livestock.

  Like anyone smaller facing someone larger, I engaged in asymmetrical warfare to defend myself. In other words, I pulled every dirty trick on them that I could think of, always trying to exploit their weakest points. While I got roughed up now and then, I never really ever got beat up, because I was willing to pull out all the stops to defend myself. I knew I would never survive a straight-up fight, so I would run because they were slower, hit them below the belt because they were taller, or joke my way out of the situation. But I never did try to punch them out, because punching was their strength, and it simply made no sense for me to fight their way.

  When the Red Army disappeared across the 1990s, the U.S. military not only stood alone among the world’s militaries, nobody else even hailed from the same zip code. So all of a sudden we went from bipolar standoff to nobody left worth fighting in a straight-up contest. In effect, we became the global military bully by default. We became Casey Stengel’s New York Yankees or Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers, at once admired and feared.

  Well, the U.S. military knew it was basically unbeatable, especially in a straight-up fight, and so it spent a lot of time and mental energy in the nineties thinking about how smaller opponents would seek to negate its strengths by being clever and “dirty” in any combat with us. It is not that the Pentagon feared any state initiating a war directly with the United States, but rather that State
A would attack State B and we would have to rush in to defend State B and send State A packing. Of course, that scenario sounded suspiciously like a rerun of Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, raising the old charge that the military prefers to plan for the last war, not the next one. But there were other handy situations that fit this profile, like North Korea trying to invade South Korea, or China targeting Taiwan (the emerging favorite). This trio of scenarios was the preferred mix, by and large, for the Pentagon’s planning across the nineties on this new concept of asymmetrical warfare.

  When you were explaining to Congress what you felt you needed in force structure, or your overall array of ships, aircraft, tanks, and the like, it was a whole lot easier to simply point to a chart that listed everything the Soviets had and say, “We’d like that in green, some of those in navy blue . . .” But we would never trade our force structure for Iraq’s or China’s, and so convincing Congress not to cut the defense budget any deeper across the nineties became quite a song and dance on the part of Pentagon officials, as asymmetrical warfare became a tune every analyst knew by heart.

  But what strategists did in the nineties was to elevate the concept of asymmetrical war even further. Our enemies would not simply avoid fair fights, the Pentagon contended, but they would do so in such a way as to “deny” our “access” to conflicts involving our “national interests.” So when State A attacked State B, A would seek to conquer B quickly so it could present the world with a fait accompli that the U.S. military could reverse only if it was able to overcome A’s ability to “deny access” to the battlefield through their “asymmetrical, anti-access strategies.” Basically, State A’s hope would be that America would look at the situation as too far gone, meaning likely to cost too many U.S. casualties to reverse, and we would simply choose to accept the new status quo.