The Pentagon's New Map

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  I spent the next half-decade figuring out just what that larger ordering principle was, and in the process I finally found my version of the Manthorpe slide. This chapter is devoted to explaining how that eureka moment ultimately came about, or how I came to draw the Pentagon’s new map.

  Whatever happened to that original brief, you ask? I still use it. In fact, it became the basis for an elective course recently offered at the Naval War College called “Thinking Systematically About Alternative Global Futures.” In the class, I teach the next generation of military leaders that they must abandon the Pentagon’s tendency to view the world “vertically” through the lens of intermittent wars (“Look, another bolt from the blue!”). Instead, they need to think more “horizontally,” seeing history for what it was and the future for what it will be: the periodic ebb and flow of economic globalization. In my mind, this is how you place war within the context of everything else.

  How I Learned To Think Horizontally

  When I left Harvard in the summer of 1990 with my spanking-new Ph.D. from the Government Department, I was pretty sure I had all the intellectual tools to cut it as a policy analyst in Washington, DC. I knew a lot of my fellow students and professors looked unfavorably on the choice, believing it was quite a step down from a career in academia, but I was eager to find out how things worked in the real world.

  Washington, D.C., is a lot different from rural Wisconsin, where I grew up. In Wisconsin, people ask you what you do because they are really interested and—if possible—they would like to help you get ahead in life. But in Washington, people ask you what you do because they want to check your status relative to theirs, and getting down your particulars proves handy if they ever need to bring you down a peg or two.

  Naturally, career types there will tell you what a wonderful place the capital is, and how it is full of such diversity (“We have both kinds of people here—Democrats and Republicans!”), but let me put it to you this way: it is very hard to live in a society built entirely around your most aggressive personality traits. Sometimes I felt like I was Dr. Jekyll at home and Mr. Hyde at work, with my hellacious morning commute serving as my daily potion.

  What always disturbed me about my graduate years at Harvard was how as students we spent most of our time in seminars trashing all the giants in the field. It always reminded me of the scene in the movie The Princess Bride, in which the despicable villain, Vizzini, played by Wallace Shawn, brags of his intelligence by exclaiming, “Have you ever heard of Plato? Aristotle? Socrates? Morons!”

  Harvard, as it happens, is the perfect finishing school when it comes to working for the government. Because in Washington, the only way to stand out when you are surrounded by thousands of people just like you is to tear down their ideas. The problem is, in that vision-hostile environment it is almost impossible to come up with any stories with happy endings—as I like to call strategic visions. That is because no one in Washington is really interested in your happy ending; all they obsess about is preventing what they are certain will be the disastrous outcome of your ill-conceived plan. So if you want to get ahead or get noticed, you learn to excel at this pack-dog mentality, and you bury whatever dreams you had of proposing something different or better. This is why we do not have any real leaders in Washington anymore, just investigations.

  I got my job at the Center for Naval Analyses the old-fashioned way: I convinced an older version of myself that I was a younger version of him. It was pretty easy actually: he had gone to Harvard as an undergraduate, and I had as a graduate student. He had had my old boss, Professor Adam Ulam, as his government tutor at Eliot House, and I had been a government tutor at Eliot House. He had written his dissertation on West Africa, and mine had involved Soviet-bloc relations with Southern Africa. He was someone who thrived on generating grand strategic visions, but subordinated that love by and large to his amazing skill at dissecting the flaccid reasoning of Pentagon strategists, and I . . . was smart enough to spend the bulk of my eight years at CNA learning everything I could from the man. Eventually, of course, I would have had to use that knowledge to discredit him thoroughly and steal his job from him, but I took the high road and left Washington for the Naval War College, and so we have remained good friends.

  Henry H. Gaffney Jr., or Hank, as everyone calls him, is probably the smartest man alive when it comes to understanding how the Pentagon and national security decision making actually work. But what really marks Hank as unique in the defense community is the combination of his wide-ranging but detailed knowledge of security issues, his innate ability to ferret out weak assumptions in strategic logic, and his crankiness and lack of respect for authority. It is his encyclopedic knowledge of both global security issues and Pentagon history that allows Hank to spin off dozens of brilliant, big-picture observations about U.S. national security planning every time he stands up to give one of his own infamous briefs, which, frankly, feature such complex conceptual visuals that you could spend a lifetime trying to figure out what they all mean.

  During my eight years in Washington, Hank Gaffney and I did a lot of research together and coauthored a number of significant reports, and most of the big ideas I have hatched over my career either began in or were intimately shaped by my time with him. But what Hank really taught me was how to think horizontally. By that I mean thinking broadly across subject matters versus drilling down deep into a particular subject, which I call vertical thinking. In both the Pentagon and Washington in general, the system of debates awards points almost exclusively to those who think vertically, because intense subject-matter expertise allows you to poke holes in everyone else’s thinking. Inside the Beltway, vertical thinkers are expert at telling why something will never succeed, and little else. Horizontal thinkers tend to be the exact opposite. They often argue by analogy and are quick to borrow concepts from other fields. They are usually synergists, meaning they combine disparate concepts in new and unusual combinations. For example, in my Ph.D. dissertation I borrowed from the field of interpersonal psychology to explain how the relative “weakling” Romania stood up to Soviet bullying tactics within the Warsaw Treaty Organization, ultimately achieving a certain degree of foreign policy independence.◈

  The most important advantage of horizontal thinking is the ability to see a future unfolding in realistic stages, never becoming too invested in any one particular pathway. Most of what passes for strategic planning in the Pentagon involves the acquisition (or buying) of future technologies in the form of weapons systems and platforms (e.g., ships, aircraft, tanks). Within those narrow confines, most vertical thinkers do well. But these same vertical thinkers are incapable of making similar forecasts about the messy world lying outside the Pentagon. Here their tendency to define the future as straight-line projections of current trends consistently betrays them, because you can never mechanistically extrapolate tomorrow from today.

  Change in that real world outside the Pentagon’s five-year planning cycles is far from linear. Instead, it arrives in irregular clumps, like growth spurts in a teenager. Moreover, when tipping points are reached in any historical process, previously incremental rates of change can quickly segue into profound transformations. My daughter Emily is currently twelve years old. In 2016, she will be twice as old as she is today, but she will not automatically be twice as smart, or twice as tall, or twice as lovable. She will be something else altogether, and her journey from preteen to woman will feature more zigzags than this father can possibly anticipate from his current perspective. I can project a range of pathways for her life’s unfolding, but if I become unduly fixated on one particular downstream outcome (e.g., a Ph.D. from Harvard in political science by 2020), I could end up very disappointed—even shocked—at this seemingly unanticipated turn of events!

  Such a mechanistic approach to predicting the future would seem ludicrous when discussing an entity as complex as a teenage girl, and yet the Pentagon displays the same tendency time and time again with far more complex entities,
such as China. In twelve years, China’s economy may well be twice as large as it is today, but does that mean China will automatically be twice as “powerful”? Twice as “Communist”? Twice the “threat”? Sounds nutty, doesn’t it? Yet you can discern this logic throughout a lot of the Pentagon’s long-range projections concerning China, as if you can simply transport today’s China to some point in the future where all capacities are somehow “doubled” and yet the country’s political-military establishment remains essentially unchanged.

  Most vertical thinkers hate having to deal with that sort of real-world messiness. They like their models to be clean, so they “control” for that sort of messiness, or declare those sorts of factors to be extraneous to their model and thus simply delete them from their thinking. This is why, when vertical thinkers engage in strategic planning outside of the technical fields in which they are both comfortable and competent, they tend to jump right to the punch line. By that I mean, when they think about future scenarios for the global security environment, they need a scary future point that satisfies all their needs and culminates logically in their advocating some fabulous new weapon or platform technology. One of their great tricks for doing this is what I call the “absurdly isolated conflict scenario.” These are used all the time to justify amazing force levels (e.g., number of ships in a particular category) that have almost nothing to do with reality.

  My all-time favorite in this regard was a Navy brief I saw in the mid-1990s that projected how many surface combatants (noncarrier ships with warfighting capabilities) the Pentagon would need twenty years down the road. The scenario chosen was a rerun of the start of the Korean War. Okay, fair enough. But then the briefer started adding on absurdly isolating characteristics, such as having the entire Army, Air Force, and Marine Corps simultaneously involved with another distant war. Then the briefer posited that the United States would have—by that future date—almost completely eliminated its ground forces within South Korea. Moreover, we would have no allies to help us deflect the North Korea invasion—none whatsoever. Plus, the Navy would have no carriers or submarines in the region at the time of the invasion, so only surface combatants would be used to help South Korea, which naturally had let its own military decline dramatically in the meantime, to fend off a huge, amazingly high-tech invasion force streaming over the border from North Korea. Guess what the end result of the analysis was. The U.S. Navy clearly needed almost twice the number of surface combatants as the budgeters projected the Navy could afford. The analysis was impeccable in terms of the internal logic of the scenario itself. The ludicrous part was imagining a pathway that led America to this simply unbelievable point in future history.

  This type of thinking also explains how budgetary train wrecks are preprogrammed into the Pentagon’s long-range acquisition plans. By that I mean it is impossible—politically and economically—to both retire the required numbers and types of platforms and build the required numbers and types of platforms in a year-to-year fashion to actually make the desired force structure appear by the projected date. This is an acute consequence of vertical thinking applied to fundamentally horizontal processes.

  The Pentagon’s penchant for applying vertical thinking to force structure planning reflects the harsh realities of trying to plan against downstream threats, or the Big One mentality too many strategists still retain from the Cold War. For example, it takes several years to build a modern aircraft carrier, and that ship’s life may span more than half a century. To justify that sort of expenditure, you need to project an awfully big threat deep into the future. The more you do that, budget cycle after budget cycle, the more that sketchy forecast takes on the air of an immutable truth. After a while, it is simply so engrained in the budgetary system that not even an event like 9/11 can easily dislodge it. If you don’t believe me, check out the Pentagon’s current long-range budgetary planning document, known as the POM (for Program Objective Memorandum). If you look deeply enough, you will see China looming throughout as the dominant planning assumption.

  What is the horizontal alternative to such thinking? The best example would be “evolutionary acquisition” or “spiral development” of military technologies. In this approach, new capabilities are introduced to the force prior to their perfection, thus giving the military personnel in the field opportunities for testing and experimentation. Improvements are achieved in an iterative fashion, allowing for adaptation over time to changes in the strategic environment. In theory, this is how the Defense Department currently acquires all its new capabilities, but the focus in these efforts is not so much on staying responsive to a changing global security environment as in speeding up the time between the creation of a new technology and its insertion into the field of battle. In effect, horizontal thinking is currently applied to the scheduling of individual technologies, but it is not applied to strategic planning as a whole, where the Pentagon still displays the need for placing big bets on singularly large future threats.

  This bias for vertical thinking is especially crucial in determining how the Pentagon thinks about conflict scenarios, because rather than concentrating on how to manage complex, real-world situations as they unfold, Pentagon strategists typically want to bypass all that mess and jump right to the punch line—the onset of the war. This bias is bad in a number of ways. First, it shortchanges the role of the military in crisis management, or the avoidance of war. Second, it short-circuits planning on what comes after the war—a lesson we learned yet again in post-Saddam Iraq. But most important, it absurdly isolates the warfighting scenarios, leading to war planning that focuses on the war and little else.

  But don’t walk away with the impression that only the Pentagon is to blame for this state of affairs. In many ways, the ultimate fault lies with Congress and their insistence on having their say—every year—on almost every single program within the defense budget. So if Congress says yes to a five-year program in year one, only to change its mind later, you can hardly fault the Pentagon’s lack of strategic planning. In some ways, you could say the Pentagon does its level best to plan horizontally in a vertically challenged budgetary environment imposed on it by the Hill.

  Perhaps the best way to describe the limiting effect that vertical thinking has on strategic planning is to show how it prevented the Pentagon from both recognizing and embracing the strategic security environment that has emerged in the globalization era. I like to tell this story in terms of my early training as a political-military analyst on how to think about strategic surprise.

  When I came to CNA at the beginning of the 1990s, I was taught how to think about strategic surprise in terms of what I like to call the classic Cold War vertical scenario. This scenario had several distinct characteristics. First, it always unfolded with lightning speed, meaning there was almost no effective warning time about this “bolt from the blue.” Second, in a balance-of-power world like the Cold War, we knew beforehand both who our enemies were and who our allies were, which was quite convenient. Third, because we war-gamed this scenario countless times, we were able to preprogram our operational response, meaning little adaptive planning was required. Fourth, the scenario unfolded like a single hand of poker, meaning you placed your bet and then laid down your cards, allowing for no evolution in strategy and no switching sides during the conflict. Finally, the world stood still until the war was over, and then the winners got to divide the spoils.

  What you should recognize in this scenario is basically a highly idealized rendering of World War I and World War II, and by that I mean all the complicating factors have been removed to make the modeling of the conflict more “robust”—which is Pentagon code for “more detached from reality.” The two classic scenarios of this genre were the Soviets streaming through the Fulda Gap in Germany and triggering World War III, and the “Mini-Me” version, where North Korea pours across the demilitarized zone into Seoul.

  Now, my problem with this education was that it did not seem to prepare me at all for the post
-Cold War era—go figure! That is because I never actually experienced this sort of scenario, not even in Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, which triggered our “rapid response” called Desert Storm a leisurely six months later. What I did experience across the 1990s was cognitive dissonance, meaning I was taught to expect one thing and kept encountering something completely different. In short, the post-Cold War era did not compute.

  Instead of that classic vertical scenario, what the 1990s looked like was more a collection of messy situations that, once they had lured the United States into some sort of military response, seemed to drag on endlessly. Most seemed like the sort of situation where you discover some rotted wood along the trim of your house, and so, thinking you can handle it yourself, you tear off the damaged piece and get to work. Six months later when the contractor finally hands you that staggering bill, you are the proud owner of an entirely new roof. Of course, as you describe the situation later to friends and family, the entire cost came as a complete shock to you—out of nowhere! When in reality, your vertical scenario had been in the works for years. You simply were not paying any attention.

  The Pentagon is a lot like that, primarily because it did the right thing across the Cold War and worried obsessively about a vertical scenario that would have marked The End of the World As We Know It (TEOTWAWKI, for the uninitiated). Speaking as one small part of humanity that survived the Cold War, I have no argument with that approach. But the legacy of that focus on strategic surprise is pretty much what guarantees America will suffer a 9/11-like shock to the system now and then, unless we start thinking more horizontally and—by doing so—listen better to what the strategic security environment is trying to tell us.