The Pentagon's New Map

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  • Evacuation operations typically involve U.S. troops entering into dangerous, but not necessarily hostile, situations to rescue U.S. nationals. These deployments usually do not involve actual shooting.

  • Peacekeeping and relief operations are just that: going into desperate situations, either after conflict has ceased or following a disaster, and trying to restore order so recovery can begin. While these situations are dangerous, they are usually nonhostile. Of course, that can change quickly, as we found in Somalia in the mid-1990s, when we lost eighteen personnel in a raid designed to capture the lieutenants of the warlord Mohamed Farrah Aideed—the Black Hawk Down story.

  • “Contingency positioning” is an activity that we engaged in a lot more during the Cold War than during the 1990s. It essentially involved moving our forces around the world like chess pieces to influence the actions of some potential foe. Since we mostly deal with small fry these days, these potential foes do not pay a whole lot of attention to how many carriers we have offshore, because, frankly, there is not a whole lot they could do about that anyway.

  • “Show of force” is a more muscular version of contingency positioning, which is mostly a naval effort. When America is “showing force,” it is typically putting boots on the ground, moving weapons systems and combat platforms into the field, or moving lots of supplies into a theater of operations. So if contingency positioning is like a dad yelling, “Don’t make me come in there!” to his kids in the next room, then show of force is Dad actually getting off the couch and going in there, but stopping short of corporal punishment.

  • The final category, combat, is obviously the one we care most about. That involves shooting, killing, and lots of smoking holes. In the 1990s, combat constituted about one-fifth of our cumulative crisis-response days for the four services.

  Now, at first glance, this display of crisis responses does not exactly reveal any compelling pattern. It looks like a whole bunch of dots spread all over the planet. Your eyes are drawn to four clusters, and when you check the country names, those groupings seem to make sense. After all, our four biggest interventions in the 1990s were—going from left to right on the map—Haiti, Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Somalia. When you add up the cumulative crisis-response days for those four clusters, you pretty much capture 80 percent of the Pentagon’s business in the 1990s. As is the case with a lot of businesses, about 20 percent of your customers give you about 80 percent of your sales. These are your big customers, so you pay a lot of attention to them.

  So you might be tempted to simply draw four circles around those four intense clusters of responses and say, “Those four bad situations are basically the story of the 1990s. There is no unusual pattern, no larger meaning—just a couple of basket cases (Haiti, Somalia) and two bad boys that needed to be slapped around now and then (Milosevic in Serbia, Saddam in Iraq).” And that is exactly what I thought in the summer of 2001, when I first analyzed this database while working as a consultant for my old mentor Hank Gaffney at the Center for Naval Analyses.◈

  In reuniting with Hank, I was moonlighting from my job at the Naval War College. This was the period when my war college work saw me deeply involved in my “new rules sets” research partnership with the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald, the endeavor that reunited me with now-retired Admiral Bud Flanagan, who, upon leaving the Navy, joined Cantor as an executive vice president in charge of developing new market opportunities for the firm outside of its traditional focus on sovereign debt or bonds. I was also reunited in this effort with Bradd Hayes, my old NFCPE buddy, who, having retired from the Navy, was working as a research professor at the Naval War College.

  I picked up the outside work with Hank because the New Rule Sets Project was so focused on economics and globalization that I wanted to keep up my skills in analyzing more bread-and-butter military topics like crisis response. But it was more than that. I was searching for something to connect the two lines of work.

  The New Rule Sets workshops, which brought together Wall Street and the Pentagon to discuss the future of the world, were designed to help the defense community better understand how globalization was altering America’s definitions of national security, as well as the world’s definitions of international stability. The workshops themselves were fabulous affairs, conducted on the 107th floor of World Trade Center One, just above Cantor Fitzgerald’s offices, in one of the world’s most amazing restaurants, Windows on the World. Better still, the material they generated about the future of global energy and investment patterns was being warmly received throughout the Pentagon and the intelligence community. I was getting invitation after invitation to give my slick PowerPoint show around the Beltway, so everything seemed to be working as far as the project was concerned.

  But deep down I felt as if I were stuck in a rut, analytically speaking. I wasn’t closing the deal, so to speak. I wasn’t producing strategic concepts that sold senior Pentagon leaders on what I knew was the profound connectivity between—as I called it—America’s “exporting of security” and globalization’s progressive advance. The briefs I gave did not end with the kind of discussion I was looking for; there was no “So what are we going to do about this?” Instead, the principals I briefed generously declared the work fascinating and brilliant and patted me on the head, and as they walked me to their office doors, I got the usual kiss-off of “Thank you for your contribution to national security.”

  But that was just it: I didn’t feel that I was contributing anything. Here I was going on and on in this presentation about—in effect—what a wonderful world it is. Heck, I even used a sound clip of Louis Armstrong’s version of “What a Wonderful World” in the brief’s title slide sequence because it reflected my genuine belief that globalization is the defining historical process of our age, with security playing a supporting role in this great planetary drama. But the upshot of my brief seemed to be: Globalization is sweeping the planet, the military is babysitting some bad boys on the margin, and never the twain shall meet. I simply was not connecting these two dots with reproducible strategic concepts. I lacked a bottom line—that phrase that lingered on everyone’s lips long after I left the room.

  A big part of the problem was that antiglobalization lacked a real villain. I mean, at that point, all I could reference was “Seattle Man,” or the protesters who shut down the World Trade Organization meeting in that city a couple of years earlier. In terms of conflict, the best billing I could come up with was “Seattle Man versus Davos Man,” the latter representing the global financiers who met every year in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum. You can imagine how that matchup excited Pentagon strategists: middle-aged guys in business suits harangued by young grungy protesters hoisting signs and massive puppets. Not exactly the crowd scene you need to send out a carrier to disperse. So these protesters smashed a few windows and defaced a few Web sites—big deal! If that was all my “grand historical struggle” was generating in terms of violence, then I should be briefing metropolitan police departments, not the Pentagon.

  So the work I was doing for Gaffney on crisis response wasn’t just my keeping my finger in the pie of “real” security analysis; I was actively looking for something I could import to my research with Cantor Fitzgerald that would better connect the worlds of international security and economic globalization. I was getting tired of always being the flaky futurist talking about some fabulous tomorrow where everyone got along; I was looking for some real-world operational data that grounded my theories of globalization in the here and now. Simply put, I wanted my work to matter inside the Pentagon. I knew I was sneaking into offices primarily because my PowerPoint presentation was state-of-the-art, but I wanted the ideas to impress as much as the animation.

  It was just before 9/11 that these two seemingly very disparate research pursuits started jelling together in my mind. In the crisis-response work I was doing for Hank, I was not happy with just pointing out the four clusters of responses and saying that’s all there
was to the 1990s. Hank, always the great skeptic, kept rejecting my attempts to describe America’s crisis-response activity according to some grand strategic logic. He knew as well as I that there was no such logic inside either the Pentagon, which did as it was told, or the White House, which responded as it was prompted to by world events. He complained that I was trying to impose order where there was none, but I was certain there was a logic to all these responses, even if the U.S. Government remained blissfully unaware of it. To me, it felt as if the currents of history were sweeping us along to something; it was just a matter of clearing the right bend in the river and we’d see it finally.

  As I stared at the display of U.S. responses across the summer of 2001, I kept searching my mind and everything I knew about the world to come up with some larger strategic analysis of what that pattern meant. I knew those four clusters all resulted because America chose to pursue those situations. No one made us do it; we decided to do those and not others—such as going into the Congo or getting more involved with Colombia. So I knew I was not staring at a map of global instabilities per se, just an illustration of our choices. I figured the overlap was fairly strong between the two data sets, because—frankly—the U.S. military is the only force in the world capable of traveling long distances and actually doing something significant once it gets there. When I checked out lots of maps detailing significant conflicts around the world, sure enough I found that virtually all of them fell within the rough pattern of U.S. responses.

  So just for the heck of it one day, I drew a simple line around virtually all of the icons to see what sort of shape I would end up with. The extreme outliers I ignored (e.g., Northern Ireland, North Korea) , to keep the figure from looking too weird. Anyway, I was trying for something like a 95th-percentile sort of capture—leaving out the truly extreme data points.

  The result was a shape that stretches across the world map, encompassing the Caribbean Rim, the Andes portion of South America, virtually all of Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East, and most of Southeast Asia. That basically defines the market into which the U.S. tried to export security since 1990, responding to situations and trying to increase regional security.

  What do I see in this shape? What I do not see are any of the countries we have ever thought about as potential near-peer competitors (e.g., united Europe, Russia, China, Japan, India). What I also do not see is anything close to a Big One or even a classic, “bolt-from-the-blue” vertical scenario. I feel as if I am looking at a host of horizontal scenarios, with the little icons representing the peaks of the usual “bad stuff” that we chose to address.

  I start thinking to myself, what this shape captures is where the bad stuff usually happens, or—with apologies to Maurice Sendak—where the wild things are. So in the post-Cold War era the United States tends to send its military to where the wild things are, to the places and situations where the normal rules about not resorting to violence and warfare simply do not seem to hold. These are the world’s bad neighborhoods, where the gangs live by their own cruel rule sets, where life somehow seems cheaper. These are the enter-at-your-own-risk regions—you know, the early Oliver Stone movies like Midnight Express and Salvador. These are the places where people still go medieval on one another, and the rest of the world simply does not care because it’s just so offline from the wonderful world, where the “good stuff” and the “good life” are to be found.

  But just saying “here are the good parts and there are the bad parts” doesn’t really provide any linkage between globalization and international security. In fact, it seems to suggest that these two worlds are essentially disconnected: the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and never the twain shall meet. Surrendering to that logic means giving many Pentagon strategists exactly what they want: a rationale for ignoring these lesser includeds because—after all—intervening in these situations never does any good anyway. That’s why so many of them are drawn to Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations argument: it tells them that these conflicts among those people are intractable—a code word for quagmire.

  That sort of historical pessimism simply drives me nuts, in large part because I believe America needs to stand for so much more than simply abiding by the status quo around the world. Our entire society was built by people who refused to accept the old ways, the old divisions, and the stifling cultural pessimism that says, “This is how it has always been, so get used to it.” I didn’t join the field of national security simply to stand watch for a generation of preventable bloodshed, I joined to solve problems, intractable conflicts—the whole shebang. If ending the Cold War meant we “solved” the threat of World War III, then I wanted my career to be about drilling down to those lesser includeds to see what the solution set there would ultimately turn out to be. Chalking it all up to a “clash of civilizations” just seemed like a recipe for sitting on my hands for the rest of my career, ginning out academic tomes that sorrowfully chronicle the plight of the Gap’s failed states and feral cities (“Oh, the humanity!”).

  Like my buddy, the fictional captain of the USS Enterprise, James T. Kirk, I don’t believe in the no-win scenario. That makes me sort of a freak in my business, because futurists in general tend to be awfully pessimistic sorts who love to point out how everything is going to hell in a handbasket, “so here’s my advice on how to survive the coming crash!” These gloom-and-doomers are always going on about how all the “chaos” is increasing while all the good life is slipping away. But that just isn’t the world history I’ve been fortunate enough to witness over my life. Thanks to the work I’ve done on the New Rule Sets Project, I know that the rise of globalization has had an awful lot to do not just with expanding that wonderful world I readily recognize, but also in shrinking those horrible neighborhoods where war was once an immutable force, an intractable problem, a fact of life.

  My research partnership with Cantor Fitzgerald during the summer of 2001 serves as a sort of strategic vision life preserver. It keeps me afloat in the sea of pessimism that defines my field of national security studies. The long discussions I have with Bud Flanagan and his partner at Cantor, Phil Ginsberg, are like manna from heaven for this starving futurist. These guys are all about futures worth creating. Unlike the military types who always go on and on about “intractable problems” leading to “inevitable conflicts,” these guys always talk in terms of solutions waiting for markets to enable them. For an inveterate optimist like myself, Bud and Phil are like breathing pure oxygen after working all day in the mines. They can tell you about which new drugs get approved and why, what it takes to lay a transregional natural gas pipeline, and how much pollution a city like Beijing can stomach until it finally gets serious and does something about it. They simply do not believe in no-win scenarios, and I love them for it.

  When I listen to Pentagon strategists talk about the future of Asia, it’s always about why we’ll eventually end up fighting wars there. But listening to Bud and Phil, I get a completely different image: Asia is where all the big deals are being made. As far as they’re concerned, Asia is the next great piece of the globalization puzzle. China isn’t the problem, it’s the prize. That’s why none of the Pentagon’s vertical scenarios about China make any sense. China wants the good life too much to succumb to its worst impulses.

  Back to the slide.

  Thanks to my interactions with Wall Street, I decided that my great big blob stretching along the planet’s middle signifies not just where U.S. military forces intervened in the 1990s but those parts of the global economy that just don’t seem to work. Some may seem rich, like the Persian Gulf oil states, but none are really developed, and most are going downhill over time.

  This portion of the world simply does not function well. While the “real world” seems to be coming together, this chunk of humanity seems to be growing more isolated over time—isolated by disease, poverty, violence, and the amazingly bad ways in which women and children seem to be treated. Frankly, th
ese people don’t even seem to live on the same planet as we do. And it’s because their world is largely disconnected from the one we enjoy.

  But it is more than that. In my world, women aren’t raped en masse as a tool of political terror. In my world, people don’t rise up en masse and hack to death with machetes and axes everyone they can find from some other ethnic group. These aren’t “real world” images I recognize. These are nightmares we only get a glimpse of now and then on the evening news: a gang of teenagers rapes a woman jogger in Central Park, white supremacists in Texas drag an African-American behind their truck, or a clean-cut teenager is beaten to death in Wyoming because he’s gay.

  The difference in magnitude between my world and that world is huge. In my world, we get all upset as a society when just one person has to die that way. But in that world, people seem to die that way all the time—in huge clusters. And nobody seems to care.

  But why should we care? Except for the Persian Gulf, the violence that periodically erupts across the rest of this combat zone doesn’t seem to matter one whit to our global economy. The good life we enjoy seems only dimly connected to that pain, and when we try to step in and do something, it always seems to blow up in our faces.

  Then it’s a quagmire and we don’t know how to break it off. Then it’s blindfolded American hostages paraded on videotape and we’d give anything to see those bastards dead. Then it’s Black Hawk Down and we can’t wait to get out of that hellhole. . . .

  But then one crisp September morning it’s both towers of the World Trade Center collapsing after being struck by bolts out of the blue.

  Then it’s my workplace suddenly transformed from a sleepy college campus into an armed camp.

  Then it’s my boss telling me that the Office of the Secretary of Defense has just bought out my salary and now I’m working directly for the Pentagon.