So the medium through which the vertical shock is translated into horizontal scenarios is important, with the basic rule being, the denser the medium, the more rapid and profound the transmission. Think about how sound travels through air as opposed to through a liquid or a solid. I have to yell pretty loud to have you hear me 100 yards away, but a whale song can be heard for miles across the ocean. Then think about being a kid and putting your ear down to the railroad track and being able to hear the train coming from an incredibly great distance. Again, the denser the medium, the stronger the transmission. The fact that virtually everyone in America could visually experience the two towers’ collapse in unison made our collective sense of the world being turned upside down far more profound than if the news of that event had taken hours, days, or even weeks to sweep the countryside. So all the connectivity of the Information Age and globalization is crucial in defining the extent of the system that can be perturbed. Except for the most disconnected parts of the Gap, most of the planet knew about 9/11 on 9/11. That is what made it such a profound vertical shock.
So the definition of System Perturbation is driven by the connectivity of globalization. Prior to globalization, there were such earth-shattering triggers as Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection, the American Revolution, and the invention of the steam engine, but all these triggers took years, decades, even centuries to play out. We really do not see a System Perturbation in the way I like to define it—with all apologies to the complexity theorists—until we see globalization. So for me, the first true System Perturbations were events like the Great Depression or World War II. In effect, it took system-level shocks to kill a system-level economic process like Globalization I.
This vertical shock generates an outflow of horizontal waves whose cascading effects can cross sectoral boundaries, actually growing with time. This is what Thomas Homer-Dixon calls “complex terrorism.”◈ When someone takes down a World Trade Center, they do more than kill people and destroy a building, they stop the New York Stock Exchange, they kill cell phone traffic in the New York area, they trigger a loss of electrical power that lasts in downtown Manhattan for days, and so on and so on. A good example of horizontal waves actually growing in strength comes in the form of the SARS “superspreaders,” or the Typhoid Marys of that epidemic. One baby in China, for example, was dubbed the “poison emperor” because of all the follow-on cases he generated.◈ It took merely one sick person traveling on a plane from Hong Kong to Toronto to trigger the World Health Organization’s decision to warn against traveling to Toronto, effectively sending that city’s and region’s economy into a tailspin. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times likes to talk about “super-empowered individuals” like Osama bin Laden, but SARS superspreaders would clearly fit his description as well. It is quite possible that just one of them did enough damage to take a percentage point off China’s sizzling GDP growth for the year.◈ That, my friends, is serious power, in my mind signaling the ascendancy of the lesser includeds as the most consistent source of international instability and major crises.
Rule-set clashes need not be defined purely by security situations. China’s political leadership and the World Health Organization clearly experienced a rule-set clash over Beijing’s initial stonewalling on data concerning SARS’ spread in China. China tried its usual we’ll-tell-you-what’s-politically-convenient approach, and the WHO said in effect, “That isn’t nearly good enough if you want to avoid even more bans on travel!”◈ When Beijing realized that bans on travel included business travelers cutting major investment deals, they found religion on SARS transparency big time and voilà! Political leaders in China declared that anyone covering up SARS cases would be punished most severely.◈ Talk about a rule-set reset!
Rule-set clashes can occur during the run-up to a System Perturbation as well. When the Bush Administration openly declared that it was going to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime not simply to remove him from power but to “transform” the Middle East, that declaration—almost a vertical shock in itself—set off a clash of rule sets between Europe and the United States that has extended far beyond either the subject of Saddam’s removal or the time frame of the occupation. If Europe ends up moving toward a more united defense policy vis-à-vis the world, the System Perturbation known as Operation Iraqi Freedom is likely to be defined historically as the trigger for that lasting horizontal scenario. Another profound horizontal scenario stemming from that “big bang” might be a different sort of NATO or a new sort of UN Security Council—again, serious rule sets sent into significant flux.
But not all rule sets will change following a System Perturbation. A Chinese news media outlet may run a SARS expose today, but do not expect one on senior party corruption anytime soon.◈ France will still be France in the UN Security Council, because France is still a veto-wielding permanent member, and that is not going to change anytime soon. Russia may be a de facto member of NATO, but Russia can still be counted upon to be Russia as far as, say, its relationship with Iran is concerned. So any System Perturbation will result in a combination of new rules, the persistence of certain old rules (no matter how dysfunctional they may seem), and the mixing of both old and new rules.
How these rule-set changes unfold may well seem quite haphazard at first glance, and the connectivity among them may be very hard to trace if you view “national security crises” through very narrow lenses. Osama bin Laden declared a new sort of war on the United States on 9/11. Thanks to that act, there will probably be better access to cheaper AIDS drugs throughout the world. Thanks to bin Laden? Hardly. Because the war on terrorism involves pharmaceutical manufacturers? Now you’re getting warmer. Because System Perturbations like 9/11 can set in motion seemingly unconnected downstream rule-set changes?
Here I believe we stumble upon a story worth telling.
The terrorist attacks occur on September 11, 2001. Then “anthrax man” (or woman) strikes to take advantage of the resulting situation. Within a short time, there are five dead and eighteen sick in the United States. Soon after, Canada, normally a wonderful rule-set follower, tells Bayer, the giant German pharmaceutical company, that it is going to crank out a generic form of Bayer’s patent-protected drug, Cipro, as part of its national security response to the anthrax crisis. Does the United States take a similar step? Doesn’t need to, thanks to Bayer suddenly finding it in its heart to flood the U.S. market with Cipro, turning on factories across Europe like crazy.
At that point, a bunch of sub-Saharan African nations sitting—figuratively—in the back of the room raise their hands and say, “Wow, that is one neat trick. We’ve been asking for patent relief for the AIDS ‘cocktail’ drugs so Indian and Brazilian pharmaceuticals could crank out generic versions for use here in Africa at a mere fraction of the usual cost, but when we asked for that sort of rule-set relaxation, you guys said, ‘No way. What you’re asking is too hard and too unfair.’ We’ve got millions dying in Africa, but you said, ‘No . . . shareholders . . . research and development costs . . . very complex.’ But now you have less than a dozen dead and all of a sudden you seem to change the rules as you need to. What gives?”
Well, as the United States tried to think of a good answer, these nations set about threatening to derail the launching of the so-called Doha Development Round of trade negotiations that were scheduled to begin at the Doha meeting of the World Trade Organization in Qatar, November 2001. The advanced economies were determined to launch this round, which they had planned to launch back in Seattle in 1999—until Seattle Man the über-protester appeared on the scene, smashing up all those Starbucks and ingesting all that tear gas instead. The Core’s major economies were determined that the debacle of Seattle would not be repeated, hence the choice of isolated Doha as site for the meeting, and after 9/11, their determination for success was all the stronger. No one wanted to be seen as giving Osama bin Laden the right of veto over the Doha Round simply because he had pulled off 9/11. But because 9/11 begat anthrax mania and
anthrax mania begat the hypocrisy of the Core telling the Gap to “do as I say and not as I do,” this much-hyped Development Round was being set up for another failed launching, until . . . the Core relented in the personage of U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, who skillfully engineered the compromise on AIDS-drugs patent relief that proved a crucial milestone in launching the Doha Round.◈
Of course, the rest of the story is not as uplifting. Soon after, the major American drug companies, who supported Republican candidates with three out of every four dollars they donated toward the 2000 election, immediately began placing phone calls, begging for relief. Guess what happened? America started backtracking, at one point being the only member of the World Trade Organization to oppose the agreement it helped launch. But U.S. opposition was not completely cynical, because as soon as the Core indicated it would relent on patent relief regarding certain life-threatening epidemics such as AIDS, Gap states started proposing similar relief from baldness and sexual dysfunction. At that point, the Core’s giant pharmaceutical companies stood up in unison and said in effect, “Over our dead bodies!”◈ So, needless to say, contentious negotiations will long continue on this issue, although great progress has been made, such as a WTO deal, with U.S. blessing, to let Indian and Brazilian pharmaceutical companies disregard international patents as they crank out AIDS cocktail drugs cut-rate.◈ More progress on many such fronts is inevitable simply because governments all over the world can eventually be expected to lean on big drug companies to force them to invest more time and effort in antidotes and vaccines, two drug categories long ignored for being—quite frankly—too Gap-oriented.◈ So in the end, whether he wanted to or not, bin Laden probably has saved countless lives across the Gap by launching the terrorist strikes of 9/11.
That is also what I mean by System Perturbation.
And, yes, I know it’s a clumsy phrase, but let me tell you why I seek to reinvent this wheel: I think 9/11 proved a new type of national security crisis exists in this age. I think that new type of crisis is intimately linked to the process of globalization, which is itself a vaguely bland term that still will get you as many definitions as the number of people you ask to describe it. I purposely chose to create not just a new buzz phrase but frankly a whole new national security lexicon. My goal is nothing less than a revolution in how the Pentagon thinks about war and peace in the twenty-first century.
The Greater Inclusive
During my twenty-month stint as the Assistant for Strategic Futures in the Office of Force Transformation, Office of the Secretary of Defense, I gave my brief on the Core-Gap divide and System Perturbations to a wide variety of federal agencies involved in national security. At the end of virtually every presentation, I was asked, “How much does this brief reflect the thinking going on in OSD?” Until Art Cebrowski and I—between us—actually briefed all the senior leadership in OSD, I would interpret that question as a So what? You know, someone asking whether or not he should take you seriously, in a fairly direct fashion. Later, after the Esquire article came out, I became more confident that the material reflected the thinking “on the third deck,” where senior OSD leadership has its offices inside the Pentagon, because of the way the article was passed around the Defense Department as an authoritative source. The Chief of Naval Operations, for example, e-mailed a copy to all the admirals in the Navy.
These other federal agencies were really interested in knowing how committed the senior leadership of the Pentagon was to defining a new ordering principle for U.S. national security, because they were already there. I finally realized that what they were saying was, “Tell OSD they’re not alone.” I heard this from officials in the State Department, Homeland Security, the Agency for International Development, the intelligence community, the Coast Guard, the Joint Staff, several combat commands, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines, and the Special Ops. And I heard it from the private sector, especially banking and finance. I heard it from governors and mayors. I heard it from foreign militaries, such as those of Singapore, Australia, and Brazil. I heard it in question after question, phone call after phone call, e-mail after e-mail. After a while I felt like that elephant in the Dr. Seuss book Horton Hears a Who. I mean, just about everyone was yelling out, “We are HERE! We are HERE! We are HERE!”
What they were all telling me is that we need to expand our definition of national security crises in the age of globalization—beyond commanders in the field, beyond the Pentagon, beyond the Defense Department as a whole. After more than half a century of almost complete segregation thanks to the terror of nuclear war, the Pentagon needs to reconnect to the world—to war within the context of everything else. We need to break up the old hierarchies between the Big One and all those lesser includeds. We need something that covers the whole enchilada—that makes us one with everything. We need a greater inclusive.
The signs are all around us: CIA operatives steering their own unmanned aerial vehicles now have the okay to conduct assassinations of terrorist targets upon sighting.◈ They do not have to ask the Pentagon or the FBI for permission. That is a new rule set. The Justice Department had one list of priorities before 9/11, and a new one afterward.◈ That changes not just the department’s rule set but the rule sets of basically every other law enforcement agency throughout the country, because when the FBI focuses on terrorism and cybercrime, local cops get left holding the bag on everything else.◈ That is a new rule set that affects every single citizen in this country. When the Attorney General says he wants to double the number of Neighborhood Watches around the country as part of the global war on terrorism, that is a new rule set.◈ When three out of every four mayors in the United States say they have neither the money nor the manpower to handle any significant terrorist strike, they are screaming out for a new rule set.◈ When the FBI Director opens a new office in Beijing, that is a new rule set.◈ When the Coast Guard revamps its worldwide operations to stress port security at home, that is a new rule set.◈ When Washington, D.C., gets sensors to detect radiological releases, when airports are told to start accounting for shoulder-fired missile threats, when the President proposes the biggest increase in U.S. foreign aid in several decades, when the White House considers a domestic spy agency and the CIA expands domestic operations—all these indicators scream out “WE ARE HERE!”◈
Officials in OSD, if they had their way, would pursue a serious revamping of the laws that define our national security establishment. They know the Defense Department was fundamentally built for another era, another threat, another world. They are working toward a new ordering principle. The question is, How far are they willing to go?
The Defense Department’s ordering principle can be defined as the core conflict model around which everything is planned, procured, organized, trained, operated, and—most important—incentivized. If you change the rule set on how to become a flag—an admiral or general—then you will find yourself with a new military in less than a decade. That is really how quickly you can change the entire outlook of the organization, because in the up-or-out world of the military, we have an entirely new military leadership every ten years.
After I give a brief in the Pentagon or, really, in front of any crowd of security professionals, I find myself surrounded by a small crowd who cannot shake off the challenge I have tossed at their feet. I have had this conversation with so many people in so many venues, I can recite it verbatim: I say, “9/11 is a new form of crisis,” and some say, “No, it is only a supercrime. Catch the criminals responsible and life goes on. We may have to change the way our commanders do business around the world, but that won’t take much. Just load their staffs with liaison officers from other federal agencies. Play the terror war like the drug war. That’s all the transformation that’s required. Don’t confuse this military.”
But plenty of others do agree with the notion that 9/11 represents a new form of national security crisis, so with them, I take the conversation one step further. Next I say, “New
rules of war come with this new form of crisis, so we need a new ordering principle.” And among those still talking with me, some will say, “No, the rules remain the same. We still only do nation-states. If you need a Taliban or a Saddam taken down, fine. But we can’t be in the business of nation building, or serial assassinations around the planet. Our product line should remain the same, even if perhaps we need to reposition our suppliers—the services—in terms of the people they crank out. Don’t ruin this military.”
But there are some who have answered yes to those first two questions, and with these few I posit the last and hardest question, “Do newcomers define the rules? Are superempowered individuals like bin Laden and transnational terror networks like al Qaeda fundamentally altering the nature of war in the twenty-first century?” And among those still in the conversation, some will persist, “No, the rules are still defined by states, so that is where our focus must lie. So, yes, we must transform Defense as a whole, but we need to maintain a firewall between us and homeland security. We’ve given them Northern Command and that’s enough. We took down Saddam and that’s enough. At the end of the day, we still need to concentrate on defeating other militaries, not running some damn empire. Don’t crucify this military.”
At the end, only the younger officers, the ones who will run this world in a decade, are left in the conversation. They know it will take something more than tinkering to transform this military. These future flags are looking for a new ordering principle. They want a definition of war that goes beyond warfare. And they want it now.
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