Let me remind you how we got to this point, because it is crucial to understand that the Pentagon is a victim of its own incredible success to date in managing the global security environment. I know I go on and on about the Pentagon’s bad habits and all those “strategists” I refuse to name but lambaste at will, but deep down I truly believe that not only is the United States Government the greatest force for good the world has ever known, but the U.S. military is the single greatest instrument of that good as well. Show me a part of the world that is secure in its peace and I will show you strong or growing ties between local militaries and the U.S. military. Show me regions where major war is inconceivable and I will show you permanent U.S. military bases and long-term security alliances. Show me the two strongest investment relationships in the global economy and I will show you the two postwar military occupations that remade Europe and Japan following World War II. Show me globalization made truly global and I will show you a U.S. military playing Leviathan throughout the Gap. Show me a future worth creating and I will show you a price worth paying—even at the cost of some of our loved ones.
In the Cold War, we faced a system-level threat: the Soviets. We optimized for that threat. We made it our ordering principle. On the level of the nation-state, we waged careful proxy wars, because we could not risk taking on the Soviets directly. Way down within nations, we worried now and then about the least of the lesser includeds—the terrorists, drug traffickers, and so on. But those were left completely to law enforcement, because we had bigger fish to fry.
Now what do we have? Some will say the Pentagon should be solely in the business of keeping Americans alive, but that seems absurd. We cannot pull back our forces into fortress America and hope to keep the world at bay. Others say we should admit we are already fighting World War IV, country by country, so let us order ourselves around that goal, “just as we did back in the big one—you know, Dubya Dubya Too!” But that is simply fearmongering. Ann Coulter may want to kill all their leaders and turn them all into Christians, but that just will not do for those of us interested in leaving something better behind for our kids than the do-it-yourself instructions for Götterdämmerung.
America is a system-level power, really the only system-level power. If we do not possess a system-level definition of crisis and instability, then exactly who will? We solved global nuclear war by inventing Mutually Assured Destruction and selling it to the world. We have effectively ended interstate aggression by inventing a New World Order and—that’s right—we successfully sold it to the world. Only the worrywarts still sending me daily e-mails fret anymore about global nuclear Armageddon. Meanwhile, state-on-state war has gone the way of the dinosaur, thanks to America’s willingness to remind everyone on a regular basis that we are the last superpower standing. Reaching down past the near-peer competitor, down past the regional bullies, we are now waging wars on individual bad actors throughout the Gap. That transformation of U.S. military power over the last generation is nothing less than amazing.
WE ARE HERE!
The same U.S. military that specialized in deterring the Soviets twenty years ago now increasingly specializes in stopping bad people from doing bad things. Twenty years ago our standard of warfare was being able to respond within eight to nine minutes of a Soviet launch of intercontinental missiles—all at the push of a button. Within a short time, we will close in on a standard of warfare where an unmanned aerial vehicle operating on the other side of the world can locate, identify, and kill a terrorist within eight to nine minutes—all at the push of a button.◈
WE ARE HERE!
America has basically arrived at a point in world history where—if we really want to—we can render organized mass violence of all sorts essentially obsolete. We have helped move the Core toward that standard over the past half century. We could do the same for the Gap, if we can muster a similar, long-term effort. But we need a new ordering principle for national security, or something bigger than just great-power war. In the Cold War, great-power war basically covered all the lesser includeds, but not anymore. Now building a force primarily for that sort of war leaves us desperately short for the everything else we find ourselves doing so often in this global war on terrorism. You want a good example? We have a military that can take down a bunch of Saddams every year—easy. What we do not have is a military that can effectively occupy an Iraq—not one. Plus we need a force able to do that and still perform a host of other tasks around the world at the same time.
Here is another example, relayed to me by a friend of mine, a Navy captain whom I will call Phil. Phil told me the following story about his efforts leading a group of U.S. Navy ships operating in the Arabian Sea south of the Persian Gulf following 9/11.
Phil’s basically out there operating with ships that—he’ll tell you straight off—are really designed first and foremost to engage and destroy other ships. His problem is, he’s trying to track and capture al Qaeda operatives we think might be using high-speed boats to escape from Southwest Asia into the Horn of Africa and thereupon disappear deep inside the Gap. This is the classic interdiction problem, or what the drug-ops guys call a go-fast event. That term really has a double meaning: not only are the targets going fast, but you have to decide awfully fast whether that target needs to be checked out or, if need be, targeted for destruction.
Our military has had this problem for a while, like when civilian airliners wander into war zones. Think back to when a Navy ship shot down an Iranian Airbus during the Persian Gulf “tanker war” of the late 1980s. Phil’s problem was similar, in that he was conducting “warfare” in the middle of peace. He was waging a global war on terrorism, but everybody else in the neighborhood was just going about their business. So in effect Phil was operating under a serious handicap: his ships were really built to fight other nations’ navies, but here he was tracking individuals across a system; plus he was conducting war within the context of everything else and did not have the operational mind-set he felt he needed to do the job right.
You can say, “Come on, it’s just a matter of stopping boats, and the Navy knows how to do that.” But it was harder than that. He couldn’t stop every boat, or even check out all the go-fast events. It was like he was a cop training in one of those pretend shooting galleries where the life-size cutout figures come popping out at you and you have to think on your feet: Is that a bad guy or not? Do I shoot or not? Will I get shot or not? Of course, the military trains for that sort of rapid decision making all the time. Phil just felt as if he wasn’t operating in his usual shooting gallery.
So, as Phil tells the story, he sets up his own “neural network.” He just starts stopping any old boat in order to talk up the local fishermen, figuring they knew the everything else part. He gets local knowledge. He makes himself a known commodity. He shifts from warrior to the cop walking the beat. He learns to separate the real data from the background noise.
One day Phil was tracking high-speed vessels roaring out of the Gulf and heading toward the East African coastline. He consults his neural network, checking out the particulars of this go-fast event, asking his local sources, “What do you know about this and how long has it been going on?” They reply blandly, “Oh, about a couple thousand years.” It turns out this particular go-fast event is nothing more than the annual pilgrimage by a certain class of fishing boats to the coast of Africa in search of some delicacy that’s available in big numbers only that time of year.◈ Phil shoulders his firearm, so to speak, and walks away from the situation that much smarter about how to spot the bad guys in this neck of the woods.
That is waging war within the context of everything else.
But it is also an officer trying to shift back and forth between warrior and beat cop at the drop of a hat. It is also the U.S. military trying to wage a new type of war with a force built for another type of war. Finally, it is also the Pentagon letting itself be painted into corners, thanks to an outdated rule set.
The legacy of our fo
cus on great-power war is a military whose structure is best described as “the few and the expensive.” The problem is, our future enemies prefer to wage war using “the many and the cheap.” We field a huge carrier or a B-52 bomber that can waste an entire city on the fly, but he fields a suicide bomber who can infiltrate a defended zone, like an embassy compound or a crowded port, and be more politically effective—pound for pound. He is built for the everything else environment, we are not. But that can and will change. We will build smaller, faster ships in larger numbers, not to replace carriers but to complement them. We will build smaller, better unmanned aerial vehicles, not to replace fighter pilots but to complement them. We will field more nonlethal technologies, not to replace guns but to complement them. We will build a stabilization force that puts the right boots on the ground, not to replace our Leviathan force but to complement it. Our shrink-the-Gap military will feature both SWAT and cop-on-the-beat capabilities, not to replace the UN but to complement it. We will define future war as something bigger than just preparing to fight another great power’s army. Over time, we will master the everything else.
You may be thinking, “Oh, that’s great for running our empire overseas, but tell me how all this war within the context of everything else makes Americans safer at home. You tell me you’re going to remake our military, but it still sounds like some force running around out there, while our security is still largely over here. Your ordering principle needs to make me feel safer at home, not just feel better about our troops fighting overseas.”
It is when we look at the interrelationship between those “home” and “away” games that we really come to understand how completely things have changed. In short, the Pentagon’s ordering principle of great-power war has already taken a backseat to something larger, or what I describe as a System Perturbation. I like to use a medical analogy to explain what I mean here.
When our daughter Emily had to go through fifteen months of chemotherapy, Vonne and I had to come up with a larger definition of “the threat” than the one to which we were accustomed. It was not that Emily was now subject to a wider array of threats, because they were all there all along. It was just that, given her significantly depressed immune system, we needed to protect her more deeply.
Most parents, when they think about bad things happening to their kids, concentrate on what can happen to them when they step out the front door and enter that bad, scary world outside. Sure, you also worry about something hitting home or some problem starting with your child, but most of the time, it is that outside world you fear the most, because, you figure, your kids are safe at home.
Well, when Emily was fighting her cancer through all those long months of chemo, we faced threats from all angles. Of course the cancer could kill her, but it looked like the chemo would do the trick. Then there was the chemo itself, but Emily was handling the poison pretty well. That left the last big problem, which is actually the one that kills most pediatric oncology patients: catching some illness when the immune system is down for the count. Simply put, Emily could catch a cold and die because her body could not adequately defend itself. She was like this perfectly open system, into which any bad thing could easily enter and wreak deadly havoc.
So we designed a defense-in-depth strategy to keep Emily alive all those months. First, we worked on her insides. We stuffed her full of protein every chance we got, trying to build up her weakened immune system by pushing the best building blocks for blood production. Second, we kept the defensive barrier between her and the outside world—her skin—as strong as possible. Here we had a big problem: a permanent chest catheter that was like a huge hole in Emily’s defensive perimeter—a drawbridge we could not raise. Since it lacked the normal defenses associated with an orifice (like a mouth or nose), we needed to keep the catheter entry site especially clean, in addition to the rest of her surface. Finally, we worked to keep her operating environment, or our town house in northern Virginia, as antiseptic as possible. That meant we ran our home like a hospital—actually a lot cleaner. Moreover, we severely restricted access by outsiders. If you had the slightest sniffle, we barred you at the door. If you did not like that, too damn bad.
In many ways, what we were trying to do with Emily is similar to what we now refer to as homeland security: trying to keep this incredibly open society from being harmed by bad things vectoring in at us from that nasty world outside. We had to put up with Emily’s depressed immune system because that was the price we paid to beat the cancer. Likewise, America needs an open society because that is the price we pay for linking up so effectively with the rest of the global economy.
So how do we keep America-as-we-know-it alive? Same basic routine: we bolster our immune system, we man our perimeter defenses effectively, and we try to root out those nasty sources of terrorism out there in the global environment. Some examples of who does what: America’s immune system is basically its first responders, or the police, fire, emergency medical, and so on. You cannot stop every bad thing from entering the system, so you need to keep that immune-system response capability strong. The protective membrane force? That is more like your FBI, Customs, Coast Guard, and so on. Much of our Department of Homeland Security is found here. Who works to keep the outside environment clean? Here we are talking about the Defense Department, by and large, in what used to be a pure “away game.”
But of course there is no such thing as a pure away game anymore. We cannot restrict our worries to bad things happening to Americans only when they head out the door and travel overseas, which is the most practical way the Pentagon thought about the safety of Americans prior to 9/11—what we call noncombatant evacuation operations.
Today, our definition of national security is not just a matter of being able to play “over there” versus “back here,” but being able to play in all arenas simultaneously: over there, back here, and along the perimeter. Welcome to the three-front war, where nothing is sacred and no one is ever absolutely safe.
When the United States invaded Iraq in the spring of 2003, we fought a three-front war, whether most Americans were aware of that or not. We massed a huge security force to protect Americans all across the nation. We increased our border security operations to levels not witnessed since the Second World War, or the days immediately following 9/11. This combined internal/perimeter defense operation was named Operation Liberty Shield. It was done solely in conjunction with our invasion of Iraq. This is the first time we have ever taken such dramatic steps preemptively to secure our nation as part of a planned overseas intervention. That is because our toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime was no simple intervention; it was no mere major-theater war. Operation Iraqi Freedom was an overt attempt to create a System Perturbation centered in the Persian Gulf: to throw rule sets there in flux, to shake things up, to trigger a Big Bang that would transform the region’s security system and, we hoped, so much more. It was war within the context of everything else.
America is attempting to do things today in global security affairs that people everywhere—in this country and around the world—are struggling to describe. The world desperately needs a new lexicon for this new security environment, otherwise America will never be able to make itself understood. Our problem right now is not our motive or our means, but our inability to describe the enemies worth killing, the battles worth winning, and the future worth creating.
The Big Bang As Strategy
At this point, I should probably tell you that I am the real Agent Mulder of X-Files fame. What I mean to say is, a lot of people out there are certain I am the real Fox Mulder, and if they are that certain, then at least some of the rumors must be true. I could deny it, as I have many times before, but even I have to admit the evidence is getting to be overwhelming. So I figure I might as well come clean and confess everything. That way I can tell you the real story behind the war in Iraq and the so-called Big Bang theory. By doing so, I can pull back the curtain and show you the Bush Administration for what it re
ally is—a bunch of crazy idealists hell-bent on transforming the Middle East!
The story of my Mulder-like career of nonstop conspiracy really needs to be told by a man smoking a cigarette, but here I go anyway: First off, I never worked at the Center for Naval Analyses, that was strictly my cover while I received eight years of training at the Agency—you know, somewhere in northern Virginia. But to make it look good, the Company sends me to Rhode Island when I’m ready to be put into play. That way, it’s not so obvious what I’m up to. So they get me this gig at the War College, where I, like, never seem to teach a class! Come on! That’s a dead giveaway. Why the college? Those guys had those supersecret workshops going on with Cantor Fitzgerald. Yes! That Cantor Fitzgerald. Run by a bunch of Jews. Those guys control almost all the government bond trading in the universe. You remember the ’93 bombing, right? That was the pretext for the workshops—all part of the big plan to be revealed at a later date.
So what’s my first assignment there? Planning the Pentagon’s coup d’état for Y2K! Jack Anderson broke that story, but the signs were there all along. I mean, that phony Web site at Geocities, the fake bio on his Web site, right down to the kid-with-cancer story—so humanizing! But Y2K fails to provide the pretext for the ZOG takeover—you know, the Zionist Occupation Government. I mean, after Anderson broke the story, many of us were too afraid to go through with the plan, so the whole thing fell apart: the Marines never took over Washington, Cantor never engineered a financial panic, and the Agency never got around to assassinating all those American leaders to clear the way for the ZOG. So the Clintonistas had to go. If they couldn’t pull it off with all those Jews running Treasury, then we’d have to try again using Defense. So the ZOG masterminds, working with the Agency, fix the 2000 election and Bush beats Gore. I vote for Gore, by the way, just to cover my tracks.
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