The Pentagon's New Map

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  The key thing to remember in all of this is that the rest of the Core does not want to see America fail in its role as Gap Leviathan, they simply want to see us thinking about the system as a whole, and administering the system as a whole. This is why I propose that America truly needs two separate types of military force: one to serve as warfighting Gap Leviathan, and one to serve as peacekeeping System Administrator that organizes and facilitates the Core-wide exporting of security into the Gap. In short, we need a force for might and a force for right. When our Core allies see that America is serious about generating both types of military power, we will see the usual bandwagoning effect—meaning, friendly nations will join coalitions they know are certain to succeed. Build it and they will come, as they say, but they will come only if we decide to build both forces.

  The System Administrator

  Within a month of 9/11, I got a call from my old boss Art Cebrowski, former president of the Naval War College and now a senior adviser to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld on defense transformation. He wanted a copy of an article I had written immediately following Y2K.◈ In that piece, I posited what would happen to the Defense Department following a disastrous enemy attack against our networked economy. I described a scenario in which a Pearl Harbor-like catastrophe disabled some future, far more pervasive iteration of today’s Internet, which I called the Evernet. As a result of that disastrous strike, I hypothesized that the big war-focused Pentagon would be “unmasked as almost completely irrelevant to the international security environment at hand,” and therefore would subsequently be split into two forces: a big-war, highly lethal strike force that focused on “global deterrence” and a crisis-oriented, highly responsive protection force that focused on “network security.”

  The first force would serve as America’s “killer application” for the twenty-first century, or the big stick we would pull out as needed to unilaterally crush enemies that rose up, while the second force would serve as America’s cop on the beat, managing the world day to day in an integrated fashion with other U.S. federal agencies, the UN, and allied militaries. These two forces would operate under different rules, would pursue different missions and goals, and—by doing so—would reconstitute America’s previously bifurcated national security structure of a Department of War and a Department of the Navy. Why did Cebrowski want the article? He said there was serious talk in the secretary’s office about exactly these sorts of issues. Senior leaders there were beginning to realize that the Pentagon was not set up for the world it suddenly found itself trying to manage after 9/11.

  To me, such a split was more than simply a back-to-the-future outcome, it was a return to normalcy for U.S. national security, which had been perverted into the Pentagon’s current structure because of the decades-long hair-trigger strategic standoff with the Soviets. The military has long been too distant from American society, from the world as we know it, and increasingly from our own allies struggling to keep up with our technological advances. By “distant” I mean divorced from the everyday reality of why America employs military force around the world. Thanks to our endless theorizing about global nuclear war, all our reasoning regarding the use of force degenerated into vague abstractions—“national interest,” “national will,” and so on. In focusing on the Big One, the Pentagon became so fixated on the how that we forgot the why—much less how to explain it to the American public. Truth be told, the defense community is so out of practice in explaining the why that we prefer to avoid this conversation altogether.

  Over time, the U.S. military evolved beyond the strategic environment to the point where it would never again face a genuine peer, but instead of asking the tough questions about how to deal with our de facto Leviathan status, we spent the post-Cold War era searching for a near-peer competitor and denying the split that emerged between our high-tech force and the low-tech missions we were constantly pursuing. Wars kept getting shorter and easier, but crisis responses kept getting longer and more complicated. The Pentagon was so unhappy with the situation by the end of the nineties that most transformation gurus wanted to “take our ball and go home” to plot endlessly for the distant war with near-peer China.

  That fabulous Leviathan force was completely useless on 9/11. It could not stop the attack. There was no force to counterattack. Our fighter jets circled menacingly above New York and Washington for weeks, shutting the barn door long after the cows had escaped. In many ways, it was pathetic. America’s unbeatable military force had let our homeland be sucker-punched and dropped to the canvas. Then the U.S. national security establishment did what it knew best, it retaliated against a nation-state, but even here it was an odd sort of war led by Special Operations Forces and CIA paramilitaries. The Pentagon was completely unprepared to fight in Afghanistan, but with its usual brilliance for adaptive planning, it nonetheless pulled it off using about one-fifth of its force to do four-fifths of the fighting. The warrior spirit was revalidated by our swift victory (This is why we have this military!), and when the Department of Homeland Security was proposed, it seemed as though the Pentagon had dodged a bullet of sorts—the splitting of U.S. national security would be between homeland and overseas, not within the Pentagon itself.

  But the split I had long predicted was not obviated, merely delayed. The Pentagon had suffered serious losses in the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. The Coast Guard is essentially lost as a warfighting asset, returning home to the U.S. coastline, where it will focus on homeland security tasks the U.S. Navy is keen to avoid.◈ The U.S. National Guard and reserves are likewise in many ways greatly diminished as a warfighting asset. Operation Liberty Shield, the domestic security alert that occurred in conjunction with Operation Iraqi Freedom, saw a great number of these troops called up, just as many in fact as were called up for Operation Desert Storm. But this time, many were used to guard key facilities and venues all over America, as well as military installations around the world.◈

  Critics charged Secretary Rumsfeld with trying to wage war in Iraq “on the cheap,” meaning he did not put enough troops in the field. The Pentagon was accused of fighting a “transformational war” merely to prove some pet theories, thus endangering American personnel. It would be a bloodbath, many “experts” predicted, with a block-by-block Stalingrad-like siege of Baghdad. The Pentagon, many retired flags opined (usually on network TV), was ill prepared to win this war. America’s lack of allies, Central Command’s lack of easy entry (thanks to Saudi Arabia and Turkey), and the Pentagon’s stubbornness regarding the need for more heavy armor meant we would win, but quite probably at a terrible price.

  True to its post-Vietnam form, the U.S. military came through the war with flying colors. Combat casualties were amazingly low, the enemy was unable to mount a stand, and the war passed quickly into occupation. Then came the hard part: dealing with a devastated economy, a brutalized society, and significant numbers of postconflict guerrillas and terrorists more than happy to wage asymmetrical war against a sitting force both ill prepared to manage the transition and eager as hell to leave.◈ The warrior force was immediately transmuted—against its will, its ethos, and its skill set—into an occupation force.◈ The Leviathan was transformed into System Administrator, the unilateral foreign policy was transformed into a multilateral mea culpa, and President Bush’s upbeat May speech aboard a carrier steaming home in triumph was transformed into a sober September speech from the White House—the “end of hostilities” having quickly segued into the “long haul.” Whether the Pentagon wanted to admit it or not, the split had finally arrived.

  America now has, for all practical purposes, a Department of War and a Department of Everything Else. Both are housed, quite uncomfortably, in the Pentagon. Both are directed by a single leader, the Secretary of Defense. But these two “departments” remain fundamentally at odds with each other. One wants to remain greatly separated from society, from allies, and from the UN. The other realizes it needs to cut a new deal with society in terms of
the National Guard and Reserves, with allies in terms of their willingness to provide peacekeepers, and with the UN in terms of internationalizing the nation building that will occupy our attention in Iraq for years to come. One force felt it did its job in Iraq brilliantly, and thus wanted to go home as soon as possible. The other force felt it was doing its job in Iraq the best it could, and it was desperate for new resources, new skill sets, and new partners. To this day, both forces continue to feel underappreciated, but both realize that no matter how well things went in postwar Iraq, this split will be replicated in every major intervention America undertakes in this global war on terrorism. “Military operations other than war” suddenly does not seem the lesser included it once was, triggering nervous debates about whether America needs a bigger military—not to mention emergency spending bills that are larger than virtually any other country’s entire defense budget.◈ The warfighting-obsessed Pentagon has long feared the rise of the near-peer competitor and it has finally arrived—from within.

  Again, this is a problem of the Leviathan force’s unprecedented success over the past generation. It can simply whip the world in any type of war imagined, but it is poorly constructed to deal with the peace that must invariably follow if permanent victory is to be secured. It is a first-half team playing in a league that keeps score through the end of the game. Outside of Vietnam, America is basically undefeated in war, but its historical record of postconflict nation building is way below .500, and that has to end.◈ It has to end because shrinking the Gap is about growing connectivity and enabling economic integration, not just serial assassination and drive-by regime changes. Taking out bad guys is necessary in key instances, but it is never sufficient. America simply does not have a Pentagon able to win the peace, and winning wars is just not enough anymore. War must yield to peace, disconnectedness to connectivity, Gap to Core. If the Pentagon is not on board with this vision, then it will be forced to change. It does not have its own foreign policy and it never will. The Defense Department serves the larger purpose of U.S. foreign policy, or it does not serve at all.

  The System Administrator force will be everything the Leviathan force is not. Where the Leviathan projects power menacingly, the Sys Admin will export security nonthreateningly. Where the Leviathan will be event-focused, the Sys Admin will be continuous—the former’s vertical scenarios of war yielding seamlessly to the latter’s horizontal scenarios of transition, integration, and peace. The Leviathan will destroy rogue regimes wielding immense lethality, but the Sys Admin will build nations wielding nonlethal technologies appropriate to the policing systems they will generate as legacies to the succeeding political order. The Leviathan will be punitive, bringing down enemy networks and blindsiding foes, but the Sys Admin will seek preventive cures that emphasize making networks more robust and crisis situations more transparent.

  In operations, the Leviathan force will emphasize speed above all, preempting where possible and always staying on the offensive. Its high-tech capabilities will assure it access to any battle space a foe might prefer, and its relentless focus on disintegrating an enemy force and hunting down its remnants will keep our opponents desperately seeking more remote sanctuaries. The Leviathan’s speed of command and maneuverability will allow it to get inside the enemy’s decision loop (i.e., outpacing his speed of decision making), destroying his ability to mount coherent defenses.◈ Its warfare will be Hobbesian in the extreme: very nasty, very brutal, very short. Most enemies will not choose to fight the Leviathan force whatsoever, meaning technical knockouts will become the norm.

  In contrast, the Sys Admin force will emphasize deliberateness above all, because in occupying postconflict transition spaces it will necessarily stay on the defensive, guarding sites versus killing bad guys. The “access” this force will defend focuses on civilian partnerships to be maintained, allied forces to be integrated, and political victories to be won. It will serve as hub to the many spokes involved in postconflict security generation, humanitarian relief, and national reconstruction. Where the Leviathan force prefers unilateral freedom of action, the Sys Admin force will be thoroughly multilateral, bureaucratically multilingual, and able to coexist peacefully with any nongovernmental organization or private voluntary organization on the scene. These groups—like the International Red Cross, Save the Children, and Doctors Without Borders—will be made to feel not just welcome in any postwar or disaster environment but safe as well.◈ The presence of these groups will not just be tolerated, but thoroughly accommodated with the zeal of a service-delivery company (think UPS or FedEx). The Sys Admin’s decision loops will necessarily sync up with those of the relief agencies and the international development organizations, and both sides in this civil-military marriage will learn to live with each other over the long haul.◈ The Sys Admin force will not be in a hurry to leave, and will remain until the locals are ready to assume control or the UN mission is up and running. All the broken windows will be fixed before this force departs, and the American public will come to understand that these are the troops that remain after we “bring the boys home.”◈

  These two forces will be organized quite differently. The Leviathan force will be young, overwhelmingly male, and preferably unmarried, while the Sys Admin force will be far older, more educated, gender-balanced, and often married with children. The Leviathan force will remain under military law, and will not submit to oversight from the International Criminal Court (ICC). It will remain a secret society, largely disconnected from Homeland Security and never transgressing Posse Comitatus restrictions against military operations within the homeland.◈ Its entire ethos will revolve around killing bad guys over there. The Sys Admin force will be its complete opposite, moving progressively from military law toward civilian law. It will eventually submit to the ICC’s oversight, and it will not be bound by Posse Comitatus restrictions on operating within the United States. It will be a far more police-like force, connected to society and always available for insertion into homeland security operations.

  Unlike those in the Leviathan force, personnel in the Sys Admin force will alternate service in the ranks with periods of work outside in normal society. It will not be a case of up-or-out career paths but in-and-out career rotations. The Sys Admin force will revolve around protecting society from bad actors, and it will “serve and protect” both at home and overseas. To its detractors, this force will be a “mobile police state,” pure and simple. But in truth it will represent not American justice, but Core justice, and as such it will be easily deployed for at-length duty across the Gap, enjoying as it will the financial support of the Core as a whole. Moreover, as the world’s largest and most respected public-sector security consultancy, the Sys Admin force will attract foreign troops from the Gap as peacekeepers because—financially speaking—the provision of such troops is a moneymaker for developing nations.◈ You may deride such a development as signaling nothing more than the resurrection of the French Foreign Legion (Gap supplies the soldiers, Core supplies the guns), but tell me, wouldn’t you rather see Gap militaries being put to this sort of use rather than joining in the civil strife that currently plagues too many states there?

  Where the Leviathan force defines the global war on terrorism, the Sys Admin force defines our long-term goal of shrinking the Gap. Done right, the Leviathan force is first-in, first-out, while the Sys Admin force is last-in, last-out. The Leviathan force does not wait on UN Security Council resolutions, although it will welcome them should they arrive in time. The Sys Admin force will not only welcome such resolutions but do everything possible to attract the UN missions that it is dedicated to supporting. Where the Leviathan force does not share information and is inwardly networked, the Sys Admin force will be purposely designed for outward connectivity. Its networks will emphasize not just “jointness” among the services, but interagency cooperation throughout the U.S. government and beyond. In essence, it will aspire to the role of universal translator, able to speak any bureaucratic tongue or
private-sector language. Where the Leviathan force is shrouded in acronyms, coded language, and exclusionary terms, the Sys Admin force will employ plain English, transparent terminology, and a lexicon of inclusion. The Sys Admin force will not need to join the civilian world outside the Pentagon, it will largely live in that world.

  These two forces will offer very different coalition opportunities to potential allies. The Leviathan force will be combat-oriented and Special Operations Forces-centric, so the ante for participation will be simple: Can your country provide SOF willing to kill on command and face death in combat? Because these individuals really are a breed apart, any number an ally can provide will gain that country entry into the posse of the moment, no questions asked. The Sys Admin force will be civil affairs-oriented and network-centric, so the criteria for participation will be more complex, but also more fungible, the question being: Can your country provide any niche capability that is self-supporting, modular, and easily networked according to international protocols?◈ Where the Leviathan force distributes encrypted hit lists across hardened networks, the Sys Admin utilizes open-source code and hosts shared databases on the Internet. As far as the Sys Admin is concerned, so long as you can meet the basic interface standards, it will welcome as many units as your country can manage, assuming all your systems achieve log-in and maintain secure network connections.

  These two forces will, by and large, not interact with each other, as the Leviathan will be activated only when certain thresholds are reached and certain tasks need performing. Like the SWAT team within any metropolitan police force, it will enter and exit crime scenes as dictated by circumstances, while the Sys Admin force will be an always-on, always-nearby, always-approachable resource for allies and friends in need. The Leviathan force will wage war with an eye toward leaving the situation as amenable as possible to follow-on management by the Sys Admin force, so precision of targeting and economy of force will be the watchwords. The Sys Admin will not be forced to deal with the Leviathan’s unexploded bombs or unexplainable massacres. The Leviathan will focus on killing and removing bad actors while leaving behind societies otherwise unimpaired; it will surgically remove unwanted tissue, not riddle the body politic with smoking holes.