Without reopening the entire debate on Saddam, who I think we’ll all admit had multiple priors and a number of outstanding warrants for his arrest, just take a minute and ask yourself why this administration felt it needed to hype its case for “present danger” to such an unseemly degree. The majority of Americans had already expressed support in polls for removing Saddam simply because of all the bad things he had done and continued to do to his people. So why all the unnecessary drama?
I’ll tell you why. The international system today lacks any sort of recognized institutional rule set for processing a politically bankrupt state. We have one for economically bankrupt states, and it’s called the IMF bailout and rehab process. We may argue incessantly about that rule set, but at least we’ve got one. So when an Asian financial “flu” disabled a number of states in 1997, the system processed that entire crowd within a couple of years.
What do we have for the Saddams and Mugabes and Kim Jong Ils of the world? Just a toothless UN Security Council whose only “weapon” is sanctions that inevitably kill innocent civilians while doing nothing to change the behavior of the regime. The UN is at best a legislative branch for the global community, whereas the U. S. is clearly the closest thing we have to an executive Leviathan able to prosecute criminal actors across the system.
The new rule set on this one is relatively straightforward but difficult to achieve; we need an IMF-like international organization that is set up to process dangerous Gap leaders who have ruled beyond their expiration date. It’s not a long list, but imagine how much better a world we’d have if we could somehow manage to ditch all these dictators in a manner the entire Core could buy into—even the French.
As for the American public, what the intelligence failure on Iraq should translate into is a new and frank understanding of the limits of arms control. Again, different worlds (Core, Gap) require different rule sets on security. Getting any state from the Gap into the Core means, first and foremost, getting that state to accept the Core’s fairly clear rule on security with regard to WMD—basically “just say no.” I know it’s hypocritical for nuclear powers to tell smaller states to “Do as I say, not as I do,” but on WMD I think that it’s better to err on the side of order over justice.
What Americans need to understand about the potential (and real) proliferation of WMD inside the Gap is that all the arms-control treaties in the world won’t do a damn thing to stop it. All such treaties reflect the conventional wisdom of life inside the Core, where mutually assured destruction has basically ended great-power war. That logic, or that security rule set, simply does not penetrate the Gap. So when states or transnational actors inside the Gap make moves in the direction of acquiring WMD, the new security rule set called preemptive war not only makes sense, it is imperative. If the Core lets the Gap’s lawlessness on WMD infect our long-standing stability on nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, then we will be doing nothing less than throwing away the cold war’s most important peace dividend.
Pentagon vs. Pentagon: Why We Will Soon Have Two Militaries, Not One
THE SECOND REASON why so much of the world is unhappy with the current state of affairs in Iraq is that it’s now clear that the Bush administration did a terrible job of thinking beyond Saddam’s takedown. In effect, it is guilty of planning for war within the context of war when it should have been planning for war within the context of everything else. This is an acute and continuing problem for President Bush himself, who has gone so far as to color his reelection campaign with the imagery of his being a “war president,” when both the public and the world at large clearly want evidence that his administration isn’t myopically focused on this global war on terrorism but instead has learned to locate that much-needed security effort within the larger political, social, and economic context of globalization’s advance—or everything else.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t lay all the blame for this sad state of affairs on the Bush administration alone. The Pentagon has spent the last decade and a half willfully ignoring its growing workload throughout the Gap. We’ve spent the entire post-cold-war period engaging in what are derisively known throughout the defense community as “military operations other than war” (MOOTW, or Moo-twah to insiders), and yet we have adamantly refused to rebalance our forces—especially our National Guard and Reserves—to account for this dramatic uptick in the Gap’s demand for our services. Simply put, we currently have a military that can do two or three Saddam-style takedowns every year but cannot pull off even one Iraq-style occupation.
But that is changing rapidly, and for the better. Already, senior Defense Department leaders are pushing for the creation of a “stabilization force” component within the U. S. military. A year ago, such a proposal would have been summarily rejected, but today it strikes most serious defense analysts as a crucial task of defense transformation. In this new era, our military interventions will be judged primarily by whether or not we leave the country more connected to the outside world than we found it, not whether we generate an instant democracy or win the war in record time.
The importance of this new direction within the Pentagon cannot be overstated, because it signals a “back to the future” outcome that will return America’s national-security establishment to the structure that served our nation so well prior to the historical aberration known as the cold war. Before we created the all-encompassing Department of Defense in 1947, America had two very distinct security establishments at its disposal: a Department of War and a department of everything else called the Department of the Navy. The War Department served as the “big stick” force that we busted out as required, while the Navy Department (especially the embedded Marines) served primarily as the “baton stick” force that we employed around the world on a regular basis.
Why did America fuse these two entities into a unified whole? As the cold war was beginning, defense strategists correctly foresaw a decades-long hair-trigger standoff with the Soviets over nuclear weapons. In effect, national defense (War Department) and international security (Navy Department) became interchangeable and virtually indistinguishable; to defend America was to deter the threat of global nuclear Armageddon.
As one small part of humanity that survived the madness of the cold war, let me be the first to applaud that historic decision. But let’s be clear: The dangers to system stability that we face today do not involve global nuclear war among great powers; they involve undeterrable rogue regimes and transnational actors located exclusively inside the Gap, with the exception of the cold-war tailbone known as North Korea.
What the Iraq occupation is making clear throughout the defense community is that we currently have a Department of War and a Department of Everything Else—the latter underfunded and overworked—coexisting uncomfortably inside the Department of Defense. Over time, a great divorce will occur because no house divided against itself can long stand. This progressive bifurcation of the U. S. military into a Leviathan force focused on waging wars and a System Administrator force focused on winning the peace has been years in the making, but it took the painful lessons of Iraq to really get the ball rolling.
What this splitting of the force will mean to future presidential administrations is clear: greater flexibility in dealing with the world as we find it. The Leviathan force will remain your father’s military: testosterone-fueled, lethal, and not subject to civilian law. The Sys Admin force will end up being more your mother’s military: supportive, nonlethal, and willing to submit to recognized authorities such as the International Criminal Court and the UN—Teddy Roosevelt meets Woodrow Wilson.
What this bifurcation offers the rest of the world is twice as many opportunities to contribute to America’s current scattershot efforts to export security throughout the Gap. The Leviathan is the classic come-as-you-are coalition of the willing, and since this flies-on-eyeballs crowd will feature Special Operations Forces as the pointy end of its spear, any nation able and willing to contribute its own small conting
ent of tough hombres can join this bandwagon on a first-come, first-to-serve basis.
But contributing to the war-fighting half of the pie won’t be the only way to gain a seat at the table, because the follow-on Sys Admin effort will allow those nations unwilling to field combat forces in certain situations to nonetheless participate in the peacekeeping force that must necessarily stand watch over the longer haul. Having both forces is crucial for this reason: There is a strong temptation for any administration—especially the pointlessly vindictive Bush White House—to tell allies that if they do not join in the war effort, they cannot participate in the rebuilding that follows. What having both forces means is that we will be able to tell potential allies not only to “come as you are” for the war but also to “come when you can” for the peacekeeping.
As we have learned in Iraq, America can lose about 150 soldiers in six weeks of combat and/or lose about 500 soldiers to terrorism to date in the ensuing occupation. Either way, it hurts just the same. If any country is willing to help out on one side of the war-peace equation, we should simply be grateful for the sacrifice offered, not picky about the timing.
Here’s what this splitting of the U. S. military means to the American people: The National Security Act of 2005 tentatively sits on the far side of this national election. I fully expect that if Bush is reelected, this piece of legislation will be profound, moving America down the pathway of seriously reordering its national-security establishment for the better. Does that mean a Kerry administration wouldn’t do the same? Not at all. In fact, that administration may well be the far better choice to pull off such a dramatic reorganization, given the growing distrust of many Americans and the world regarding the Bush administration’s integrity on matters of security.
My point is not to tell you how to vote, but simply to make sure you ask the right questions. If you think “preemptive war” and all that violence in the Gap are going to go away simply by voting Bush-Cheney out of office, you’re kidding yourself. The next administration is going to have its hands full with international-security issues no matter how much it may want to focus on other things. So don’t let either ticket off the hook on how it proposes to reshape our national-defense establishment for the big tasks that lie ahead.
AS AMERICANS SEEKING to choose our next president, we all need to understand better the stakes at hand, for it is not the danger just ahead that we underestimate but the opportunity that lies beyond—the opportunity to make globalization truly global. America stands at the peak of a world historical arc that marks globalization’s tipping point from a closed club of the privileged few to a planetwide reality. Making that strategic vision—that happy ending—come true will end war as we know it.
America has made this effort before and changed the world. Now is the time to rededicate this nation to a new long-term strategy much as we did following World War II, when we began exporting the security that has already made war only a memory for more than half the world’s population, enabling hundreds of millions to lift themselves out of poverty in the last couple of decades alone. It is our responsibility and our obligation to give peace the same chance in the rest of the world.
Thomas P.M. Barnett is the author of The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century, just published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. From November 2001 until June 2003, he served in the Office of Secretary of Defense.
About The Pentagon’s New Map
The groundbreaking examination of U.S. and global security, certain to be one of the most talked-about books of 2004—and beyond.
“Thomas Barnett is one of the most thoughtful and original thinkers that this generation of national security analysts has produced.”
—JOHN PETERSEN, President, The Arlington Institute
“His work should be read not only by policy makers and pundits, but by anyone who wants to understand how the world works in the Age of Terror.”
—SHERRI GOODMAN, Senior Fellow, The CNA Corporation, and former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense
“Barnett puts the world into context.”—Esquire
Since the end of the Cold War, America’s national security establishment has been searching for a new operating theory to explain how this seemingly “chaotic” world actually works. Gone is the clash of blocs, but replaced by what?
Thomas Barnett has the answers. A senior military analyst with the U.S. Naval War College, he has given a constant stream of briefings over the past few years, and particularly since 9/11, to the highest of high-level civilian and military policy-makers—and now he gives it to you. The Pentagon’s New Map is a cutting-edge approach to globalization that combines security, economic, political, and cultural factors to do no less than predict and explain the nature of war and peace in the twenty-first century.
Building on the works of Thomas Friedman, Samuel Huntington, and Francis Fukuyama, and then taking a leap beyond, Barnett’s book crystallizes recent American military history and strategy, sets the parameters for where our forces will likely be headed in the future, outlines the unique role that America can and will play in establishing international stability—and provides much-needed hope at a crucial yet uncertain time in world history.
For anyone seeking to understand the Iraqs, Afghanistans, and Liberias of the present and future; the intimate new links between foreign policy and national security; the operational realities of the world as it exists today, The Pentagon’s New Map is a template, a Rosetta stone. Agree with it, disagree with it, argue with it—there is no book more essential for 2004 and beyond.
Thomas P. M. Barnett is a senior strategic researcher and professor at the U.S. Naval War College. From October 2001 to June 2003, he served as Assistant for Strategic Futures, Office of Force Transformation, Office of the Secretary of Defense. Before that, he directed the NewRulesSets.Project, in partnership with Cantor Fitzgerald, to draw new “maps” of power and influence in the world economy; directed the Year 2000 International Security Dimension Project; and served as a project director for the Center for Naval Analyses and the Institute for Public Research. In December 2002, Esquire named him “The Strategist” for a special edition titled “The Best and the Brightest,” and followed that in March 2003 with his article “The Pentagon’s New Map.” Barnett has written for several other publications, including The New York Times and The Washington Post. A Harvard Ph.D. in political science, he lives in Portsmouth, Rhode Island.
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“Barnett’s book should be as instrumental for executive readers as Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree.”
—Dr. Paul B. Davis, national security expert, Washington, D.C.
“Barnett’s work is a tour de force. I have never seen such a persuasive presentation linking defense policy and globalization analyses.”
—Robert Orr, Vice-President and Washington Director, Council on Foreign Relations
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—Mac Thornberry, U.S. House of Representatives (R, Texas)
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