The Pentagon's New Map: A Proposal For Restructuring The Military

Saturday night, I watched the Thomas Barnett lecture on The Pentagon's New Map, a proposal for reorganizing the military that he's given to thousands of global government officials in the past year or so. This really does seem to be the direction that we are heading in the future, regardless of political persuasion (Barnett is voting for Kerry). We need to take a hard look at this proposal. I've done a very brief summary here, taken from Barnett's book proposal. He also has a blog and other information about this at that site.

http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/pnm/proposal.htm

To many Americans, it seems that 9/11 completely erased what used to be a huge distinction between national security and domestic policy—and they’re right. What used to be a pure “away game” of sending our military forces overseas with no repercussions at home simply doesn’t exist anymore. When U.S. forces engaged in Operation Iraqi Freedom over there, the “home game” back here was called Operation Liberty Shield. When you turned on CNN to watch the war coverage, the images you saw were beamed in from Iraq but much of the information scrolling across the bottom of the screen was about the heightened domestic threat level—and that’s a first. Never before in our history has an overseas military intervention explicitly triggered a highly organized (and named) domestic security operation back here in the United States. The precedent of Operation Liberty Shield means that there is no such thing as the pure “away game” anymore. The security of any American is now intimately linked to any military interventions we pursue abroad. As globalization deepens and spreads around the planet, this connectivity and the dangers it spawns will only grow.

So when people are asking, "Where does this all end?" They’re not just asking about which country we should invade next. They’re wondering about the impact on their daily lives. With each step forward in our nation’s new preemptive globalization strategy—the ambition to “remake the Middle East,” the War on Terrorism—what will the average American have to endure here at home?

In my view, however, this is really the wrong question. As someone who has advised senior government political and military leaders on “strategic futures” over the past dozen years, I know the real question is not "Where does this all end?" but "Where does this all lead to?"

...The New Map will show readers that where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security, we’ll find regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living, and more deaths by suicide than murder. These parts of the world I call the Functioning Core, or Core. But where globalization is thinning or just plain absent, we’ll discover regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and—most important—the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists. These parts of the world I call the Non-Integrating Gap, or Gap.

...Understanding this distinction is crucial to understanding the future of U.S. national security. In fact, the Core-Gap thesis basically decodes the Bush Administration's controversial National Security Strategy by placing in context a host of new policies that—at first glance—seem like reversals of long-held U.S. strategic tenets. When the Bush administration announces such policy distinctions, it is not striking a unilateralist pose but rather signaling our nation's continued willingness to bear the bulk of the Core's burden in managing and ultimately reducing threats emanating from the Gap. In other words, it is not about seeking a separate set of international laws and guidelines for the United States, but acknowledging the need for one in those parts of the world that do not recognize the multilateral rules and understandings that have long been the cornerstone of peace and prosperity among most of the Core countries.
Recognizing the Gap for what it is puts everything into perspective. For it is in the Gap that:

· America will walk the beat 24/7 (so forget about being a “global cop”).

· America will frequently be forced to use military force unilaterally.

· America won't be able to rely on the traditional strategies of deterring the use of weapons of mass destruction.

· America will sometimes engage in preemptive strikes against enemies.

· America won't allow its military forces or its political leaders to fall subject to the International Criminal Court's jurisdiction for combat or peacekeeping operations they undertake.

· America and Europe will often part ways regarding how best to respond to regional security threats.

Understand this distinction between Core and Gap and you basically understand—even if you do not agree with—the Bush Administration’s strategic policies after 9/11. Ignore it and you'll be reduced to blaming everything on George W. Bush's "cowboy" militarism.

There are two forces Barnett proposes, and he makes a good case for them. One is the "Leviathan" force, as he calls it, the "bad cops". This would be the preemptive strike force. He wants it full of unmarried young guys, pumped and a little pissed off. The second one is the "System Administrative" force. It would be gender-neutral, composed of married people, and older people. This is the force that would win the peace, the "nation-building" crowd. Incidentally, the actions of the SysAd force would be under the auspices of the ICC, in Barnett's view.

So what do you think?

behind the scenes for quite awhile.

They often cite realizing the Revolution in Military Affairs/RMA.
http://www.datafilter.com/mc/rmaWarCollege.html

They don't like to mention the Revolution in Political and Military Affairs/RPMA because it is a study of the efficacy of military coup-it's the "bad cops" that actually partially pulled it off imo.
http://www.guerrillacampaign.com/coup.htm

Do you see any linkage to what Barnett is espousing and RPMA/RMA?

I've not had a chance to do more than scan those two documents, but they're worth reading in this context definitely. I feel that Barnett's addressing this, and here's some areas I think apply.

He talks about a rapid disconnect between war and Military Operations Other Than War (military speak for We Don't Wanna Do This - Barnett, being a Navy professor, had a genuine gift for communicating with military officials). Historically, the military was split into two forces (anybody remember the Department of War?), but were combined in response to the Cold War. The Cold War being over, the military is drifting back to the old split, and the discontent is fueled by not really being equipped to win the peace.

What Bush's misadventures in the Persian Gulf is brought us back to a Cold War mentality. The New Soviet Union is Terrorism, and we're approaching that fight in the old way. This is delaying the problems for a while, but since Terrorism isn't a nation-state, we're confronting it in an asymetrical manner, and that raises the real possibility of quagmire. Addressing the root causes of terrorism is the way to stop terrorism, and the Levithan forces are there for incorrectable problem children (I believe Barnett stated the new response milestone to be a 20-minute response to intelligence on terrorist leaders).

Any restructuring is going to stave off any building coup. And the War on Terrorism as it now stands is occupying the military in a Cold war way, but many military leaders are balking at Bush's fumbling of the peace objective. The DNC commercial of General McPeak changing his vote has been released to take advantage of this discontent. Barnett's plan appears to be one way to release the pressures that threaten a coup completely.

I saw this Saturday evening and it has been in my mind ever since. What Barnett fails to consider seriously is fossil fuel depletion. He kept stating we will run on hydrogen in 20 years. Hydrogen is not an energy SOURCE. It takes energy and fossil fuels to make hydrogen. He doesn't take this serious enough.

He also said that if another 9/11 were to happen, this country would lean more towards "order rather than justice". That tells me this would/can become a military state and all of our freedoms could be lost under martial law if such an attack were to occur. They have planned for it obviously.

After we go about the world emparting globalism on everyone for our corporate and economic maintenance in supremacy, and we begin to decline in fossil fuel, I believe we will not be in very good standing with a lot of countries in the end and our position will be very weak and vulnerable to many attacks. I would rather take the more friendlier route before we leave the industrial age. Then we won't be as much of a target. This aggressive spread of globalism through military means is not going to keep us alive in the very end.

There has to be another way--maybe more defense. I heard Pat Buchanan on Washington Journal this morning. I couldn't believe I was agreeing with him on all things military. I don't really consider myself an isolationist but I don't consider myself for military globalism/imperialism either.

I didn't see the whole program, so I didn't hear that particular prediction (hydrogen in 20). I did hear the portion where he talks about four approaches to globalization.

It's under Globalization Compromised. We could put a firewall around the Gap, develop hydrogen (What Would Jesus Drive?, which got a huge laugh from his military audience), and let the Gap soak in it - which means the Gap would retaliate. Only real interaction with Gap countries will make the difference in Barnett's view, and on this I agree. There's no place on Earth we Americans can hide anymore.

Also, he mentioned that other countries would be willing and able to participate in the SysAd side of the equation. I definitely got the idea that Barnett's no fan of the Halliburton cash funnel that the Iraq war became. The Leviathan forces are about preemption, but they're also to be used under a strict set of parameters in this analysis. SysAd people are about security and investment - for Barnett, globalization is best accomplished by foreign direct investment.

Imagine if the occupation of Iraq had been prepared to identify community leaders in Iraq and give them the capital they lacked to rebuild Iraq themselves. How much money would that have saved the American taxpayer? With shared oversight and investment opportunity, how many countries would have signed up to help win the peace in Iraq under those circumstances?

I do feel that if we are going this route regardless, Kerry would be the one needed to implement the rest of this strategy. Bush, Cheney, and his corporate friends have done enough damage and some relationships with other countries will never be totally repaired until we have someone more easily received.

I still can't see in the long run how America will have any true friends outside of economic friendship. When the economic bubble bursts someday, we have no other common interest to be friendly with each other because of all the bad deeds that are done to maintain a global economy. I would like to share the wealth and my standard of living as much as the next person but the whole world cannot have everything without depleting resources fast. The developed nations should be a catalyst for resource conservation but I know it will never happen with this goal of economic globalization. The end of economic globalization will be the ugliest thing we'd ever want to see, IMO. I don't want my children's children to have to endure it.

I realize we will always have to fight the mideast and religious fundamentalism but why can't we remain with a strong defense while trying to find alternative energies? I would be more for a satellite defense system and keeping the ME in check that way rather than marching boots into their land and killing and destroying everything and changing them this way. I wonder if it is the corporate interests that keep driving us to do things like this? I also understand that if a country is more wealthy and industrialized, the less they are to attack another but my argument remains that not everyone can have the wealth throughout the world without depleting resources too fast.

Sorry if I'm repeating myself. I'm just trying to put my thoughts together on this. A lot of what Barnett says is good. We are in there now and we need a plan to get out. Kerry would be the best person to do it at this point. I just don't appreciate the long-term strategy.

It's how he can be for the use of force, still able at this point to have voted for the authority to go to war (because the Middle East needs to be engaged), and yet decry the President's use of force.

Bush is screwing it up. They went in without a plan to win the peace, and John Kerry can fix that. I'd be interested to know his take on this book.

I think Barnett is addressing your concern, too. From the Esquire article:

IF WE STEP BACK for a minute and consider the broader implications of this new global map, then U.S. national-security strategy would seem to be: 1) Increase the Core’s immune system capabilities for responding to September 11-like system perturbations; 2) Work the seam states to firewall the Core from the Gap’s worst exports, such as terror, drugs, and pandemics; and, most important, 3) Shrink the Gap. Notice I did not just say Mind the Gap. The knee-jerk reaction of many Americans to September 11 is to say, “Let’s get off our dependency on foreign oil, and then we won’t have to deal with those people.” The most naïve assumption underlying that dream is that reducing what little connectivity the Gap has with the Core will render it less dangerous to us over the long haul. Turning the Middle East into Central Africa will not build a better world for my kids. We cannot simply will those people away.

The seam states are countries who are on the edge of being Core states, such as Turkey, Mexico, Brazil, the Phillipines, etc. Disconnectedness means danger. We must work within the seam to minimize the worst exports of the Gap states, but to be ultimately successful, the ultimate objective must be to shrink the Gap, use foreign direct investment to raise the Gap nations into the Core.

What Barnett is preaching: a win-win situation. The United States doesn't win if other nations are losing. It's got to be a mutual success.

It was intense. I think that more DUers should watch it. I'm not at all concerned with if people would agree or disagree with what he was saying. Just watch it with an open mind, recognize that this is the perception of many, many people in the defense industries/agencies, and then let's have a rationale discussion about what does it mean.

and he is advocating for smashing
other less murderous countries just for the sheer heck of it.

The Pentagon's New Map
It explains why we're going to war. And why we'll keep going to war.
http://www.esquire.com/features/articles/2004/040510_mfe_barnett_1.html

"America now has, for all practical purposes, a Department of War and a Department of Everything Else," writes Barnett.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0810/p17s01-bogn.html

I am not suprised to see certain elements supporting this
and other Nazi-like arguments for mass murder
on such as scale as to render Cain himself aghast.

Barnett’s lexicon is laden with pop culture terms, not the acronyms common at the Pentagon. In his view of the world, the bad guys are in “the Gap,” and the good guys belong to “the Core.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5014127/

"In Barnett's world," Martinovich writes, "Earth is essentially made up of two groups. The first is the Functioning Core, nations like the U.S., Canada, much of Europe, Russia, China, Japan, India and several other nations. The second is the Non-Integrating Gap, made up of the Middle East, most of Africa, parts of Central and South America and parts of Asia. The Core is defined by economic, political and military stability while the Gap is home to poverty, authoritarian regimes and conflict. Led by the U.S., Barnett argues, it is the Core's mission to shrink the Gap and usher in a new era of relative global stability.
http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=The_Pentagon's_New_Map:_War_and_Peace_in_the_Twenty-First_Century_(2004_book)

President Bush and his civilian Pentagon leaders were determined to move the military from a heavy, slow-moving industrial era-type force designed to fight the Red Army to a faster, more adaptive organization built around information age technologies. It would become more agile and easier to deploy, making it better equipped to deal with failed states, terrorism and other 21st-century missions. One of the first steps the administration took toward that goal was creating the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation, led by retired Vice Adm. Arthur K. Cebrowski.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30901-2004Jul31?language=printer

February 26, 2004
Calling his office a "think-and-do tank," Cebrowski told lawmakers that the office "focuses on specific activities" to make transformation happen. In his prepared testimony, he also said the process is happening "much faster than what we expected when we announced the journey just 28 months ago."
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0204/022604td1.htm
Which is when * assumed office.

There are two kinds of countries in Barnett's geopolitical framework: "Core" countries that are integrated into the globalization system, and "Gap" countries that are still outside the system. The "Gap" states are the hotbeds of terrorism, drug trafficking, crime, corruption and every other form of evil on the planet. Barnett argued, in a March 2003 essay in Esquire magazine, that summarized a power-point briefing that, he claims, he has given 125 times in recent years to military, banking, business and government leaders, that a preventive war against Saddam Hussein is both justifiable and necessary, not because of Saddam's supposed WMD or terror links, but because such an action by the United States would "...mark a historical tipping point--the moment when Washington takes real ownership of strategic security in the age of globalization."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalism
Hence the Axis of Evil speech.

Brave New World,
that has SUCH "people" in it.



"You will fall upon one another like wolves, you will make what we did pale in comparison. The billions who live forever will be a testimony to my work, and the billions who are murdered to buy that immortality will be the continuance of my work .. not like us, you will become us. That's my monument, Commander."
-- Warmaster Jha'dur

You're completely misrepresenting what Barnett said, Dulce. Leave the alarmist, apocalyptic language behind and join the discussion maturely.

It's not going to be enough to post a bunch of disjointed quotes that you think speak for themselves. You need to actively engage us in discussion, Dulce. What are you saying, besides "Thomas Barnett is advocating mass murder," which he most certainly is not?

and am accused of misrepresenting him.

Taking his quotes out of context and adding your own interpretation to them is how you misrepresent him.

Unless you contribute to the discussion, this is the last time I'm going to indulge your hysteria in this thread.

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Barnett makes a lot of good points although there were some areas I wasn't sure just what he was advocating.

I found his presentation to be critical of the Bush regime and it's policies, but not as explicitly as I would have liked. He did have some praise for Rumsfeld for being able to manage a state-to-state style war but not for managing the occupation. I thought many of the gaps he identified were not being addressed by the Bush regime and he was leaving it to the listener to realize this. He expressly criticized the "patriot" act for impeding forces that are inevitable and necessary for avoiding future clashes.

I like his point about how we in the US are "living large" by getting goods and services from other countries and paying for them by printing money. To me this is equivalent to the southern plantation model in which we are living well in the big house on the hill thanks to cheap labor. But this is an unsustainable model and we can't expect it continue without catastrophic consequences.

He talked about the ratio of workers to retirees decreasing to unstable levels. This is already causing problems in Europe but has been mitigated somewhat but importing labor and outsourcing. I'm not sure the US could handle the social changes of new immigrants even at European levels much less at the levels that will be needed.

I see terrorism as a reaction by those who see their culture and values threatened by external forces, or who see themselves being exploited by others. We have to understand this and find ways to deal with these forces. The hard reality of this is that we may no longer be able to live large. The resources of this planet and current technology will not permit us to do so.

So which hardship do we prefer? Do we want the hardship of warfare with its destruction and grief, or the hardship of lowered expectations, of a life less large but in tune with our planet's resources and just compensation for the labor of everyone on our planet?

http://www.oldielyrics.com/lyrics/art_garfunkel/woyaya.html

ramblin_dave says:
I like his point about how we in the US are "living large" by getting goods and services from other countries and paying for them by printing money. To me this is equivalent to the southern plantation model in which we are living well in the big house on the hill thanks to cheap labor. But this is an unsustainable model and we can't expect it continue without catastrophic consequences.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=parasite&r=67