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Deleted ScenesDeleted Scene #21Chapter Five: The New Ordering PrincipleSection: The Greater InclusiveCommentary: This twenty-first "deleted scene" was going to appear on page 277 and was going to offer additional details on what I mean by the challenge of the three-front war. My guess is that Mark Warren cut it for being too detailed and offering extraneous information when the section really needed to get to the ending faster, having made all the key points I needed to make. Deleted Scene: More Background on the Three-Front War Concept[TEXT BEGINS] But you interrupt, "Hey, wait a minute. I thought you were the one security expert who wasn't going to scare the hell out of us all the time. What's up with that?" Here is where the new ordering principle comes in. Yes, under normal system operations, you actually have little to worry about. We live in the Core, where war is basically obsolete and our immune system is fairly robust. All of the serious violence in the system resides in the Gap. If we effectively manage our perimeter defenses around the Gap, so to speak, we do not have too much to worry about. Bad stuff will sneak in now and then, but we can handle it without calling it a crisis. Frankly, it is mostly just boat people. So what constitutes a crisis? In this world system, a real crisis is when something so perversely shocking happens that rule sets are thrown temporarily in doubt. In that case, you can talk about America's or even the Core's immune system being depressed. We need to recover somewhat before we becomes ourselves again. In the meantime, we are at heightened risk from all sorts of things, from the simplest forms of mass panic to serious misperceptions between great powers triggering actual wars. Doesn't that sound like our worst-case fears with Y2K? Remember? Everybody was going to freak out, and maybe some computer glitch would start World War III? That's exactly what I'm talking about here: a perturbation starting somewhere in the system and spreading instability across the whole for some period of time. I define that perturbation not in terms of destruction per se, but more in terms of networks being disrupted and/or rule sets being disturbed. I think that if we, as a nation, build a security strategy around our being as smart and as capable as possible in dealing with such complex situations, we will not only deal with whatever residual dangers exist for great power war, but we will get better at managing all types of crises better. The better our skill sets in managing all types of crises better, the more likely we will be able to export security into the Gap effectively and therefore shrink it. But you protest, "Alright! Alright! You've made your point. But I still don't see why the Pentagon still can't just focus on fighting other nations' armies "over there." We had your "System Perturbation" on 9/11 and then our Cold War military went over and kicked ass in both Afghanistan and Iraq just fine!" True enough. But I don't want America to suffer more 9/11's like the last one, though I know others will try to do the same to us in the future, and I expect their efforts and skills to improve with time, so ours must as well. Plus, we need to avoid thinking about such crises as such discrete packages. We live in an interconnected world, or at least an interconnected Core. My point on the three-front war is this: if the enemy pings us at back home, our defenses will be activated across the board. If the enemy pings us at the border, our defenses will be activated across the board. If the enemy pings us overseas, our defenses will be activated across the board. There is no such thing as the pure home or away game anymore, and that reality has huge implications in terms of how scarce national security resources are employed. In the old great power war model, the Pentagon could call upon the Coast Guard and the National Guard big time for support overseas. But now the Coast Guard has a new focus on perimeter defense, and the National Guard, lest we forget, belongs to 50 governors, all of whom naturally put homeland security before war "over there." If great power war was still king of the hill, there would be no question of throwing every available resource into the war effort overseas, but it is not the king of the hill anymore. 9/11 changed that, by being something a whole lot bigger than just sending the troops "over there" -- much less a long-term occupation. It was a System Perturbation. It was an act of war in the midst of peace. It was war within the context of everything else. [TEXT ENDS] |
Putnam, 2004 |
