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The Pentagon's New Map > Director's CommentaryThe Core and GapOVERVIEWThis chapter serves a variety of functions. First, it further displays the fundamental differences between the Core and Gap, hopefully bolstering my theory that the two are worlds within a world, operating under different sets of rules. So in that way, this chapter is an extension and further proof of the previous one. But it is also a leap forward from Chapter 3's description of the present strategic security environment into the future. The focus of this chapter is on how this Core-Gap relationship is going to unfold and evolve over the next several decades, providing new challenges but also new opportunities for cooperation and peace. The chapter likewise seeks to broaden the perspective of the reader beyond a security-focused description and definition of the Core-Gap divide, bringing in issues of demographics, energy and finance. As I say in the intro, this is the effort to move beyond the vision of war within the context of war, and to create understanding of the everything else. This chapter is harder than most, perhaps the hardest. The reader is asked to shift gears throughout, as the four subjects are hugely different. Moreover, a lot of data are tossed in the reader's face, demanding a strong effort on his or her part to take it all in. So this chapter is a real workout intellectually, coming right on the heels of the massive one that laid out the major (i.e., Core-Gap) theories of the book. To put it simply, there is no rest for the weary in this book. It keeps demanding more and more from you as you go along, but hopefully it makes you feel equally rewarded by the journey. UNTITLED INTRO ESSAYThe basic point here is that I know this chapter is going to tax the reader considerably, so I'm trying to psych them up for the challenge. But I know from my briefs, that most people are not only up to the challenge, they are desperate to hear that someone in the Pentagon is actually thinking across these boundaries, so the chapter really starts the process in the book of instilling not just awareness but hope that a better future is possible. Details …(1) On the bit about having large numbers of people get up early in my brief and leave the room [p. 191], obviously unhappy with the material: that happens less and less and I have to admit that I miss the tension it once would cause. When an audience responds to you in that way, it's really quite exciting—those voting against you and your vision by leaving and those voting for you by staying. You rarely get that sort of intense and immediate feedback in life. What does it say to me that I rarely get that response anymore? It means I've converted most of the crowd I normally deal with in the defense community, so I'm losing my crazy-ass John-the-Baptist sort of reputation. That's both good and bad, because it's good for a visionary to remain on the edge. It also means it's time to take the message broadband, which is why I write the book. Finally, it may well mean I need to switch professions soon so as to avoid becoming a "wise man" before my time (you tend to get fat, lazy, and fall deeply in love with yourself). If that's true, then the question becomes, Where to go to get the fear factor back in my work? (2) Jack Mayer, who I acknowledge in the Acknowledgements, was the guy who taught me the KISS principle [p. 192]. (3) The bit about "globalization at the barrel of a gun" [p. 192] comes from a question I got on a TV interview show (local Providence NBC station). The guy who asked the question was Bill Rappleye. It was a pointed question, and a good one. Then again, most of the book was built on good comeback questions from skeptical audience members. THE MILITARY-MARKET LINKThis chapter is both smart and cheap on my part. Smart because I offer the reader an integrated version of the "four flows" I'm going to talk about later, and cheap because I'm basically cannibalizing a previously published article ("Asia: The Military-Market Link"). Two thank-you's are thus in order. First one goes to Captain Rich Suttie, Deputy Dean, Center for Naval Warfare Studies, Naval War College. During a recent trip together where he came along while I gave my brief to the staff of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense, he pushed me to make sure I'd get the whole "Decalogue" into the book, saying it was probably the finest single thing I've ever created. I get that from a lot of people, who consider it a sort of Holy Grail that describes the intense but poorly understood global linkages between security and economics. So it was crucial for me to rework the material and get it in here. Second thanks goes to Fred Rainbow of Proceedings. Fred really championed my work across my career, giving me an unusually good (really the best) platform within the naval community to spread my ideas. Getting my stuff published in Proceedings was, I know, always tricky for Fred because it did not scream out "carriers" every third line—it was about the everything else that the naval community assume it knows well but often is only dimly aware of. Without Fred's support in getting the articles published, it is hard to see how the book would have eventually come about. The Decalogue began, as with everything I do, as a slide. Here is the original pair from the Asian Energy Futures report. The first says how it all works out, the second says how it fails. Two sides of the same coin. The positive expression became the basis for the article.
Other details ….(1) On the possible career change I thought of in the mid-1990s [p. 193]. Another one was to join the FBI and track down Russian mafia. Most of that was really driven by my sense of being lost in life, not just because of the content of my work, but because of our daughter's long battle with cancer. (2) The Salzburg Seminar [p. 195] I attended was for two weeks, which they don't do so much nowadays (too expensive). It was one of the coolest things I've ever done in my career. CNA paid the several thousands of dollars to send me, and I remain quite grateful even after all these years, which is why I still like to work for them as a consultant. (3) The brief I gave at Salzburg [p. 195] was the same one I describe in the book: the one that lays out the three visions of the Transitioneers, the Big Sticks and the Cold Worriers. (4) I really did just sit down one day [p. 199] at a meeting (where I was ignoring the work at hand) and pen the Decalogue very quickly (both versions). I often work like that: thinking about something for days or weeks or even months, and then writing it down in a matter of minutes. (5) I love getting Wimpy and Karl Marx in the same paragraph! [p. 200] (6) One of the most interesting people to listen to and read regarding the shift to hydrogen is Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute [pp. 201-202]. (7) The guys who really turned me on to energy statistics [p. 202] were Guy Caruso and Jim Caverly of the Department of Energy. Caruso is now at CSIS, and Jim the snake eater is now at the Department of Homeland Security. THE FLOW OF PEOPLE, OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE POPULATION BOMBThe first of the four flows and the most deterministic on many levels, as the demographers like to say. We never did a NewRuleSets.Project on this one, because 9/11 intervened. But I had done much research on the subject on my own in preparation, so this becomes the one I basically gin up on my own using UN statistics and projections. I find this material the most fascinating because the notion that we are going to begin to depopulate as a species within my lifetime is such a huge turning point in world history as to boggle the mind. Other details ….(1) Title [p. 206] obviously borrows from Stanley Kubrick's movie, "Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," with some changes. So I guess when Kirkus Reviews calls me "Strangelovean," I was asking for it by abusing this title. I keep this basic framework for the rest of the chapters titles, as you see. (2) The PSR v. PSA joke [p. 206] in the brief is always a sure laugh—at least among middle-aged men. In fact, in a dark room, it's a great way to gauge the gender and age distribution of the audience. (3)When I wrote the bit about our adopting from China, we were still fairly early in the process. Our "dossier" did not go over until December 2003, or about three months after I had written this, so I was a little nervous putting it in the book. I was nervous also because we hadn't told many people about it, including close relatives, so I knew that we'd have to spill the beans when the bound manuscript started floating around in January 2004. As of today, we expect to get our referral in August and to go over to pick our baby girl sometime in the early fall. She was probably born around the beginning of the year and abandoned during the winter of 2004. (4) Two classic sci-fi references in less than a page: Planet of the Apes on page 207 and Star Trek on page 208. I'm writing here! I'm writing here! (5) Here are the slides I proposed to Putnam for reworking and inclusion in the book for this section. The color ones are stills from the brief and the B&W are ones Bradd Hayes ginned up for the US Government report (still unpublished and perhaps OBE with this book).
THE FLOW OF ENERGY, OR WHOSE BLOOD FOR WHOSE OIL?The second of the four flows, reflecting the first workshop in the NewRuleSets.Project series. This one drive the whole boat: if China et. al are going to grow, they need this energy, so they need the money, so they need the rules, etc. This section ends up being a very blood-for-oil focused counter-argument, which was not how I planned it going in to the writing (or at least, not how I remember thinking about it prior to writing—may have to check the master book plan . . . but again, I completely ignored that once I started writing). It's just hard to write anything about energy and the Middle East right now and not get caught up in that argument. Plus, I didn't want the section to sound too academic and distant, so embracing that argument as a theme made the material more topical and gave it a strong unifying theme. Other details …(1) The audience moral outrage I describe [p. 214] never occurs within the defense community. This happens when I brief civic groups, etc. The military in general has a reasonably sophisticated understanding of what they really protect when we intervene militarily in the Gulf. (2) The bit about Arabs hating us not for the oil trade but because there's nothing but the oil trade [pp. 215-16] actually comes out of the interview I gave to Wolf Blitzer on CNN right around the time the Esquire article came out. My brother-in-law Steve Meussling loved the line so much he convinced me to put it in the book. Here is the excerpt from the interview:
I really enjoyed the Blitzer interview. He seemed to really appreciate the article (see how he gives me a pat on the back at the end of the piece). (3) The Charlene Barshevsky op-ed that generates the data on the Middle East's growing trade disconnectedness from the global economy on page 218: that is easily, pound-for-pound, one of the greatest op-eds I have ever read. I put maybe four or five in the same category. It is that stunningly brilliant in execution. It simply blew me away and really provides a huge animating force for this section. (4) The energy numbers on pages 219-221: these things drive me nuts, because you need to check them over and over again. Right up to the last edit, I was obsessed with getting these numbers as accurate as possible and avoiding any mistakes. Fortunately, the Department of Energy is such a great source, and so readily available on the web. The International Energy Outlook is one of the best USG reports. Read that every year and you'll learn more about the future of the world than all the CIA projections put end-to-end. (5) I was really surprised when I launched into the what-would-Jesus-drive sequence beginning on page 222. It made the section wrap up on this very moralistic tone, which Mark Warren made me tone down quite a bit. My brother-in-law and proxy reader Steve Meussling also found the sequence troubling, but I wanted to keep it in because I feel so strongly about it. My point to Steve, which is readily accepted, is that I'm not interested in writing a long book where I never bother to piss you off vehemently at least once! (6) Here are the slides I proposed to Putnam for this section (usual mix of color from the brief and B&W from Bradd Hayes):
THE FLOW OF MONEY, OR WHY WE WON'T BE GOING TO WAR WITH CHINAThe third of the four flows, and the one that really drives the integration. This is the one where Bud Flanagan and Phil Ginsberg of Cantor Fitzgerald gave me the greatest education, because I hadn't even heard of the concept before we started planning the workshop on it. That workshop was the best of the ones we did in terms of neat use of GroupSystems and the "wargames" we played. The theme song for the workshop was Kraftwerk's "Numbers" from the album Computer World. The poster I generated as the logo for the workshop was also my coolest. Here it is (with most of the great detail very hard to see):
To my surprise (like the last section), this one became the "get off China" section of the book. I guess I was trying awfully hard to make these flows seem connected to current events and not just present them as some distant trends that matter only in the longest run. Other details …(1) The whole story about the "spies" [pp. 224-226] is actually a lot more complicated than I present here. But that is not a story I ever plan on sharing. What I present is reasonable and appropriate to the purposes of the narrative, and I'll let it go at that. (2) Note how I bury my "no intelligence failure on 9/11" concept deep within the book [p. 226]. Why? I find that notion completely unremarkable—obvious as the nose on my face. (3) Mark Warren actually cut this section down by a whole lot. He did this by basically whacking the back half and ending with what he saw as the perfect tag line: "And that, my friends, is how you make a roomful of Cold Warriors cry" [p. 231]. To see the rest of the section that was cut, you go to the deleted scenes page. (4) Here are the slides for this section, which—as always—Mark Warren made me "write through":
THE FLOW OF SECURITY, OR HOW AMERICA MUST KEEP GLOBALIZATION IN BALANCELike the Military-Market Link section, this one tries to integrate the four flows, because that is where war bumps up against the everything else of globalization. So, in many ways, this section repeats the themes of the chapter's first section. For me, this section was all about explaining my concept of "exporting security," which a lot of lay people take as "exporting arms," when I'm really talking about an entirely different range of activities the military pursues all over the world that the public has little understanding of. Here's the slide I use in the brief to explain the range of activities:
Other details ….(1) I love telling the story of my trip to India [pp. 232-36]. It was such a fantastic and enlightening trip. I got there in a very weird sort of way. The commodore in charge of getting foreign speakers wanted someone big from the Naval War College, so he surfed our website and realized that my material dominated the site in terms of content (far less so today but this was back in 2000). When he proposed to his superiors to bring Prof. Barnett from the Naval War College, most of them thought he meant Roger Barnett, an old Cold Warrior who was, at that time, on the verge of retiring. This commodore let his superiors fall victim to that assumption because he feared they would nix me as being too young and not established enough for the invitation, but he really wanted me because, as he put it, "we needed someone who could really speak to all those younger officers in the back of the hall." Why did my material dominate the NWC web so in the year 2000? That was the legacy of the Y2K work I did and my struggles to get the material on the Wall College server, which I detail in Chapter 5 of the book [pp. 252-53]. (2) You can see the brief I delivered to the International Fleet Review symposium. It's posted on the web right now at http://www.nwc.navy.mil/newrulesets/Indian%20Navy%20presentation.htm. I include the title slide and the favorite two slides of my Indian hosts below:
Notice, how in the brief, I am pushing the notion that DoD is undergoing a bifurcation. Proof that I've been pushing that notion for a long time. Here's the slide I used:
(3) The paragraph on India on page 142 is basically a lift from the article I ended up writing for Proceedings about my trip entitled, "India's 12 Steps to a World-Class Navy." I plotted the whole article out using the 12-step recovery method of Alcoholics Anonymous. That, my friends, is a good example of horizontal thinking. . . (4) Here are the slides I proposed using in this section:
* * * That's it for the director's commentary on Chapter 4, a tough chapter to read on some level, given the great switching of subjects as you proceed, but a good way to place war within the context of everything else. My brother-in-law Steve is convinced there are several other books lying inside this chapter, just waiting to be written. He may be right. |
Putnam, 2004 |
