|
|
The Pentagon's New Map > Director's CommentaryDisconnectedness Defines DangerOVERVIEWThis really is the book within the book—the heart of the matter. If I've kept you reading to this point and you enter this chapter, I'm convinced I have you for good. Not surprisingly, this is the longest chapter by far, at roughly 30,000. Also not surprisingly, this chapter survives basically in tact from the original plan, or the Excel spreadsheet map of what I wanted to get done chapter-by-chapter. Finally, there are no "deleted scenes" worth posting, because the most Mark ever cut from this chapter was a portion of a paragraph or just one repetitive paragraph. Mark Warren likes to call this chapter the magnum opus of the book—this huge explosion of a world view that is self-contained in all its complexity and logic. To me, it is the center of gravity in the book. If you read only one chapter, this one is it. UNTITLED INTRO ESSAYThis one is unusual in that it starts out basically with two jokes, neither of which has any roots in the brief. First joke about acquisition is an old saw within the Pentagon. Not sure who told it to me or where I heard it, just sure I didn't make it up. The second bit about the "personal ads" is an example of me collecting something I know is great, sticking it in my files where it sits for years, and then finally finding a use for it. I held on to that paper for a decade before using the notion in this book. Have no idea who the author is, but guess it to be the anonymous office cut-up commander, much like my friend Bradd Hayes was for most of his naval career. Here is a scan of the original Xerox I made of the paper taped to the wall in the Pentagon office. Bradd Hayes cleaned it up for me because I had written on it over the years, so thanks to him for that small kindness typical of his support over the years.
The underlying purpose of the chapter is expressed in the intro: I am going to take the reader through both the logic and the career journey that was the creation of this map. While that journey extends over the entirety of my career (to include the early work on the Russian navy and the From the Sea effort), a new era for my career begins in the middle of the 1990s, when I first start trying to capture globalization as a world-historical force in my work. That work was mostly a frustration for me for several years, although it got much easier to speak with people about it once Thomas Friedman of the NY Times started writing openly about globalization in his columns and ultimately bagged up all that material and published "The Lexus and the Olive Tree." Details …(1) The Center for Naval Analyses project director in question was David Dittmer, with whom I never really got along. While several other people on the study thought my material quite good, he never seemed to get it. Dave was a classic senior analyst at CNA: really a numbers-cruncher with lots of field experience which made him think he was also a talented political-military thinker, which he was not. (2) I still have the "Alternative Global Futures" brief in its original file. I ended up using it for work I did as a consultant for CNA on non-lethal technologies (done first for the Marines and then for the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate). Much of that work ended up being anonymous, because of conflict-on-interest concerns, but anyone who runs into the material instantly recognizes it as mine. (3) The class I taught called "Thinking Systematically About Alternative Global Futures" sold out quickly the one time I've offered it to date, which coincidentally, was the fall of 2003. So I wrote much of the book at the same time I was teaching. My students were great sources of new ideas (the best student in the class ended up being the equivalent of the class valedictorian). I got a $500 bonus from the college on the basis of receiving super-high marks from the students in their after-class survey. This is a real point of pride for me, because we're talking mostly men in their late thirties who are either just post-command or pre-command, so not your average undergrads HOW I LEARNED TO THINK HORIZONTALLYThis section is basically my big thank-you to Hank Gaffney for all he has given me as a mentor and teacher over the course of my career. It is a big valentine of sorts. Like the opening section of all the chapters, this one is career narrative almost completely through and through. First I start off with the usual sort of gripping about living in DC. Then I tell my story of how I got Hank to hire me, which I could have gone on and on about. I was probably the only person ever hired by CNA who ended up having to do two full days of interviews: one with the SPAG unit (Strategic Policy Analysis Group that was moving from independent status as a mini-think tank for the Chief of Naval Operations to becoming a unit of CNA) and another with CNA proper. The upshot of the two days of interviews was very mixed. Within SPAG, the people I met with were roughly split between: "Why hire some Soviet expert?" and "He seems like an interesting thinker." Within CNA proper, the vote was mostly negative, I guess because I was such a soft scientist. Nonetheless, Hank went against the majority view and hired me anyway, something for which I remain eternally grateful, because I can't imagine how I would have gotten to where I am today intellectually without his vast improvement of my thinking capacity over all these years. Next I move on to my theory of horizontal versus vertical thinking, which I admit is a bit self-serving because I clearly favor one over the other, but it does give me another chance to stick one of my kids in the text [Emily, p. 113]. The main purpose of the section is to run through my presentation of what I think are the differences between vertical and horizontal scenarios. I got the inspiration for this breakdown from Hank originally, and then developed it over the years. Here are two slide captures from the brief where I go over the differences. You can see that they basically formed the structure of the argument I offer in this section.
MAPPING GLOBALIZATION'S FRONTIERThis section is basically about explaining my definitions of "functioning within globalization," and "disconnectedness." It's a lot of wordage, no doubt, but I felt I really needed to spend some time and run these buzz phrases to ground if the reader was going to get everything they need from this chapter. It ends up being some of my favorite writing in the book. The whole section is really based on just a handful of bullets I use in the brief to explain the word "functioning" when I use that phrase to define who's in the Functioning Core. Here's the slide in two de-animated captures: first one shows the bullets and the second one shows the regions I say are functioning.
Other details ….(1) The Barbie story is one of the best gags in the brief, and it is all based on a simple AP story I pulled from the Newport Daily News. Later story (I think in 2003) I saw said the same basic thing has happened in Saudi Arabia as well. (2) The Miss World story I tried to put in the original Esquire article, but Mark cut it. (3) The whole bit of exploring the Gorbachev route of rule-set reform versus Deng's versus Lee Kwan Yew's: that whole thing just sort of came to me while I was writing this section. For years, I've wanted to write about Gorby's route being the opposite of Deng's (Gorby's is politics first and Deng's is economics first), and for months before the book I had that basic equation written on my window at my War College office (too much art work in my office for a white board, so I use the window a la John Nash in a Beautiful Mind—and no, I don't think that tendency signals my mental illness!). When I started in on this section, it simply came to me to add a third leg and call it a triangle, so the single-party route of the tigers became the third way and the sequence was complete. I like that portion of the section [pp. 127-130] a lot. (4) A rare sort of academic citation on page 131: Dani Rodrik, whose work I respect a lot even as I disagree with much of what he says. (5) The whole sequence [pp. 132-37]of explaining disconnectedness was one of those efforts where I had this loose list in my head and as I sat down to write the section, I had all these clips I knew delineated my list somehow. So it was the classic sort of effort of laying out all the articles on the floor and then ordering them logically before writing. (6) Huge point at the end of the section. I know it seems like a bit of a toss-off, but to me it is enormous: the bit about every military intervention in the future having to leave a country more connected than when we found it. You could write a whole book on that concept alone. MINDING THE GAPFirst there is the obvious appropriation of the title from the London subway system. But "minding" here means—at least to me—the eureka moment of defining the Gap. This section is the pivot of the entire book, because it describes the "that's it!" feeling I finally achieved following 9/11. I had, by that time, basically done all the work, and actually even come up with the name, which is something I was toying with in my write-up of the Asian Environmental Solutions economic security exercise of the NewRuleSets.Project in the summer of 2001, in addition to the work I was doing for Gaffney, so it really was a matter of my two lines of work finally fusing together on 9/11. One way you can tell this is THE intellectual pivot around which the whole book rotates is that it is the only section where I actively mention and integrate the influences of my three great mentors: Hank Gaffney (the crisis response work), Bud Flanagan (the mapping of globalization) and Art Cebrowski (putting those two together in the aftermath of 9/11 and running it up the chain in the Pentagon). Because I am combining those three influences in a single section, the historical narrative basically spans my entire career: I start with my quick response work for Flanagan back at the beginning of 1992 and end with my walking into SECDEF's conference room in the spring of 2002. Throughout the section, Mark really pushed me to give the material the strongest possible narrative arc. In short, he wanted a sense of tension and drama, which is hard to generate when you're talking about an idea gestating over ten years, so we're talking about a movie plot about as abstract as a "Beautiful Mind" (note the phrase "governing dynamics" in the Preface [p. 5]). I imagined myself using the cool narrative technique of that movie (by Ron Howard), plus the exposition techniques of "24 Hour Party People" (Michael Winterbottom's cult classic, done as a sort of documentary-like flashback sequence) to help guide me in my storytelling here, which is why you get the flashback feel at various places. I wanted the section to feel like you were watching a quick series of flashbacks from across my career, with the soundtrack pounding in the background and my Party People-like main character narration winding over the top. Clearly, all that efforts makes this section the most theatrical of the book—at least in my mind. But then again, I find the ideas the most exciting part of anyone's career. Other details …(1) Here is the slide from the Asian Environmental Solutions brief of the NewRuleSets.Project. I believe it is the first time I use that functioning/non-functioning breakdown.
(2) Here's another iteration I did as a consultant for CNA, or actually their division known as the Center for Strategic Studies.
(3) In the brief, here is how I show the crisis response cases.
(4) When I talk about "…then I click my remote and that big red blob dissolves into view" [p. 154], here it what it looks like in the brief (still capture):
(5) When I reference the temptation to just circle the "four clusters of responses and saying that's all there was to the 1990s" [p. 148], I basically refer to Hank Gaffney's preferred presentation of naval crisis response patterns in that decade. He calls the cluster the "BISH," for Bosnia, Iraq, Somalia and Haiti. Here's a slide the way he likes to do it:
(6) Another great Star Trek reference [p. 151] from the best of the classic movies: "The Wrath of Khan." (7) One graphic that I had made up for the government report (Bradd Hayes did the art work) is shown below. I planned on using it in the book, but it was one of those we ended up cutting almost from the start. It visualizes the shifting global market of U.S. security services that I touch upon on page 140.
TO LIVE AND DIE IN THE GAPTitle comes from one of my favorite modern film-noirs: "To Live and Die in L.A." Basic goal of this section was to throw out a host of data points that distinguish the Gap from the Core. How I organized the section is clear: I take the pivotal quote from Thomas Hobbes and parse it out—word for word. So this section is basically my effort to prove the thesis of Core-Gap I just laid out in front of the reader, using a wide variety of data. This isn't based on any slides from the brief, because there I use only the crisis response data as a visual prompt and then spit out the supporting data orally in the presentation. There is some career narrative to start out the section: using the pretext of the readers' response to the original Esquire article to explore how various people tend to react to the Core-Gap thesis. Other details …(1) Colleague I cite as receiving all those emailed copies of the Esquire article [p. 154] is—surprise—Bradd Hayes. (2) The phrase the "moment and the map had met" is my paraphrase of a famous quote about Jefferson Davis assuming the presidency of the Confederacy ("The man and the moment had met"). If memory serves me correctly, you hear it on Ken Burns' PBS documentary "Civil War." (3) Mark Warren pushes me to generate the critical material on the Bush Administration on pages 156-58. It was much smaller at first blush, but he told me I needed to flesh it out and stop being so reticent to criticize. Mark was right to do this. To make the book better I needed to stop thinking like a government employee and feel free not to toe the party line. (4) Admittedly, I was worried on page 161 to be tossing around Kant and Hobbes so casually, but Mark made me resist the temptation to launch into an academic-style recitation of their main concepts, so here I expect the reader to be able to keep up on his/her own. (5) If you check the endnotes in the book, you see that some of the neatest data I present here was stuff I had War College students originally gin up for me as independent research projects over the summer. One commander did the rotation of leadership data effort cited on pp. 162-63, and another did the refugee stuff cited on p. 164. I credit them by name in the endnotes. Both commanders (LCDR Thad Dobbert and CDR Alan Boyer) each did a stellar job. (6) John Harris's stuff that I use on page 165 is culled from an online critique of my original Esquire article that I simply stumbled upon Googling one day. I was really flattered by his effort to think beyond my original enunciation. DIFFERENT WORLDS, DIFFERENT RULE SETSThis section basically lays out what I think is one of the most important policy implications of the Core-Gap thesis: that the U.S. Government needs to get honest with itself, the American public, and the world that when we go into the Gap we simply enter a different rule-set arena. So this section becomes the great explanation of why preemption is a reasonable approach to dealing with the new threats we face in this era, making this material probably my most apologetic WRT to the Bush Administration. I first did this notion as a simple op-ed for the Providence Journal entitled, "The 'Core' and 'Gap': Defining Rules in a Dangerous World." When it came out, one officer at the college said to me, "Your concept is really too good to waste on just an op-ed in the Projo. You need to write an entire article, or maybe a book." That guy, Steve Smith, really did get me thinking . . .. This whole section is based on a very simple visual presentation in the brief. Here is a couple of still captures:
Other details ….(1) The opening bit [p. 166] about holding opposing ideas in your mind is typically credited to F. Scott Fitzgerald in terms of original enunciation (quote), but I believe the idea predates him considerably. (2) My wife Vonne really does ask me now and then, "Are you secretly becoming a Republican" [p. 167]. I always say no, because I want there to continue to be sex within our marriage. You'd know what I mean if you saw Larry David's season-ender on HBO in his series "Curb Your Enthusiasm" (the season just finished, where he's starring in The Producers on Broadway). (3) In all honesty, I don't actually pull the briefing trick I describe on page 169 with any regularity. I've done it a couple of times. In reality, I got this material more in terms of post-talk interactions with audience members in small groups. (4) The conversation I describe with my Mom on page 170 is almost verbatim. If you knew my Mom, her response is just sooooo her. (5) The material about "when unilateralism makes sense" [pp. 173-178] is expressed visually in the brief as follows (greatly de-animated):
The reference to bilateralism is to bilateral security assistance to Seam States ringing the Gap. (6) The strong ending line "No exit means no exit strategy" becomes a lynchpin argument in the June 2004 Esquire article "Mr. President, Here's How to Make Sense of Our Iraq Strategy." Mark Warren absolutely loves that line, as the article makes clear. WHY I HATE THE 'ARC OF INSTABILITY'Not much explanation needed here because I am so explicit in the text. Lots of career narrative here because this section is really about distancing myself from how the Bush Administration and the Pentagon typically like to equate my Gap concept—or, in my mind, narrow it down—to the old notion of an "arc of crisis." So this section really is about how some twist the meaning of my thinking to their purposes and how I get unhappy when their definitions trump mine in the press coverage. Other details …(1) When I talk about Greg Jaffe and his story in the Wall Street Journal [pp. 181-182], I must confess that he made the story originally sound like it might be a profile of me and my work, but in the end he logically extended the storyline to where the news really was: the work of Andy Hoehn in OSD on realigning our global military base posture. Disappointing for me, yes, but good journalism on Greg's part. (2) During my Premeditated Media Tour of March 2004, I actually got to sit down with Mark Mazzetti of U.S. News & World Report and discuss his "Global Cops" article I mention on page 183. He was interested to hear I actually folded that material back into the book, which he was reading. (3) I had a desperate time figuring out where I was going to place the material about Seam States in the book [pp. 187-89]. I knew I wanted it in this chapter, but here I was at the end already and I hadn't found a place. So I stuck it on the end of a string of anti-arc arguments. Mark Warren didn't like it there and tried to cut it out repeatedly, but here I actually stuck to my guns and did not give in, simply because neither he nor I could come up with a better place to put the Seam States material. (4) It was neat to resurrect the NIEO stuff on page 190. That's my PhD dissertation talking. Final point on this chapter is not a detail, but more important. I actually changed the title of the section to "A Rose By Any Other Name" at one point in the editing process and we almost went to print with that new title. I guess I felt I was just being too critical with the whole "hate" thing and so I wanted to dial it down. Problem was, the replacement was so bland and so not me in tone. On the very last substantive edit that Mark and I did in January 2004, at about 1 a.m. in the morning of the deadline day, I casually mentioned to Mark that I regretted changing the title and he shot back, "I always hated that you did that, because I loved the original." I was so relieved to hear that that we put the old title back in right on the spot. Of all the titles in the book, that was the only one where I engaged in any panicky flip-flopping. * * * I will never forget Mark Warren's reaction to the chapter when I finally got it done after six huge days of writing. He really felt I had hit my stride with this chapter. He said he knew right then and there that this would be a great book. I felt the same. |
Putnam, 2004 |
