|
|
The Pentagon's New Map > Director's CommentaryThe New Ordering PrincipleOVERVIEWThis chapter starts moving you toward the home stretch. Chapters 1 & 2 explained the past, Chapter 3 explained the current strategic environment, and Chapter 4 told you how the world is going to work in the future as globalization continues to advance. What this chapter does is lay out the definition of threat in that new security environment, or my concept of how to describe instability and crisis in this age. This chapter is a full-bodied review of how this definition came to me over the years of my research, how I think this concept was proven on 9/11, how this definition should become the new ordering principle for U.S. national security, and how I think the Bush Administration has already adopted this mindset in what it has sought to do in the Middle East by toppling Saddam (hint: it wasn't about WMD!). To me, this is the most thrilling chapter of the book, but frankly, it tends to attract the least amount of interest—just like in the brief. But to me, the most important task of DoD and the national security establishment right now is to leverage a new understanding of the strategic security environment to define the future of crises that we'll experience in this age of globalization. Getting this definition down is how we understand what we have to do in terms of reshaping the national security establishment for the great tasks ahead. Simply put, until you understand the System Perturbation idea, you probably won't make the intellectual journey toward understanding the need for the Sys Admin force. So in Chapter 3 I give you the new environment and in Chapter 4 I explain how that system basically works. Now I tell you how that system can be disrupted, damaged, and derailed, setting you the reader up for the solution set I propose in Chapter 6. Given my level of enthusiasm and intense pride of ownership of these concepts, it is incredible for me to remember actually discussing with Mark Warren the possibility of killing this entire chapter in order to streamline the book! But to me, absent this chapter I have no explanation of the great historical pivot that is 9/11. UNTITLED INTRO ESSAY This was the most easy intro essay to write because I've already written an entire book on the subject. The Emily Updates: A Year in the Life of a Three-Year-Old Battling Cancer is my 200,000-word web-posted manuscript (no longer available for reasons I will explain in a minute) that serves as my family's diary of our firstborn's struggle with cancer in the mid-1990s. I wrote it with my wife Vonne as a weekly email of 8 to10 pages for family, friends, and prayer circles around the U.S. in 1995 and 1996. It was my original blog, in many ways, though we had no such name or concept back then. I had generated an entire section built around a summation of that story for Chapter 4. It was going to be the heart of the last section entitled "Keeping Globalization in Balance." But as I noted in the last chapter's Director's Commentary, I merged section 5 ("Exporting Security") and the planned last section, and in that merging I killed the Emily Updates rehash. That decision was made easy by Mark's push to have me gin up intro essays for each chapter. So as soon as I did that for Chapter 1, I knew I would resurrect the Emily Updates material for the intro essay in Chapter 5, where I always thought it belonged far more logically as an intro to the whole System Perturbation concept. As I stood in the shower the morning I was about to rewrite the material I had originally written for the Chapter 4 final section and adapt it for this intro essay, I was searching for some quick metaphor to wrap the whole thing around. That's when I remembered the Godfrey Reggio movie Koyaanisqatsi, and I was off to the races. The way I relate the whole package back to 9/11 is to reuse the controversial language of "the gift" from page 34, and that generates the segue into the first section which tells the reader where I first began working this concept of System Perturbation. In all, this is my favorite intro essay because it's such a neat little package and story all its own—sort of a mini-section. Why are the Emily Updates no longer available on the web? I put the manuscript on the web in the late 1990s as a way of sharing the story with others around the world. Georgetown University Hospital uses the manuscript as a teaching text for social workers who interact with pediatric cancer patients, but judging from the emails I've received over the years from all over the world, the text helps a lot of people deal with the basic trauma of having a loved one fall victim to some life-threatening or -ending disease. I took the Updates off the web because Em is now hitting teenager-dom and I was worried about a heightened attention to me and my writings stemming from the publication of this book would attract undue attention to the site and thus to her at a time not of her choosing. Mark Warren and I have discussed the possibility of seeking publication of the manuscript at some point, essentially assuming that my enhanced stature as author would now make that feasible. When I spoke to agents about this possibility in the late 1990s, I was told it was a fabulous manuscript but that since I wasn't famous or anything, it would be enormously difficult to publish. That situation may change with this book. If it does, then the material may yet see the printed page with Emily's okay. OVERTAKEN BY EVENTS This section is basically about how I generated the concept of System Perturbations in the first place, or the story of my research project on Y2K. This one had to be written very carefully, to avoid any sort of Richard Clarke-like look-at-me!/I told-ya-so!/If-only-they-had-listened-to me!-sort of tone. Of course, my stuff being non-operational big-picture material, anyone inside the community would know better, but since this book is written for a broad audience who might not know better, I wanted to be very clear that I did not predict 9/11 whatsoever. Still, the whole Y2K thing is a fascinating untold story in its own right. Just about everything we learned "for the first time" on 9/11 was material we—and everyone else deeply involved in thinking strategically about Y2K—had covered previously. But to me, that's not magic, that's just good strategic planning and/or futurology: nothing really surprises you anymore. That's not true because you're cynical and jaded and simply expect the worst in people and everything else all the time, but because you make a point of thinking about the future in a systematic fashion. But as much as I might want to downplay such work as just "doing my job," I know enough to realize that my work is fairly unusual—both in terms of whom I interact with and whom I advise, so I knew this story needed to be told in this, the fifth such autobiographical opening section of a chapter. Again, the real focus of this chapter was to establish: 1) I had thought of the 9/11-like event in advance and had a theory to explain its impact; 2) I think 9/11 served as existence proof for that theory; and 3) that theory is relevant to how we plan for the future of war and peace in the twenty-first century. Plus, one theme that is apparent throughout this book is that I take a lot of my thinking, language, metaphors, and analogies from the world of information technology. All that started really in the Y2K work, as I explain in this section. Other details … (1) My "dean" I complain to was Bob Wood [p. 251]. When he told me of the assignment, he said I was the only man for the job given my unique skills. I asked if my being low man on the totem pole had anything to do with it, and he beamed "That too!" (2) My second-in-command throughout the Y2K project [p. 251] was my colleague Hank Kamradt. He was a huge influence on the work and a great mentor to me in my first NWC project. (3) That bit about meeting the Y2K fanatics on page 252: I must confess that my first F2F encounter with my current webmaster Critt Jarvis inspired that. When he approached me in the darkness of a presentation hall following one of my talks, I found him a bit unusual, to say the least. His online persona at that point could have doubled for a smart-ass 14-year-old, whereas today its much closer to 19, hell—maybe 20. So seeing this rather hulking fellow coming at my through the darkness and introducing himself as Critt (a name I was certain was fake) discombobulated me a bit. (3) Here are the slides describing the four onset scenarios for Y2K and the scenario dynamics grid that I mention on page 252:
Of course, if you really want to peruse this sort of stuff, I have an entire website on the subject, still found at the Naval War College server at this point but likewise locatable on this site. (4) Here's the text of the Jack Anderson story [p. 253] on my Y2K work:
(5) Talking about ordinary people visiting the Y2K website I managed [p. 253], I made a bit effort to prepare them for the material they would come across. Here is the language I wrote for the top of the homepage:
(6) Talking about all the people I briefed [p. 253], here is the official list of people I admit to briefing [from the Y2K site]:
(7) When I talk about senior leaders in the Intelligence Community [on page 254] who "were already leaning in the direction of an aggressively offensive strategy vis-à-vis terrorist threats in the months leading up to Y2K," I am talking about Richard Clarke, but he was far from alone on this subject. (8) CINCSOC, or the Commander-in-Chief (old term) of Special Operations Command, was the first CINC I had ever briefed in my career up to that point [p. 255]. His name should be familiar: General Peter Schoomaker, whom Rumsfeld lured out of retirement to help him transform the Army as Chief of Staff. Schoomaker and I had nice office calls both fore and aft of my presentation, and he was nice enough to give me his command medal (big, Ike-dollar sized medallion with all sorts of cool spec ops command insignias plus his name and the motto, the "quiet professionals"). I will never forget briefing these guys. My Y2K brief was very funny, but these guys would laugh very hard without ever making a sound! I could just sense them shaking imperceptibly while emitting no sound. Later, I realized this was the SOC equivalent of LOL. Yes indeed, the quiet ones. Schoomaker was one of the most impressive officers I have ever interacted with.
(9) The "aftermath scenarios," or those that describe what Y2K ends up looking and feeling like in the end (different from the onset scenarios cited above) mentioned in the text [p. 256] included three others besides the worst-case Y2 KO! Here is the slide that displays all four:
We also developed four "legacy" models, or scenarios regarding how Y2K would be judged by history. Here is the slide that presents those:
Note the designation for the bad outcome: your choice is to administer the system or to firewall yourself off from the chaos. Sounds a lot like America's choice after 9/11, does it not? THE RISE OF SYSTEM PERTURBATIONS This section is basically my explanation of what happened on 9/11 and the days and weeks that followed. Since Cantor Fitzgerald is the great personal and professional bond between the Y2K work and what happens on 9/11, I tell their story in particular as well, because I think it's an amazing story in its own right. When I first created the brief that became the full blown "A Future Worth Creating: Defense Transformation in the New Strategic Environment," it started out being mostly an attempt to predict where the whole 9/11 tumult was headed, using the same scenario techniques developed in the Y2K work. So to write this section is finally to annotate those original slides—none of which I can find today, sad to say. Other details: (1) That whole bit about the density of the medium comes from Art Cebrowski. He gave me the examples of hearing sounds transmitted through various media [p. 262]. In our work together on the subject, we developed a framework for looking at the various characteristics of a System Perturbation. The six parameters are portrayed on the slide below. The graphic on the slide is meant to suggest a rock being dropped in the still pond.
(2) The sequence [pp. 261-64] where I delineate what a System Perturbation entails is based on the slide below, which constituted the first enunciation of these concepts:
(3) The storyline of the horizontal scenario stemming from 9/11 involving anthrax and AIDS drugs was first portrayed in the brief on the following slide. As you can see, it is one of several storylines I tell in the brief, some of which appear in the following chapter section.
NEW RULES FOR A NEW CRISIS Aha! You're confused! There is no section in the book by this title! That's because this section was cut in its entirety by Mark Warren as being too damn theoretical. For an explanation, see Deleted Scene #22, where you can find the entire text of the section and supporting information about the high-powered workshop of experts who generated the ideas I captured. THE GREATER INCLUSIVE In this third section, I try to extrapolate from the "existence proof" of 9/11 a sense of a new ordering principle for DoD whereupon we stop thinking of 9/11-like events as "lesser includeds" within the larger ordering principle of Great Power War and start reversing that hierarchy to the point where we hedge against Great Power War with a minority of our assets and start planning for the mitigation and management of System Perturbation-like crises with the majority of our assets. That whole idea, and the phrase "The Greater Inclusive," began with the following slide in the brief (you can guess what the acronyms refer to):
The "Horton Hears a Who" bit up front [pp. 267-69] really tries to get at the notion that everyone within the U.S. Government but outside of DoD tends to be more than open to this experience—in fact, this is already the basis of the way they think about crisis in their bureaucracies (something closer to a natural disaster than war). Then I segue into the crux of my argument for a new ordering principle for DoD, which I frame in the "three questions" sequence on pages 269-70. Here is the original slide where I captured that in the brief:
Then the argument shifts into an historical treatment [pp. 270-272] of how the ordering principle of DoD has mutated from its Cold War origins. That is a huge section in the brief, albeit one captured in just one slide:
If you're getting a sense that, of all the sections in the book, this one is most clearly based on a series of slides, then you're absolutely correct. Following that sequence, we're into my "Captain Phil" story (not his real first name—wink! wink! [pp. 272-274]). "Phil" was my next-door neighbor in Portsmouth for a year following the duty he describes. After a year in Newport, he's back in DC working working in a very important white house. The story "Phil" told me became the basis for a sequence of overlays on the slide portrayed above, in which I argue about how much change in force structure must occur inside the military to account for the change in the strategic environment. Here's how it looks:
The motto of this slide is that we have to move "from the diamond to the hour glass," meaning we have to move from a force structure that is spread mostly at the nation-state level to one that is top-heavy in strategic assets and bottom-heavy in assets designed to deal with individuals/nation-building. After that sequence, we're back into the territory of the Emily Updates [pp. 275-78], where I use her struggle in surviving the damaging effects of the chemo as an analogy of the challenges we face in defending the homeland in the global war on terrorism. Here are the two slides I have used on that one (first one on the Emily story; second on the 3-front war concept):
And that basically gets us to the end of the section . . . No further details to offer on this section, because the entire storyline here is based directly on the slides from the brief. That really made this section the easiest to write, as far as I was concerned, because I had all the materials—right down to the individual sequencing of the arguments—on slides. Of all the sections in the book, this one is most like simply listening to me deliver the briefing live. THE BIG BANG AS STRATEGY Here is one of the most crucial sections in the book, in my mind, because it's here that I try to explain the Bush Administration's strategy of going after Saddam on the heels of 9/11. That is a hugely controversial subject, made all the more by the plethora of conspiracy books and theories out there, plus such mainstream accounts as Richard Clarke's book ("Against All Enemies") and Bob Woodward's most recent ("Plan of Attack"). In comparison to these insider accounts, the logic of what I'm trying to explain here may seem a tad theoretical—even disconnected from the presumed manias, biases, and single-mindedness of various senior Bush Administration officials as portrayed in these works. But none of that stuff really detracts from my arguments here—in my mind. No matter how things get described in secret interviews to journalists, I think I do a good job here of actually capturing the grand strategy of what this administration has sought to do to the Middle East by taking Saddam down. How can I be so confident this stuff has meaning to readers already jaded by all these backstabbing and/or insider accounts? It is this section which forms the fundamental basis of the June 2004 Esquire article I've written entitled, "Mr. President, Here's How to Make Sense of Our Iraq Strategy." Esquire is awfully jacked about the piece, thinking it expresses something really important that's being lost in all this blame-Bush/Cheney-for-the-mess-we're-in frenzy, and I agree. Simply put, what we've been doing in the Middle East these past few decades is not only not working, the situation there has gotten worse with time. The Big Bang as strategy, therefore, was something America was inevitably going to have to pursue. 9/11 gave us the impetus and the excuse alright, but to pin this all on a Saddam-obsessed Bush/Cheney Administration is to miss the grand strategic reality of this moment in history. It was never about Saddam per se; it was always about altering the rule sets in the Middle East in one fell swoop. Now here's the hard part, as I saw my task in writing this section: how to break the reader's mind from the paralytic condition imposed by all these conspiracy thinkers and harsh, anti-Bush rantings (I say this as a lifelong Democrat, so don't take it personally)? My answer was to open the section with a parody of a conspiracy theory [pp. 278-81], using all the crazy things that I have ever run across on the web or had emailed to me over the years regarding my own "role" in such earth-shattering events as Y2K, 9/11, and the war in Iraq. In part, it's a hilarious drill of connecting the dots on my own career, something more than a few webheads have done over the years, but more so since the original Esquire article came out (I do so love being part of the Illuminati, simply because that' such a cool name—whatever the hell it stands for). My Mom really hates the parody, and begged me to edit it out before it went to print, but Mark Warren loved it, saying it proved I had a good sense of humor and more than enough self-awareness not to buy into any such nonsense. I have to admit, no section in the book makes me more nervous regarding how readers may misinterpret it. For example, I fully expect to see the sequence up on websites once the book is out, as "proof" of the whole conspiracy! Mark my word! Following the parody is the meat of the section [pp. 281-290], where I lay down my interpretation of how you can link 9/11 to the war in Iraq—logically and strategically. Again, this is fairly incendiary stuff, given the political climate right now, so it'll be interesting to see how it gets interpreted. And again, a lot of this stuff drives my June 2004 Esquire article, so it'll be out there in that national magazine no matter how little attention either this section or the book in general garners upon publication. Here are the slides I use to explain this material in the brief (with no further explanation needed, I think):
The last part of the section [pp. 290-94] presents my scenarios for the future of the Middle East in light of the Iraq takedown and occupation. Here's the original slide that generated the four named scenarios. I will note that the original best-case scenario was named "By George, Aya-told-ya-so" but that Neil Nyren made me change it, saying it was too cute and therefore too obtuse for the reader to get. He was right, so I came up with a better one (Persia Engulfed).
* * * That's it for the Director's Commentary on Chapter 5. Having taken the reader on this scary ride, the next chapter is all about settling him or her down with a plan for how we change DoD to meet these security challenges by effectively exporting security around the planet in coming decades. |
Putnam, 2004 |
