|
|
The Pentagon's New Map > Director's CommentaryTable of ContentsThe commentary here is really about how the book changed so much from the proposal and then in the actual writing. The proposal spoke of eight chapters, which is what I ended up with, but the eight were different in structure and order. In the proposal, Chapter 1 was to be a "call to arms" that debunked the myth of global chaos and offered a critique of the current administration's foreign policy. In the final book, Chapter 1 becomes the huge exploration of the concept of rules and how the global security rule set has been evolving over the Cold War and post-Cold War experiences. The "call to arms" stuff goes into the Preface (not foreseen here), and the myth of global chaos eventually gets pulled out of this chapter and put into the new Chapter 7 dreamed up by Mark Warren as we began editing the full text in October. Chapter 2 was going to present the map and define Core v. Gap. My agent Jennifer Gates was really worried about waiting too long to get to this punch line, since this was the material defined by the Esquire article. My original outline had that material waiting until the third chapter, but she advocated moving it up. In the end, though, I decided to move it back to the third spot, instead using Chapter 2 to focus on the Rise of the Lesser Includeds. So if Chapter 1 got the reader basically from the beginning of Globalization I all the way up to the end of the Cold War, then Chapter 2 would focus on the post-Cold War period. Chapter 3 was going to provide a long history of globalization. That would really have ended up being my desperate attempt to stretch material, so that ended up being the core of the second section of Chapter 1 entitled, New Rules for a New Era. So Chapter 3 ended up being what I originally intended it to be: the Esquire article deconstructed and explored at length. I had felt that original article was so tight in form that huge areas needed to be explored within, so—not surprisingly—this ended up being the largest chapter by far, or roughly 30,000 words. Chapter 4 was to focus on the "four flows" of globalization, which is how it ended up being in the book. My sense was: 1 to explain the Cold War and 2 to do the post-Cold War. Then 3 would explain the current security environment, so 4 would end up taking the reader deep into that system's operational future, by examining these four flows and how they would shape globalization in the decades to come. Chapter 5 was to present the System Perturbation concept, which it also ended up doing in the final book. Basically all the material that I foresaw for this chapter made it into the final book, except for a long section entitled Rules for System Perturbations. In that section, I planned to present and describe at length 15 rules I had developed for System Perturbations as a result of a workshop I had led to explore this subject in the spring of 2002. The workshop brought together a load of interesting experts, including some chaos and complexity thinkers. I loved the material, but audiences often found the slides and the material very hard to grasp—or perhaps just boringly academic in nature. I used these slides in my master brief only about five times until I simply shelved them. I put them into the final first draft as a single chapter section, but Mark edited the entire section out before we sent it to Neil Nyren at Putnam, who I suspect would have demanded it anyway. I plan to post them on this website on the Deleted Scene page. Why? Because I'm just stubborn. Chapter 6 was designed to present a new ordering principle for national security, whereas the chapter that eventually emerged in the book presented far more than that. In the end, I used that phrase, New Ordering Principle, as the title for Chapter 5, which I originally intended to title The Rise of System Perturbations. But with Chapter 2 slated for a "Rise" title (The Rise of the Lesser Includeds), I thought that would be too much "rising" for just one book. I mean, wouldn't something have to fall as a result? So I used New Ordering Principle for Chapter 5 and used that Rise of System Perturbations as one of the sections in that chapter. Eventually, Chapter 6 ended up absorbing what I had originally planned, as you shall see below, for chapters 7 and 8. Chapter 7 was going to focus on the Sys Admin force and model of managing the global security environment, but this material wasn't really long enough for an entire chapter, unless I got very specific and I felt that if I did that, I would end up going deeper into military operations and tactics than I had a right to, given my natural level of expertise focuses on big-picture strategizing. So that material, in a single section form, was folded into Chapter 6 in the final manuscript. Chapter 8 was going to focus solely on the American way of war. This died a death similar to the originally planned Chapter 7, for all the same reasons. So this likewise became a section in Chapter 6. The Chapter 7 that did emerge in the final draft was generated by Mark Warren's decision to pull the three myth sections originally envisioned to conclude Chapter 1 (The Myth of Global Chaos), Chapter 2 (The Myth of Globocop and Perpetual War), and Chapter 7 (The Myth of the American Empire). That Chapter was constructed by Mark after I was completely done writing the original first draft—just before we sent it to Neil Nyren at Putnam. The proposal ended with an Epilogue that would plot out a grand future worth creating. In the final book, this became the Conclusion, or the virtual eighth chapter. Two other things I would like to explore about the Table of Contents are my original planning documents. As I noted in The Writing of the PNM series, I had originally planned to write the book as 75 one-thousand word op-ed-like essays, so fearful was I that I would lose my way. I drew up this map after the proposal was sold to Putnam but before I began writing—in the latter half of July 2003. I actually created an Excel spreadsheet to lay out the 75 beats (click here to see). The code for the "map" of the PNM was as follows:
In the end, my 75 beats became 31 chapter sections, counting the Conclusion as one. The Preface, added after the fact, became the 32nd essay. Then, as Mark and I edited those 32 sections, chapter by chapter, he made me write a short intro essay to each main chapter—in effect, bringing my "beat" total up to 39 in all. When I say I wrote the book in 40 days, I really mean it. One beat (the Preface) actually took me two days to write, but everything else was written in a single furious day. That was my discipline—get my section done before I could rest for the night. I also include in this director's commentary section an additional document: my original master outline of the book, based on the map. In this outline I describe what I thought would go into roughly each beat. So the chart lists (from left to right):
It's neat to look back at the outline to see how scared I was about setting out to write this big book. I made it simply to calm my nerves and to give me a sense of where everything would go. In the end, I never consulted this outline, although I used the Excel map like a roadmap, consulting it every morning before I started writing and editing it almost every night when I finished. Months later, I gave the original, horribly marked up hard-copy version that I carried everywhere during the writing period like a talisman to Mark Warren as a memento of the whole experience. So if you look at the book as a whole now, here is how I explain it:
If you look over the chapters, you will see them alternating (in my opinion) from easier to harder. The "easier" chapters (more narrative, less high concept) are the odd chapters, or 1-3-5-7. The "harder" chapters (the opposite of the easy) are the even chapters, or 2-4-6-8. More details and facts in the hard chapters, more soaring rhetoric in the easy ones. All by design to keep the pace as lively as possible. As a memento of Mark's coaching during the entire writing process, I conclude this post with the Four Rules he gave me on the eve of my first writing day (2 August 2003):
In the end, these four rules were all that Mark and I talked about for hours on end as I wrote the book. They essentially shaped the tone of the material that emerged. |
Putnam, 2004 |
