The Naval Supply Corps Newsletter

September/October 2003

Transforming the Pentagon Vision
of the Global Security Environment

An Introduction and Interview with Dr. Thomas P. M. Barnett,
Assistant for Strategic Futures, Office of Force Transformation,
Senior Strategic Researcher, U.S. Naval War College

By Captain Dave Coderre, SC, USNR

       Dr. Thomas Barnett recently completed an assignment with  the Secretary of Defense's Office of Force Transformation that helped reshape the direction of future military strategy based upon a new map and vision of the world security environment. This new understanding, in turn, is helping guide the transformation of the military as it adapts to the evolving security challenges of the 21st century.

       The end of the cold war marked the end of the bi-polar world struggle between the U.S. and the Soviets and signaled a foundational shift in the international security environment for us. The likelihood of peer-to-peer warfare diminished, and events like 9/11 highlighted a new "asymmetrical" type of threat seeking to circumvent our traditional military strengths. This new security environment, which Dr. Barnett's theory charts, is a fundamental reason for a "Transformation" and not simply an update of our military.

       Donald Rumsfeld created the Office of Force Transformation (OFT)¹ just after 9/11, in response to President Bush's mandate to transform the military's capabilities to ensure its future competitive advantages in this changing security environment. VADM Arthur K. Cebrowski, retired, former president of the Naval War College, was appointed as OFT's inaugural director with Dr. Barnett as the assistant for strategic futures.

       The Harvard educated Barnett was recently highlighted in the special "Best and Brightest" issue of Esquire² magazine featuring dynamic new people changing the world for the better. Dr. Barnett has also been a prolific contributor to the U.S. Naval Institute's Proceedings magazine and was honored as "Author of the Year" for 2001.

       A senior military strategist at the Naval War College³, Dr. Barnett also heads the "NewRuleSets.Project" at the college. Among other initiatives, this project defines new "maps" of power and influence across the international security environment to guide the vision of the U.S. Military on how and where to maximize influence throughout the world.

       The pivotal focus of this mapping is around a relatively recent (late 1980s/1990s) and evolving concept called "Globalization." There's still much debate and controversy about Globalization's specific nuances and benefits. It essentially boils down, however, to the process of increased interconnectedness and interdependence between peoples and states in a world that continues to grow "smaller." Three-time Pulitzer Prize winning author Thomas Friedman defines it as, "the inexorable integration of markets, transportation systems, and communication systems to a degree never witnessed before -in a way that is enabling corporations, countries, and individuals to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before and is enabling the world to reach into corporations, countries, and individuals farther, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before." ⁴

       The rapid advance of communication technologies and international economic forces, especially in the last decade and a half, has accelerated the influence of globalization and has caught the imagination of a growing number of people. Many now see globalization as the defining struggle of our age.

       Dr. Barnett's theory suggests that if you look at the regions of the world "thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security" you will see stable governments with rising standards of living. He classifies these regions as the Functioning "Core." A Core country is functioning within globalization when it seeks to harmonize its rule sets with the emerging global rule sets of democracy, transparency, free trade, free market, and collective security. These areas welcome content flow and connectivity. The Core makes up roughly two-thirds of the world.

       By contrast, if you look at areas out of touch with or "disconnected" from the globalization process, you see areas of constant conflict, poverty, disease, and repressive regimes. The totality of these places he calls the Non-Integrating Gap. He aptly points out that if you look at where the U.S. has sent its military since the end of the cold war (the last 12 years - about 132 cases), the overwhelming majority of these cases lie in regions that are out of sync with Globalization.

       The Gap is important to national security because, as Barnett puts it, "disconnectedness defines danger." One aim of U.S. national security strategy is to "Shrink the Gap." This view becomes increasingly more useful as the military moves from containment and retaliation to a more proactive and pre-emptive approach to national security.

       Even from the Gap's point of view however, stability is a foundational prerequisite before a state can successfully integrate into the globalization process and reap its rewards. Stability is usually derived through security and "exporting security" is one thing the U.S. military is most qualified in the world to contribute - in a positive sense.

       In his role at OFT, Barnett presented his view of the world security landscape in a briefing entitled, "A Future Worth Creating: Defense Transformation in the New Security Environment." He presented this briefing more than 100 times to more than 3,000 people including all the military service secretaries, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's personal aides, and many other high ranking officials of the military, state, intelligence, and think tank communities.

       An excellent narrative about this presentation titled "The Pentagon's New Map" and subtitled "It Explains Why We're Going to War, and Why We'll Keep Going to War" received a lot of public attention after publication in the March 2003 edition of Esquire magazine⁵. The Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan think tank, listed "The Pentagon's New Map" as a "must-read" on member reading lists for both Globalization and National Security. CNN's Wolf Blitzer also did a TV interview with Barnett about "The Pentagon's New Map" on "Showdown: Iraq"⁶ during the conflict.

       The following interview serves as an introduction to Dr. Barnett's views through his outlook on the postwar Iraq security environment.

CAPT Coderre: What direction do you think we need to take now in post-war Iraq?

Dr. Barnett: We can't mandate types of government and how much they open that government onto the outside world in terms of accepting different leadership ideas or how they conduct their activities. The minimal thing we need to shoot for though is connectivity on an individual basis.

       People argue that the Truman and Reagan administrations were the key in defeating communism. If you really look back at the Soviets, what defeated them was the onset of connectivity. The administration most responsible for that was the Nixon administration with détente. What it did was settle the question of "we're not going to get you; you're not going to get us." That let a certain amount of connectivity ensue.

       This corrected the Soviet system by letting money, that had real value, and ideas, and all sorts of other things flow onto the system. And once people got enough connectivity with the outside world, they became unmanageable in an authoritarian sort of sense. The only way you can really have a true authoritarian government is to maintain very strict control over your public's access to outside information and their ability to travel abroad. This is the big stick used on them.

       So, again, as a bare minimum, I think what we want to get in an Iraq, what we want to encourage elsewhere is freedom - of connection, of travel, of information flow. We may very well end up with a one party state in Iraq and there is nothing wrong with that. Japan had a one party state for a long time … so did South Korea, so did Mexico until recently. You can develop in this manner as long as the leadership is rotated.

       As long as we promote connectivity and the feeling of rotation of leadership on a regular basis, then I think we've put into play the minimal "rule sets" needed for good things to happen. This is going to entail us getting involved in a way that would seem quite dramatic compared to past efforts that have been pretty much sitting off the shore, coming in when need be, slapping down bad actors on occasion but never really showing staying power.

CAPT Coderre: Speaking of past efforts, what do you think of U.S. efforts to reduce our dependence on Middle East oil?

Dr. Barnett: I don't think they're particularly important. Oil is primarily used for transportation in the global economy, and there is going to be a natural push toward fuel cells for a lot of good reasons. It's going to be a winner technologically, a winner environmentally, and we just plain like to pursue the technology. There will be all sorts of opportunities for Detroit to sell us a variety of cars to, in effect, exchange the car market two or three times in this process. There will be plenty of winners. And we should make this shift for all of these reasons.

       We should not do it, however, so we can get out of the Middle East. We should not do it so we can disassociate ourselves from that part of the world. We should do it in conjunction with a Middle East that is aware of what we are doing and is allowed to participate in that to whatever extent is possible in terms of, say, the production of hydrogen or the pushing of natural gas as an alternative export. We want the countries that may feel threatened by this to feel part of the process. I hate the notion of reducing our dependence on Middle Eastern oil out of fear. We can't write off these parts of the world. There are security interests there that are profound.

CAPT Coderre: What new perspective do you feel the American public has gained regarding the evolving world security environment after Iraq and 9/11?

Dr. Barnett: I think what Iraq and 9/11 did is this: If you think that the struggle between an "us and a them" disappears in an end-of-history sort of manner with the falling of the Berlin wall - you're wrong. There's a new struggle. That struggle is between those who can handle connectivity and find value in it and are willing to engage in the concepts of security that we find amenable to our own national security and those who feel, in effect, left out, off the grid, and off the net.

       Well, 9/11 said that these people will make you feel their pain on a regular basis, and Iraq alerted us to the fact that when we find great danger in the system, we worry about its ability to come to our neck of the woods through a sort of a super-empowered individual like an Osama bin Laden. If they can't have our good life, they can certainly seek to disrupt our good life. When that can come from these distant disconnected places we begin to realize that the struggle between security and insecurity doesn't really end because the Soviets went away.

       There are still people who not so much by choice but by history are left disconnected. The struggle between the Soviets and us was a struggle between two networks that were largely disconnected. And what we forgot in that process was that there was, in effect, a third world that was disconnected not by choice but in many ways by historical legacy -the victims of colonization. They hadn't been integrated into a global economy.
      
       We're still there. We have long assumed that nothing that would come out of there would really constitute a big enough threat for us to worry about. Hence, we tended to call them the "less includeds" or "military operations other than war." I think what 9/11 and Iraq did is take a lot of this grab bag of stuff that we didn't care to do and all of a sudden said, you know, maybe this is really the important stuff. This is a huge new challenge because it's a big chunk of humanity not in the easiest places to travel to and operate in.

       This is going to create huge logistical questions for us. It's probably going to redefine the nature of the Navy through the concept of Sea Basing, which will probably put us in a position of Jointness like nothing ever before. It'll also help to redefine the Navy by, in effect, pulling the Coast Guard back closer to the United States and forcing the Navy to play more of the Coast Guard-like role around the world.

       I think you're going to see the high/low ship mix with a vengeance. We're going to have some big ships like our carriers, capable of tremendous projections of power because they're unique and virtually unassailable and they define us. But you're also going to see the rest of the Navy get very much logistically focused, get very much "small" and "many." This is going to create logistical issues. It will require more along the lines of mother ships to replenish and will involve the new Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) - due out in 2007.

CAPT Coderre: Regarding "Exporting Security" or "Shrinking the Gap," should the U.S. bear the burden of this itself?

Dr. Barnett: Well, I think there is kind of a wedge, that is overwhelmingly American, that goes into areas like an Iraq and perhaps several places like Africa that suffer terribly in terms of security deficits. The focus is on the great dangers and the regimes that really hold back other countries or hold back their own people. In those instances, I think it's going to be kind of a functional unilateralism. We are going to be the ones leading the efforts at regime change or counter-terrorism or counter-insurgencies (not really the problem it was among the failed states).

       But as we successfully migrate any country, society or region to something better, it's going to be less of us and more of others. And when I say less us, it's going to be less DoD and more the rest of the U.S. government. It's going to be less government and more private. It's going to be more Foreign Direct Investments, which really integrate countries as we now see with developing Asia - it's the private money that really does it. And it's going to be less the United States and more the rest of the world because you can't integrate a country by yourself. You need the rest of the world. I think we've seen this with the Balkans, and I think we've seen this in a negative sense with the Congo and will see this in a positive sense with an Iraq.

       It's not the cart before the horse for the United States to lead militarily and to get the wagon rolling. Once you get a sense of inevitability that good things are going to happen, the allies who couldn't manage the cooperation during the uncertain points, generally appear, like a France and Total Fina Elf (one of the top five multinational oil companies in the world - formally owned in large part by the government of France), which has an enormous amount of energy connectivity throughout the Middle East. So, does a France get involved eventually in the Middle East when an Iraq comes online? Absolutely.

       There's nothing wrong with that because we need the likes of Total Fina Elf and Russia's Lukoil. There's plenty of work for everybody to do in those kinds of situations. I don't think we should ever be in the position of punishing allies for their inability to step forward. We shouldn't exactly turn a deaf ear but expect people to have a say on the basis of what they do. Anyone should be able to earn his or her way back into collective good graces by making an effort at any point in the process. We certainly don't want to be in the position of looking like we're shutting anyone out.

CAPT Coderre: Where would you predict that the U.S. military might find itself five to 10 years out?

Dr. Barnett: Well, one place I think they're not going to find themselves is Europe. The service men and women who spend a lot of time in a Germany or Bosnia are going to be fewer in number.

       I think Korea is a situation that's going to rise in prominence, if you get any sort of settling in the Middle East and understanding between the Iranians and us. One member of the axis of evil would be left standing. Meanwhile, I think China, Japan and South Korea are moving toward a notion of … how long should we put up with this? There's a lot of suffering, perhaps 2 or 3 million dead prematurely. As a result, in five to 10 years we may be moving beyond a Korea as a focal point of our activity. I think it's quite possible we may be out by that time.

       I think we're more in central Asia, more into east central Europe (We've already made those announcements.) and we are more in the Middle East. I think you're going to find us more in the Horn and down the eastern slope of Africa because I think you see a lot of dysfunctional states there. You're going to see us more active. You're going to see us trying to engage through a more permanent presence that's going to be on the ground as well as in the water. I think you're going to see us focus on what is quite naturally those parts of the world that are the biggest sources of violence that exist right now: Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and to a certain extent the archipelago countries of Southeast Asia.

End Notes

¹ OFT's website can be found at http://www.oft.osd.mil/index.cfm.

² Chaikivsky, Andrew. "The Strategist," Esquire, Vol. 138, no. 6, p. 163. This "Best and Brightest" section features an introduction (page 134) by former President Bill Clinton, who was featured as one of the "Best and Brightest" in 1984.

³ A brief biography of Dr. Barnett can be found on the Naval War College website at:
newrulesets/thomas_barnett.htm.

4 Friedman, Thomas L. Longitudes and Attitudes; Exploring the World after September 11 , New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.

⁵ Barnett, Thomas P.M., "The Pentagon's New Map" Esquire, Vol. 139,      no. 3, pp. 174-179 & 227-228. 

⁶ Wolf Blitzer's interview was aired by CNN on Feb. 26, 12:50 EST..

CAPT Dave Coderre is on the staff of the Naval Reserve Naval Supply Systems Command Headquarters unit in Mechanicsburg, Pa. CAPT Coderre interviewed Dr. Barnett at the Naval War College in May.