[ The strategist ]

Much has been made in the past year of profound changes in the way we make war. Thomas Barnett, forty, is the man who dreamed them first.

Thomas Barnett is a philosopher of modern war.  

A few years ago, Barnett, a Harvard-educated professor of military strategy at the Naval War College, began to imagine a world of grave threat posed by unseen, stateless enemies capable of striking fatal blows against the modern world yet impossible to defend against. He was criticized as being perhaps unrealistic. Now the entire world knows he was right, and now the United States is in an escalating war, with a military that has significant adapting to do.  

“We really haven’t been a nation at war since World War II,” Barnett says. “We always did it on the side, so to speak. We networked ourselves with the outside world so much that our definition of national security started moving beyond the war paradigm to something else—crises that threatened our connections with the outside world.” So in the late nineties, he began thinking larger. He teamed up with the bond firm Cantor Fitzgerald and asked a question: How would the U. S. military react to a hypothetical, interconnected catastrophe like, say, a terrorist attack on Wall Street? “People heard our brief,” Barnett says, “but everyone thought we were too apocalyptic, too out-there.” 

No more. Within weeks of September 11, 2001, Barnett was called to the Pentagon and installed as the assistant for strategic futures in the Office of Force Transformation, Office of the Secretary of Defense. Since then, he has been relentlessly briefing high-ranking members of the intelligence community and brass from all branches of the military on the next world and how to manage it. “September 11 was crystallizing,” he says. “We all just went, This is what we were talking about—a peacetime, war-like event that’s so profound it forces us to rethink everything.” 

Barnett breaks the big world down thusly: “core” countries, those that promote or align themselves with the larger global community through a relatively free flow of trade, people, direct foreign investment, and security; and “gap” countries that either refuse to or can’t work with the core because of political instability, cultural rigidity, or extreme poverty. It’s not as if he’s making it up. He drew a map of the world and highlighted our military responses of the past three decades—from Iran, Lebanon, and Libya to the Gulf war, Haiti, Kosovo, and Somalia—until the logic emerged: The U. S. military rarely needed to respond in the core countries. The gap was another story, not only in terms of warfare but also because of exports like terrorism and illegal drugs. “The goal,” Barnett says, “is not to contain the gap countries but to bring them constructively into the core. It’s what we’ve been doing, and the only question is how long it takes us to recognize it and articulate it.” And for Barnett, it’s hardly hopeless: In the numbers game, there are four billion people within the core, two billion in the gap. 

The future likely means that the U. S. military bases set up last year in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan will develop into more-permanent bases like those in Europe. It will mean an “export of security,” which involves everything from joint military exercises to long-term occupation. As we’ve seen in Afghanistan, it means few front lines and, when things get rough, dropping in “a small number of guys with immense power and leaving almost no footprint on the ground,” Barnett says. “War is assassination on some level—all wars. The goal is to be able to do it to a point of discretion that’s pretty amazing.” 

Barnett has the brass’s ear, and the brass is listening. “When people start using your words—core and gap, system perturbations, exporting security—you know you’re getting through,” Barnett says. “In Washington and in the Pentagon, battles are won one room at a time.” 

Andrew Chaikivsky

 December 2002

Volume 138 No. 6


 

The Best & Brightest

A special issue devoted to introducing a few dozen people who are changing our world. Saving our cities. Unlocking secrets of science and medicine. Creating new industries. Imagining new worlds. Their work will astonish and inspire a new generation. Featuring an introductory essay on leadership in America by Bill Clinton.

136 CULTURE

137  Ryan Gosling The star of last spring's The Believer is the most ferociously talented actor of his generation.

138   Charlie Kaufman The most innovative screenwriter in Hollywood is also the most . . . well, you gotta meet him.

140  Malerie Marder, Jenny Gage, Anna Gaskell
Three women who have changed the direction of American art photography.

142  Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss Fast talk between fast friends who are also two of the best young voices in American fiction.

143  Van Toffler The man who is reinventing television.

143  Jonathan Ive Apple computer owes much of its comeback to its young chief of design. 

144  William Massie One young architect has a startling idea about how to bring high-end, custom house design within the reach of everyone.

146  Will Wright  The man who created The Sims is about to obliterate the line between computer gaming and reality.

148  Paul Liebrandt The most daring chef in America concocts a dish for us.

148  The Neptunes  If the radio's on, there's a good chance you're listening to one of their songs.

149  Samantha Morton  An Oscar nominee who has uttered fewer words onscreen than any star since the silent era.

150  SOCIETY
151  Bill Frist The only heart-lung transplant surgeon in the country who also happens to be a U. S. senator.

152  Martin O'Malley The best young mayor in America is on a mission to save Baltimore.

156  Michael Gerson  Notes from the most important presidential speechwriter in a generation.

157  Ray Boshara  Asset building has always worked for the rich. Why not let it work for the poor?

157  Mellody Hobson A Chicago fund manager has a dream: that poor black kids can learn to love the stock market.

158  Vernor Vinge The man who foresaw the Internet now sees something else-the post-human future

160  Sara Horowitz One woman thinks that even if you work for yourself, you should have group benefits.

160  Gregory Rodriguez On the post-minority nation.

161  Jedediah Purdy One of the best young thinkers in America thinks the most provocative thing about America is that it's invisible to itself.

162  Cory Booker Rewriting the rules of racial politics — and other lessons taken from the sixteenth floor of the Brick Tower houses in Newark.

163  Thomas Barnett  A view of the world from the military strategist who saw September 11 coming. 

164   SCIENCE
165  David Lederman The man who built the first self-contained artificial heart isn't finished with it yet.

166  Eugene Chan The most radical innovation in biotechnology since the discovery of DNA is the work of a medical-school dropout with an unshakable vision.

168  Josef Penninger A leading genetic scientist may have found a cure for nothing less than pain itself.

169  Jonathan Eisen  By studying life that thrives in the most extreme conditions on earth, a biologist hopes to discover how life began at all.

170  Mehmet Oz Why would a brilliant heart surgeon bring hypnotherapy and energy healing into the operating room? "I don't care what works," he says.

171  Donald Ingber Our understanding of how cells are constructed has changed utterly, all because one biologist took an art class.

172  Dave Lavery The NASA scientist who is leading mankind on a mission to Mars.

175  Michael L. Dustin  By capturing an image of how immune cells communicate, he may have begun to unlock the body's ability to cure itself.

175  Sarah Flannery Others had spent years trying, but in just three days, a sixteen-year-old Irish girl on a work-study job found a way to make data encryption twenty times faster.

176  BUSINESS
177  Richard Barton  What has the thirty-five-year-old CEO of Expedia learned? Trust your external dependencies (but not your stock price).

178  Ed Breen The man hired to save Tyco is at least one thing many recent would-be titans weren't-a man of business.

182  David Neeleman Can the visionary behind JetBlue tell us how to save the rest of American industry?

184  Amory Lovins A leading environmental thinker believes that business can lead us out of the mess it has created.

186  Craig Newmark  The elusive creator behind Craigslist, the best e-commerce site on the Web.

186  Joseph Jacobson  By the end of this decade, he hopes, E Ink will fundamentally change the way you read-on screen and on paper.

187  Matthew Rabin  Will five-dollar packs really get smokers to quit? A Berkeley economist is filling in the most glaring holes in traditional economic theory.

187  Dan DeLong  The head engineer of XCor could make commercial space flight a reality within four years.

188  Chad Mirkin It's one thing to speculate about the coming miracles of nanotechnology. It's another to be the guy who's turning them into products.