Thomas P.M. Barnett
Senior Strategic Researcher and Professor,
Warfare Analysis and Research Department, Naval War College

[pp. 15-16]

Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett is a senior strategic researcher and professor at the Naval War College. His latest book, The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century, is published by G.P. Putnam's
Sons (April 2004).

Fire and Movement, Issue 134 (2004)

NOTE: SEE MY CORRECTION ON THE NATURE OF THE USAF WARGAME PLAYED IN ALABAMA IN JANUARY OF 2004

Last January the U.S. military conducted a huge tabletop wargame in Alabama designed to test out new, "transformational" technologies and force postures in four emerging warfighting areas. The military's version of board games is used primarily to stretch minds and test new ideas at low cost—usually in the range of 1/5th the normal cost of a more realistic exercise. While the technologies employed were certainly impressive (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or UAVs, with almost unlimited loiter time), the actual scenario used was downright pathetic, indicating just how low the Pentagon's imagination has sunk despite being more than two years past the terrorist attacks of 9/11 (not to mention the anthrax scare, the DC sniper case, SARS in China, and so on and so on).

The scenario, you ask? It was basically the same one the military has been using for a good decade now: a large unnamed Asian land power exhibits a rather unhealthy interest in a small, island nation off its coast. Seems this large unnamed Asian land power has designs on this little state, which just so happens to be a close military friend of the United States. Now, this scenario was kept secret, but let me go out on a limb here and suggest that the "near-peer competitor" in question was none other than China. How can I state this with utter certainty? Because basically every big wargame we've conducted since the Taiwan Straits Crisis of 1996 has been a replay of that scenario, even as most military intelligence suggests that if China were to invade Taiwan anytime soon, it would likely go down in history as the "million man swim."

So why is the Pentagon so stuck on this largely implausible scenario? Pure lack of imagination. Simply put, the ordering principle of the Department of Defense (DoD) hasn't changed one whit since the Cold War: we built DoD around the core conflict model of great power war back in 1947, and nothing has come along to knock that baby off its doctrinal pedestal since. When the Soviets went away officially at the end of 1991, we hung on to the hope of their eventual return through the strategic planning pillar known as "reconstitution," a fancy word meaning we'd hedge against their revival until we could dream up something better to force size ourselves against.

That something better came in 1996, when we shadow boxed the Chinese in the Taiwan Straits during one of their periodic shows of force designed to scare the Taiwanese political leadership from making any declarations of political independence from the mainland. Don't get me wrong, I believe this is a scenario worth gaming, because if it went down, a lot of important things would immediately get screwed up in Asia, which represents almost half of humanity. My problem with the scenario is that it represents the height of imagination right now inside the Pentagon regarding the future of warfare, and as far as I'm concerned, it is the strategic planning equivalent of steering by staring at your rear-view mirror.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 gave us a glimpse of what "asymmetrical warfare" in the 21st century is going to be all about. It won't just be some other great power or some regional rogue keeping America from accessing some future battlespace they hope to own, because frankly, there ain't no such thing as a conventional battlespace anywhere in the world that our military force cannot access. Asymmetrical warfare in the future is going to feel more like you're trying to play football while the other guy has decided to play soccer. In other words, you won't be playing the same game, with the same rules, or even the same scorekeeping.

Great power war effectively died with the realization of mutual assured destruction thanks to nukes. Meanwhile, classic state-on-state war is going the route of the dinosaur: basically no one engages in it anymore. What's left is plenty of violence within states and non-state actors looking to hijack societies from globalization's creeping embrace so they can disconnect those societies from the global grid and have their way with the captive population. Increasingly, the most motivated non-state actors will employ terrorism to scare off advanced states from caring about those societies they seek to hijack from history. That's basically the al–Qaeda's game, and if it reminds you of a similar movement of a century earlier (Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks), then you were paying attention in history class.

Like Lenin, Osama bin Laden has proven himself a capable leader of a transnational terrorist movement, and like Lenin, bin Laden seeks to break off a huge chunk of humanity (a billion Mulsims living in predominately Islamic societies) from the Western-dominated global economy so as to be able to lord over them in their collective pursuit of a "good life" divorced from all that Westoxification imposed by globalization's advance. Bin Laden (and all the Bin Ladens to follow) realizes that time is not on his side. In twenty years, the Saudi Arabia he hopes to jerk back to some seventh-century version of paradise simply won't be there for the taking, so he has to move fast. If Lenin realized he had to start his socialist empire by targeting the most pre-capitalist societies, bin Laden seeks to begin his version of Islamofascism by targeting the most pre-globalized societies. That's why al-Qaeda has flourished up to now in some of the most backward, disconnected states such as Sudan and Afghanistan.

The struggle I describe here is basically the dominant conflict model of the 21st century: between those who would lead their states toward embracing globalization and enmeshing their governments within the security rule sets it imposes and those who seek to disconnect relatively backward states in order to impose their particular brand of isolating authoritarianism. What I'm talking about here is basically a Risk for the era of globalization. Bin Laden and al-Qaeda don't just want to drive the U.S. military out of the Middle East, but to drive the Middle East out of the world. That's the global war they are waging when they take down the twin towers on 9/11. And it's the global war America (or at least the Bush Administration) believes it's waging when they take down Saddam Hussein in the Middle East. Al-Qaeda seeks to disconnect the Middle East from the global economy, whereas the United States seeks to reconnect the Middle East to the larger world—one big game of Risk.

Now if someone could just clue the Pentagon in on what's really going on, because, if left to their own devices, military strategists will continue gaming the Taiwan Straits ad infinitum. Why? It's a wonderful proving ground for various weapons systems they are convinced they need. Do they really need these systems? Depends on whether you think the Chinese diesel submarine threat is the big obstacle between some future, downstream global reality we seek to generate through the strategic employment of our military forces around the world and us.

Myself, I don't stay up nights fretting over Chinese diesel subs, not when China is sucking up foreign direct investment like crazy and putting massive state enterprises up for auction (want to know what the biggest Initial Public Offering in the world was last year? China Life Insurance!). No, I see a China busting its rear end trying to integrate its society with the global economy, and as far as I'm concerned, that push for connectivity is a very good sign. When I look around the world, I see danger and violence overwhelmingly concentrated in the most disconnected states and regions, like Africa and the Middle East. Moreover, that's where the bulk of the terrorist groups are, because it is primarily within those regions where we find the endemic conflicts and authoritarian regimes that breed such desperate people.

But gaming the spillover effects of raging civil wars and far-flung terrorist networks is hard, dang it! And awfully complex to explain to a Congress that just wants to know in whose district the Pentagon plans on building that fabulous new weapons system or expensive platform. Gaming the sort of war al-Qaeda seeks to wage against the United States wouldn't look anything like the tabletop wargames the Pentagon knows only too well how to play. Instead of just gaming war within the context of war, you'd have to game war within the context of everything else—Risk meets Monopoly meets Life meets . . ..

But that is exactly what we saw on 9/11: war within the context of everything else. The New York Stock Exchange was shut down for a week. Do you think they gamed that one in the Pentagon wargame last January? Or air travel being shut down for an even longer stretch? Or a bulge of hate crimes against Arabs? Or a rush among Americans to buy guns? Or insurance companies refusing terrorism coverage? Or a GM auto plant in Indiana shutting down because it couldn't get a computer chip from Taiwan "just in time?”

All of these downstream effects occurred in response to 9/11, along with our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, along with a host of new anti-terrorism laws being generated around the world, along with an immediate slow down of foreign students visiting the United States, along with . . .. Is the Pentagon gaming any of those aspects of this global war on terrorism? Is anybody? Do we even understand warfare of this nature?

Let me give you an even better example. The U.S. Census Bureau says two-thirds of America's population growth between now and 2050 will come from Latinos immigrating here from Central and South America. Without that flow of bodies, our Potential Support Ratio (PSR) of workers-to-retirees will plummet dangerously. That's the future economic strength of this country in a nutshell. Guess what happens in response to 9/11? We tighten our borders and already we see a diversion of that flow to Europe. You want to know who made that call? Bin Laden did. He's playing a game of Risk we don't understand, because we lack the imagination to do so—because we only understand war within the context of war and not within the context of everything else. We're role-playing 20th century warfare across a global security system against opponents who already moved onto the 21st century's version of warfare across a global economic system. We lack even the language to describe this new form of warfare. So we call this new form of attack a "9/11." What will we call the next one? Well, I guess it depends on the date.

Rest assured, the Pentagon will know exactly what to do . . . when China invades Taiwan. As for the next 9/11, military strategists don't have a clue, because they can't wargame that scenario, because those board games simply don't exist.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the commercial board wargame industry cranked out plenty of games designed to scope out the core conflict model of the day—the Sovs streaming the Fulda Gap and everything else that would follow. But where is that industry today? Where are the games that will teach a new generation of strategists to think about war within the context of everything else? Or strategic minds that will recognize a 9/11 as something more profound than just three buildings being hit?

Board games are all about tracing cause and effect, thinking several moves ahead, and seeing the entire playing field in one fell swoop. Show me the board that can locate a 9/11 somewhere on a battlespace that includes energy markets, global financial flows and labor migration patterns and I'll show you a game worth playing, because you'll be describing the conflict that few in the world understand and yet all in this world find themselves operating within.

America is currently engaged in a global war that is neither global nor a war in any way we've previously understood or experienced. We need a new lexicon to describe this sort of warfare, and the commercial wargame industry has a vital role to play in this voyage of discovery. The sort of in-depth, context-rich role-playing games that are typically filed under Fantasy need to be reclassified, through revision and expansion, under Complexity, because they offer many of the skill sets strategic planners need to master in the battles ahead.

The Pentagon needs to start understanding this global war in all its non-military complexity, so that we can employ our military assets around the world for maximum impact. The military is reaching for this understanding in its pursuit of effects-based operations, which is just a fancy way of saying that smoking holes are—in and of themselves—not nearly enough to win the wars ahead. You can see this in Iraq today. Did we wargame the Saddam takedown effectively? The results speak for themselves. Is it clear we didn't have a clue about the occupation? Again, the results speak for themselves.

As a result, the U.S. military has wandered into—with almost no strategic forethought—what even Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz admits is the "super bowl of terrorism." Show me the commercial board game that effectively prepares tomorrow's military leaders for the Iraq-occupation-after-next and I will show you a product that saves lives.

The intellectual challenge is clear. The only question is how the commercial wargame industry will respond.