Wall Street Journal
May 11, 2004
Pg. 1By Greg Jaffe, Staff Reporter Of The Wall
Street Journal
In 1998, Thomas Barnett, an obscure Defense Department
analyst, teamed up with senior executives at the Wall Street
firm Cantor Fitzgerald LP to study how globalization was
changing national security.
One scenario they studied was a meltdown caused by the
Y2K computer bug followed by terrorist attacks designed to
exploit the chaos. Mr. Barnett posited that Wall Street
would shut down for a week. Gun violence, racially motivated
attacks and sales of antidepressants would surge. The U.S.
military would find itself embroiled in brushfire conflicts
across the developing world.
His theories were met with skepticism. "People began
referring to me as the Nostradamus of Y2K," Mr. Barnett
says.
Then came the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Suddenly Mr.
Barnett didn't look so crazy.
At the urging of his Pentagon bosses, Mr. Barnett
overhauled the concept to address more directly the
post-9/11 world. The result is a three-hour PowerPoint
presentation that
more resembles performance art than a
Pentagon briefing. It's making Mr. Barnett, 41
years old, a key figure in the debate currently raging about
what the modern military should look like. Senior military
officials say his decidedly controversial ideas are
influencing the way the Pentagon views its enemies,
vulnerabilities and future structure.
Mr. Barnett's military is a far cry from the shape of
today's armed forces. Instead of a single force to wage wars
and rebuild nations, Mr. Barnett envisions two. The first,
which he dubs "Leviathan," would be hard-hitting, ready to
take on conventional foes such as Saddam Hussein on a
moment's notice. The second, more unconventional force of
"System Administrators" would focus on bringing
dysfunctional states into the mainstream through the type of
nation-building operations seen in Iraq, the Balkans and
Eastern Africa. It wouldn't only mop up after wars but would
travel the world during peacetime building local security
forces and infrastructure.
This blueprint for America's defense force comes wrapped
in a presentation devised by Mr. Barnett that samples the "ching
ching" sound effect from the television series "Law &
Order," borrows lines from the Sopranos and features the
voice of movie character Austin Powers calling out "Oh yeah,
baby!" to punctuate a key idea. At one point, upsetting
some, Mr. Barnett refers to 9/11 as the "first
live-broadcast, mass snuff film in human history."
"Tom polarizes people with his brief. They either love it
or they hate it," says retired Navy Capt. Bradd Hayes, a
professor at the Naval War College, where Mr. Barnett also
teaches.
With the military struggling in Iraq and Afghanistan,
it's possible the American public could lose its appetite
for anything that smacks of intervening in troubled states.
But it's precisely these problems that are prompting senior
officials to listen more closely to the pitch. A group of
strategic planners from the Pentagon's Joint Staff invited
him to kick off a two-day retreat in April for senior
officers. Afterward they told Mr. Barnett they wanted him to
brief a more senior group. The Navy's top admiral recently
e-mailed an essay written by Mr. Barnett to the service's
top brass.
Rep. Mac Thornberry, a Republican and a senior member of
the House Armed Services Committee,
says Mr. Barnett has shaped his views
on China, global trade, foreign aid and national defense.
"Since the fall of the Soviet Union we haven't
had a global strategy with bipartisan appeal that can
survive changes in administration and in Congress," the
lawmaker says. He thinks this could fit the bill.
Mr. Barnett conjured up his vision at the urging of
Retired Vice Adm. Arthur Cebrowski. After 9/11, Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tapped the admiral to run a new
office in the Pentagon, dubbed the Office of Force
Transformation, focusing on changing the military, one of
Mr. Rumsfeld's pet projects. Adm. Cebrowski turned to Mr.
Barnett because he first wanted a better idea of what a
post-9/11 military was supposed to do. During the Cold War
it was designed primarily to contain Communism. "The Soviet
Union was the principal designer of our force," the admiral
says.
Adm. Cebrowski, a 61-year-old former naval aviator, flew
158 combat missions in Vietnam and commanded an aircraft
carrier in the Persian Gulf War. He's a devout Catholic who
attends Mass every day and raves about Mel Gibson's "The
Passion of the Christ."
Mr. Barnett, by contrast, studied at Leningrad State
University in the mid-1980s, taught Marxism among other
subjects at Harvard, and voted for Al Gore for president. He
maintains his own Web page (thomaspmbarnett.com)
that features
his wife's poetry, a
eulogy he wrote on his father's death
and a book-length chronicle of his eldest daughter's
successful battle with cancer.
For much of the 1990s, Mr. Barnett worked for the Center
for Naval Analyses, a federally funded research center. He
is currently a senior professor in the Warfare Analysis
department of the Naval War College in Rhode Island, where
Adm. Cebrowski served as president until 2001.
In Mr. Barnett's world, countries are divided into two
categories. His "core" countries are part of a global
community linked by trade, migration and capital flows.
Europe, the U.S., India and China fall into this group. Then
there are "gap" countries that either refuse to join the
global mainstream (such as Saudi Arabia and Iran), or are
unable to because they have no central government or are
struggling with debilitating crises (such as Iraq,
Afghanistan, Somalia, and much of sub-Saharan Africa).
"The "gap" is a petri dish of grief, repression,
terrorism and disease," says Adm. Cebrowski. "And 9/11 shows
we can't wall ourselves off from it."
To join those worlds together, Mr. Barnett envisions two
different military forces. The Leviathan force consists of
stealthy submarines, long-range bombers and highly trained
soldiers who are "young, unmarried and slightly p----- off,"
Mr. Barnett says.
The System Administrator force is named for the
technology wonks who run corporate computer networks. This
force is focused on training "gap state" security forces,
stamping out insurgencies and rebuilding basic
infrastructure such as legal systems and power grids.
That force would include lightly armored soldiers, the
Marine Corps and officials from the State, Justice and
Commerce departments along with the U.S. Agency for
International Development. Its troops would be older and
more specialized than the Leviathans. The purpose of the
System Administrators would be to bring order to a country,
but the force would also be strong enough to defend itself.
This concept relies on a key assumption: The power of the
U.S.'s nuclear and conventional arms, plus increasing global
economic interdependence, has made war between superpowers a
thing of the past. It also assumes that wars with
less-powerful states are less likely to occur.
Instead, the U.S. is more likely to find itself embroiled
in dysfunctional parts of the world battling terrorists and
rebuilding failed states, something it doesn't do very well.
"You guys can do two or three Iraq wars a year, no problem,"
Mr. Barnett recently told a group of senior officers from
the Joint Staff. "But you can't do one occupation."
It's not clear what Mr. Rumsfeld thinks of Mr. Barnett's
vision. Adm. Cebrowski has briefed the Pentagon chief on key
aspects as recently as last month and says he got a warm
reception. A Pentagon spokesman says the press office wasn't
able to determine Mr. Rumsfeld's reaction to the briefing.
Many worry Mr. Barnett's concept leaves the U.S.
unprepared to fight a big war with countries such as China
and North Korea. "What if we are misreading China's
intentions the way we misread radical Islam?" asks Michael
Vickers, a national-security analyst and former CIA officer
who does consulting work for the Pentagon.
Mr. Barnett bets that advanced technologies will allow
the U.S. to fight wars with smaller, high-tech formations.
Some military analysts, such as retired Marine Corps Lt.
Gen. Paul Van Riper, think that's naive. Gen. Van Riper, who
plays the enemy in Pentagon war games, says enemies could
too easily hide from the Leviathan force's sophisticated
surveillance. He also thinks the System Administrator force
wouldn't be strong enough to defend itself in places such as
Fallujah.
"I admire Adm. Cebrowski," he says. "But this is absolute
nonsense from folks who are thinking about war as they want
it to be, not as it actually is. War is a terribly nasty,
brutish business."
The Pentagon has a history of taking intellectual cues
from unexpected sources. In the 1970s and 1980s Andrew
Marshall, a low-profile Pentagon analyst who runs an office
similar to that of Adm. Cebrowski, argued that wars could be
revolutionized by precision bombs, unmanned planes and
wireless communications that would allow the U.S. to destroy
enemies from a distance.
Mr. Marshall, who cultivated a network of prominent
military officers and civilians, rarely spoke in public and
almost all his papers are classified. But his ideas have
informed the way the U.S. military fought high-intensity
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Andy Marshall's kind of like
a rabbi," says Mr. Barnett.
Mr. Barnett has delivered his brief some 150 times since
9/11. Pearson PLC's Penguin Group published it earlier this
year as a book, "The Pentagon's New Map," and Mr. Barnett
penned a shortened version for Esquire magazine.
On a spring day in Washington, Mr. Barnett stepped into a
room full of generals, admirals and colonels from the
Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff. His job was to kick off a
two-day retreat where the military would debate his ideas.
In the room was the deputy director of operations for the
U.S. Central Command. A few seats away sat the Army colonel
whose battalion led the famous "Thunder Run" into Baghdad
that toppled Saddam Hussein. Seated across the room was an
Air Force brigadier general -- one of only a handful of U.S.
fighter pilots to have shot down an enemy plane in combat
over the past two decades. Mr. Barnett recognized none of
them.
The lights dimmed and Mr. Barnett, clad in a dark
turtleneck and khakis, launched into his brief. He soon
flashed up on a screen a picture of a mock personal ad that
he found taped to a Pentagon wall in the late 1990s.
"ENEMY WANTED: Mature North American Superpower seeks
hostile partner for arms racing, Third World conflicts and
general antagonism. Must be sufficiently menacing to
convince Congress of military financial requirements...Send
note with pictures of fleet and air squadrons to CHAIRMAN
JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF/PENTAGON."
In the early days of the current Bush administration,
senior Pentagon officials thought China, with its growing
arsenal of ballistic missiles and increasingly sophisticated
submarine fleet, might fill this role.
Mr. Barnett's work with Cantor Fitzgerald, which stemmed
from a long-standing relationship between the firm and the
Naval War College, convinced him otherwise. China was buying
U.S. debt, angling to join the World Trade Organization and
growing increasingly dependent on foreign direct investment.
"China isn't the problem, it's the prize," he told the
officers.
He displayed a map of the sprawling "gap," which includes
most of Africa, Central Asia, the Middle East and a big
chunk of Central and South America. "This is globalization's
ozone hole," he said.
In the past, Mr. Barnett's pitch for a System
Administrator, or nation-building force, was often greeted
with howls of disapproval from military crowds. A year of
faltering progress in Iraq has made his ideas more
palatable. One Army colonel in the audience compared the
Iraq nation-building mission to a screw that needs to be
driven into a wall. "Right now all we've got is a hammer and
we are driving that screw into the wall with our hammer as
best we can. But it won't set right. What we really need is
a screwdriver," he said.
An Air Force general suggested the bifurcation of the
force recommended by Mr. Barnett was already quietly
happening. The Army National Guard, a force comprising
part-time soldiers, used to be indistinguishable from the
regular Army. Today, it's trading weaponry used in
high-intensity conflicts for military-police units to
restore law and order.
One Army colonel balked at the presentation, suggesting
it might not be possible to save some societies, such as
Saudi Arabia, or even Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Aren't you assuming the people in the 'gap' think like
you and want the same things as you?" he asked.
"Everyone wants a better future for their kids," said Mr.
Barnett.
"I've been around a lot of people who don't think like
us," the officer replied.
After the meeting, the group—led by a team of one- and
two-star admirals and generals—decided to recommend that Mr.
Barnett brief the military's most senior four-star generals
at a retreat later this year.
It's not likely that the Pentagon will officially split
the military into a Leviathan force and a System
Administrator force. But acceptance for the general concept
is growing. "I used to be afraid to pitch the Sys Admin
force," Mr. Barnett said after his speech to the Joint Staff
officers. "I literally would worry that I'd get laughed off
the stage."