Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

NOTE: I wrote this post on Saturday and retracted portions of it on Sunday morning (right after some prayer at the 0800 mass, which Art would have approved of!). I alter it ex post facto because of subsequent exchanges with Jim Blaker, Art's biographer, that lead me to believe that my criticisms were both valid and easily addressable. My thanks to Jim on that score. However, I leave the non-retracted portions of this post because I hate just erasing things and pretending they didn't happen, and because I feel very strongly about Art and always welcome the chance to stand by my words concerning his historical greatness. All of this back and forth easily marks me for the kind of person I am--and I'm okay with that. Art certainly was.]

Got a draft manuscript from old friend (going back to my SPAG days at the Center for Naval Analyses) Jim Blaker, entitled, "A Wedge into Time: Arthur Cebrowski and Transforming US Military Forces."

Jim says it will be published by Praeger next spring, and asks for comment. I wasn't interviewed for the book and this is the first time I've seen any manuscript.

Naturally, given how my career blossomed under Art, who was obviously a very special mentor and father-figure of the highest order, my main interest in the book is how it treats the stuff that I worked on under him at both the War College and the Office of Force Transformation. As for all the NCW/Transformation stuff, I won't confess to being much of an expert, and quite honestly, Art never came to me on that stuff--just globalization, 9/11 as a System Perturbation (he attended my workshop on the subject at Potomac Institute in 2002), and the whole Core-Gap/Map thing (all of which I cleared with him before briefing anyone or writing anything for publication because I knew anything I popularized would be assumed to come with his stamp of approval, given our respective titles in OFT).

As I indicate at length in The Pentagon's New Map, I developed much of the map image, the Core-Gap dichotomy, and the subsequent Leviathan-SysAdmin stuff in response to prompts I had received from Art during the Y2K work (when I first proposed what became the Leviathan-SysAdmin split in a Proceedings article), the Cantor-Fitzgerald "NewRuleSets.Project" (where both Art and I got the "rule sets" phrase from Bud Flanagan and Phil Ginsburg), and the System Perturbation-leading-to-the-Map work I did on grand strategy for him in the Office of Force Transformation after 9/11 (I worked most of these concepts with my colleagues Bradd Hayes, Hank Kamradt and Lawrence Modisett back in Newport, traveling to meet Art every month or so in Reston to brief him on the progress and report how my numerous briefs--many of them arranged by him--were being received).

Art had a huge hand in shaping everything I did from 1998 onward, telling me what to push most and what to de-emphasize and hold off on pushing until audiences were more accepting. His advice was invaluable to me throughout, as was his top cover. He wasn't just the best possible boss for me at that time in my thinking, he was easily the most joyous boss I ever had the privilege to work for.

So I was a little disturbed to peruse the first draft of the manuscript and ... [NOTE: I added the rest of this para and the next one Sunday morning, killing the original text] come away with the impression that the reader might view the Core-Gap and SysAdmin's concepts as basically Art's in origins, with an assist from me, when it was really the other way around.

I don't make that statement to diminish Art's profound role in mentoring me and helping bring these ideas to life, because I value that collaboration intensely. Rather, I just want to get the story straight, as I know Jim ultimately wants to do the same. Art didn't just come up with his own ideas, he also brilliantly pushed others to do the same, and I found his intellectual leadership in the latter to be even more impressive than his historic accomplishments in the former. Why? Creating your own great ideas marks you as a great thinker, but inspiring them in others marks you as a great man, and as much I admired Art's thinking, I admired him as a man that much more.

In interpreting Art's legacy, Jim proposes ... [BARNETT: I cut the following text in light of subsequent interactions with Jim Blaker].

... while I'm honored to the extent that Art used the Core-Gap and SysAdmin concepts (basically in interviews and briefs, where he was always kind enough to cite me), they were but a small part of his universe of thinking, and were typically awkward fits at that (no Kantian, Art was significantly darker in his view of humanity than I--then again, he was a warrior by profession). But yeah, we had a lot of our thinking come together after 9/11 (when Art softened somewhat on China), and Art was beyond huge in both shaping my stuff and helping me popularize it.

[Another section where I voice my concerns about the text is cut here, because I feel the criticism needs to be withheld pending further conversations between Jim and I.]

If anyone can be described as the pre-Barnett source of Core and Gap, it's clearly Hank Gaffney. How so? I did all the original crisis response work for Hank for about a decade before I ever broached these ideas with Art. Art knew this, and in fact, became a good friend of Hank's and sponsor of his analysis as a result of the great respect he developed for Hank because of our personal little network of intellectual connectivity.

I wrote the words "Core" and "Gap" first for Hank in draft analyses in the summer of 2001. Truth be told, Hank didn't care for the terms or the analysis, and we argued them at length. Hank's the eternal skeptic, and prefers great detail and nuance in his descriptions of the world. Me, I like to go for the jugular, keep it exceedingly simple, and communicate as much--or even more--than inform. Eventually I won Hank to the terms, and I consider that, even more than winning over Art, the greatest intellectual accomplishment of my life. Why? Hank is another huge father-figure in my life. I have said that you could basically put "... and Henry H. Gaffney, Jr." after my name on everything I've ever written. That's how big Hank's influence has been. The man is the Sun in my solar system, even as Art's Jupiter cast a huge frickin' shadow.

[cut]

That's even more true for SysAdmin as it is for Core and Gap. The SysAdmin concept is as close to a pure steal from Gaffney as anything I've ever created. Hank and I developed an archetypal breakdown of three forces for the U.S. Navy back in the early 1990s ("presence," "surge" and "future" navies). The presence force is the pre-cursor to the SysAdmin concept, and in its original conception, it's far more Hank's than mine. We brief Bill Owens on the future force and he loved it, because it fit his view of the perfect force and helped enunciate some of the strategic choices he and we felt were necessary to pull it off. Art, as Blaker's manuscript indicates, basically is cut from the same Owens/future force mold.

[cut]

I wrote of my concerns to Blaker ... [and he answered them with great speed and sincerity and willingness to address them, hence my retractions here.]

I can count on one hand the number of people I've held in my arms and kissed on their death beds, telling them how much I loved them. Art was number 2 for me (my only great regret in life being that I did not make the same journey and effort with Adam Ulam before he passed), so yeah, I'm awfully ambivalent about preserving credit for my original works when the alternative is to credit someone of Art's stature in my life.

I guess what makes me most sad right now is how much I still miss the man. I catch myself dialing him on my phone, like he's still there and I've just neglected to see him for too long.

[cut for inappropriateness, as it was mostly my heart talking, not my head, and because I no longer feel the need to defend myself so, given Blaker's very kind reply.]

... Art's real legacy, which is huge and powerful and lasting and real--and incredibly important to me. Art was the Curtis LeMay of his age, laying key intellectual groundwork for what will inevitably become some of the doctrinal solution sets for this Long War. His thinking has and will continue to save countless lives over the course of history.

Art ... does need to be acknowledged as one of the greatest bosses any grand strategist like myself could have. I don't think I become one UNLESS I have people like Hank, Bud, and Art come along and show me the way.

[cut]

Art's legacy is Net-centric warfare and how it was transmuted into Transformation. The IT evolution of the U.S. military is the tale of many key figures, Art being one of the most important handful, but NCW and Transformation are huge historical subjects where he dominates--to the tune where the "father of ..." statements are legitimate.

[cut]

Art was my rabbi, my priest, and one of my best friends in life. When I got sad, or depressed, or didn't like my life anymore, Art was someone I spoke with. When he was battling cancer, I was someone he talked with.

NOTE: I wrote this post on Saturday and retracted portions of it on Sunday morning (right after some prayer at the 0800 mass, which Art would have approved of!). I alter it ex post facto because of subsequent exchanges with Jim Blaker, Art's biographer, that lead me to believe that my criticisms were both valid and easily addressable. My thanks to Jim on that score. However, I leave the non-retracted portions of this post because I hate just erasing things and pretending they didn't happen, and because I feel very strongly about Art and always welcome the chance to stand by my words concerning his historical greatness. All of this back and forth easily marks me for the kind of person I am--and I'm okay with that. Art certainly was.]