Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

People try to convert me a lot.

They say, "I like most of what you're saying, except you're not ranking my favorite concept #1 and if you just did that, I could really buy into what you're saying."

Of course, nothing of the sort is true, so you engage them for a bit (some are funny, most are definitely not as there is no one quite so unable-to-self-deprecate as a committed drill-down artist who's gonna ride his pony til it drops! [in fact, that's a great measure of blogs NOT to read: a lack of humor--especially self-deprecating humor--is a clear signal that you're diving deep but missing out on the wide horizontal), then you let them go for a while, then you say goodbye as you must.

They immediately protest, of course, that you're squelching free speech and intercourse with your readers, but frankly you're doing them a favor. Indulging their myopia is not healthy for them (not that you give a f--k with the older ones because it's too late anyhow), but much more importantly, it's not good for you, the grand strategist.

You have to remain unconvertable.

Now let me contextualize that a bit by saying I see grand strategy being a middle-years-sort of career at its earliest (I'm still wondering about how you manage it in your older years--my fear of Strategic Alzheimer's--but I think my own perpetual immaturity innoculates me some, plus my inveterate inability to be a team player). My sense on this is that you pretty much should plan on several decades of apprenticeship, so if you start early enough (I began around ten), you can actually get into the biz sometime around 40.

Honestly, I look at almost everything I wrote before 40 and treat the kindergarten stuff as being roughly equivalent to much of what I wrote at CNA across the 1990s: I view it all with detached bemusement ("Look, I started writing whole sentences!" "My, that must have been about the time I started really getting the Wall Street Journal!" and so on).

Now, two key events drove this process for me: the micro System Perturbation (Em's cancer) and the macro SP (9/11). Reaching for my usual reliance on threes (not superstition, just Waltzian), I guess Iraq becomes the nation-state third.

Em's cancer radically altered my writing and thinking--in that order. Once Em got sick and Vonne made me promise to leave DC if we survived intact as a family, I stopped writing carefully. I just started choosing instead of equivocating or analyzing (paralysis by analysis, as they say). Once I stopped caring what anyone else thought and writing as such, I thought differently. Of course, people started treating me differently. Once you don't give a damn, the visionary stuff gets a whole lot easier.

9/11, as I've described extensively, was the system-level shock that liberated my treatment of the whole. Iraq-the-mess becomes the connecting thread, then, for the prescriptive volume that is BFA. Vol. III, then, for me is all about lock-in: I want to lock in the gains by replicating myself. Pure ego to some, canny reach for self-help book-buying public to others, but closure of a sorts to me, especially since I can't see working the Emily Updates material (originally 400k in long emails over 65 weeks, now about 200k in edited text) until I pass through the process that is III.

But I digress...

The point about being unconvertable is about remaining true to the vision in its expansiveness and flexibility. The problem with the converters is that they really seek reduction (they see more "flavor" in a reduced stew), but as a grand strategist, you need to recognize that path as death. Once you elevate the one over the many, you're finished. You've become the one-note-Johnny who has to interpret everything in their favor or else.

That's why keeping it big and vague and long and flexible is the key. While events and trends and readers simply force upon you the duty of definition, even those should be kept almost fortune-cookie-like. The one who always want lists and specifics are only those who want to bring the vision down by partitioning it in the name of being "realistic," "practical," etc.

But you gotta relax on that stuff. The ones who need details aren't going to do anything anyway. They just want to buttress their own sense that inaction or opposition is the correct course. The ones who are really going to change things don't ask your permission. They're just out the door.

The do-ers will send you notes from the field regularly. You live on these things, but you don't really share them because it's better to let these people bubble up on their own, selling in their own way, referencing you or not (who cares on their deathbed?) and just plain doing.

The only proof you really need to revel in is the invitations to continue the dialogue and to brief the next generation (my twist on Boyd).

There it's okay to brag, because you get talks by giving talks and letting those talks be known ("If he went there, maybe I can get him to come here!").

In the last year I've been to SOCOM, PACOM, CENTCOM, JFCOM and TRANSCOM. I am already rebooked for PACOM and CENTCOM and my bonds with future AFRICOM have been unfolding for quite some time (as I now understand). Also booked are returns to Maxwell (Air War College) and Leavenworth (Army's main schoolhouse) and Monterey (Naval Post-Grad). Negotiating West Point now. Numerous other cats and dogs.

This is your core audience. You grew up with these people over the years, and now the original majors and commanders you connected with--way back when--are bringing you back as commanders of much bigger shows. They're also the ones who either make the big talks happen or welcome and approve them when the current band of Young Turks arrange them.

Good example: one of my first bosses at the Center for Naval Analyses is now a three-star (just a lowly commander then) and we'll be linking up soon in his current role. Naturally, this interaction will be multipurposed into columns, stuff for Esquire, Vol. III and my general education in terms of inputs, and hopefully some good guidance to this friend's command in terms of output. But everything connects to everything else, so your sense of accomplishment is really generational in scope (perhaps why I think being a parent is an important prerequisite for this sort of career, and the more spread your age range the better!), because I really think you need to be intimately aware of being both mentee and mentor.

If that's really your canvas, you can't become a disciple of anything besides your framework for understanding change (for me: Core + Gap, Leviathan v. SysAdmin, System Perturbations, etc.). So your model never gets "proven" and it never breaks down. It simply evolves, and your understanding of its main components (for me, basically the overarching notion of connectivity) simply grows (more in understanding the horizontal links than in an any in-depth verticality).

Your "defensiveness" (get used to that charge!) is simply your unwillingness to subordinate your vision to someone else's preferred hierarchy ("everything you say depends on my X"), which--again--is exactly the sort of reductionism you want to avoid. You want to focus on differentiating stuff (my list is the Four Flows) and you want to have a basic rule set for their interaction (mine is the military-market nexus "ten commandments"), but beyond that, there's no great need to try to explain everything.

You want to be the General Manager who focuses on the key positions, like the left tackle, quarterback, halfback and go-to flanker (the "triplets" plus that big quiet guy, which for me tends to be demographics). You leave the play-calling to somebody else, but your understanding of the key positions enables that whole philosophy. So indirect influence is your basic mode of operation; your fingerprints are everywhere (thus my love for the Tyler Durden character), but you--quite frankly--sleepwalk through most of your career (Greg Jaffe poking fun at me in his profile about my never knowing who the hell it is I'm talking to).

But seriously, you really don't need to know who you're talking to, except by general background (easy with the military, as they wear it quite literally on their sleeve--hell, it's the color of their sleeve!). With civilian offices and crowds, you just need the zip code and little else, and then just listen to what they respond to (sometimes I think my most important skill is reading a room--thus the utility of being 8 of 9) and what they ask about. But knowing too much about their background really hurts your effort. You will feel intimidated and hold back, when in truth you should barrel ahead even more with the more experienced, just shortening your OODA loop on delivery (thus the heightened excitement of speaking with expert audiences--I gave a talk at CNA a while back that had more inside laughter than almost any talk I've ever given [why? the wider the audience's base knowledge, the more risks you take and the more you have, plus the more you can riff with jokes and references that are hugely shaded and deliberately complex]).

Like I said in a previous post, this is both generational in patience but blitzkrieg-like in breakthroughs (which is why current events truly are your friends, no matter how they challenge you at first blush--as everything is a calibration).

And it's that calibrating that gets me back to the original point: you have to remain unconvertable, or unreduceable. You want to be reproducible, not reduceable. You want to be viral but not incapacitating (like all the Deus ex machina-types who don't want your answers but merely your submission, as their blind [and I do mean blind] ambition is fundamentally to derail you in the same way that their beliefs have derailed them).

That's why the one-note-Johnnies are the pure escapists. They just want out. They just want absolution like Chalmers Johnson. They want to proclaim their inaction to be a result of "realism" when it's really a sad, pathetic sort of fatalism. They are your worst "friends" if you fall for their needy attempts to validate themselves through you (they're like alcoholics who want you to drink with them). Indeed, they are the ones who constantly pretend to be helping you when in truth they're rather artlessly (once you pick up the tendency) trying to tear your down (didn't a psychologist write a book about such tear-down false friends a few years back?).

Actually, come to think of it, bad teachers have the same soul-depressing effect--that queer sort of "feel bad like I do about this subject or else you get a bad grade!"

I had two Russian history teachers like that at Wisconsin: one good (Petrovich) and one bad (later Russian history, going into Sov period--his name escapes me for obvious good reason). The good teacher gives your framework and his call. The bad teacher gives you his call and an intellectual cage to endure it within.

The difference between the two is really subtle in many cases: the same call is usually delivered ("Look over here!" to connect/disconnect).

But that's why the core strength of your own vision (your kernel code) is so crucial. How to know what connects or disconnects your thinking unless you have your thinking in hand?

That's why I have to write Vol. III. I struggled for a very long time to recognize my kernel code and learn how to protect it. That's a skill worth passing on for the decades ahead.

Like the make-up commercial says, "because I/you/we are all worth it!"