Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

Here's a post from March 2006, describing a phone interview I gave to Noah Shachtman:

Several quotes in Noah Shachtman’s Popular Mechanics cover story “The Great Weapons Debate” (April 2006 issue)

I spent the better part of an hour sitting on my apartment balcony talking to Noah back at the start of the year. His story finally appears in this month’s issue of Popular Mechanics. It’s a good story ...

Here's the second post when I noted the phone interview.

Here's the original post when I noted the interview, where I made a note to myself that I "Need to call that Popular Mechanics reporter back tomorrow for last couple of questions."

I guess we had a habit of doing more than just emails, but people remember what they want to remember.

My memory is this: Shachtman and I discussed what became the thesis of his recent Wired article in January 2006 (more than one phonecon), when he was writing an article for Popular Mechanics. I made clear my opinion on that line of thinking, because it wasn't the first time I had encountered it. In fact, I discussed that very debate in hundreds of briefings I've given over the years, and was just coming off my profile of Petraeus after interviewing him at length at Leavenworth, where I got one of the earliest looks at the COIN as it was coming together. My point? That was a huge subject rearing its head right then: do we blame Transformation for the hold up or not?

Not being the shy type, I was not surprised that he didn't interview me for the Wired piece, where Shachtman sought to build a case that Transformation and NCW did us in. That piece will naturally be celebrated by the one side in the debate to which it caters, and dismissed by the other side (a dynamic I noted a year earlier in my own treatment of this long and ongoing debate in Blueprint for Action).

My problems remain: a false dichotomy (if my defense gives up tons of long TD drives in a loss, do I fire my offensive coordinator and change my offensive scheme?) and a fantastic charge (if Cebrowski and Gartska hadn't been so "wrong," we would have . . . won the postwar from the start?). The latter charge is--in my mind--about as low as you can go in print--on a dead guy to boot. I can almost see Art shaking his head in mystification. You can make your points without casually shitting on somebody's legacy you barely understand.

Shachtman had a chance to do something right here. Instead he did something easy. But honestly, arguing with journalists is a waste of time, I have found over the years. They ask if the story was good, not if they did any good.

Life is short for such low bars.

Net-Centric Warfare's successful transformation of the Leviathan force did not lead to the postwar difficulties in Iraq. The entire U.S. national security establishment having a systemic bias against preparing for SysAdmin-style activities is what generated the postwar difficulties in Iraq.

The Army went to Iraq with the Army it had been wanting and buying for the last 20 years. Transformation had largely bypassed ground forces right up to the Iraq War, and instead had been concentrated in the air community, an argument then CNO Vern Clark had made to me an interview.

Fixing our postwar challenges is NOT about killing/dethroning/discrediting NCW--like you even could (a point Petraeus made in the piece to Shachtman's mock surprise, and if it wasn't mock, then he shouldn't have been writing this story). Both NCW and 4GW bring much to the understanding of what it will take to get states from failure to stability. COIN can give you the conditions for stability, but it will hardly deliver stability on its own. COIN is about removing/neutralizing the obstacles, but the military's ability to nation-build is limited. It can but only create enabling conditions. Ultimately, the SysAdmin function is more civilian than uniform, more USG than DoD, more rest of the world than just U.S., and more demand-pull infrastructural development by private sector funding than supply-push official development aid from the public sector. Both NCW and 4GW are required for the solution set to emerge, which is why attempts to blame Iraq on NCW--and Cebrowski and Gartska in particular--is just not good journalism. Rather, it's the classic heroes-villains stuff that MSM loves to peddle.

I believe in solutions that bridge and combine domains, not artificially set one off against another. That's what Enterra tries to do. That's what Development-in-a-Box(tm) is all about.

That sort of synthesis is possible without demonizing one camp or the other. Indeed, many of the same people who demonized those of us who pushed SysAdmin-like ideas years ago now praise Petraeus for finally getting them to the forefront (as the result of years of work by a slew of officers) and what these critics said in both instances is telling: "stop fighting the war you want and fight the war you have." Well, the "war" is different in the front-half versus the second-half: it's going to be more NCW and Leviathan up front, and it's going to be more 4GW/COIN and SysAdmin as you proceed. It's all about seams and transitions and balancing of capabilities, not pitting one camp against the other (you were wrong, now we're right!).

Meanwhile, the Jaffe story on Art and I make clear Shachtman's personal charge against Cebrowski is complete nonsense. Art was capable of holding opposing ideas in his head (that's how he could support opposing thinkers in the same shop, as Gartska and I were very different, but guess what? That doesn't mean only one of us can be right), just like Petraeus demonstrates in his interview with Shachtman. These officers exist, and they know better.

Again, for the MSM, somebody has to be going down if somebody else is rising. Readers love the zero-sum model. They just deserve better.

Next time I let it ring...