Is your vision being adopted by the Pentagon?
Dateline: Southwest flight from BWI to Providence, 26 May 2004
Day two of the “Changing Nature of Warfare” conference at The CNA Corporation’s HQ “somewhere in northern Virginia” (okay, Alexandria).
I spend the first hour or so off-line with Alec Russell, DC bureau chief of the London Daily Telegraph and his photographer. We got through the usual storyline of the vision, and end on the inevitable question of, “Is this vision being adopted today by the Pentagon?”
Journalists are like that: they want to find out—right then and there—who’s won and who’s lost and on what exact day did that happen (and who was in the room)? I give my usual reply about concentrating on the officers just before they become admirals and generals (i.e., flag officers), changing the career paths of flag officers, and how just the mindset matters for now and that organizational codification is years away.
Russell seemed to get it, and said he’d write the article sometime in the next two weeks or so.
Then we went outside for some suitably “visionary” portrait shots by the photographer, during which time I was attacked repeatedly by those amazing cicadas that are EVERYWHERE in DC right now (and I mean, that distant roaring sound you here is “them”).
I say, to hell with “The Day After,” THEY’RE HERE NOW!
The second day of the conference is as good as the first: good minds, good analysis, and lotsa disagreements. My favorite bit: comparing the counter-insurgency models of the Brits in Northern Ireland (suffer the slings and arrows, work the underlying conditions) and the Israelis in the West Bank (punitive strikes, screw the underlying conditions). One expert, Steve Metz of the Army War College put it best: we’re trying to do both in Iraq and it’s conflicting our minds and approaches, putting us at risk of serious mean-ends mismatches. Again, he’s describing the fundamental bifurcation of skills and organization that this era’s environment of war and peace is forcing upon the Pentagon.
Good tidbit from my old Pentagon boss Art Cebrowski: he says he was invited recently to brief Bill Gates and a host of his business friends from around the world. He gives them the Core-Gap thesis and describes the military-market nexus (the Decalogue). The response? As always, the business world gets that stuff intuitively. That’s why I say this new vision I push is not mine but the world’s: it’s a reality I capture, not a dream I concoct. It’s happening and will happen within the Defense Department not because people like myself advocate it, but because the environment simply demands it from us.
And if you think that makes me an economic determinist, you’re right. Doesn’t mean I ignore irrational actors. In fact, it just means they are naturally cast as the enemy in this grand historical process. To not “get” this reality is simply to be irrational on some level, unless you think it’s some grand accident of history that the global economy has developed and spread around the planet in the manner that it has over the last century and a half.
Yes, I’m talking to you Karl and Vlad.
And then there’s the heads up I get from back at my workplace: people in high places complaining about what I said near the end of the Wolf Blitzer interview yesterday. The statement in dispute: my asking the question openly about whether the current administration is better positioned to make the deals necessary to gain serious buy-in from major allies or would America be better served by a new team after November, armed with a clean slate.
Hmmmm.
Like the end of the Esquire article, I don’t tell people how to vote, just the right questions to ask. I am dedicated—professionally—to generating “reproducible strategic concepts,” meaning those that can survive changes in administration, or exactly what Congressman Mac Thornberry (R-TX) said (in Jaffe’s WSJ story) was needed in the U.S. government right now in history. Shooting for anything less in grand strategy in this global war on terrorism is a cynical waste of our servicemen and servicewomen currently putting their lives on the line inside the Gap.
Here’s today’s catch:
REFERENCES with my commentary:
“U.S. Warns Of Al Qaeda Threat This Summer: Agents in Country Said To Be Planning Attack,” by Susan Schmidt and Dana Priest, Washington Post, 26 May, p. A1.
“N.Y. Times Cites Defects in Its Reports on Iraq,” by Howard Kurtz, WP, 26 May, p. C1.
“The Times and Iraq,” From the Editors, New York Times, 26 May, p. A10.
“Five Points of Reality That Bush Overlooked,” WP, Jim Hoagland, 26 May, p. A27.
“Iraq May Survive, but the Dream Is Dead,” by Fouad Ajami, NYT, 26 May, p. A25.
“The Bush-Kerry Nondebate,” by William Safire, NYT, 26 May, p. A25.
“Evangelicals Give U.S. Foreign Policy An Activist Tinge: A Campaign to Export Values Makes Legislative Headway Even as It Arouses Critics,” by Peter Waldman, Wall Street Journal, 26 May, p. A1.
“Who Would Try Civilians From U.S.? No One in Iraq: Civilian contractors and Abu Ghraib abuses,” by Adam Liptak, NYT, 26 May, p. A11.
“MTV to Start First Network Aimed at Gays,” NYT, by Bill Carter and Stuart Elliott, NYT, 26 May, p. C1.
“In Latin America, a Cellular Need: Mobile Phones Become a Part of Life, Even for the Poor,” by Brian Ellsworth, NYT, p. W1.
“Great Walls of Unknowns,” by Robert J. Samuelson, WP, 26 May, p. A27.