Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 21 June 2004
CNN is neat about putting out transcripts of appearances on their major shows. Here's the capture from my 18 May appearance on Lou Dobbs Tonight, which I blogged back then. I post it here simply to enter it into the record, knowing that some people might be interested in the text if they didn't happen to catch me.
LOU DOBBS TONIGHTCOMMENTARY: I thought Dobbs was pretty complimentary even as he flashed his bits of usual combativeness. He was very gracious in person and easy to interact with on the set. His production staff was also very nice.
Israel Declares Gaza Gateway to Terrorism; Iraqi Prison Abuse Charges Widen
Aired May 18, 2004 - 18:00 ET
DOBBS: Bill, thank you very much -- Bill Schneider.
My next guest says the Pentagon must now quickly apply the lessons of the war in Iraq. And that mean restructuring the U.S. armed forces. Thomas Barnett says the military should be divided between what he calls a leviathan force for high intensity wars and a system administrative force to rebuild nations. He's the author of the new book, "The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the 21st Century."
Thomas Barnett served in the office of secretary of defense between November 2001 and June of last year and joins me now.
Good to have you here.
THOMAS BARNETT, AUTHOR, "THE PENTAGON'S NEW MAP": Thanks for having me.
DOBBS: The lessons that you talk about not applied to this point in Iraq, nor by this military. Why not?
BARNETT: Well, you could say, in many ways, we've been learning these lessons going all the way back at least to Somalia, the reality that what we're facing in the post-Cold War era isn't so much the high intensity conflict that we are so well adapted to, but, really, what we call under this rubric military operations other than war, basically, the everything else.
DOBBS: Tom, you are a gifted analyst, strategist, and writer. But when you say high-intensity war that we are so suited for, what high-intensity war have we demonstrated great success, strategic thinking in, in the last two or three decades?
BARNETT: I would argue the first Desert Storm conflict and I would argue what we did in Kosovo and what we did in, recently, last year in Iraq, meaning, when we're facing military forces on the ground, we know how to take them apart, basically dismember them almost at will.
But what we're not structured for is what comes after. Basically, we've been building for a high-end scenario for the last 10, 15 years, looking for a near peer competitor to appear on the strategic horizon once the Soviets are gone. We are really focused on say a China 20 years from now and not so focused on what happens in Iraq after the hostilities end.
DOBBS: Your writing in "Esquire" magazine reminded all of us of the Bush administration's fixation on China as not only a strategic competitor in an economic sense, but also a geopolitical sense.
BARNETT: Right.
DOBBS: Do you think that is eliminated?
BARNETT: I think it was eliminated by 9/11.
But I think what people have to understand with the Pentagon is, what the Pentagon basically does is, it spends its time thinking about, imaging future war and then building a force to fight that future war. And we basically decided around '95, '96, that China was that long-term paradigm that we were going to size our forces against. We have not gotten off that, which is why we're short on equipment and personnel and training. We just haven't rebalanced to meet the challenges we're facing in Iraq since May 2003.
DOBBS: As you talk about high intensity wars, there are those who would say deft, nimble, brilliantly executed in the war to seize Baghdad.
BARNETT: Right.
DOBBS: Botched, pathetic and bungling in the period since.
BARNETT: It's been a tough road. I would argue this force has the best capability of any military on the planet to do this kind of activity. Is it good enough to secure the kind of success we were hoping to get following the takedown of Saddam, absolutely not. More over, if we demonstrate that, we don't attract the coalition partners who want to join that aspect, the peace keeping more than the war fighting, because that's what they're built for.
DOBBS: The peace keeping they're built for instead of the war fighting, one might argue, Tom, that's of limited use to us. If it is to be our blood and treasure that is spilled around the world in the war against radical Islamist terrorists, having to mop up operations by a group of nations that we then attach to a coalition seems like more PR than substantive assistance and the work of real allies.
BARNETT: I would disagree in the following sense. We lost about 150 souls in six weeks of combat. OK, I think we can do that well and keep our losses proportional to the gains we achieve. We have lost what 500, 600 and counts in the 12 months since the "End Of major hostilities in Iraq." I would argue most of the militaries around the world are built for that and eager for that sorts of opportunities. When I talk to foreign militaries and describe that back half force, that system administrator force, most come out of their seats and say this is what we can marry up with.
DOBBS: The two issues that arise with your considerations and the Pentagon's obvious valuation. One is, do we want to be a nation executing nation building as a matter of primary national strategy, a reflection of our national interests. And do we want to engage ground troops because those 736 Americans have died seemed like a high cost to all of us for a strategy that is unclear and an unclear goal. Don't you agree?
BARNETT: Well, I think it was explained badly. I think if you're going to deal with a global war on terrorism, if you are going to deal with foreign terrorist threat into the United States, there is a variety of ways you can approach this. You can try to firewall America off from the outside world. I don't think you can stop really anything. You can hunt down and kill terrorists as fast as possible. As Israel learns in the West Banks, you can't kill them faster than you can grow them. And the more you kill, the more they grow them. So, what you have to do is deny the enemy his strategic goal. And what Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda's strategic goal is to drive the West out of the Middle East so they can hijack the Middle East out of the world. That means we have to integrate the Middle East faster than they can disconnect it from the outside world.
DOBBS: We thank you very much, Thomas Barnett, for being here.
BARNETT: Thanks for having me.
DOBBS: Thank you.
The Pentagon's new map, the 21st century -- Timely.
