Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

Dateline: Above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 10 September 2004

[NOTE: When I first posted this blog on 9/10, I cited friend and fellow blogger TM Lutas as the author of the following lengthy posts about PNM. TM sent me an email today saying I was mistaken. While he sent me notice of the posts, and does himself also post at Chicago Boyz.net, he is not the author known as "Lexington Green." Who is Lex? I have no idea, other than he must have studied economics at U. Chicago. So my apologies for misidentifying TM and not giving "Lexington Green" his due at the time of my initial posting. Here is the post re-edited as a result.]

Lexington Green (a pseudonym, I imagine) writes at Chicago Boyz , which is explained as:

Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago boys including those pictured above, and others who helped to liberalize Latin American economies.

Here is Green's magnum opus review of both PNM and the Sys Admin force in two very long blogs. His pieces ignited a lot of comments on the site, and these constitute some of the best discussions I have ever read of the book. I don't include them here, but you can find them linked below.

Here is the first more general blog:

August 21, 2004
Barnett, The Pentagon's New Map

For some time now I have had a stack of books I've been going to blog about. The top of the stack is Thomas Barnett's book The Pentagon's New Map. First, the book is good, it is worth reading, and you should do so. Barnett is engaging and smart and is seriously trying to think through important questions. This is demonstrated not only by the book, but also by Barnett's website. Barnett's book has been reviewed far and wide, and on his website he publishes the reviews and responds to them. In fact, his website is almost the ideal of what a web-minded author can do. He engages in a dialogue with reviewers and responds to criticisms. Others, hopefully, will adopt his approach. May they also have the stamina to sustain it.

I read the book a few months ago and I hope I can make sense of my notes. I'll focus on points that relate to issues which interest me. There is much in the book which I simply won't touch on here. There are plenty of summaries on his site, if mine is too cryptic. But everybody reading this blog has heard about it and has some idea what it is about -- The Core and The Gap, to get it down to five syllables. These terms, as well as many others, are part of Barnett's idiosyncratic nomenclature.

Barnett asserts throughout that globalization means increasing "connectivity" to "content flows", and that "disconnectedness is itself the ultimate enemy." The Core is that part of the world in which is "functioning within globalization" because it "accepts the connectivity and can handle the content flows associated with integrating one's national economy to the global economy." How countries handle the "content flow" turns on their internal "legal rule sets". Traditional-minded (or just oppressive) countries try to limit the content, e.g. Internet pornography or criticism of the government. Core countries also succeed in "harmonizing their internal rule sets" to the "emerging global rule of democracy, rule of law, and free markets." Success at synchronizing with the global rule set, itself an evolving set of norms, means investment and other "connectedness" increasingly links a country to the functioning Core. The pace at which countries make these transitions, and which parts of the global rule set they adopt first, vary. A good index of "connectedness", as Barnett notes, is the way a society treats its women, a point Ralph Peters has also made.

Barnett addresses at length the more strictly military side. He correctly notes that the United States has been spending more and more "billable hours" in the last 20 years, starting before the Cold War even ended, sending its military into the disorderly and violent regions of the Gap (Haiti, the Balkans, the Middle East). It has done so on an ad hoc basis as crises boil over, with no over-arching rationale to these various ventures. This is in part because the military has resisted acquiring the capability, equipment and knowledge needed to intervene with long-term success in these places. Each intervention has been treated by the Pentagon as a distraction from some forthcoming major war, which looks less and less likely to occur any time soon. The military, according to Barnett, still clings to a planning and training and acquisition mindset focused on one Big One akin to WWII or the Cold War, with China nominated to sit in the Bad Guy chair. Barnett sees this fear of China as overblown, if not unfounded. The military needs to learn that the Gap is not a distraction from its job. Its job is the Gap and there is no exit strategy.

Barnett says we need to recognize that the security goal of the United States is to eliminate the sources of disorder and terrorism at their roots, in the Gap. We need to learn and accept that connectedness has raised the cost of fighting within Core way too high for sensible people to contemplate. And most compellingly, nuclear weapons are always in the background as a deterrant if anyone were foolish enough to start an intra-Core war. So, the Core states have too much to lose by fighting among themselves and they know it. Hence we are happily surprised to find something like a firm basis for perpetual peace in the nicer parts of the world.

According to Barnett, a big part of why people worldwide have "freaked" about Bush's assertion of preemption and apparent unilateralism is they don't realize, because the Bush team has failed to clearly articulate it, that the "rule set" for the Core (Mutual Assured Destruction, deterrence, collective security) is still in place. We we only mean to operate in the rougher, more Hobbesian fashion in the Hobbesian badlands of the Gap.

So much for the descriptive part. Barnett goes on to advocate making it an express goal of United States policy to "shrink the Gap." One way to do this is to encourage trade and particularly technology transfer to the Gap. He believes it is futile to try to prevent dangerous technology from reaching rogues in the Gap by restricting trade. Barnett advocates a robust system of threats and preemption instead.

… if you have a bad actor, whether he is a superempowered terrorist like Osama bin Laden or a rogue leader like Kim Jong Il, who has a long list of boxes that says he is not to be trusted or that the world would be a better place without him, then I say you move on to preemption. There is no negotiation at this point in the process, because you have given them plenty of warnings and requests to cease and desist. In the case of a regime, you simply keep ratcheting up your demands for compliance, and when the regime cannot comply and cannot be provoked into a precipitating action by your constantly growing military pressure, you preempt. In the case of a terrorist group, you skip even these preliminaries and preempt the moment you have any of them in your crosshairs.

Barnett notes "that may sound pretty harsh", and rightly so, though I like the sound of it. I think those who don't like Bush's "unilateralism" will also 'freak" if we do things way, especially if we announce we are going to. Barnett asks rhetorically, what "gives America the right to make such decisions"? He answers that "'might makes right' when we are talking about America playing Gap Leviathan." And when the French get in a snit, what then? "[I]f the other Core powers want a greater say in how we exercise that power, they simply need to dedicate enough defense spending to develop similar capabilities." In the meantime, "America will need to act unilaterally inside the Gap on a regular basis . . . because … quite frankly -- no other military power on the planet even comes close to matching our capabilities. [H]ave no delusions: the United States owns the only 'fist' in the business." Again, this sounds pretty realistic.

However, Barnett says the problem is that the United States cannot do Part 2 of a war all by itself. We can conquer anybody, but getting the conquered territory up and running requires lots of help. We need to get the rest of the Core to assist us in these ventures, not just "the Brits and Aussies" (i.e. the Anglosphere, a word Barnett does not use). How, do we get other Core powers to join us in the "follow-through effort"? Mostly, "we need to be more explicit with [our] allies about the better world we want to create whenever we undertake these necessarily difficult tasks." Bush et al failed to articulate this vision, hence isolating us unnecessarily.

I'm not exactly sure why we need the other guys to help us do Part 2, assuming we were to acquire the skills needed, but let's just take it that Barnett is right that we do need help. Barnett goes on to ask what happens if others do not buy our vision of a "happy ending", what then? Uncharacteristically, he does not provide a plausible seeming answer to this.

This points up one of my biggest problems with the book. The Core is an amalgam of countries with interests and beliefs which conflict. Yes, intra-Core warfare is highly unlikely, especially in the "Old Core". But explaining ourselves more carefully before we invade somewhere in the Gap is not ever going to make the Russians or the French or the Chinese support us. These countres have learned over the centuries to survive in a harsh, zero-sum world in which their own unique and prized identities were always in constant, mortal danger. All of these ancient countries resent American power. All of them want more freedom of action in the World. All perceive the United States as in some degree hostile to their interests. None of these countries wants to blow up a trading partner, or get in a war with another powerful country. But any of them could very well want to see the United States suffer some spectacular failure in the Gap because they may well believe that such an outcome would enhance their own status and opportunities. The Core is still a realm of zero-sum competition for some of the players. Shrinking the Gap is not a project they are going to want to invest a nickel in if the USA will do the heavy lifting anyway. And there is always the chance the USA will suffer some exploitable setback while policing the Gap. Many countries would, sensibly enough from their perspective, rather stand on the sidelines and see what opportunities emerge from the smoke when the USA ventures into the Gap. Barnett is aware of this dynamic, but I think it is more important than he apparently does.

This leads me to another related point, which is something which Barnett hints at, but is not explicit about. As I read the book, I repeatedly thought, "the Core of the Core is the Anglosphere." The Core "rule sets" which Barnett refers are classically those of Anglo-American liberalism -- representative democracy, apolitical militaries, strong sovereigns with delimited powers, flexible common law, free trade, free markets, openness to immigrants, economic dynamism and openness to change. These values and institutions were spread around the world by the maritime trading powers, Britain, then America. I think Barnett is therefore mistaken when he says that the United States is "globalizations godfather, its source code, its original model", "its first great multinational state and economic union". He acknowledges that the USA restarted a previously derailed globalization in 1945. However, I would attribute more than he does to this older globalization of the 19th Century and earlier. (See Kevin H. O'Rourke, Jeffrey G. Williamson,Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy). So, contra Barnett, the true "first great multinational state and economic union" was the British Empire, which we were once part of. It was this first globalization, which was ruined in 1914, which laid much of the foundation of the globalizing order the USA picked up in 1945. The "source code" Barnett is looking for is therefore not the architecture of the early Cold War Wise Men. They put upper stories on a structure that stared much earlier, whose foundations go back to the middle ages in England. This very ancient civilization originated in England, and is the source of the liberal order established in its colonies, and which is the source of the "rule set" which is now spreading around the world.

Why does this remote ancestry matter, since Barnett is addressing what the United States should be doing now? Because to "shrink the Gap" we need to understand how the Core became the Core in the first place -- a process which began in a particular place and time, i.e. England in the Middle Ages. (See Alan MacFarlane's wonderful books The Riddle of the Modern World, and its sequel The Making of the Modern World: Visions from the West and East.) (And while you are at it, pre-order Jim Bennett's forthcoming book on the Anglosphere.) We need to accurately understand the foundations of our political and economic success -- our "rule sets" in Barnett's parlance -- if we wish to understand what it will take to "shrink the Gap", i.e. to build states and to spread the benefits of our values and institutions around the world.

The fact that the dominant "rule sets" we hope to spread into the gap are Anglo-American is yet another source of intra-Core tension. These Anglo-American values and institutions enjoy at best mixed popularity in Old Europe. France in particular does not like "Anglo-Saxon" liberalism. (See this earlier post, citing Walter Russell Mead's review essay of recent French books.)

On the military side, Barnett repeatedly and accurately points out that Britain, Australia and the United States are reliable allies who are increasingly intermeshed and interoperable. This is the Anglosphere in arms. While Uncle Sam is the Leviathan, these junior powers continue to make disproportionate contributions. (The United States and Canada are joined at the hip economically, though Canada has long remained in our shadow militarily. Even so, we have a long-standing defensive alliance (NORAD) with Canada.) So, nothing in Barnett contradicts the notion that the Anglosphere is the core of the Core in terms of institutions and values, strength of alliances with the USA, or military capabilities. He just does not focus on it, or the ongoing intra-Core tensions this fact will continue to provoke.

Barnett mentions astutely notes that of the "New Core" countries, "China is the most worrisome" and India is the most promising." I think he gets this almost exactly right.

China faces the biggest challenge to changing its "rule set" -- moving away from one party rule. The Party is maintaining itself in the saddle by playing up nationalism and by bribing the People's Liberation Army with rhetoric and funding which keep the PLA dreaming and planning its big showdown with the USA over Taiwan. Barnett notes that the "rule set fallout from a United States-China conflict" would "effectively bar[] Beijing from stable Core membership for the foreseeable future." That is correct in my view. Let us hope the hard-faced men in Beijing manage to ride the tiger and not get into a war with the USA. Even if they "win" it will be a disaster for all parties. China can make the world a monumentally better place, or do horrendous damage, and it is all a matter of luck how the Party oligarchs handle the next few decades. I wish there was a way to put more certainty into the equation, but I don't see it. Offer a decade of the rosary daily for things to go well in China. (Yes I am literally suggesting you pray for this. I do.)

And India. One of Barnett's most unusual insights is his awareness of the critical importance of India. This is a point I have long believed and few others seem to focus on it. Barnett intriguingly mentions India as a "former colony" of Britain in the same breath with Australia, and even refers to India as "a crucial military partner" of the United States. Barnett sees India moving more and more toward the Core Anglophone states, both economically and militarily, a point made several times on this blog. He quotes approvingly a comment that India is "the most important country for the future of the world" because "if globalization succeeds in a democratic society where half the population is impoverished and one-quarter is Muslim, then it can succeed anywhere". I don't exactly agree. India will succeed relatively early and briskly precisely because it is a former British colony, which has a large population with a facility with English, a large and relatively wealthy diaspora population which wants to return and invest in India, a functioning democracy and a fairly well-functioning court system a relatively competent and law-abiding military all of which it inherited from Britain. India is not a long shot to succeed at globalizing, once it abandons the socialism it also inherited from Britain, it is an odds-on favorite to do very well indeed. (See the much-discussed essay Can India Overtake China?.)

Barnett offers a nice rebuttal to the claim often made by British scholars (e.g. Niall Ferguson, Paul Kennedy, Paul Johnson) that we are in fact (or ought to be) an "Empire". This is a pet peeve of mine, and Barnett pithily points out in his own unique consultant-speak that Empires are about "maximal rule sets" where the globalized world order America is establishing is about "minimal rule sets". (At some point I'll finish a partially written post in lawyer-speak about why the United States is not an empire, but Barnett's riposte will have to hold you for now.)

Barnett makes a two-pronged argument for America exerting itself to shrink the Gap. On the negative side, he points out that Gap is the source of disorder, criminality, terrorism and other Bad Things in the world, and this is only going to get worse unless conditions there improve. So, we need to do it to protect ourselves. On the affirmative side he makes an impassioned and evidently sincere argument that the United States, to be true to its own patriotism and its own destiny must help to spread the blessings it enjoys to the rest of the world, to end "disconnectedness" and bring everyone into the globalized Core. He addresses many of the obvious counter-arguments, which discussion I won't summarize here. He forthrightly says that American lives will be lost in the process and that it is a cause which is worth that price. I'm not sure that he is right because I'm not sure that "connectivity" is a cause which can inspire the Jacksonian core of America to go to war, or that they will perceive need to bring order to the Congo to protect America in the long run. They have tended to want to stay home and only venture abroad to destroy specific threats. In Walter Russell Mead's parlance, Barnett is offering a modernized Wilsonianism, an approach which has never enjoyed strong majority support. Also, I found myself asking whether this venture is this really something which is demanded by our founding principles and our very identity? Barnett has not fully convinced me it is. But he'll keep writing and I'm still listening.

The practicality aspect in particular concerns me. I'm also not sure we really can pull off the kind of rock-bottom nation-building which would be necessary in the worst parts of the Gap. Does this mean millions of people are condemned to tyranny or poverty or both? Maybe. Not by me. By history, by fate, maybe. I wish it were otherwise. Maybe it is. Maybe very great improvements can be made for the lives of vast masses of people, even if the United States has to conquer the places to bring it about. Barnett has not yet convinced me it is possible. (Francis Fukuyama's book on state-building, which I read and hope to write about on the blog, takes up this question.) And if it is a long-shot, I don't want our soldiers dying in the mud for it. But I am open to hearing and seeing more arguments on this point from Barnett and others, because he may be right about the scope of what is possible. Iraq is a test case, even though it is not the test he would have preferred.

Another facet of the book seems mistaken to me. Barnett's Gap is all one color. Core, Gap. Two zones. Now, such a bipartite division is a useful simplifying tool as far as it goes. But just as I think there is a Core-of-the-Core (the Anglosphere, potentially eventually including India), I think there is a heart of darkness in the Gap -- the Arab Middle East. Barnett hates this idea. In Pentagon-speak, this represents a focus on the so-called "Arc of Instability", and is code language for keeping a lid on the oil-producing regions of the world. That issue aside, and even accepting Barnett's framework generally, the most threatening part of the Gap is this region -- Islam famously has "bloody borders". We have a huge population surge there, with many young men who have no opportunities in horribly stunted economies, oil revenue which has allowed exposure to the Core and access to its products and weapons without having to adopt its values and institutions, a popular and violent ideological mutation of Islam which presents a particularly serious menace, a strong aversion to much of the Core's liberal values based upon even a more benign interpretation of Islam, and the problem that we are reliant on the material located under the surface of these places. Whether spreading "connectivity" into this area is going to lead to pacifying it is a very open question. It is just as likely to provoke a violent response. And we cannot choose to ignore what happens there, as we can and do about places like Burundi. We have to take an interest in these places. Barnett has not convinced me that a program for dealing with the Gap generally (1) will work in the Arab Middle East, or (2) will not be a distraction from the most urgent menaces we face, which do originate there. We need to focus on the primary danger first, and if we eventually get to Colombia and Zaire and Burma, good. But the recruiting grounds for a future Mohammad Atta and his colleagues has to be dealt with first. If the Gap is to be shrunk, if it can be shrunk, we should start there for our own good.

Barnett has many interesting things to say about the changes which will be necessary in the military and other arms of government to carry out the tasks he is proposing. His proposal that the military be divided into a Leviathan force, to fight wars, and a SysAdmin force to manage the peace, seems like a wise course. The great fear the military has is that it will become diluted if it gets into too many ancillary roles. If we do it his way, one part of the military can retain a total focus on shattering America's foes without too much distraction. It could stay focused on high- and medium-intensity operations. As Steven Biddle put it in his brilliant recent book, our enemies only resort to unconventional warfare because we have such an overwhelming edge in conventional warfare. We should make absolutely sure we maintain that. The way to square the circle is to create an arm of the military which has the specific job of supervising the post-war phase. This force, as Barnett notes, would be composed of older personnel, would have more of a police function, would have a range of reconstruction skills, would have a high level of interagency cooperation, and would otherwise possess distinct capabilities which did not overlap with Leviathan. (Incidentally, Leviathan is a darn cool name. We need to come up with something better for SysAdmin.) Building the SysAdmin force makes sense to me whether or not we make transforming the Gap our primary focus.

This relates to a point I have thought about a lot. Our Army is always, always, always surprised when it has to do occupation, nation-building and constabulary work. They never learn. They don't want to learn. They refuse to prepare or to commit resources or people to the task. They want to spend money on fancy weapons, train for and fight "proper" wars, and come home. But it rarely works out that way. This persistent, culpable negligence is something the military really needs to deal with. (See this essay, and this one for good books on lessons learned the hard way and then ignored.) We cannot afford to relearn for the umpteenth time these same hard lessons.

There are a lot of reasons why this has repeatedly happened. (1) The military is properly focused on the biggest dangers, and defeating those. Insurgencies are not perceived as existential threats the way the Wehrmacht or the Red Army were. You can lose Vietnam and survive. If you fail to defeat the blitzkreig coming down both sides of the autobahn into the Fulda Gap, you have lost everything. (2) The military is driven by budgets, and counterinsurgencies don't have many big-ticket purchases associated with them. (3) The military is driven by career-enhancing postings, and counterinsurgency operations have few glamorous, resume-building opportunities. A victory is when nothing happens. And they offer many, many opportunities for career-destroying mistakes. So, the expertise always evaporates. No one wants to go near this stuff. With good reason. That is why political leadership is necessary to make the soldiers think about, equip for, train for, and do well the distasteful but necessary things they don't want to do. Barnett's proposed SysAdmin force would be an institutional home for these capabilities and this knowleged, and it would be composed of a group of people who would lobby for their organization and its budgets.

(The military is already thinking somewhat along these lines. See this fascinating article, which proposes something akin to Barnett's SysAdmin force. The author proposes an interagency government task force to be attached to each Marine expeditionary unit and Army brigade, particularly in urban combat, so that the reconstruction process can start in the immediate aftermath of the fighting, even during the fighting.)

This post is insanely long and it could be a lot longer. Go read Barnett's book.

Here is the second blog, more specifically on the Sys Admin concept:

August 22, 2004
Further Thoughts on Barnett's Proposed SysAdmin Force and State-Building

My previous post about Thomas Barnett's book The Pentagon's New Map was so well-received (see the comments to that post), that I decided I'd put down a few further thoughts on it.

Barnett's call for a distinct SysAdmin force to handle peace-keeping, stability operations, nation-building, etc. is probably his best idea. These tasks will not go away. We can either do them well or do them badly. We can either allow them to erode our military's core function of war-fighting, by misusing a war-fighting military to undertake tasks it is not trained or equipped to do, or make sure we have the full range of capabilities in place. The very good article Why Great Powers Fight Small Wars Badly. Its author, Maj. Robert M. Cassidy makes this point.

[t]he military organizations of great powers …embrace the big-war paradigm, and because they are large, hierarchical institutions, they generally innovate incrementally. This means that great-power militaries do not innovate well, particularly when the required innovations and adaptations lie outside the scope of conventional war. In other words, great powers do not win small wars because they are great powers: their militaries must maintain a central competence in symmetric warfare to preserve their great-power status vis-à-vis other great powers; and their militaries must be large organizations. These two characteristics combine to create a formidable competence on the plains of Europe or the deserts of Iraq. However, these two traits do not produce institutions and cultures that exhibit a propensity for counter-guerrilla warfare.
Moreover, however dire the need for low-intensity and reconstruction capabilities may be, the Big War capabilities must be created and maintained, a point which Barnett is very clear about.

Steven Biddle puts it very well in his brilliant recent book, Military Power: Explaining Defeat and Victory in Modern Battle. Biddle's focus is on what he calls "mid- to high-intensity conflict", i.e. conventional warfare in "the middle part of the spectrum ranging from guerilla warfare at the low end to global thermonuclear war at the high end." He then asks: "Why this focus? Is this just irrelevant 'old thinking' in an ere of counterterrorist warfare, ethnic conflict, coercive strategic bombing, and weapons of mass destruction (WMD)?" The answer:

The answer is no. While major conventional war is only one among many important missions, it remains far more important than some now suppose, and it will be for the foreseeable future. It will also remain the most expensive mission to fulfill, it will remain the central purpose for the majority of the U.S. military, and it will continue to occur between other parties in other parts of the world.

In the emerging war on terrorism, for example, counterintelligence and police work against terrorists hiding in the shadows will be accompanied by periodic major warfare against states who harbor them. …

[A]mong America's most powerful escalatory threats is the ability topple regimes by invading and taking political control of their territory -- that is by fighting and winning a major conventional theatre war. … Even where this ultimate sanction is unused, its existence makes other more coercive means more effective …

Nor are concerns with major warfare limited to great and regional powers, or wholly superseded by ethnic disputes, guerilla warfare, or other low-intensity conflicts elsewhere. The recent wars in Bosnia, Croatia, Eritrea, Zaire/Congo, Rwanda, Azerbaijan and Kuwait were all mid- to high-intensity conflicts I which combatants sought to take and hold territory in conventional ways.

So, we clearly need Leviathan and will continue to do so for the imaginable future -- probably forever.

However, we do not yet have a well-developed suite of low-intensity capabilities to complement Leviathan. Major Cassidy cites to a report from the United States Institute of Peace, which contains excerpts of interviews with senior U.S. Army officers who participated in operations in Bosnia. "The USIP report also concluded that peace operations are the new paradigm of conflict that will confront the army in future deployments as more failed states emerge and peace enforcement and nation-building become staples of the senior military leadership diet.'"

The USIP report quotes General Shinseki as saying:

Army doctrine-based training prepared him for warfighting and leadership at all levels, but “there wasn't a clear doctrine for stability operations. We are developing it, using the Bosnia experience, to define a doctrine for large stability operations. But it is this absence of a doctrine for a doctrine-based institution that you walk into in this environment. There you are in a kind of roll-your-own situation.

Cassidy also quotes "[a] study, [in which] the former Implementation Force chief of staff expressed the need to "build a military capable of many things—not just the high end." That study, A Force for Peace and Security U.S. and Allied Commanders' Views of the Military's Role in Peace Operations and the Impact on Terrorism of States in Conflict(1999) is here. A more recent update of the report is here. These studies, which I have only skimmed, appear to give a good overview of what the SysAdmin force would, at least in part, look like.

"Rolling your own" is something we cannot do in the future. The postwar situation in Iraq has a distinct "roll your own" feel to it. It is imperative that the United States do better at these things.

These same concerns are also addressed in this recent article, The Army's Dilemma, which concludes:

It is essential to remember that the US Army, the premier land force of the world’s sole superpower, must maintain primarily a warfighting focus in its culture, organization, training, and modernization plans. That is unassailable as the Army’s central focus. The issue for the Army is one of balance. Given the changing realities in how the United States will conduct future joint operations, plus the fact that mid- to low-intensity missions will clearly dominate in the coming decade or more (and the Army is the optimal force for such missions), the Army has to reexamine how it will balance its traditional focus on high-end combat operations with the need to perform the other missions that will predominate in the coming years.

Answering this question is exactly what Barnett is doing, with his suggestion a separate force with its own identity "to perform the other missions". These authors suggest that the resolution is "…nothing less than a cultural change, and these are neither lightly undertaken nor easily accomplished, particularly in conservative military organizations." I like Barnett's idea better. Keep the Leviathan culture just like it is. It is good at what it does. If you need a different culture to do a different job then create a different entity which can embody that different culture. Barnett's proposal makes a lot more sense. Let the warriors be warriors. When you really need a warrior, nothing else quite does the trick.

A breakthrough for Barnett's sales pitch in the Pentagon will come when the Army realizes that SysAdmin is not a threat to their warrior culture. Rather, it is the only way for them to preserve their warrior culture.

It occurs to me that this need to undertake two functions, one fighting major wars, one dealing with lesser contingencies in the Gap, has some analogy to a historical case. Specifically, Britain's performance in the last 150 years or so sheds some light on what the United States is going to need to do in the future. (And even if the analogy is not so strong, it is an interesting digression so sit still and read it.)

The very short version is this. Britain rose to preeminence in the mid-19th Century and started the 20th Century as a very wealthy and influential world power. It lost its Empire and became a second rate power as a result of costly participation in major wars. Some of this decline was inevitable, possibly. But the way it happened was not. Britain had two distinct groups of security challenges, (1) policing its Empire and the Empire's frontiers, and (2) deterring and if necessary defeating major-power threats to its Empire or to Britain's home island itself. It did the first task decently well and cost-effectively and humanely, at least in comparison to other colonial powers. But as a consequence of the disastrous human and material costs, and initial defeats, in the major wars it was compelled to fight, Britain could no longer sustain its Imperial enterprise. The British failed to master what Biddle calls medium- to high-intensity war. They failed to make the necessary investment to build continental-scale military forces prior to either world war. Despite early, episodic insights into modern warfare, the British failed to develop appropriate doctrine or equipment and failed to teach, buy and train as needed. The lessons about charging machine guns that they taught the Sudanese dervishes at Omdurman were lost on them. (See Daniel R. Headrick'sThe Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century.) The lessons they learned about attacking infantry armed with magazine rifles, which they learned the hard way from the Boers (and which were captured in Swinton's Defense of Duffer's Drift) were lost. The British thus failed to acquire an army which could deter Germany in 1914, or which could fight as effectively as possible if committed to battle.

The British by the end of World War I had made huge strides in developing doctrine, tactics and equipment (e.g. tanks, which they invented) needed to survive and to attack and to prevail in modern warfare.
(See Paddy Griffith's Battle Tactics of the Western Front: The British Army's Art of Attack, 1916-18.) The British proceeded to squander all of this knowledge, won at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, during the period before World War II. Even the victories of the last 100 days in 1918 were forgotten as soon as possible and only the massacre on the Somme was remembered. In light of these memories and its pre-existing biases, the possibility of fighting the Third Reich was greeted in the 1930s with horror. The British leadership recoiled from that prospect and sought technological panaceas such as "strategic bombing". So they again failed to create adequate military power to deter war or to wage it in a tolerable fashion if deterrence failed. When they were compelled to go onto the Continent after all in 1939, they had to enter that conflict in a condition even less well-prepared than they had been in 1914. They extemporized, and that doesn't work against professionals. They were repeatedly smacked silly by the Germans. They never completely got the hang of major, high-intensity war, and the British army generally performed poorly most of the time throughout World War II. The section in Russell A. Hart's recent masterwork Clash of Arms describes this inter-war failure by Britain in harsh but fair detail. (If you read one work of military history in the next year, read this one.) In other words, the British Army's institutional bias was a large factor in their disastrous performance in and preparation for the major wars against Germany, both of which they did not so much "win" as barely survive. (A classic book on this topic which I read recently is Michael Howard's The Continental Commitment: The Dilemma of British Defense Policy in the Era of the Two World Wars.)

The United States must not and will not follow in Britain's path, of course. We must always maintain Leviathan and keep it current and devote the human and material resources needed to make Leviathan second to none. We must always have a force which can deter conventional war, or prevail if deterrence fails, or make credible threats and deliver on those threats if necessary. We are however, faced with the challenging task of learning to do things Leviathan cannot do, things that the British used to do fairly well -- police and build institutions in what Barnett calls the Gap.

The British Army in the 20th century was too distracted by and bound up with its Imperial policing role, its proto-SysAdmin role. It did not want to do high-intensity warfare, i.e. spend the money and effort to learn to be Leviathan. To the old-time British army "normal" soldiering was running around in Waziristan or Somaliland or in the highlands of Burma. Our Army's institutional bias is the other way -- it has no nostalgia for chasing the Apaches or the Moros (to say nothing of the Phoenix Program). It's hallowed memory is of the clattering, green juggernaut which rolled over the Wehrmacht in 1944-45. Frankly, if there must be bias, ours is better. Better to mishandle the threats which are not existential. But even better than that, and best of all, would be to create a military which is organized to carry out well all of the tasks which it is ordered to undertake. The knowledge of how to carry out the low-intensity end of the spectrum exists. A distinct arm of the military charged with those functions is Barnett's best suggestion, and I think we may see it come into being. I hope so. (But call it something other than "System Administrators". Give it a more appealing name. Send all suggestions directly to Barnett. Ha.)

Of course, Barnett wants his SysAdmin team to do more than win counter-insurgency struggles. In fact, they may not get involved until Leviathan has finished at least the heaviest part of that heavy lifting. SysAdmin's true tasks would get underway as the shooting died down, and it began to function as a security force, and to build a local police force, and then schoolhouses and hospitals … . Barnett wants it to have a large inter-agency component, be multi-lingual and deal with foreign governments and NGOs. "The SysAdmin force will not be in a hurry to leave, and will remain until the locals are ready to assume control or the UN mission is up and running. All the broken windows will be fixed before this force departs, and the American public will come to understand that these are the troops who remain after we bring the boys home." I could quote at length his description of the proposed SysAdmin force, which is fascinating.

One element of the SysAdmin force that Barnett doesn't mention is that it could become … popular. There are a lot of people who want to "make a difference" and have some adventure in their lives, but are not young and rock-hard enough to be a paratrooper. For one thing, old guys like me, too old for Leviathan, could maybe work for it. (I wonder if they need any monolingual 41 year old lawyers with prostate problems? Honey, great news! I'm taking an 80% pay cut and we're going to Somalia!)

This all begs the question I raised in the prior post of whether we really know what the Hell we are doing if we try to do state-building. Do we really know how to get Gap territories organized for participation in the Core? I will mention here that Francis Fukuyama's short book State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century. I read this a few months ago. I strongly recommend it. (So does Max Boot, in this review.) (I'll note that Fukuyama is a very reliable writer. All his books are good. He is condemned by those who haven't read him for his "End of History" thesis, but he is more right than wrong even on that point, properly understood.)

Fukuyama appears to summarize much of the current wisdom on the topic, with many good footnotes to current scholarship. He breaks "state-building " out into building various interconnected institutions, some harder than others to construct. He makes a distinction between "strength of state institutions" and "scope of state functions". The ideal is a strong state with limited scope -- i.e. a state which is very effective at its core competencies (law enforcement, protecting property rights, honest and efficient tax collection being rock-bottom basics) and which does not get too mixed up in other stuff. The old Soviet Union had too much scope and too much strength in the wrong areas. Zaire has neither. Both are bad. Fukuyama refers to four "aspects of stateness", all of which must function, in increasing difficulty of importation or imposition: "(1) organizational design and management, (2) political system design, (3) basis of legitimization, (4) cultural and structural factors." He notes an important fact -- foreigners who go into Gap locations frequently destroy local institutions in their zeal to quickly do good. For example, rather than try to reform a corrupt, under-funded and incompetent local public health agency, they just step in and take over the function, hiring the few able locals. The local capacity withers entirely. Fukuyama also notes the basic challenge of measuring public sector outputs, a point with larger application.

All in all, Fukuyama's book offers the unspectacular but positive news that we know a fair amount about state-building on the level of administrative and political organization, but less on providing legitimacy and the cultural end of the spectrum. So, there are some things we don't know and others we can't know, and if we undertake these tasks we can count on them being difficult and providing us with surprises. A particular complicating factor is the extent to which cultural factors prevent the "connectivity" which Barnett sees as critical. In other words, if you can install the top of Fukuyama's chart, the superstructure, can you also generate or impose a cultural foundation which will support it if what is there already is not working? How hard is it to have foreigners create a government and then have people who live there think it is legitimate? Anyway, Fukuyama's short book is a good guide to the challenges that the SysAdmin force will be facing in the mid- and late-occupation phase.

Another point more specifically related to this blog and its small-l libertarian cousins comes to mind. Fukuyama quotes Milton Friedman, who said after the fall of the Soviet Union that the best course was "privatize, privatize, privatize". Friedman later conceded that he "was wrong" and "the rule of law is probably more basic than privatization." This points to a larger point, which is the growing consensus of the imperative need for effective government, and how its absence is the worst thing going on in the world. Those of us of a libertarian cast of mind need to adjust our thinking somewhat. We reflexively think: Government Bad. I know I do. Plus as Fukuyama points out, most of the 20th Century was a tale of bad deeds by too powerful governments. However, the mere fact that a state is a state does not make it "Our Enemy", as Albert Jay Nock famously called it. The State may never be our friend, but its necessity is apparent, especially when you look at places which don't have one. There is an optimal middle ground on this. Providing the Gap with Good Government is the foundation needed to get the people in these areas on the road to a better life, and ourselves a more peaceful world. How much we can really do to make this happen is an open question.

This need for functioning government, and much else of value, is summarized very well and in detail in Martin Wolf's brilliant new book Why Globalization Works. (Stellar review in the Economist, here.) The one sentence version: "Good markets need good governments." (Once I finish this book, I may have more to say about it on this blog.) Wolf's section on the initial wave of globalization, its collapse in 1914-45 and its Postwar resurgence is superb, and worth the price of the book alone. Wolf is the Chief Financial Commentator at the Financial Times. His recent Hayek Memorial Lecture is an appetizer-sized portion of the book, which should make you go buy it and read it.

Another book which I just finished reading also focuses on these issues -- but it looks at the true "first round" of state building in the Middle Ages -- Joseph Strayer's On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State. Strayer wrote the book with the state-building of the decolonization-era then going on in the 1950s in the background. In one comment on contemporary affairs, Strayer noted that those former colonies had armies but not much else. This did not bode well at the time, and subsequent events have not been happy. The first things the early kings of England and France put in place were law courts, both to impose peace and to sort out property disputes and enforce property rights, and they organized tax collection so it was systematic rather than predatory. The very first functions of the very first (and most successful and longest-lasting) modern states were the same core functions which Fukuyama identifies as the basics for state-building today. Some things don't change. Or not much, anyway.

That's it. Finally, Lexington Green got PNM off his chest. Like many of the Chicago Boyz, I am very grateful that he made such a supreme effort. I take it as a huge compliment to the book.

Here's today's catch:

•“[op-ed] Stop Blaming Putin and Start Helping Him: Unless peace is made in Chechnya, the war may spread,” by Fiona Hill, New York Times, 10 September, p. A27.

•“Odds of Bird-Flu Epidemic Rise As First Thai Death Is Confirmed,” by Gautam Naik et. al, Wall Street Journal, 10 September, p. A2.

•“A Farsighted New Fortress Mentality on Wall Street: Relocation, Relocation, Relocation,” by Landon Thomas Jr., New York Times, 10 September, p. C1.

•“Intelligence Test: On Ground in Iraq, Soldier Uses Wits To Hunt Insurgents: Sgt. McCary, Fluent in Arabic, Improvises Tactics in Field; Not the War He Trained For; Deception Within the Rules,” by Greg Jaffe, Wall Street Journal, 10 September, p. A1.

• “Powell Says Rapes and Killings in Sudan Are Genocide,” by Steven R. Weisman, New York Times, 10 September, p. A3.

•“Polls Suggest War Isn't Hurting Bush: Mounting Deaths in Iraq Have Not Resulted in Major Backlash in Public Opinion,” by John F. Harris and Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post, 10 September, p. A10.